by John Kobler
Crowe's tenure was not without merit. He transformed the office of state's attorney, expanding its scope of operations and recruiting vigorous, ambitious young law school alumni. The normal quota of judges available to the state's attorney was six. Crowe's oratory in appeals to administrative and civic committees brought about an increase of twenty. His eloquence further obtained for his budget an extra $100,000 a year with which to retain special assistants, and at his urging 1,000 policemen were added to the city force.
Crowe recognized the folly of Prohibition and the unenforceability of the Volstead Act, and he repeatedly inveighed against them. Eighty percent of the Cook County population, he contended, was wet, and this included most judges and jurors. "A specimen of the idiocy to which the dry law reduces otherwise sane men," he said in a notable speech, "is the recent wordy war between Mayor Dever and the United States District Attorney [Edwin A.] Olson in Washington. Dever says the town is dry because he dried it up and because he threatened to report Olson to President Coolidge, which made Olson get busy. Olson testified that in spite of all his efforts, which eventually dried the town, it again became wet because the mayor's police are corrupt. In other words, each of these officials says the town is dry because he dried it and wet because the other fellow hasn't dried it. That is, it is both wet and dry!
"I'll tell you something: the town is wet and the county is wet, and nobody can dry them up. They holler about Sheriff Hoffman permitting the county to run wide open. Well, it is wide open. But for every dive in the county there are two in the city, and everybody in Chicago knows it except Dever.
"Why don't I get busy and stop it? For the simple reason that I am running a law office, not a police station. If Chicago wants things cleaned up, let somebody bring the law violators in here and I'll send them to the penitentiary. But I will not be both arresting officer and prosecutor."
Among Crowe's major court victories (as he never tired of reminding the public) was the breakup of a statewide auto-theft ring. He also assigned one of his crack assistants, Charles Gorman, to the prosecution of Fred "Frenchy" Mader, president of the Building Trades Council. With bombs and threats of strikes Mader had been extorting from Chicago construction firms 10 percent of the costs whenever they put up a new building. Despite the bribery of jurors and the intimidation of witnesses, Mader and forty-nine members of his gang were convicted. They served no prison sentence. Governor Small pardoned them all.
"Probably the worst handicap this office confronts is Len Small's parole and pardon system," said Crowe. "He lets them out as fast as we put them in. It takes us two weeks to get the guilty man convicted and it takes the Governor two seconds to sign his name on a pardon blank. In 1923, for example, I put 59 burglars and 97 robbers in Joliet, and Small released 88 burglars and 97 robbers!"
But first and last Crowe was the total politician, a magisterial player of the power game. A running mate of Thompson and Small in the 1921 elections, he broke with their machine over the control of Chicago's richest single source of patronage and graft-the Police Department. Thompson had chosen for police chief Charles C. Fitzmorris, a former city editor on William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American and no admirer of Crowe. The state's attorney formed his own anti-Thompson, anti-Small cabal within the party fold.
The co-drafters of the petition to Congress, Dean Edward T. Lee of Chicago's John Marshall Law School, and Dr. Elmer T. Williams, director of law enforcement for the Better Government Association, accused Crowe of consorting with criminals. He once attended a banquet given by the Gennas, they charged. "Liarsl" retorted Crowe and dismissed the whole petition as a publicity stunt, part of a political campaign to "put over Diamond Joe Esposito and others like him" in the coming primary. Diamond Joe thereupon revealed that during the previous elections, when he refused to support Crowe's c ndidacy, Crowe sent Jim Genna to him with threatening messages. Throughout his first term, Diamond Joe maintained, the state's attorney kept vengefully persecuting him; again and again his detectives raided the Bella Napoli Cafe.
The recriminations were still echoing when there occurred a murder that would lead to the fullest disclosure yet of the complicity between public officials and outlaws. As the Illinois Crime Survey summarized it, the cause celebre involved "most of the aspects of organized crime."
THE questions tantalized Chicagoans all that spring and summer: What had an assistant state's attorney been doing, driving around Cicero with four notorious hoodlums? What had he been doing, drinking bootleg beer with them, when only a few months earlier he had tried hard (or so it seemed at the time) to send two of them to the gallows?
