Who Killed McSwiggin and Why?
As long as the gangsters only killed each other, the public didn’t get too upset. In some quarters, the Beer Wars were like a blood sport, with daily accounts in the newspapers serving as box scores. In 1925, the recently formed Chicago Crime Commission instituted the first ever use of a public enemies list. Printed semiannually in the papers, complete with mug shot photos and abbreviated rap sheets, it became a virtual player program, helping the public to keep names and territories straight. Of course, some people were horrified by the killings and growing lawlessness, but others among the cities many ethnic enclaves rooted for their side in a bloody game that sometimes seemed like a surreal microcosm of life in the big city.
Even those who viewed the city’s crime wars with frivolity and “ethnic pride,” however, were shocked by the events of April 27, 1926, a mob hit so outrageous that it would significantly reconfigure the way people looked at “those lovable bootleggers.”
William H. McSwiggin was a smart, highly touted twenty-six-year-old prosecutor in the state’s attorney’s office. He had been handpicked by the top man himself: Robert Emmett Crowe, a stern, beetle-browed Irish American who for five years had served as state’s attorney for Cook County, with an eye on higher elective office. Crowe’s tenure happened to coincide with one of the most violent periods in the county’s history. According to records compiled by the Better Government Association of Chicago and Cook County, of the 349 murders that occurred in Crowe’s first two terms in office, 215 involved gangsters killed in the Beer Wars. Yet, despite the size of the state’s attorney’s office (with seventy assistant state’s attorneys and fifty police, it was the largest in the history of the prosecutor’s office), it obtained a mere 128 convictions for murder, none involving gangsters. Bombings during the same period totaled 369 without a single conviction.
With daily broadsides in the press suggesting that Crowe was either inept or corrupt, the prickly state’s attorney placed a high level of emphasis on his rising young star, Bill McSwiggin, who in one year alone won convictions in nine straight capital cases. Little Mac, as McSwiggin was known to his friends, was the son of a decorated Chicago cop. The product of a Catholic education that included undergraduate studies and law school at DePaul University, McSwiggin was a registered Republican who had helped deliver votes for State’s Attorney Crowe, which led to his appointment at a young age. Five foot nine, with the build and bearing of an athlete, McSwiggin dressed beyond his means and was known to have a sharp wit. In an office still largely comprised of WASP holdovers from a previous generation, he was a tough, street-wise Irish American who’d grown up on the West Side alongside kids who were now among some of the city’s most notorious bootleggers. In fact, he was still friendly with various members of the West Side O’Donnell gang, who were presently engaged in a rambunctious shooting war with Al Capone for control of Cicero.
Despite McSwiggin’s occasional fraternization with known disreputable characters, his reputation as a public servant was squeaky clean. The belief that he was incorruptible was underscored by his father’s long years of service to the Chicago police department. But given the abysmal record of the state’s attorney’s office in recent years, the public lionization of the handsome, young prosecutor involved a fair amount of fanciful myth-making on the part of the citizenry and the press—all of which made it doubly shocking when McSwiggin wound up dead in the company of scoundrels.
At six o’clock P.M. on the evening of April 27, McSwiggin was eating supper at 4946 West Washington Boulevard, where he still lived with his parents and four sisters. He was visited by Tom “Red” Duffy, a boyhood chum and known member of the West Side O’Donnell gang. McSwiggin left his meal unfinished, saying he was going to play cards with some friends.
Outside the McSwiggin home, Bill and Red climbed into a car waiting at the curb. Behind the wheel sat Jim Doherty, another known gangster whom McSwiggin had only recently prosecuted (unsuccessfully) on a murder rap. Seated next to Doherty was his co-defendant from that case, Myles O’Donnell. In the back seat of the car sat Klondike O’Donnell, Myles’ brother. These four men, crammed in the car alongside Assistant State’s Attorney Bill McSwiggin, represented the entire upper echelon of the notorious West Side O’Donnell gang.
