1950 CHICAGO GANGLAND The crooked cops, beleagured state’s attorney and killings
Annabelle Drury, worried that her husband still wasn’t home at 7:35 p.m., shined a light through the garage window of their home at 1843 W. Addison St. Then she ran to a nearby grocery store. “Call the police, my husband has been shot!” she screamed to the clerk.
It was Sept. 25, 1950, and the responding officers found William Drury, a former Chicago cop, slumped over the wheel of a new Cadillac. There were four holes in the windshield made by the shotgun that killed him. The hood was scarred by a 45-caliber bullet.
“Drury had no chance to open the glove compartment of the car, where police found a regulation .38 caliber police revolver containing five cartridges,” the Tribune reported. “A gray fedora hat with shotgun pellet holes in the crown, and a pair of yellowish gloves were on the seat.”
A few hours before the shooting, Drury and his attorney had been making arrangements for him to testify before the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce — popularly known as the Kefauver Committee, for its chairman, Sen. Estes Kefauver, D-Tenn.
Drury had told the lawyer, “I’m awfully hot” — jargon the Tribune translated to mean he was in imminent danger.
“He had blood in his eye,” the lawyer told a Tribune reporter. Drury had been looking forward to sharing his take on corruption in Chicago, but he wanted a guarantee of protection from the feds.
That had prompted an investigator from the Kefauver Committee to call Annabelle Drury at 5 p.m. The investigator asked her to have her husband call him at 7 p.m. She hadn’t made much of the call, possibly because William Drury had recently opened a private detective agency on the second floor of their home. She said that around 6:45 p.m. she heard what she thought was a car backfiring in the alley behind their home.
In fact, the investigator who’d requested the call back had checked with his superiors, and the feds had OK’d a deal: If Drury would testify, he’d be protected.
William Drury didn’t live to make the phone call.
Drury’s killing “shows the savagery of the Chicago gang,” Kefauver told the Tribune. “His killers must be brought to justice.” In the end, neither the Chicago police nor Kefauver’s investigators ever solved the crime.
Kefauver was hoping his committee’s investigation would make him the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1952. The committee traveled across the country in 1950 and 1951, holding televised hearings in a number of cities. What better publicity could he ask for than a gangland killing in Chicago, on the eve of his hearings in that city, known for mob boss Al Capone? Two gangland killings.
Marvin Bas, an attorney who claimed
to have the dirt on Chicago gambling operations, was murdered the same day as Drury. Bas had offered his information to the Republican candidate for Cook County sheriff, who was running against the Democratic candidate (and assumed mob favorite), Dan Gilbert. Making $9,000 a year, a hefty sum in 1950, Gilbert lived on Lake Shore Drive and credited “Lady Luck” for making him a successful gambler.
Gilbert also happened to be chief investigator for State’s Attorney John Boyle, who was taking a beating in the press over the two killings. He fought back by attacking the victims.
“Who says they were crime fighters? We don’t know how Drury has been making his living in the last two years. He had six $100 bills in his pocket when he was shot,” Boyle told the Tribune. “Bas was on the other side of the fence. He was always getting writs of habeas corpus for persons we arrested. And he had represented a lot of honky tonks as well as hoodlums.”
Drury’s finances were mysterious. He claimed to be broke, which had prompted his lawyer to ask: “What about that new Cadillac you are driving?” Drury replied that the car had been a gift from “someone for whom he had done a favor.”
He had crossed paths with a number of mobsters. It was easy to see how, depending on the angle, Drury could look like a resolute crime fighter or a crooked cop.
He was slight of build, well-read in the classics and a natty dresser. He was also one tough guy. In 1927, he was off duty when a bandit jumped on the running board of Drury’s car and put a gun to his head. Drury reached for his weapon and, as they wrestled, managed to open the door.
“Both rolled to the street and disengaged their gun hands,” the Tribune reported. “Drury was quickest on the trigger and inflicted a wound on the bandit from which he later died.”
Drury was given the Lambert Tree medal, Chicago’s award for outstanding bravery.
As a detective, he and his partner were hailed as “the watchdogs of the Loop” for their many arrests of pickpockets and stickup men.
But in 1944, Drury was fired for tolerating gambling in the police district he commanded as a lieutenant. After a bitter court fight, he was reinstated and given files of unsolved murders to review. The assignment probably was intended to bury him in meaningless paperwork. Drury saw it as an opportunity to restart his career.
So he dug into the 1946 ambush of James Ragen, a distributor of horse racing information to bookies. Shortly before he was killed, Ragen told prosecutors that mobsters tried to muscle in on him.
Working with his old partner, Drury found witnesses who said some minor gamblers were Ragen’s murderers. But taken before a grand jury, two of the three supposed witnesses said their identifications of the killers had been coerced.
When Drury and his partner refused in 1947 to appear before the grand jury, they were fired. They narrowly escaped criminal prosecution because one of the recanting witnesses was found murdered.
Drury and his partner always insisted they had been railroaded by the state’s attorney’s office on orders of Jake Guzik, a syndicate boss they’d once arrested.
For a couple of years, they fed tips on the mob to the Chicago Herald-American. The winter before his murder, Drury wrote a series of articles for the Miami Daily News about Chicago mobsters transplanting their rackets in Florida.
Shortly before being killed, Drury advertised in Chicago newspapers, offering his services “to any group which wanted to smash syndicate gangsters anywhere,” as the Tribune noted in reporting his murder.
He never gave up trying to clear his name. He and his partner appealed their discharge from the Police Department to the courts. A judge ruled in their favor. That decision was overturned by an appellate court, a ruling affirmed by the Illinois Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case.
On Sept. 25, 1950, he was hoping for one last shot at proving he was a good cop. He believed his testimony before the Kefauver Committee would show the world that he was the victim of crooked politicians and hoodlums.
He had recently spoken by phone to Bas, whose murder also has never been solved. Perhaps they were coordinating their efforts to tie the Chicago machine to the mob.
As Drury pulled into his garage, Annabelle Drury was cooking dinner for the two of them. They had no children. Someone had unscrewed the garage’s lightbulb. The cops would find its shattered pieces on the floor. So Drury probably never saw the shotgun and pistol that fired the shots his wife thought were nothing more than a neighbor’s car backfiring.