That was when McSwiggin’s night on the town with the boys ended, and the nightmare of blood and terror began. As McSwiggin’s group came into view, Capone’s gunmen let loose, and the unmistakable rhythm of a machine gun firing split the night. Whether Al himself had fired any shots was not clear, and it would soon become the matter of impassioned debate. As the convoy rolled past, the victims fell to the street; the entire attack had taken only seconds to execute, and over fifty shots had been fired. (“I saw a closed car speeding away with what looked like a telephone receiver sticking out of the rear window and spitting fire,” said one elderly witness of her first look at a machine gun in action.) Red Duffy, his body nearly cut in two by the bullets, and Jim Doherty were gravely wounded. The O’Donnell brothers and Edward Hanley were lucky to survive; they had reacted quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets. As for Billy McSwiggin, the “hanging prosecutor” whom Al Capone had called his friend, he was writhing on the sidewalk, his body riddled with twenty bullets lodged in his back and neck.
Fearing another attack, the O’Donnell brothers hastily dragged Duffy to a tree and left him. (“Pretty cold-blooded to leave me lying there,” he remarked just before he died the following day.) They then carried Doherty and McSwiggin to their Lincoln sedan and sped to “Klondike” ‘s house on Parkside Avenue. By the time they arrived, both McSwiggin and Doherty were dead.
Panicking, the O’Donnells hauled the bodies inside, removed the contents of their pockets, ripped the labels from their clothes, as if these precautions would change anything, and returned the corpses to the car. The O’Donnells drove away from the city and its lights to the black prairie extending from the outskirts of Berwyn. They came to a halt along a deserted stretch of road, shoved the remains of McSwiggin and Doherty out the door, and fled. At ten o’clock that night, the driver of a passing car noticed the bodies. He stopped to investigate and discovered they were still warm. He informed the police, and by midnight the corpses had been delivered to the city morgue, where they were positively identified as those of James Doherty and William McSwiggin.
Only six hours earlier McSwiggin had been eating dinner with his parents, and the news of his death wreaked havoc on his family. “Mrs. McSwiggin was so grief-stricken that a physician’s care was later needed,” it was reported. “The father, Sergt. Anthony McSwiggin, returned this morning from a trip to Des Moines, Iowa, to get a prisoner. He had left home just after his son started out last evening on the ride that took him to death. A message calling him home reached him at Davenport. Sergt. John Murphy, Sergt. McSwiggin’s partner at the detective bureau, met him at the station to help him bear the shock. Then the father went home with his daughters—Helen, twenty-six years old; Emily, twenty-three; Nellie, nineteen; and Marjorie, seventeen—and tried to comfort the stricken mother.”
“Those bullets couldn’t have been meant for him,” the grieving father said. “The assassins were out for someone in the group, someone they thought were their enemies.”
“Dad was so brave and wonderful,” added his youngest daughter, Marjorie. “He’s trying not to show how hard it hit him. He was so proud of Bill.”
Even before the slain prosecutor was laid to rest, the Chicago newspapers were howling for justice. The banner headline in the Chicago Tribune for Wednesday, April 28, proclaimed:
Gangsters Turn Machine Gun on William McSwiggin
2 OTHERS OF AUTO PARTY SLAIN IN CICERO KILLING
Booze Feud is Back
of Crime—Police
Raid Village
Resorts.
Wednesday’s Daily News, not to be outdone, claimed to have solved the case and laid the murder at Capone’s doorstep:
BARE MCSWIGGIN DEATH TALE
CAPONE IS ACCUSED OF IMPORTING GANG;
DEATH QUIZ OPENED
Torrio Also Suspected; Police Charged Young Assistant State’s Attorney Was Shot Down in Cicero by Gangsters by Mistake.
Gunmen brought to Cicero from New York by “Scarface Al” Capone and John Torrio at primary time killed William H. McSwiggin, assistant state’s attorney, and the two other victims of last night’s gang battle in Cicero. . . .