Jim Doherty had driven only a few blocks when his engine began to sputter. He pulled into a West Side garage and left the car there for repairs. The entire group got into Klondike O’Donnell’s new Lincoln sedan. A sixth man joined the party: Edward Hanley, a former police officer now working for the O’Donnells. Hanley drove. They cruised around Cicero for about two hours, drinking beer in several saloons and speakeasies. Their last stop was the Pony Inn, a two-story, white-brick saloon owned by Harry Madigan, once a member of Ragen’s Colts. At 5613 West Roosevelt Road, the Pony Inn was a mile north of the Hawthorne Inn, Al Capone’s new headquarters in Cicero.
The rivalry between the O’Donnells and Capone for control of Cicero had been heating up. Mostly it was about beer, but it also had to do with Capone’s having opened a massive brothel (managed by his brother Ralph) on the southern edge of town near the Hawthorne Race Track. Like Deanie O’Banion before them, the O’Donnells made a distinction between illegal booze and gambling on the one hand and prostitution on the other; whoring, after all, was a corruption of the flesh, a sin that was biblical in nature. It was a quaint distinction, perhaps (the illegal beer business killed more people than prostitution ever did), but it was one that held considerable sway with Cicero’s sizable Catholic population, both Irish and Italian, who viewed Capone as a degenerate vice peddler.
Even so, Capone had managed to take over Cicero through political intimidation, corruption of the local police, and brute force. The O’Donnells had resisted to the extent that they could. Mostly, they were a thorn in Capone’s side, one that he viewed in the larger context of his war with the Irish who were spread far and wide throughout the area and coming at him from all directions.
A Capone scout spotted Klondike O’Donnell’s Lincoln parked in front of the Pony Inn. He notified his boss, who impulsively saw the occasion as an opportunity to consolidate his business interests in one fell swoop. Capone grabbed a tommy gun and quickly assembled a team of men. Applying Machiavelli’s theory of massive retaliation, they deployed five cars with a total of four gunmen. The cortege of vehicles lined up a half block away from the Pony Inn and waited for the Irishmen to appear.
Bill McSwiggin and his group of gangster buddies emerged from the saloon shortly after eight o’clock P.M. Pleasantly stewed, they ambled across the sidewalk toward the Lincoln. Capone’s motorcade immediately swung into action. While cruising past the group of six men, they cut loose with a barrage of machine gun fire. An eyewitness who lived above the saloon later testified: “I saw a closed car speeding away with what looked like a telephone receiver sticking out the rear window and spitting fire….”
Duffy, Doherty, and McSwiggin took the brunt of the hit, while Hanley and the O’Donnells were spared by throwing themselves to the pavement behind the sedan. Once the dust settled, the O’Donnell’s surveyed the damage. Duffy was beyond help, riddled with holes and maybe already dead. Doherty’s legs had been shattered and his chest ripped open, but he was still alive. McSwiggin was also alive, but hurt badly, shot multiple times in the back and neck.
A dog barked in the distance, and lights flicked on in the surrounding apartment buildings. “Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck…” mumbled one of the injured men.
“Think, think, think,” muttered Myles O’Donnell, trying to decide what to do.
In the tense moments that followed, the O’Donnell brothers panicked. Hoping to avoid a scandal that would surely ensue if they took the assistant state’s attorney to the hospital, where they would face a battery of police and newspapermen, they decided to move the injured men to Klondike’s house nearby on Parkside Avenue and call a doctor from there. They quickly loaded Doherty and McSwiggin into the back seat of their car. Du
ffy, they figured, was a hopeless case; they left his bleeding body propped up against a tree. But before the brothers ever reached Klondike’s house, Doherty and McSwiggin both expired.
The O’Donnells now had two dead bodies on their hands, one of them a renowned public official. Leaving Doherty’s corpse in the car, they decided to cart McSwiggin into the house. There they removed all identifiable belongings from his pockets and clothes, then took the body back to the car and put it in the trunk. With one brother following in a smaller car, they drove out of town to a lonely stretch of prairie and stopped. The O’Donnells removed the bodies of their two boyhood friends from the Lincoln and dumped them in a ditch. Then they continued on to Oak Park, where they abandoned the Sedan. After that, they vanished, not to be seen or heard from for more than a month. (Capone also vanished that night and hid out for the next three months.)
