ROGER TOUHY - MURDERED BY CHICAGO MOB

My uncle, Roger Touhy, was involved in bootlegging in the northwest suburbs of Chicago during the time of Prohibition, an ill-advised law that was subsequently repealed.  Previously, Roger had been in the U.S. Navy, received an honorable discharge, traveled west to Colorado and Oklahoma where he worked at train depots and learned about buying land and selling it to big oil people, respectively.  He returned to Chicago to marry, have two sons and establish himself as a businessman by owning car dealerships.  He became very successful and was living a very comfortable life in the suburbs with his family.

Roger had five brothers and four of them were involved in crime from the time they were in elementary school.  The Touhy children were born and grew up in one of the poorest immigrant sections of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.  Their father was an honest Chicago policeman and both he and his wife tried very hard to keep all of their children on the "straight and narrow" but their older sons could never fight the temptation of the streets where there was money to be made as thieves. Roger was fortunate enough at age ten to be taken by his widowed father from the crime-infested neighborhood called The Valley to live in the country.  There, he attended parochial school, was an altar boy and was valedictorian of his graduating class.  However, his father could not afford to educate him after the eighth grade and, so, he went to work at the age of thirteen.

At the time he owned his very lucrative car dealerships, his older brothers were involved in bootlegging.  As intelligent as Roger was, he used extremely poor judgement when he answered his brother Tommy's call to join them.  The lure of a great deal of money that was to be made in selling beer, in addition to his loyalty to his brothers, is what sealed his fate.  Al Capone wanted Roger's beer territory and was willing to do whatever it took to claim it.  The Chicago Mob used a kidnapping hoax involving a swindler and con man who was fighting extradiction by the U.S. Government as a means to frame my uncle for the crime that never happened.  The witnesses perjured themselves, jurors were either bought or terrorized, and the judge, District Attorney and chief investigator for the District Attorney were already in the hip pocket of Al Capone.  So, it was an easy matter to get my uncle convicted.  He was sentenced to 199 years!   After being unjustly incarcerated in Stateville Prison for a quarter of a century, Roger was finally freed.  It was through the efforts of his sister --my mother -- who struggled for 25 years to exonerate him and a honest and courageous federal judge who wrote the definitive Decision outlining the horrendous miscarriage of justice that was perpetrated on my uncle, that opened the doors of Stateville for him.

After only 28 days of freedom, while living with me and my family, Roger Touhy was murdered by the Chicago Mob who shotgunned him to death on the front steps of my home.

I am currently writing a book about my uncle's tragic ordeal and will reveal details which are not commonly known about his being railroaded into prison and subsequently murdered.  The facts surrounding this case lead all the way up to the presidency of the United States.  I hope to be published sometime in 2013.

In the meantime, I would welcome on this site any questions or comments from anyone who is interested in my uncle's case.

Thank you.

Carol M Touhy