Authors: Gus Russo
As recounted often and with great swagger by agent Bill Roemer, the feds obtained a key to Celano’s and executed a recent Hoover directive that ordered a wholesale trashing of their targets’ civil rights: Hidden microphones would be planted in the hangouts. The order gave witness to the pressure Hoover felt to break the mob. “I decided I would be the first guy to plant a mike,” Roemer wrote. “I had been the first and only guy to win four Notre Dame boxing championships. It wouldn’t be my first first.” Roemer’s bravado notwithstanding, Hoover and his agents were fully cognizant of the unconstitutionality of their “black bag job.” In his autobiography, Roemer recounted the situation: “If we got caught, we were not to identify ourselves as FBI agents, and we were to attempt to escape without being identified. We were to carry no badge or credentials, no gun, nothing to connect us with the FBI. But, heaven help us if we were apprehended and it eventually came out that we were employed by the FBI; then the Bureau would denounce us. We were ’rogues,’ carrying out an unauthorized operation.”
Every Sunday night for two months, the G-men surreptitiously entered Celano’s, sawing their way through crawl spaces to create invisible wiring ducts. The operation was fraught with danger as the agents bumbled toward their goal. On one occasion reminiscent of a Three Stooges short, an agent fell through the crawl space, exiting the ceiling of the first-floor restaurant below, which was luckily closed. The agents had to race out to find plaster and paint to repair the damage before the eatery opened the next day. On July 29, 1959, Agent Roemer finally completed the task of planting a pineapple-sized World War II microphone (nicknamed Little Al in honor of Al Capone) behind the backroom radiator, hardwiring it into phone lines.
3
Of course, the noise of the radiator when it kicked in obliterated the conversation in Celano’s, just the sort of discovery that led to the invention of a new definition for the Bureau’s famous acronym: Famous But Incompetent.
Emboldened by their success at the tailor shop, Hoover’s mob busters spent the next several years planting bugs at other gang headquarters: Mooney’s Armory Lounge (this mike nicknamed Mo); Curly’s apartment (Plumb); Johnny D’Arco’s First Ward headquarters (Shade); the dry-heat room at Postl’s Health Club, where the gang often met; and one in Accardo’s lawyer’s offices. In addition to the bugs, phone lines were tapped both in Chicago and at the gang’s Las Vegas properties. One of the G’s intelligence coups was hearing that the Outfit was skimming over $12 million per year in Sin City. They also learned that the gang had at least forty-nine cops on their dole, in addition to various and sundry politicians of both statewide and nationwide notoriety. And invariably, the G came face-to-face with the shadowy connections between upperworld and underworld leaders. Agent Bill Roemer recalled how he once informed Sidney Korshak that he wanted to interview his wife, Bernice. Korshak said, “I’ll tell you where you can reach her. She’s having dinner at the Mocambo with Peter Lawford and his wife - you know, Bobby Kennedy’s sister.” At the time, Bobby Kennedy was the inquisitor general on the McClellan Committee. When Roemer reported the intelligence to his superiors in Washington, he assumed that they would rendezvous with Bea Korshak at the upscale eatery. Johnny Leggett, the THP coordinator at headquarters, responded, “Are you kidding, Roemer? They wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole.”
In passing, Curly mentioned to Jeanne that the G was getting wise to the gang’s activity. “Maybe they’ve got the tailor shop bugged,” Jeanne surmised. “No way,” Humphreys responded. However, with Humphreys’ seeming endless list of infiltrators in the police department, it wasn’t long before he confirmed his wife’s suspicion. “He also had a source in the Bureau,” insists his second wife, who refuses to divulge the name in deference to the agent, who may still be alive. West Side boss Frank Buccieri told one friend, “We knew the place was bugged, so we gave them a show.” According to Buccieri, Humphreys knew that the bugs were illegal and thus inadmissible in court. Said one friend, “Curly got a kick out of teasing the G.”