Duffy was the first to be found that night. He was still alive when a passing motorist discovered him seated against a tree in a pool of his own blood. The motorist drove him to a hospital.
“Pretty cold to leave me lying there,” Duffy muttered in the emergency room. Those were his last words. In his pocket, the police found a list of sixty Cicero speakeasies and saloons, many of them checked off with pencil marks. Before the night was over, the list mysteriously disappeared.
A few days later, McSwiggin’s and Doherty’s corpses were discovered and identified. The bare details of what happened that night were established. Though it was not immediately known whether McSwiggin was the target of the hit or who had done the shooting, the circumstances surrounding the bloody triple homicide were discouraging. At the very least, Bill McSwiggin, the county’s crusading prosecutor, had been killed while in the presence of known desperados, two of whom he had tried for murder just a few months before. Why was he hanging out with these men, and what had they been discussing?
The ensuing investigation did not answer these questions, but it did uncover many disturbing truths. Among other things, it was learned that once the bodies of McSwiggin and the others had been discovered, Cicero policemen visited every saloon in town and warned the owners: “There’s gonna to be a big investigation. Don’t tell nobody nothin’. If you open your face, you get ratted out to the Prohibition office and face federal prosecution. Understood?”
The Tribune asked the question in a page one editorial: “Who Killed McSwiggin and Why?” Every week, this same headline appeared on the editorial page with an update on the investigation. Despite state’s attorney Crowe’s guarantee that an unprecedented amount of investigatory firepower would be brought to bear, the investigation floundered. “The police have no more actual evidence as to the motives of the shooting and the identity of the killer than they did when it happened,” stated the Tribune.
The frustrating lack of progress led to an irrefutable conclusion: Justice was ineffectual when stacked up against the forces of the underworld. If the cops were in on it and telling people to clam up, who else had a vested interest? Maybe state’s attorney Crowe’s laughable gangster prosecution record was not a result of ineptitude, as some felt, but of a process of collusion between the System and the gangsters. Maybe it wasn’t corrupt politicians who were calling the shots, as it had been since the earliest days of the Machine. Maybe the gangsters were in control now. Maybe they—not the judges and the prosecutors—decided who would be convicted and who would go free. Maybe the whole of American justice was rotten to the core.
When Al Capone finally reemerged in Chicago after numerous grand juries had been empanelled and disbanded for lack of evidence, he quickly tossed fuel on the fire. “I didn’t kill [McSwiggin],” he told reporters. “Why would I? I liked the kid. Only the day before he was up to my place, and, when he went home, I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man.”
He told another reporter, “I paid McSwiggin. I paid him plenty and got what I paid for…Doherty and Duffy were my friends, too. I wasn’t out to get them. Why, I used to lend Doherty money. Big-hearted Al I was, just helping out a friend. I wasn’t in the beer racket and didn’t care where they sold. Just a few days before that shooting, my brother Ralph and Doherty and the O’Donnells were at a party together.”
Out of frustration, McSwiggin’s old man took matters into his own hands. The retired sixty-year-old cop told reporters, “I thought my life’s work was over, but it’s only begun. I’ll never rest until I’ve killed my boy’s slayers or seen them hanged. That’s all I have to live for now.” After a year-long investigation, Sergeant McSwiggin publicly named the men he felt were responsible for his son’s death. Al Capone and three other men manned the machine guns, he said, while two others acted as look-outs. An oath of secrecy prevented him from revealing the source of his information.
The names offered by the grieving father were nothing new. Months earlier, State’s Attorney Crowe had himself publicly identified Capone as the killer, stating that Big Al had fired the tommy gun himself as an example to his underlings. So everyone knew who the killers were. The problem was that without some kind of evidence linking them to the shooting, and no witnesses or accomplices willing to testify, there was nothing anyone could do. The gangsters were above the law.