At twenty-six William H. McSwiggin was one of the smartest, toughest prosecutors on Crowe's staff. The previous year he had won convictions in nine capital cases. Short but powerfully built, handsome, dapper and witty, "Little Mac" had grown up in Chicago's West Side Irish colony, a comrade of future gangsters like the O'Donnells, Jim Doherty and Tom "Red" Duffy. Like Doherty and Duffy, he was a policeman's son, the only boy among five children born to Sergeant Anthony McSwiggin, who joined the Chicago force in 1881. He attended De Paul Academy, a Roman Catholic institution, then De Paul University and finally the university law school, earning his tuition as a department store salesman, movie usher, dance hall bouncer, trucker and special agent for the American Railway Express Company. He graduated with such high honors that Crowe immediately offered him a place on his staff. Academic distinction, however, was not what originally impressed Crowe. As a popular Thirteenth Ward Republican, young McSwiggin had garnered votes for the state's attorney in 1920 and again in 1924. So had the O'Donnell gang. This political labor also brought him into contact with Capone, who often spoke of him as "my friend, Bill McSwiggin." A bachelor, McSwiggin lived with his parents and four sisters at 4946 West Washington Boulevard. His father was continually begging him to break with the disreputable companions of his youth.
The sequence of events that so agitated Chicago (as the police, a succession of grand juries and various special investigating committees pieced them together over a period of months) began on April 17 in the Hawthorne Inn. McSwiggin went there to confer with Capone. Though Capone later confirmed rumors of the meeting, he never disclosed its purpose. Police Sergeant McSwiggin, who claimed he knew what took place between his son and the gang leader, also refused to discuss it. "If I told," he said, "I'd blow the lid off Chicago. This case is loaded with dynamite. It's dangerous to talk about it."
At 6 P.M. on the evening of the twenty-seventh McSwiggin was eating supper at home when Red Duffy dropped in. Leaving his meal unfinished, McSwiggin followed him out to the street, saying he was going to play cards in Berwyn. They got into Jim Doherty's car. Doherty, whom McSwiggin had unsuccessfully prosecuted for the murder of Eddie Tancl, sat behind the wheel. Doherty's co-defendant, Myles O'Donnell, was in the rear seat with his brother Klondike. They had had a busy day. In the recent Republican county primaries the Crowe slate had defeated the ticket endorsed by Senator Deneen, who thereupon demanded a recount. The O'Donnells, Doherty and Duffy had spent the day in the County Building in Chicago, wearing the badges of ballot watchers for the Crowe machine. The recount confirmed the Crowe victory (and later investigations of election frauds by four special grand juries failed to upset it) . As Klondike O'Donnell left the County Building, he boisterously remarked to his companions, "We'll adjourn to Cicero and brace up on some good beer. I know it's good because I delivered it myself." A Capone spy happened to overhear the boast and at once reported it to Capone by telephone at the Hawthorne Inn. Before proceeding to Cicero, the four gangsters stopped for McSwiggin.
The numerous explanations advanced later to explain McSwiggin's actions were as disparate as their sources. The Crowe office acclaimed him as a valiant, dogged prosecutor who accompanied the gangsters only to gather material information for several pending cases, among them the second Scalise-Anselmi trial. According to the O'Donnells, simple kindness motivated McSwiggin; he had sought their help in recoverin
g some bulletproof vests that had been stolen from a friend, a salesman named Albert Dunlap. The anti-Crowe faction imputed corrupt motives to the assistant state's attorney. He was an underworld tool, they said; his conduct of the first Scalise-Anselmi trial had been cunningly manipulated so as to spare the killers the extreme penalty. To others, it seemed possible that McSwiggin had committed no offense more serious than an impropriety. Clan loyalties among Chicago's Irish were as durable as those of the Italians and in many instances accounted for the friendships of Irish gangsters and politicians raised in the same neighborhood.
