WINDY CITY WRONG

4/27/1926 - Murders all over the streets of Chicago and it's suburbs as rival gangs fight for control of the area's criminal enterprises, mostly the creation and distribution of liquor during Prohibition, it does come as a mean surprise however when the victim is a leading member of the justice system ... adios to 26-year-old bachelor, assistant state attorney William Harold "Bill" McSwiggin, a rising boy star in the barrister community.

Histrionics Addressing A Chicago Jury

A hometown boy all the way, McSwiggin is born in Chicago on February 7, 1901, and will grow up surrounded by the Catholic love of both his parents (his father, Anthony, is a thirty-year veteran of the local police department) and four sisters (Helen, Emily, Nellie, and Marjorie) ... and sadly, also enveloped in the friendship of future gangsters.  Black haired and blue eyed, and of moderate height, though somewhat dumpy in appearance (he wears owlish horn-rimmed glasses and has a double chin), his actual physical prowess allows him to box and pitch baseball.  He is also quite intelligent, advancing through parochial school, De Paul Academy, and then De Paul University with a law degree he pays for by working jobs as varied as being a truck driver, a bouncer for a dance hall, a sales clerk in a department store, and as a security guard for the American Railway Express Company (he also finds time to become a lieutenant in the University's ROTC).  One month after receiving his law degree from De Paul with honors, he passes his bar examination, and soon becomes one of sixty-nine assistant state's attorneys working Cook County for Yale Law School graduate, Robert Emmett Crowe (the prosecutor in the infamous Leopold & Loeb murder case).

De Paul University - 1911

Crowe

Hard work, speaking in a manner juries can understand, pounding on tables, thumping the jury box, and waving his arms and hands about to illustrate points has McSwiggin win seven of the office's eleven first-degree murder cases in 1925 (in eight months) ... convictions that include the five-feet-three-inch notorious "Midget Bandit," Henry J. Fernekes, and two of his confederates for the 1925 holdup killing of Michael Swiontkowski, and Raymond Costello, for killing his sixteen-year-old girlfriend.  He is soon know as "The Hanging Prosecutor" (other nicknames include "Little Mac," "Specks," "Billy," and around the childhood home he still lives in at 4946 Washington Boulevard, he is called "Harold") by local newspaper men who note his status as one of Crowe's ace lawyers, his conviction rate, and his placement on high publicity cases such as the investigation of the 1924 flower shop hand-shake murder of mobster Dion O'Bannion, interviewing Al Capone in association with the murder of hoodlum Joe Howard (a crime Capone did commit for Howard's drunken slapping of Capone associate, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Cuzik, and for calling Capone a "pimp" when he demanded an apology for the slapping), and heading the second prosecution of hitmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi (two gorillas who rub their bullets in garlic so they with create gangrene if the wounds they produce are not initially fatal) for the 1925 murder of Chicago Police officer Charles Walsh, and trying Jim Doherty and Myles O'Donnell for the murder of their beer rival, Eddie Tancl.  What no one seems to notice though is that all his attempts to dispense justice to liquor mobsters are failures, he has maintained his childhood friendship with the same Jim Doherty, though prohibited, he likes to imbibe himself, and gamble too, and earlier in April, he meets with Capone at the gangster's headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois (a meeting the lawyer's own father will later state would "... blow the lid off Chicago" if its subject matter were to be revealed).  McSwiggin is dancing on very thin ice, and on 4/27/1926, it breaks beneath his feet.
 The "Midget Bandit"
 "Scarface" Capone

After eating dinner with his parents, and making a phone call to attempt to "fix" a friend's parking ticket, at about 7:30, Thomas "Red" Duffy, a barber, political precinct captain, low-level beer peddler, gambling operator, and McSwiggin childhood friend shows up and asks the lawyer if he'd like to go out on the town with friends ... an offer the attorney accepts with alacrity, telling his parents he going into Cicero to drink some "good beer" (a sign of the times, his police officer father does not react to the news).  Outside, McSwiggin finds himself among men he knows, the car for the evening's frolics is driven by boyhood buddy Jim Doherty (the same man he has unsuccessful recently prosecuted for murder), and also contains Myles O'Donnell (the other man who escaped justice in the Tancl killing, and O'Donnell's brother, William "Klondike" O'Donnell ... the leadership of the criminals controlling liquor distribution on Chicago's "West-side" (when their ride goes bad, they move to Klondike's green Lincoln sedan and pick up a sixth celebrant, Edward Hanley, a former boxer and policeman, and now a Doherty associate), all rivals of Mr. Alphonse Capone.  Believing Capone has shown weakness for brokering a gangster truce while city elections are taking place (the primary's take place on 4/13/1926), they enter the mobster's Cicero territory without fear ... and soon regret the decision.
 Klondike
 Myles

