The Outfit (15 page)

After the trial, Nitti took a much needed vacation at the Florida home of Capone’s cousin, Charlie Fischetti. Chicago crime experts believe that Nitti never fully recovered from his injuries, suffering lasting neurological injuries that rendered him incapable of taking charge of the Outfit. Some months later, acting as the “caretaker” chief of the Outfit, Nitti returned to Chicago and met with his board at what the locals referred to as Little City Hall, on the third floor of the Capri Restaurant on North Clark Street, directly across from official City Hall. According to a union boss who was taken to the Capri, the Outfit maintained a supersecret room on the third floor where they held daily meetings. “This dining room was so private,” the labor organizer said, “that you couldn’t get in there unless the elevator operator recognized you.” In attendance were Curly, Joe, Paul, Sam Hunt, and the Fischettis. Nitti advised his crew of decisions made at a meeting at Charlie Fischetti’s Biscayne home that summer, a convocation also attended by the Lansky brothers from New Jersey, and Jack Dragna, Rosselli’s Los Angeles partner. At the Capri, Nitti ticked off an agenda largely dictated by Chicago’s position as the country’s hotel and service industry mecca:

• Invest in beer and liquor businesses, then control restaurant and bartenders’ unions to increase the sales of their own brands.

• Expand into hotel and food operations, building on the groundwork already laid by Curly Humphreys.

• Get into the entertainment business, especially nightclubs and musicians’ unions.

• Take over the race wire and bookmaking businesses.

Nitti advised his gang, “The bartenders” union is our biggest lever. After we get national control we will have every bartender in the country pushing our brands of beer and liquor.’ But Nitti was wrong. Although the control of the bartenders’ unions would be lucrative, it would pale in comparison to other schemes soon to be devised.

While waiting to assault the Touhy half of the Cermak-Touhy alliance, Humphreys, Nitti, and the Outfit spent the spring cashing in on the “Century of Progress.” Even before the gates were opened on the first day of the Fair, the Outfit reaped huge profits. With land having to be cleared on Northerly Island, just off Lake Shore Drive, and massive construction projects necessary, the organizers were at the mercy of the trucking and construction trade unions, which in turn were controlled by the Outfit. Curly and his boys saw nothing wrong with taking a 10 percent cut “off the top” on all work performed at the Fair. After all, the upperworld had been collecting its 20 percent graft for decades. That fee was the price fixed to guarantee work permits for lucrative jobs. Private contractors automatically added the fee to their job estimates, a tribute paid “to take care of the boys downtown,” as one such businessman put it. The Outfit, led by Curly Humphreys, paid a visit to the Fair’s builders and convinced them of the wisdom of tacking on the added 10 percent for the Outfit.

Held on the Lake Michigan shoreline between Twelfth and Thirty ninth Streets, the 1933 World’s Fair ran for two years, attracting more than thirty-nine million visitors. Its main theme was the number of recent scientific breakthroughs in use of lighting (the Fair’s lights were turned on when rays from the star Arcturus were focused on photoelectric cells at disparate astronomical observatories, transformed into electricity, then transmitted to Chicago).
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Not all the fair’s exhibits were high-minded. The earthy, hedonistic pleasures were in evidence, if not advertised by civic promoters: Exotic “fan dancer” Sally Rand showed her wares at the Streets of Paris emporium; wine and women flowed at the Ann Rutledge Tavern. With so much money to be made at the Fair, the members of the Outfit were not about to look the other way after construction was completed. They were, in fact, among the chief beneficiaries of the tourist largesse. While Chicago’s newest corrupt mayor, Edward Kelly, squired dignitaries around the grounds, Al Capone’s heirs controlled many of the Fair’s critical functions, including parking, hot dog, hamburger, soda, hatcheck, towel, and soap concessions. What services they did not operate outright, they nonetheless profited from by collecting “protection” money. Curly Humphreys owned the most popular ride at the Fair and, with Fred Evans, controlled the popcorn concession. While Curly was on the lam later that year in Mexico, he hired a manager who picked up the weekly profits from each booth. Al Capone’s brother Ralph virtually cornered the market on bottled water and sodas, while Paul Ricca ran the San Carlo Italian Village, where the Outfit socialized after hours. The roulette wheels were spinning and the dice rolled under the supervision of Outfitter James Mondi. Outfit boss and Capone cousin Charlie Fischetti said at the time, “If a wheel turns on the fairgrounds, we get a cut of the grease on the axle.”

