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That Wednesday, Purvis had been the Chicago SAC for eight months, and as his behavior would show, he hadn’t yet mastered the arcane politics of gangland Chicago. On the phone was the chief investigator of the state prosecutor’s office, a former Chicago cop named Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert. Purvis was working with Gilbert to crack the strange kidnapping of a syndicate con man named Jake “The Barber” Factor. Many in Chicago thought the kidnapping a sham, an effort by Factor to evade extradition to face criminal charges in Great Britain. Purvis believed it was genuine. It was his first major kidnapping case.

That morning Tubbo Gilbert broke the news that the Factor and Hamm kidnappings had suddenly become intertwined. Two weeks earlier, Gilbert had announced to the press that Jake Factor had probably been kidnapped by an Irish gangster named Roger Touhy, whose suburban bootlegging and gambling empire was an old rival of Al Capone’s. With Capone in a federal prison after his conviction on tax evasion charges, Touhy was locked in a struggle with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, to take control of several large Chicago unions.

Now Gilbert claimed he had evidence that Touhy had kidnapped Hamm, too. Better yet, Gilbert told Purvis, he had just learned that Touhy and three of his gangmates were in custody after a fender bender that morning in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. There are no records of the conversations between Gilbert and Purvis, but by late that afternoon Gilbert had Purvis believing Touhy was responsible for the Hamm kidnapping, too. Purvis made no independent investigation of Touhy. As far as he was concerned, Gilbert’s word was enough for the Bureau.

Friday morning Gilbert and a pair of Purvis’s men arrived in Elkhorn, and afterward the prisoners were ferried to Chicago, where they were fingerprinted by an FBI man. Touhy was led into Purvis’s office. Purvis told him he was being held for the Hamm kidnapping. “What do you mean a ham, Mr. Purvis? A ham sandwich?” Touhy cracked. “Or did I kidnap a ham steak?”

The next day, William Hamm and several eyewitnesses to his kidnapping were brought to Chicago to identify Hamm’s kidnappers. Looking through a one-way mirror, Hamm wasn’t at all sure they were his kidnappers and said so to reporters. But one eyewitness, a cab driver named Leo J. Allison, was, and that was all Purvis needed. He emerged from his office to tell reporters that the Bureau had assembled “an ironclad case against Touhy” for the Hamm kidnapping.

“We have positive identification of all four of the prisoners,” Purvis said. “The government men worked carefully and thoroughly on this case, and we are sure of ourselves.”11 In Washington, Hoover was thrilled. “[T]his is a splendid piece of work, which was consummated only by the untiring and resourceful efforts of the entire Chicago staff,” he wrote Purvis. 12

It was nothing of the sort. In fact, Purvis was fooled into arresting the wrong men by a corrupt investigator in league with the Chicago Syndicate, a fact that would be confirmed twenty years later by a federal court. Roger Touhy would ultimately be convicted of the false kidnapping of Jake Factor; only after two decades in prison was he able to convince a judge he had been framed. In 1954 Judge John Barnes, in an opinion that led to Touhy’s release, noted that the Illinois state prosecutor’s office, which he found to be dominated by Tubbo Gilbert, had never brought charges against a single member of the syndicate. Judge Barnes found “sinister motives [by] Captain Gilbert and the politico-criminal syndicate for wanting to remove [Touhy] permanently from the scene.” With Purvis as his unwitting ally, the judge found, Gilbert and the FBI “worked in concert to convict Touhy of something.”13

“That Touhy was indicted at all in the Hamm matter,” the judge concluded, “is something for which the Department of Justice should answer.” Of course, it never did. Within days several prosecutors involved in the case expressed doubts about