The December 1959 murder of alleged kidnapper Roger Touhy is believed by some to have inspired a classic Humphreys tease of the G. For twenty-six years, law enforcement officials had suspected that the actual planner of the Jake Factor kidnapping, for which Touhy had been imprisoned, was Curly Humphreys. When Touhy was gunned down after threatening to sue Humphreys and Accardo in 1959, authorities were all but convinced of Curly’s authorship of the hit. Confounding the G was the knowledge that Curly had fled Chicago for Florida on the day before the December 16 murder, much as Capone had done decades earlier, before the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Thus authorities were excited to overhear Humphreys at Celano’s discussing Touhy’s killing ten days after it had happened. The rest of the story was developed by Chicago journalist Sandy Smith, who was given access to the tapes of the powwow at Celano’s. In the middle of a conversation with Joey Glimco, the Humphreys-appointed head of the taxicab unions, Glimco brought up the recent whacking of Roger Touhy.
“What was it with Touhy?” Glimco asked, bringing the G-men to attention in their hidden listening post.
“Well, Joe, I’ll tell you . . .,” answered Humphreys. At that moment the steam from the radiator that concealed the hidden mike came on full force. For the next ten minutes, Humphreys’ voice was obliterated by the gurgling and clanging of the radiator. When the clamor died down ten minutes later, Humphreys’ voice returned in its full resonance: “. . . and that’s the way it was, Joe.”
The opportunity to finally resolve the Touhy case, and the garbled tape that held the answers, sent paroxysms through the headphoned agents. The tape was rushed to FBI headquarters in Washington where the Bureau spent many fruitless months trying to filter out the static. Jeanne Humphreys is certain that the episode was staged by Curly, who merely turned on the radiator manually just as he got the G’s attention.
Although Humphreys seemed to have learned of the Celano’s bug, he likely never learned of the other microphones, including the one eventually placed in his own apartment. After a time, the entire Celano’s charade became even too ludicrous for Humphreys. He began to amuse the agent monitors, many of whom had come to a grudging liking of the hood, with a new meeting-opening address: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and anyone listening. This is the nine-o’clock meeting of the Chicago underworld.”
Although the truth of the Touhy murder was obscured from the feds, the cause of another recent hit, also believed tied to a longtime Chicago mystery, was revealed, at least to Humphreys’ wife.
Curly’s Partner Gets Whacked
On August 23,1959, Jeanne Humphreys was reading the newspaper and catching some late-morning sun with Curly on the patio of their new Key Biscayne home when her eyes caught an unsettling story emanating from Chicago.
“Fred Evans was killed yesterday,” she said to Curly. “Didn’t he used to be your best friend?”
“He’s no friend of mine,” Humphreys responded brusquely, before turning and walking back into the house.
Jeanne Humphreys knew better. The Curly & Fred Show went back to the 1920s, when they had met as Young Turks in Messinger’s Restaurant and had thereafter partnered in a freelance fencing operation. From then on, after Curly’s graduation to the Outfit’s inner sanctums, they had worked closely together on numerous labor rackets, especially those involving the laundry business. In 1940, Curly and Fred had been indicted together in the $350,000 embezzlement of the Bartenders Union. At the time of his death, an up-against-the-wall execution, Evans was running a number of large operations, including the Industrial Garment Service with another Humphreys underling, Joey Glimco. In addition, Evans owned five other large laundry businesses and two luxury hotels in Los Angeles. His net worth was in the millions. But behind the scenes, Evans’ life was in turmoil.
Evans’ problems had come at him from different directions, and the question never resolved was, which one caused him to be shot twice in the head and twice in the throat as he exited his 5409 West Lake Street offices at high noon on August 22? And for Jeanne Humphreys, the question was twofold: Why had Curly turned against a lifelong friend, and was the desertion connected to Evans’ demise? In time, Curly’s minimal commentary combined with Jeanne’s hindsight reminiscences gave a degree of explanation for the tragedy.
Over the years, explanations for Evans’ murder have focused on two possible causes, both of which involved his recent problems with the G. First, Evans had come under attack by the IRS. For over a decade, Evans had been under close scrutiny by the taxmen, and once a year, as ordered, the dry cleaning kingpin toted his books down to the IRS office, where his numbers were put under a microscope. Despite their best efforts, the feds failed to find one penny out of place, so meticulous was Evans’ accounting. But by 1959, after McClellan and Apalachin, the G tried a new tactic: It began leaking details of Evans’ business to the press. It seemed that Evans’ minutely detailed ledgers also included the names of all the gangsters who received a cut of his operation, people like Curly Humphreys and Joe Accardo. Three weeks before his murder, Evans’ office was burglarized, the result of which left his files in shambles and many records missing.
