A Good Night's Sleep

Roger ("Terrible") Touhy knew all the rackets: liquor, bank stickups, kidnapping. So did his pal, Basil ("The Owl") Banghart, whose skill with a machine gun was a Chicago gangland legend. Both were tough and smart as horsewhips, and proud of being redhots. When a prison official asked Banghart his occupation The Owl boasted: "I'm a thief, pal."

When they escaped from the Illinois Stateville Prison (TIME, Oct. 19), they hid out the smart way. With five other desperadoes who made the prison break they headed for Touhy's old bumping-off grounds on Chicago's North Side. Here was the ideal hangout: cheap hotels, row on row of furnished apartments, a floating population of clerks, barkeeps, nightclub entertainers, girls with no visible means of support. And Touhy and Banghart were smart enough to avoid the mistakes of other public enemies before them: they stayed out of the nightspots, kept away from their old underworld friends.

But they were not smart enough to whip the eternal dilemma of the man-hunted. All they gained was liquor and women : as they moved from apartment to apartment they left a trail of bobby pins and empty bottles. Otherwise life was just like prison -- except that it was riskier.

Life on the Lam. Every time one of them went to a grocery another trailed a half block behind, with a sawed-off shot gun under his coat. This was double protection : against the cops or a double cross.

They needed money, so they knocked off an armored car and snatched a $20,000 payroll. In these times they needed draft cards, so they carefully engineered pickpocket jobs and fifth-rate stickups to get cards that matched their descriptions. But above all they needed 24-hour-a-day caution, and discipline that surpassed anything they had ever known in prison.

One night two of them, William Stewart and Matthew Nelson, forgot themselves and went out on the town. At 10 o'clock Stewart dragged Nelson home drunk. The others' faces went grim; they reached for their pistols. They sat Nelson up on a sofa, beat his head with butt and barrel. Stewart, sick at his stomach with fear, slipped to the bathroom, jumped out the window, ran away.

The gang quickly cleared out of that apartment. Behind, as evidence of what had happened to Nelson, they left a blood-soaked pillowcase, two blood-soaked, handkerchiefs, stains on sofa and floor. After that, nerves were nearly as raw as Nelson's tortured head and face. The gang split up, took two new apartments. They never saw Stewart again. Somehow Nelson got away, too, and fled to Minneapolis. And somehow the Federal Bureau of Investigation got the clue it needed.

End of the Trail. First the FBI picked up Nelson and Stewart. Then, with FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover directing, it laid careful traps around the two North Side apartments. One night last week the traps were sprung.

At one apartment Gangsters James O'Connor and St. Clair Mclnerney elected to shoot it out; they were mowed down by a crossfire from FBI shotguns. At the other apartment their pals woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning to find the street brilliant with searchlights, to hear a loudspeaker blare: "Basil Banghart, Roger Touhy, Edward Darlak. We know that you are in there. . . . Come out with your hands up. One at a time."

Federal agents stood at every doorway, in every hall. Across the street there were machine guns on the building tops. Touhy and Banghart were smart enough to know that their number was up. They and Darlak walked out, backwards, their hands high above their heads.

Behind, on the table of their last supper in freedom, they left a revealing still life: a copy of the Chicago Tribune for a tablecloth, a quart carton of chow mein, three paper plates still half full of untouched food, an empty bottle of Canadian Club, three coffee cups drained to the last drop. For frayed nerves, solid food had been too much, but the coffee and whiskey were soothing.

Said William Stewart as he went back to prison: "This will be my first decent night's sleep since we got out. ... I had less liberty than I had in Stateville. They wouldn't let me go out of the room except at night for a meal and coffee. . . ."

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