Death on the Steps

In a boxy brick house in a drab West Side Chicago neighborhood. Ethel Alesia was late cleaning up the dinner dishes. As she moved around her kitchen one night last week, she half-listened for steps on the front porch--her brother had promised faithfully to be home by 10:30, a good half-hour before the 11 p.m. curfew of his prison parole. For an instant she thought she heard the steps. Then, unmistakably, she heard another sound she had also been half-listening for: the harsh roar of shotgun fire. She rushed to the front porch, found two men twitching in a gumbo of blood. One was her brother Roger ("The Terrible") Touhy, 61. notorious survivor of Chicago's Prohibition gang wars, who had been paroled just 22 days earlier from Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary; he died* an hour later on a hospital operating table. The other man, critically wounded, was Walter Miller, 62, a retired police sergeant who was Touhy's friend and bodyguard.

A $100 Wreath. In the thunderous heyday of Prohibition gangsterism, Roger the Terrible was the jaunty cockalorum of northwest Cook County. After leasing a few trucks to rumrunners, he abandoned a $50,000-a-year automobile business for bootlegging--and thereupon set in motion a relentless procession of events that led to his death. With a partner, Matt Kolb, he carved out an empire of suburban speakeasies, controlled a big slot-machine franchise, sold 18,000 bottles of illicit beer each week, boasted that he made $1,000,000 a year. He also made enemies: to Al Capone and his henchmen, Touhy was a natural rival and a menace. To Police Captain Daniel ("Tubbo") Gilbert, often called "the richest cop in the world," he was fair game in the Chicago guerrilla war. But Roger got along until Matt Kolb was murdered by Capone bullets (Capone sent a $100 wreath to the funeral). After that, Touhy began to live in heavily armed fear, hired guards to protect his suburban home.

But Touhy was removed from the scene in quite another way. In the summer of 1933, John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, a professional swindler and crony of Capone mobsters, was stopped as he drove away from a roadhouse by seven gunmen in a Duesenberg and two other cars. Twelve days later he reappeared in suburban La Grange, with a luxuriant beard and the story that Touhy and his mob had kidnaped him for $70,000 ransom. Tubbo Gilbert seconded the accusation, led the police investigation (along with the FBI's Melvin Purvis). Thomas J. Courtney, bright young state's attorney (now a Chicago circuit judge), directed the case of The People of the State of Illinois v. Roger Touhy, and won Roger Touhy's undying enmity. Through two long, sensational trials and until his death, Touhy claimed that the kidnap rap was a frame-up by the Capone gang and corrupt officials to put him away permanently. His sentence: 99 years.

Many people came to believe his story that he had been framed. Miller, an ex-policeman who had been Factor's bodyguard, switched his allegiance to Touhy when he found what he called positive evidence that the kidnap story was fraudulent. In a 1954 rehearing of the case, Federal Judge John P. Barnes pronounced the kidnaping a "hoax," ordered Touhy released (he was jailed again after 49 hours, when a higher court overruled Judge Barnes). Ray Brennan, a Chicago reporter, gave Roger a florid assist in writing his bitter memoirs, The Stolen Years (TIME, Nov. 30). In 1957 Illinois' Governor William G. Stratton reduced Touhy's sentence to 75 years, and last month, after nearly 26 years in the pen, Roger the Terrible was paroled, and Reporter Brennan's book went on sale.

$3,000,000 Suit. On his last evening alive, Touhy met Bodyguard Miller, Reporter Brennan and a representative of his publisher in Chicago's Press Club to worry over the fact that many booksellers were afraid to sell his book because of a $3,000,000 libel suit brought by Jake the Barber. By coincidence, Factor and Tubbo Gilbert, both grown rich and living in California, were stopping in Chicago on the same night. After two beers, Touhy left with Miller in plenty of time to be in his sister's flat by curfew. The two killers were waiting for them in the shadow of a nearby clump of evergreens. As Touhy and Miller went up the steps of Ethel Alesia's porch, the gunmen stepped to the walk behind them, fired low with six blasts of 12-gauge, 00 buckshot pellets.

Police described the killing as a well-planned, professional job. They found evidence that Touhy had been under surveillance from a basement in an apartment house across the street almost from the day he was released. His movements and habits were well known by his killers. "I don't know exactly who did it, but I do know the Chicago mob was behind it," a shaken Ray Brennan told the coroner. "There are some other people you can bring here. Touhy had three enemies and he talked about them often. He regarded [ex-Cop Tubbo] Gilbert as his worst enemy. [Jake the Barber] Factor was Number 2, and [ex-State's Attorney] Thomas J. Courtney was Number 3. I'm not making any accusations; I'm simply saying what Touhy used to say."

In contrast to his classic, gang-style death, Roger Touhy was buried quietly, with no flowers, no eulogies, in Mount Carmel Cemetery, known as the Boot Hill of gangsters. Near by are the tombs of Frank ("The Enforcer") Nitti and Paul ("Needle Nose") La Briola. Dion O'Banion is also buried there, and near the Touhy plot is a grave site reserved for Anthony ("Tough Tony") Accardo, kingpin of Chicago's rackets, and present unchallenged boss of the Capone mob.

* The fourth of Ethel Alesia's six brothers to be shot to death by hoods or police.

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