The press wondered if Evans’ killing was the underworld’s way of stopping him from divulging the gang’s secret business workings. But G-man Bill Roemer had another theory. “I had a knack for planting bugs,” the agent later wrote, “and I developed a knack for recruiting informants. The first one I really recruited was Fred Evans.” Roemer described how he and fellow agent Ralph Hill had interviewed Evans at his office just six weeks before his killing: “He was a willing talker. He told us of Humphreys” youth, mentioned a couple of Hump’s associates . . . He also told us that Humphreys had a current financial interest in Superior Laundry and Linen Supply Company . . . Ralph and I went back to the office feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves. We had made arrangements to meet with Evans again in the near future.’
Chicago reporter George Murray, with his extensive sources in the underworld, reported what allegedly happened next: “The governing body of the Syndicate [Outfit] sat in judgment of Fred Evans in a kangaroo court. The records snatched in that office burglary on August 1, 1959, were scrutinized by men who understood every accounting entry. Murray Humphreys, as Evans’ sponsor, was asked if he wanted to advance any valid reason why the sentence of death on Fred Evans should not be carried out. Humphreys passed.”
Roemer believed his meeting with Evans instigated this star chamber. “The shots to the throat may well have been to ensure he would do no more talking to the FBI,” Roemer wrote. For his part, George Murray leaned toward the IRS-leak theory. Although both explanations may have contributed to Evans’ fate, recent interviews with Humphreys’ then wife strongly suggest that the overarching reason was rooted in one of the heartland’s greatest tragic mysteries.
In the year prior to the killing, Jeanne Humphreys witnessed a repeat occurrence that seemed trivial at the time, but would later turn out to be the turning point in the saga of Fred Evans. “Murray and I were walking into a restaurant to meet Joe [Accardo] and his wife,” recalls Jeanne, “when all of a sudden, Buster Wortman came running up and begging Murray for an audience with Joe Batters.” Frank “Buster” Wortman had long been the Outfit’s man in East St. Louis, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, where he coordinated the labor rackets for Humphreys, who was a close friend. The Outfit’s relationship with Wortman went back at least as far as the 1940s, when Capone’s heirs came to Wortman’s aid in his protracted gang war with the rival Shelton gang. After eliminating the Sheltons, Wortman built a moat around his Collinsville, Illinois, ranch home.
4
“I’ll see what I can do,” Humphreys answered the frantic Wortman. When the sit-down was not forthcoming, Wortman again traveled up from St. Louis a year later with a senior St. Louis hood named Elmer “Dutch” Dowling and visited Curly at home. “They stopped by on a Sunday morning and it was the same story,” remembers Jeanne. “They were desperate to talk to Joe.” This time Curly was even more terse. “There’s nothing I can do for them,” Curly said, as overheard by Jeanne. “They got themselves into this, and now they’ll have to suffer the consequences.” After Fred Evans’ death, and unending pestering by Jeanne, Curly gave a short explanation: “Evans and Dowling broke the rules. Buster was begging for their lives, but Joe could not let the Greenlease thing go unpunished.”
When Dowling, Wortman’s key lieutenant, was similarly executed three years later in Belleville, Illinois, it all began to fall into place for Jeanne Humphreys. The “Greenlease thing” was the tragic 1953 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Bobby Greenlease in Kansas City. “Apparently, the Outfit wanted them to sweat it out for a while before hitting them,” Jeanne says of the interval between Wortman’s first entreaties and the killings. Although Jeanne Humphreys learned little else about the rubouts, she knew enough to ask no more questions. However, with her contributions, reasonable inferences can be drawn about the enduring forty-nine-year-old mystery of Bobby Greenlease.
The Midwest’s “Lindbergh Baby”
On September 28,1953, Bobby Greenlease, the son of the wealthy owner of one of the nation’s largest Cadillac dealerships, was abducted from his private Catholic school in midtown Kansas City. His captor was a forty-one-year-old prostitute named Bonnie Brown Heady, who together with her partner, ex-con Carl Austin Hall, had meticulously planned the kidnapping for months. The duo took the child across state lines into Kansas, where Hall brutally beat the child before fatally shooting him in the head, then burying the body in the backyard of Heady’s St. Joseph, Missouri, home. Next, the pair sent a ransom note to Bobby’s parents, demanding $600,000 in $10 and $20 bills (far eclipsing the 1932 ransom of $70,000 demanded for the murdered baby of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh).