Moving from patrolman to detective in under a year—another Chicago P.D. record—Drury had decided a police officer ought to do something about Al Capone and his boys, and had targeted the Outfit for special attention. Whenever he would spot a known Capone associate, Drury slammed the guy against the nearest wall and made him stand for a frisk.
And Drury didn’t care where this took place—a restaurant, the racetrack, a men’s room, a street corner—and he would gladly embarrass these hoods when they were out with their wives and kiddies.
“Let these families know,” he’d say, “what kind of coward is the head of their household.”
Soon the papers had dubbed Bill the “Watchdog of the Loop”—his sports background, his brother being a reporter, and his own gregarious nature led to friendships with countless newspapermen, who constantly gave him glowing mentions in the press—and the Syndicate boys were scratching their heads wondering why they were paying good dough to Drury’s superiors, when they were getting ballbreaking treatment like this. Before long, Bill was taken off the street and assigned station house duty; then he was transferred to the pickpocket detail, where I first met him. In neither case did these assignments prevent the Watchdog of the Loop from pursuing his mission in life.
Drury spent his off-duty hours sauntering along Rush Street and Division and other Loop thoroughfares, prowling for hoodlums. When he spotted a millionaire thug like Tony Accardo or Murray Humphries, he demanded their identification and leaned them against the nearest building, legs spread, arms and hands and fingers outstretched, patting them down for concealed weapons.
Such vicious killers as Spike O’Donnell, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, and Frank McErlane were among those he fearlessly badgered. He arrested Louie “Little New York” Campagna on State Street, catching the Capone crony packing a .45. In a North LaSalle office, he nabbed ten mobsters, catching Charley Fischetti carrying heat; and he arrested Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, the notorious Outfit accountant, outside Marshall Field’s, to the delight of jeering onlookers.
“You son of a bitch,” the pudgy, iguana-like Guzik had sputtered. “I’m no vagrant! I got more money in my pocket right now than you earn in a fucking year!”
“Two more words, Jake,” Drury said, “and I’ll snap the cuffs on you. Two more sentences, I’ll get you fitted for a straitjacket.”
This kind of showy bravado had made Bill a favorite of the reform crowd. A socially concerned segment of the social register—with names like Palmer and McCormick—singled him out as their police mascot; he was hired to stand guard in black tie, tails, and top hat at fancy weddings and various fashionable doings (and made the papers doing so). When the swells had jewels, furs, or works of art to be guarded, off-duty Drury would moonlight for them; the Opera House became his second beat. Much as he despised graft, he accepted generous fees from his wealthy patrons, and he always drove a nice car and was widely known as the best-dressed honest cop on the force.
We had a long and tangled history, Bill Drury and me. He had saved my life, back in pickpocket detail days, in a Shootout at Lincoln and Addison with a car thief named Thomas Downey, who’d been eluding the cops for weeks. For that Bill had won the Lambert Tree commendation—the department’s “Medal of Honor” for bravery in the line of duty; he also won my undying friendship.
In 1943, when an old girl friend of mine, Estelle Carey, was murdered viciously—tortured and torched—Drury doggedly pursued the Syndicate angles of the slaying. He turned up the heat on various hoods, subjecting them to polygraphs, and this led to trumped-up charges that Drury—then acting captain at Town Hall station—had looked the other way where gambling in his district was concerned. Bill and his friend Tim O’Conner—another rare Chicago cop with an honest reputation—were suspended, though both fought through the courts and were eventually reinstated.
I had also been involved in the case that had finally brought him down: the shooting of James Ragen, who had been rubbed out when he refused to turn his racing news wire service over to the Outfit. Ragen had been my client—I’d been his bodyguard driving down State Street in the heart of Bronzeville when the shotgun assassins opened up on us from a truck otherwise filled with orange crates. The bullets didn’t kill Jim, not immediately; but he died in the hospital, with the help of a mobbed-up doctor who introduced infectious staphylococci into the wounds.
Jim Ragen’s niece, by the way, was Peggy Hogan; and Peggy had been my girl friend at the time (right now she was my ex-wife).
So I had helped Bill track down a trio of colored eyewitnesses to the shotgunning—a Pullman porter, a steel worker, and a drugstore clerk—and three West Side gun men were indicted for the Ragen killing. But one of the witnesses was bumped off, and the other two recanted…and both claimed Drury had offered to share the reward money with them in exchange for their testimony. Bill and his partner Tim O’Conner were called before a grand jury demanding details on their dealings with the two witnesses; when they refused to testify unless granted immunity, the Civil Service Board dismissed both from the force.
Now, as his court battles continued, and his chance of returning to the Chicago P.D. grew ever more remote, Bill Drury was staging a last ditch effort to bring down the Outfit guys who had derailed his career.
“I trusted you, Bill,” I said, still seated on the crate, sighing, shaking my head. “And you’ve put me on the spot.”
Sitting before his feast of tape recorders and guns, he didn’t look at all contrite. He smiled like Father O’Malley and held out his open hands. “Nate…join me.”
“What? Go to hell.”
Now, ridiculously, he looked around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping; and very quietly he said, “I’m not just investigating, and helping out the committee…. I’m testifying.”
“You’re going on TV?”
He ducked that. “You know about my files, my notebooks, my journals.”
I nodded. Over the years he’d made a hobby of it, following day-by-day movements of Outfit leaders, compiling names, dates, places, which had been useful when he’d turned to writing those newspaper columns. Few people understood the inner workings of the Chicago mob better than Drury; and no one else had chronicled them in this fashion.
“Well,” he said, basking in self-satisfaction, “next Tuesday I’m meeting with Kefauver’s staff. I’m turning over all my notebooks, records, card files, tape recordings, everything.”
I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Why not just limit it to that, behind closed doors—why advertise it by