Jim Doherty had driven only a few blocks when his engine began to sputter. He left his car for repairs in a West Side garage, and the five men changed to Klondike O'Donnell's new Lincoln sedan. A sixth man joined the party, Edward Hanley, a former police officer. He drove. They roamed Cicero for about two hours, drinking beer in several saloons. Their last stop was Harry Madigan's Pony Inn at 5613 West Roosevelt Road. A two-story, white brick building with a big weedy lot behind, it stood a mile north of Capone's Hawthorne Inn stronghold.
Relations between Capone and the O'Donnells had deteriorated to the brink of open combat. The Irishmen grew daily bolder in their encroachments upon Capone's Cicero territory. Harry Madigan later explained to Chief of Detectives Schoemaker how matters had stood: "When I wanted to start a saloon in Cicero more than a year ago, Capone wouldn't let me. I finally obtained strong political pressure and was able to open. Then Capone came to me and said I would have to buy his beer, so I did. A few months ago Doherty and Myles O'Donnell came to me and said they could sell me better beer than Capone beer, which was then needled. They did and it cost fifty dollars a barrel, where Capone charged me sixty. I changed, and upon my recommendation so did several other Cicero saloonkeepers."
As soon as Klondike O'Donnell's boast in the County Building was reported to Capone, he took from behind a sliding panel a tommy gun, one of the three supplied by Alex Korocek, and an extra 100cartridge magazine. Assembling a crew of his triggermen, he instructed them to fetch five cars which were to be deployed as follows:
A lead car to ram any police flivvers the motorcade might encounter during the getaway.
Two cars to move close behind the lead car, but hugging the curb so that they could block traffic at the street intersections until the car carrying Capone and three other armed men got past.
Capone's driver to keep 50 feet behind the first three cars.
The fifth car to cover the rear and in case of pursuit, to stage an accident, paralyzing traffic.
There remained to discover where the prey would alight. Shortly after eight o'clock a Capone lookout recognized Klondike O'Donnell's Lincoln parked in front of the Pony Inn. Within fifteen minutes the Capone cars were lined up half a block away. When, at about eightthirty, the merrymakers emerged, sodden with beer, and crossed the sidewalk to the Lincoln, the motorcade started toward them. An eyewitness, a Mrs. Bach, who lived above the saloon, testified later: "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 all suffered terrible injuries, but Hanley and the O'Donnells saved themselves by pitching headlong to the pavement behind the sedan. The brothers panicked. Daunted by the prospect of the awkward questions they would face if they took their wounded companions to a hospital, they decided to take them to Klondike's house nearby on Parkside Avenue and call a doctor. McSwiggin, with slugs in his back and neck, lay twisting on the sidewalk. Both of Doherty's legs had been shattered and his chest ripped open. The survivors bundled them into the sedan. Duffy, who looked beyond help, they left propped up against a tree.
Before they reached the O'Donnell house both wounded men died. Leaving Doherty's body in the car, the brothers carried McSwiggin into the house. They emptied his pockets, cut all identifying marks from his clothes and carried him back to the car. With one brother following in a smaller car, the other drove to Berwyn, and halting beside a lonely stretch of prairie, they dumped the bodies of their boyhood comrades. They continued north to Oak Park where they abandoned the sedan. They then vanished, not to be seen or heard from again for a month. Capone, too, vanished that night and hid for three months.
Duffy was found first. He was still alive when a motorist picked him up and drove him to a hospital. "Pretty cold-blooded to leave me lying there," he said. He died the next morning. In his pockets the police found a list of sixty Cicero saloons and speakeasies, many of them checked off with a pencil mark. The list mysteriously disappeared. When it finally turned up again in the coroner's office, the check marks had been obliterated.
A passerby chanced upon the bodies of McSwiggin and Doherty at about 10 P.M., and the Berwyn police delivered them to the morgue; but it was midnight before a Chicago newspaper reporter identified State's Attorney Crowe's star aide.
The morning headlines defied belief. Chicagoans had come to view with complacency the gang wars that had claimed more than 200 lives in four years, 29 of them since the beginning of 1926. "They only kill each other"-so ran the stereotype-"good riddance." But the murder of an assistant state's attorney startled Chicago and the nation.