Like many notable Prohibition-era killings, the murder of Assistant State’s Attorney McSwiggin remains unsolved to this day. A report compiled at the time by the Illinois Crime Survey surmised that “The very failure of the grand juries in solving the mystery of McSwiggin’s death raises many puzzling and disturbing questions in the minds of intelligent citizens about the reasons for the breakdown of constituted government in Chicago and Cook County and its seeming helplessness when pitted against the forces of organized crime.”
Meanwhile, the war between the dagos and micks raged on.
Gunning for Bugs
On September 20, 1926, Bugs Moran and his gang opened fire on Capone’s headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, reducing the hotel lobby, the adjoining restaurant, and neighborhood storefronts to ruins. Capone, who was in the restaurant having lunch, narrowly escaped with his life. A few weeks later, he exacted revenge. Hymie Weiss, the former Little Hellion and boyhood chum of O’Banion and Moran, was gunned down in broad daylight along with his bodyguard, Paddy Murray, and William J. O’Brien, one of Chicago’s leading criminal defense lawyers. It would have been labeled a “shocking triple homicide,” with photos and banner headlines, except that murders of this vintage were now so commonplace in Chicago that they sometimes didn’t even make the front page.
The tit-for-tat shootings, bombings, and killings continued until a gangland summit meeting was finally held at the downtown Sherman Hotel, located within the shadows of both Chicago City Hall and police headquarters. At this meeting, which was attended by Capone, Moran, the West Side O’Donnells, and others, a five-point peace treaty was put forth and agreed to. The treaty stood for a few weeks, until Moran and his remaining crew started hijacking Canadian booze shipments out of Detroit that belonged to Capone.
More than anyone else in the underworld, crazy Bugs Moran worried Capone. Scarface Al was enough of a student of human nature to know that Moran had harbored deep-seated revenge fantasies against him ever since the murder of his mentor, Dean O’Banion. The Polish-Irish gangster was unusually vociferous in his dislike for Capone, routinely referring to Capone in public as “the Beast” or “the Behemoth.” Bugs sometimes seemed to be baiting Big Al, trying to draw him into an angry mistake or miscalculation that would cost him his life. When asked by a reporter one time to expound on the difference between himself and Capone, Bugs explained, “The Beast uses his muscle men to peddle rot-gut alcohol and green beer. I’m a legitimate salesman of good beer and pure whiskey. He trusts nobody and suspects everybody. He always has guards. I travel around with a couple of pals. The Behemoth can’t sleep nights. If you ask me, he’s on dope. Me, I don’t even need an aspirin.”
The hostilities between Moran and Capone continued for two years, with hijackings, shootings, killings,
and other acts of insurgency that seemed to be building toward some kind of crescendo, which is exactly what came to pass. On the night of February 13, 1929, Bugs got a call from a hijacker offering him a truckload of whiskey from Detroit at the bargain price of fifty-seven dollars a case.
“Great,” said Moran. “Bring it to the warehouse around ten thirty tomorrow morning. We’ll all be there.”
Bugs hung up the phone. He could hardly contain himself; the shipment was one of Capone’s, snatched along the Chicago-Detroit highway, according to the hijacker. Bugs spent the rest of the evening calling around to various members of his gang, informing them to meet at the North Clark Street warehouse the following morning to help unload the shipment.
The next day, Bugs Moran rose late, as was his usual style. A gang associate who sometimes acted as his driver met Moran at his Parkway Hotel apartment. Together, the two men drove the short distance from the hotel to the gang’s warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, and arrived in the area shortly after ten thirty.
A bone-chilling wind whipped in off Lake Michigan, dropping the temperature to fifteen below zero. Rather than pull up in front of the warehouse, park, and have to walk through the freezing cold, Moran and his associate decided to enter via an alleyway in the back. As their vehicle approached the red-brick warehouse sandwiched between two taller buildings, Moran saw a car with uniformed police officers inside. Thinking it was a raid or police shakedown of some kind, he told his driver to continue on past the warehouse and head back to the hotel.
Upon his return to the Parkway Hotel, it took only minutes for Bugs Moran to begin receiving bits of information about what had gone wrong at the warehouse. In the days and weeks that followed, the rest of the city and the nation would also find out. In fact, enterprising newspapermen gave the events of that day a memorable designation: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
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