CRIME: Back to the Roaring ’20s

Oldsters in Chicago newsrooms chortled with glee. Times had returned that they had thought were gone forever. Complete with pictures, “Xs” marking spots, big-time crime had busted loose on Page 1 again. All the worn but reliable cliches were dusted off: “Big black sedan . . . sawed-off shotguns . . . far-flung man hunt . . . cold-blooded killers.” Roger (“The Terrible”) Touhy, Bad Basil (“The Owl”) Banghart and five other long-term incorrigibles had lammed from Illinois’ supposedly escape-proof Stateville Prison.

Chicagoans nostalgically recalled the lush days of gangsterism when Chicago was good for a cadaver a night. Again they wondered when the sawed-offs would bark, wondered whose blood would run and where.

Fidgety, canny Roger Touhy, 45, sentenced to 99 years for the $70,000 kidnapping of Promoter John (“Jake the Barber”) Factor in 1933, is one of the few real gangster toughies left. A runty guy (5 ft. 5, 139 lb.), he bossed the Capone-rivaling Touhy mob during Chicago’s gory beer-war and kidnap-racket days, until sentence in 1934 cut him down. Slant-eyed Basil Banghart, 41, the Touhy mob’s tommy-gunner, likewise was serving 99 years for the Factor job. Chicago detectives label him “a regular sharpie,” tougher by far than Tough Touhy. Completely dedicated to crime and proud of his profession, Banghart is smart, energetic, fast-talking. The other escapers were no cookie pushers: James O’Connor, 36, serving one year to life for robbery, who escaped twice before; William Stewart, 43, Matthew Nelson, 40, and St. Clair Mclnerney, 30, serving life terms as habitual criminals; Edward Darlak, 33, serving 199 years for murder.

Because their escape obviously was well worked out in advance, they made it look easy. Using scissors on the convict driver, Touhy commandeered a garbage truck inside the prison yard. Loading some ladders and his colleagues-in-flight on to it (and taking along two guards, one of whom was mauled, as hostages), Touhy drove the truck to silo-shaped guard tower No. 3. There the criminals shot and slightly wounded Guard Herman Kross, scaled the 35-ft. wall, walked down the tower’s outside steps, hopped into Guard Kross’s car (parked near by) and drove away. All this took an hour. In that time few guards noticed, no guard fired a shot. The alarm did not sound until the fugitives were on the wall.

Warden Edward H. Stubblefield, a political appointee who happened to be away from the prison the day of the break, could only wail that war jobs had lured away most of his seasoned guards. Said he: “. . . the great majority of the guards are green. . . . Last month 65 new guards were put to work. . . . The State pays guards here $109 a month for three months. After that they get $118 and $136.” Only 75 guards were on duty, he said, guarding Stateville’s 3,256 inmates, when the Touhyites fled. At week’s end Illinois’ Governor Dwight H. Green launched an investigation.