Moving about town, Klondike's well known vehicle is spotted, information is passed on to the big man himself, and a Scarface plan is quickly concocted involving five vehicles ... one ready to ram any police cars that might interfere, two cars for blocking side traffic, a car to cover the retreat and cause a chase interfering accident if necessary, and an armored sedan for the night's assassins, Capone and three of his outfit's gunners.  Making contact with their targets, the killers follow the O'Donnell group discreetly until the Lincoln pulls up in front of Harry Madigan's Pony Inn, a two-story, two-door (one leads to and upside Apartment numbered 5615), cream- colored brick building standing alone in vacant lot to the south side of Roosevelt Road (5613 West Roosevelt Road to be precise).  Darkness has fallen, the light rains of early evening are over and it is around a 8:45 p.m.  Alighting with intentions to go inside (all survivors of what is to come, Hanley and the O'Donnells never clear the car) Capone's sedan drives up slowly seconds later and opens up on the group.  Machine guns firing off flame and lead, Hanley and the O'Donnell's instinctively dive for cover on the Lincoln's floorboards and are missed, unable to move as quickly however, twenty-two bullets crater the west side of the building, six more splinter a tree standing in front of the structure, Duffy is fatally struck five times (he manages to crawl behind a nearby tree, where he will be found by a passing motorist who drives him to the nearby Western Suburban Hospital where he dies six hours later), Doherty hits the sidewalk as a result of sixteen bullet wounds, and McSwiggin is murderously holed twenty times in the back and neck.  Deed done, the killers vanish in the night, while the O'Donnell's and Hanley haul McSwiggin and Doherty back to Klondike's Parkside Avenue residence, where the corpses have the contents of their pockets removed and the labels on their clothes ripped off (which does nothing to hamper identification of the men only a few hours later), before being put back in the car, driven to the nearby town of Berwyn, and dumped along a deserted road (the car is abandoned in Oak Park). 
 Crime Scene
 Klondike's Lincoln

Public indignation is immediate as the killings become front page news across the country ... but no one is ever brought to justice for the murders.  Knowing who the culprit probably is, Chicago police raid numerous Capone enterprises, but can't find the big man himself ... and no one is talking for the record.  Eventually, on July 28, 1926, Capone turns himself in to Federal authorities at the Illinois-Indiana state line (rightly believing Chicago cops might take matters into their own hands ... a plot is set in motion to allow Sgt. McSwiggin to kill his son's killer, but the honest cop can't find it in him to kill the unarmed mobster when presented with the opportunity), makes statements to the press about not being involved in the murders and how all the corpses were good friends of his, and is taken into custody.  The next day, he is released after posting a bond of $25,000 on pending Federal Prohibition charges, and then when freed, immediately arrested by Chicago Police Chief William H. "Bill" Shoemaker for the murders of Doherty, Duffy, and McSwiggin.  The next morning Capone's lawyer's take up the matter before state Chief Justice Thomas J. Lynch, and with no supporting evidence available, the complaint is dropped and Capone is freed.  One night in jail for the killings is all Capone ever gets for the crime ... and O'Donnell's shown which way the wind is blowing (Myles will be mortally wounded by a bartender he kills during a 1933 booze generated argument, while Klondike dies a penniless wraith in 1976), he is now free to giving his full attention to a more lethal adversary ... North-side gang leader, Hymie Weiss.
 Headlines
 Some Of The McSwiggin Funeral Crowd
 McSwiggin On His Way To Rest
 Hymie Weiss

Wrong place, at the very wrong time ... just another day in the "Windy City" of Chicago ... the McSwiggin killing of 1926!
 McSwiggin