When the fairgrounds emptied at night, the adult attendees partook of the Outfit’s other amenities scattered throughout the rest of the city: brothels, casinos, massage parlors, and saloons. Prohibition came to an end during the first year of the Fair, an event that only escalated the partying at the Outfit’s clubs, which operated twenty-four hours a day. With these and other gang enterprises enjoying robust business, the transition to post-Volstead was reasonably smooth.

Curly’s Revenge

With Cermak removed from the scene and the “Century of Progress” filling the Outfit’s coffers, Curly Humphreys was free to redress the personal attack by Roger Touhy, not to mention the murder of his friend Red Barker and the shooting of Frank Nitti. Humphreys’ vengeance had the added bonus of simultaneously removing a major Outfit adversary. The plot was brilliant in concept and actually played out over several decades before reaching its denouement. At the time, an English friend of Curly’s, John “Jake the Barber” Factor, was living in Chicago, on the run from the law in Great Britain. Factor, brother of future cosmetics baron Max Factor,
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had been charged with participating in an $8-million stock swindle involving South African diamond-mine securities ($160 million by today’s count). It seemed that Jake had struck a partnership with the king of New York bootleggers, Arnold Rothstein, to stake him $50,000 to set up the swindle. Among Factor’s victims were widows, clergymen, elderly investors, and most significant, members of the British royal family and the chief of Scotland Yard. When the scam was discovered, Factor fled to Monte Carlo, where he quickly created another crime syndicate that successfully broke the casino bank by rigging the tables. Before authorities caught on, Factor had fled once again. In 1931, when the British government located Factor in Al Capone’s Chicago, they commenced extradition proceedings.

Factor was by now a multimillionaire, thanks to the profits from the British and Monte Carlo swindles, and enlisted a strong legal team to stall the federal government for over two years, but by 1933, they had run out of maneuvers. When Curly Humphreys learned that the statute of limitations on the extradition would soon run out, he envisioned his elegant, if elaborate, revenge against Touhy. Only a mind like Curly’s could see the connection.

Factor had been summoned to appear in federal court on April 18, 1933, for what was certain to be his one-way ticket back to England. By amazing coincidence, Jake the Barber’s nineteen-year-old son, Jerome, chose this moment in history to become a kidnapping victim, coincidentally giving Jake an incontestable excuse for having the proceedings postponed yet again. With a $200,000 ransom on Jerome’s head, Chicago police, apparently unaware of Factor’s friendship with Curly, raided the headquarters of the the best kidnappers in Chicago, the Outfit. There they encountered Curly Humphreys, Joe Accardo, and Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt. The gangsters were incredulous, telling the cops that they were in fact strategizing on how to get the young boy freed. Jake himself admitted that he went to Curly for help. After all, Curly was not only Chicago’s best kidnapper, but also one of its best negotiators.

Eight days later, Jake and a carload of Outfitters rescued Jerome on the city’s West Side, but they failed to catch the kidnappers. “We spotted them in their car,” the Barber recounted, “but some policemen came along and the criminals sped away.” Neither Jerome, who was allegedly blindfolded the entire time, nor Jake could identify the scoundrels. With Jake’s legal confrontation in D.C. temporarily postponed, phase one of Curly’s plan was complete.

On May 29, frustrated Supreme Court officials reset the date for Factor’s hearing. It was a last-ditch motion, since the statute was due to expire in early July. But by a propitious turn of events, this time Jake Factor himself turned up kidnapped.

On June 30, 1933, Jake Factor disappeared after leaving an Outfit-controlled saloon in the northwest suburbs. Twelve days later he surfaced, walking the streets of suburban La Grange, appearing bleary-eyed and bearded. He told a policeman he had paid $70,000 in ransom to his kidnappers, whom he could not identify. But the totality of Factor’s physical appearance invited skepticism. As later described by the detaining patrolman, Bernard Gerard: “Well, his tie was in place . . . and he was wearing a light linen suit, which was clean. His sleeves were wrinkled. His pants were somewhat wrinkled. His shoes were quite clean, no marks or dirt on them; no marks of dirt on his hands. He also had a white handkerchief, which was very clean - wrinkled, but no marks of dirt on it. His nails and hands were perfectly clean, cleaner than mine, and I have just cleaned them . . . The cuffs of his shirt were pressed and clean. His collar was straight [and] in place.”