The threat to Crowe's political security moved him to fiery rhetoric. "It will be a war to the hilt against these gangsters," he promised. He ordered his detectives to arrest every known hoodlum on sight. He had Sheriff Hoffman deputize 100 city detectives for county duty and sent them into the suburbs under the command of Chief Schoemaker and Deputy Chief Stege to raid saloons, speakeasies, gambling houses and brothels. He headed the Cicero raiding party himself. For information leading to the arrest of McSwiggin's murderers he offered a reward of $5,000 out of his own pocket.
Yet many prominent Chicagoans, among them clubwomen, clergy and captains of commerce, were skeptical. The president of the august Union League Club, Harry Eugene Kelly, contending that politics would prevent Crowe from disinterested action, demanded a special grand jury, financially independent of both the state's attorney's office and the County Board, to investigate the murders. "I have nothing against Mr. Crowe personally," Kelly said, "but obviously he is unfit to go into the 'beer racket' because it is mixed up all down the line with politics. He is not only a capable politician but is the head and front of a powerful faction known as the 'Crowe wing.' He is the directing head of a faction organized for politics and politics only. Therefore, the citizens cannot expect Mr. Crowe to prosecute the kind of investigation this city requires."
Crowe counterattacked with the accusation that his critics were hampering justice. "Under the law," he said, "the people of Cook County select their State's Attorney. They do not delegate his powers to self-appointed investigators. I am engaged in the investigation of the most brazen and dastardly murder ever committed in Chicago. Selfish notoriety seekers, who are called by some newspapers `civic leaders,' have started a backfire on the State's Attorney of this county, while he is engaged in this arduous and not entirely safe duty. I appeal to the law-abiding men and women of this county for their moral support and sympathy in this crisis; and I appeal to these officious meddlers, that if they have any information, to present it to me; if they can be of any assistance, to cooperate with me, and cease giving aid and comfort to gangsters by attempting to divert my attention from the task in hand."
Crowe then outmaneuvered the opposition by petitioning judge William V. Brothers to create a special grand jury. Brothers, who belonged to the same political wing as Crowe, complied. Crowe, however, had no intention of relinquishing control of the inquiry and permitting any jury to delve into the connection between Cook County politics and Cook County crime. Seeming to disqualify himself, he called on Attorney General Oscar Carlstrom, another reliable party hack, to direct the grand jury. In reality he dictated the moves from behind the scenes.
Thanks to a broad mandate from Judge Brothers to examine the roots of all crime in the county, Carlstrom was free to pursue diversionary tactics. Instead of f
ocusing the jury's attention on the McSwiggin murder, he attacked as the chief cause of crime the parole abuses at Joliet from which convicts had been buying their way out. None of the evidence Carlstrom presented led to an indictment.
The Cook County coroner, Oscar Wolff, an official as notorious for his ineptitude as he was for his association with gangsters, also set up a special jury to sit on the McSwiggin inquest. As the hearings bumbled along irrelevantly, he conceived a gesture designed to show that he meant business. In. Terre Haute, Indiana, a prosecutor named Joseph Roach had recently distinguished himself by sending scores of malfeasant officials and their underworld allies to jail. Coroner Wolff now proposed that Roach be appointed a special Illinois state's attorney so that he could take part in the inquest. Roach arrived amid great fanfare but got no opportunity to demonstrate his investigative skill. Almost immediately Wolff adjourned the inquest. It was re convened twice during the next two years without reaching a verdict.
About all that Wolff achieved was to assemble dossiers on thirtyodd gangsters whom he accused of various murders and refer them to Carlstrom. The attorney general ignored most of them. His jury did vote a few indictments, none remotely related to the McSwiggin case and none that went to trial. When he finally got around to the McSwiggin case, the witnesses included more than 200 Cicero saloonkeepers, and while they shed no light on the murder itself, they told the jury a good deal about the sources of their liquor. This information could have been helpful to the federal grand jurors then investigating bootlegging in Cicero, but Carlstrom did not transmit it to them.