James J. Doherty, who was killed with McSwiggin, had been cutting in on the Torrio-Capone monopoly in the Cicero beer business. “Red” Duffy, the third man killed, was thick with both McSwiggin and Doherty.
Torrio and Capone recently got eleven automatic rifles (one-man machine guns) of the type used in the murder of McSwiggin, Doherty and Duffy.
These facts Capt. John Stege, assistant chief of detectives, uncovered to-day, after eighteen hours of high-pressure work on the triple murder mystery. Armed with those facts he sent his two best detective teams out to find Capone and Torrio on the one hand and . . . Myles O’Donnell, the beer-gang leader, on the other. O’Donnell was McSwiggin’s fourth companion, according to Stege.
As the police quickly discovered, many of their “facts” concerning the murder were inaccurate or badly out of date. The notion that Capone had imported an assassination squad to battle rival bootleggers was discarded, and of course Johnny Torrio had left Chicago months before. In his absence, the police began to search for Al Capone, who proved maddeningly elusive. Frustrated, squads of plainclothesmen drove to the Hawthorne Smoke Shop in Cicero, where they wielded sledgehammers and destroyed every slot machine and roulette wheel in sight. “The only thing we left was the ceiling,” said one detective who had participated in what he called the “kick-over.” For all their exertions, the raiders found no clues to Capone’s whereabouts or McSwiggin’s death.
Failing to capture Torrio or Al Capone, the police turned their fury on his brother Ralph. Swooping down on Ralph’s home at 1924 South Forty-ninth Court, they discovered a small arsenal: three shotguns, two pump guns, seven revolvers, and parts of a Thompson machine gun, “such as was used in the McSwiggin murder.” This was damning evidence, and the police immediately arrested Ralph, along with his wife and a cousin named Charles Fischetti. This lead, though promising, turned up nothing relevant to McSwiggin. The police then invaded Capone’s home on Prairie Avenue, where they arrested his younger brother John and inspected furniture they believed belonged to Al. Again, the arrest yielded nothing beyond a sense of Al Capone’s elusiveness.
The next act of this predictable, tragic story concerned the funeral of McSwiggin. His mother, who had fainted on learning of her only son’s death, sobbed hysterically throughout the ceremony. “Let him stay with me a little while,” she pleaded as the pallbearers came to move her son’s coffin from the house to the hearse. “Oh, why did they kill him?” she wailed. It was a question that no one was capable of answering. The turnout at his funeral service at St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church was impressive, numbering several thousand mourners including the city’s top officials, but for all the solemn display of strength it was not the equal of the great gangster funerals the city had witnessed. There were “only” three or four thousand observers, at most, and “only” eight carloads of flowers to accompany the body of the slain prosecutor.
After the funeral Mass, William McSwiggin was buried in Mt. Carmel Cemetery, outside of Chicago; a plain, solid tombstone marked his grave. As the firing squad gave her son a military salute, Mrs. McSwiggin, perhaps remembering the machine-gun bullets that had taken her son’s life, collapsed. Even here, amid these tranquil surroundings, there were reminders of the violence afflicting Chicago, and which had claimed the young prosecutor’s life. “On the way [to the grave site],” noted the Chicago Tribune of the procession of mourners, “they passed . . . the granite shaft that marks the last resting place of Dean [sic] O’Banion, the most colorful of the gangsters killed by enemies in the alcohol business.” And not far from O’Banion’s grave was that of Mike Merlo, the late head of the Unione Sicilione. In fact, the graveyard was filled with the bodies of racketeers and gangsters, all casualties of Prohibition and their own greed. In later years, Mt. Carmel would also become the site of the family plot for the en
tire Capone clan. Even in death, then, were these blood enemies forced to abide together within the all-knowing, all-forgiving embrace of the church.