But the discrepancies didn’t matter to a state’s attorney’s office controlled by Curly and the Outfit. Touhy was soon named the chief and only suspect in the case. Many years later, mob-fighting federal judge John P. Barnes described the arrangement between the Outfit and a compliant state’s attorney’s office: “The [Capone] Syndicate could not operate without the approval of the [state’s attorney’s] office . . . The relationship between the State’s Attorney’s office, under [Tom] Courtney and [Dan] Gilbert, and the Capone Syndicate, was such that during the entire period that Courtney was in office [1932-44], no Syndicate man was ever convicted of a major crime in Cook County.”

In rapid succession, Courtney’s goons arrested Roger Touhy and persuaded the Washington authorities to cancel Factor’s extradition proceedings, now that he was a material witness in a capital case. Touhy was tried twice in the Factor case, the first jury unable to reach a decision. Although Factor identified Touhy, his admission was suspect given that he had earlier testified that he had been blindfolded the entire time. Two weeks later, the second trial produced a surprise witness, Isaac Costner, or Tennessee Ike, who, when asked under oath to state his occupation, replied, “Thief.” Ike stated that he was with Touhy during the kidnapping but he was against the idea. Touhy was found guilty this time around and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. Meanwhile, Jake the Barber was allowed to stay in the country as “a friend of the court.” Twenty years later, Ike filed a deposition in which he admitted that he was put up to the false testimony by U.S. assistant attorney general Joseph B. Keenan, who promised to cut Ike a break on a thirty-year sentence for mail robbery if he agreed to testify against Touhy. When Keenan reneged, Ike filed the damning deposition.

But it was too little too late for Roger “the Terrible” Touhy, who languished in prison until 1959, when the abomination was finally reversed. When Judge Barnes finally reviewed the case, he concluded that “the kidnapping never took place.” The parole board agreed. Unfortunately for Touhy, he released his autobiography,
The Stolen Years,
simultaneously with his release from prison, wherein he referred to Curly Humphreys as a pimp.
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Compounding his error, Touhy announced that he intended to sue Factor, State’s Attorney Tom Courtney, Ricca, Humphreys, and Accardo for $300 million for wrongful imprisonment. One wonders what Touhy could have been thinking; it was obvious to many that he was signing his own death warrant. By this time, the Outfit, in collusion with its New York Commission partners, was on the eve of bilking the Teamsters Pension Fund out of hundreds of millions of dollars to finance casino construction in Las Vegas. Touhy’s suit held the ominous potential for exposing this massive conspiracy. Thus it came as no surprise when, on December 16, three weeks after his emancipation, Roger Touhy was murdered with five shotgun blasts, while Jake Factor dined at the Outfit’s Singapore Restaurant. The
Daily News
reported two days later that “police have been informed that the tough-talking Touhy had given Humphreys . . . this ultimatum: ’Cut me in or you’ll be in trouble. I’ll talk!’ On his deathbed, the former gangster whispered, ’I’ve been expecting it. The bastards never forget.’”

Jake the Barber continued his association with the Outfit for many years. After finally serving six years in prison for mail fraud involving the fraudulent sale of other people’s whiskey receipts, Factor moved on to Las Vegas in the 1950s. At that time, the Outfit had expanded its empire into Sin City, and Curly Humphreys sponsored Jake for a position as manager of one of Vegas’ (and the Outfit’s) first premier hotel-casinos, the Stardust. In 1960, just months after Roger Touhy’s release from prison and subsequent murder, Factor sold Curly Humphreys four hundred shares of First National Life Insurance stock at $20 a share, then bought them back after a few months for $125 per share. Curly netted a tidy $42,000 profit.

In the 1950s, Factor began drawing on the great fortune he had amassed during his early British stock swindle, to embark on a successful PR campaign aimed at creating the persona of Jake the Philanthropist. His frequent six-figure donations to various charities earned him numerous humanitarian awards. Some have asserted that another reason for Touhy’s murder was that a free Touhy could easily destroy the Barber’s hard-won reincarnation as the beneficent John Factor.