• • •
During the next few days, as more details of the circumstances surrounding the murder emerged, the integrity of McSwiggin himself was called into question. Here was a man who had once vowed to get Capone for the murder of Joe Howard, yet on the last night of his life he was in the company of those well-known bootleggers, the O’Donnell brothers. Deep in Capone territory. Drinking bootleg booze. There was no evidence that McSwiggin was actually on the take from the O’Donnells, but the appearance was highly suggestive. The more the press and police dug, the more it looked as though McSwiggin had unwittingly conspired in his own death. Still, the manner of his murder had been so brutal that public sympathy, which wavered at first, came down firmly on the side of young Billy McSwiggin, the brilliant prosecutor whom gangsters had viciously murdered.
His father fanned the flames of sympathy. “I thought my life was over, but it’s only begun,” he declared. “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.” Chicagoans learned that little “Mac” was the apple of his father’s eye, the delight of his four sisters, a graduate of De Paul University, where he had compiled a fine record, and a good Catholic. Influenced by such comments, public opinion was inclined to forgive Billy McSwiggin’s lack of judgment on account of his age. “He was only twenty-six years old and had the riotous blood of youth in his veins, and he enjoyed himself with youthful gusto in his own way,” wrote a reporter. Within days a cry was repeated in the pages of the daily newspapers: Who killed McSwiggin? Thus McSwiggin, in death, did more to torment and harass Capone than McSwiggin, alive, had ever done.
The slain prosecutor’s boss, Robert Emmet Crowe, the state’s attorney, responded to the outcry with a show of vigorous action. “It will be a war to the hilt against these gangsters,” he declared, and he offered a reward of $5,000 to anyone providing information leading to the arrest of the men responsible for McSwiggin’s death, the money to come from his own funds. This was the kind of grandiose gesture and rhetoric for which Crowe was known. Born in Peoria, Illinois, and educated at Yale, he had held his post since 1919, the year that “Big Bill” Thompson became the mayor of Chicago and Len Small the governor of Illinois, but even as these men sank into the murky waters of corruption, he managed to keep afloat with deft bureaucratic maneuvers. He was particularly adept at distancing himself from the men who had helped to bring him to power. Where Thompson and Dever made empty promises calculated to appeal to their constituencies, Crowe emphasized that Prohibition had created an impossible situation in Chicago. “The town is wet and the county is wet, and nobody can dry them up,” ran one of his characteristic exculpatory utterances. “For every dive in the county there are two in the city, and everybody knows it except [Mayor] 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.”
McSwiggin’s murder presented Crowe with the fight of his political life. From the start the press questioned his ability to act independently. “Everybody knows that the curse of criminal investigation, the blight of protection from crime, is political factionalism. The ‘beer war’ is mixed up from top to bottom with politics,” began the Herald and Examiner’s critique. “Robert E. Crowe is not only the state’s attorney, he is the head and front of a political organization. Politics ties his hands. Many of his own lieutenants and their privates might be involved. . . . So far as crimes of violence are concerned, this city is in danger. Why blink [at] the fact? Mr. Crowe cannot help us.” Crowe overcompensated for such public doubting by deputizing no less than three hundred detectives, a small army dedicated to raiding speakeasies and gambling dens throughout Chicago, especially in Cicero. One of the first pieces of information their reign of terror yielded was that Harry Madigan, the proprietor of the speakeasy where McSwiggin had downed his last drink, had recently switched sides in the simmering Capone-O’Donnell feud. “When I wanted to start a saloon in Cicero,” he said, “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. . . . It cost me fifty dollars a barrel, where Capone charged me sixty. I changed, and upon my recommendation so did several other Cicero saloonkeepers.” The implication was that Capone—or his men—were seeking retribution for Madigan’s changing sides, so investigators again raided the Hawthorne Inn; on this occasion they seized ledgers detailing the organization’s gambling and bootlegging operations. The documents would have all been very interesting in another context, but they shed no light on McSwiggin’s death, and the police failed to make an arrest.
Despite the confusion and finger-pointing, Crowe, who needed to appear decisive, declared that he had reached a determination about who was responsible for the death of Billy McSwiggin. On May 5, all the Chicago dailies carried the following statement:
It has been established to the satisfaction of the state’s attorney’s office and the detective bureau that [Al] Capone in person led the slayers of McSwiggin. It has become known that five automobiles carrying nearly thirty gangsters, all armed with weapons ranging from pistols to machine guns, were used in the triple killing.
It has also been found that Capone handled the machine gun, being compelled to this act in order to set an example of fearlessness to his less eager companions.
It was a bold thesis, but there was still no proof. By this time everybody who was anybody in Chicago law enforcement had an opinion as to who killed McSwiggin and why, and all the theories implicated Al Capone. “All of the investigators agreed with Sgt. McSwiggin that Capone was responsible for the slaying,” noted Judge Lyle, going to the issue of motive, “but it’s my opinion that Capone was solely after the O’Donnell crew and had not known McSwiggin was in the party. Capone would have foreseen the heat that was raised by killing the prosecutor. . . . Capone would not have killed McSwiggin unless the prosecutor had angered him beyond reason and no evidence to this effect was produced.” The investigators gradually came to realize that the young prosecutor had been in the wrong place (the O’Donnells’ car) at the wrong time (in the midst of the Capone-O’Donnell feud). As Lyle implied, Capone had a compelling reason not to kill McSwiggin, since the lad was a prosecutor and the consequences would be dreadful for Capone. Prosecutors, policemen, detectives, even the wives and children of rival gangsters were all off-limits in the gangland wars. The most likely explanation for his death is that Capone had not known he was with the O’Donnells when he struck. The irony was that his intended victims, the O’Donnell brothers, escaped with their lives, while the bullets intended for them took McSwiggin’s life instead.
In an effort to fathom the reasons behind the shooting, the state attorney’s office convened one grand jury after another. Since a special grand jury could remain in session for no more than a month in the state of Illinois, there would eventually be six in all, stretching over a six-month period, until October 1926. Their failed efforts to obtain an indictment against Capone or anyone else for the murder of McSwiggin became a civic embarrassment of major proportions.
There was no shortage of reasons for the breakdown. Foremost was a lack of reliable witnesses; once called before the grand jury, the witnesses, afraid for their lives, disappeared. One of the grand juries summarized the situation in this manner: “A conspiracy of silence is evident among the gangsters, and intimidation of all witnesses is clearly evident, also. There is an element of fear involved because anyone who aids the public officials by giving facts is very likely to be ‘taken for a ride.’ ” The assessment concluded, “Silence and the sealed lips of gangsters make the solution of that crime, like many others, thus far impossible.” At the same time, the jurors were afraid to convict, afraid
for their lives, in fact. There was no secret about their identities; the papers had taken care to print their full names, occupations, addresses, and in some cases, even their photographs. In these circumstances, only the most foolhardy juror would insist on issuing an indictment, for in all likelihood he would meet the same end as McSwiggin.
The balance of terror created enormous public frustration as the fruitless investigation stumbled along through the summer of 1926. Although this was not the first time a machine gun had been used by gangsters in Chicago, the murder of McSwiggin did much to establish it as the gangsters’ and bootleggers’ weapon of choice. People didn’t know which to blame for the death of McSwiggin, the gangsters or the machine guns. In the Daily News, a cartoon cynically detailed the escalation of violence in Chicago. The first panel depicted a blackjack; in the next, a hand gripped a revolver, “providing,” said the caption, “a satisfactory result by killing one person.” In the following panel, a masked gunman fires a tommy gun to “kill more people with little exertion,” and the final panel predicted: “In the future they will probably get a ‘Big Bertha’ and shoot up a whole town to get just one or two men.”
Still lacking hard evidence linking Capone to the murder, investigators proceeded to pillage Capone-controlled brothels in the Cicero area. They wreaked havoc on the most notorious establishment, the Stockade, and on another occasion, an unidentified group burned a brothel in Forest View. When firemen arrived on the scene, they stood by, watching the blaze. “Why don’t you do something?” asked a Capone employee.
“Can’t spare the water,” a firefighter told him.
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