At the dawn of the Al Capone era, prosecutor William McSwiggin was killed in a hail of machine gun bullets outside a Cicero tavern

The McSwiggin murder was the kind of story that editors once thought sold newspapers.

The Tribune laid out the initial facts in a front-page story on April 28, 1926:

“William H. McSwiggin, youthful assistant state’s attorney, who was known as the ‘hanging prosecutor’ because of his success in the conduct of murder trials, was shot to death last night when a machine gunner in a curtained automobile poured a blast of fire upon him and two other men as they stood in front of a saloon at 5613 West Roosevelt Road (the address was given as 5615 in subsequent reports) in Cicero, just beyond the Chicago city limits.”

A day later, President Calvin Coolidge cited McSwiggin’s assassination in calling for a national war on organized crime. Prohibition had sparked gang wars for control of the underground booze trade.

On the back page of the first-day story were photographs of the tavern where the hit took place; of McSwiggin gesturing in court, making the case for hanging a cop-killer; and of a police captain aiming a Thompson machine gun, similar to the type cops said McSwiggin’s killer had used.

McSwiggin’s companions in death were James Doherty, a Cicero beer-runner, and Thomas Duffy, a Chicagoan who was identified variously as a barber, a saloon keeper and a “political minion,” perhaps a euphemism for fixer. He was a West Side precinct captain.

Days after the slayings, the coroner’s jury made a “pilgrimage to three sorrow-laden homes,” the Tribune reported.

In Duffy’s modest flat, at 4721 W. Harrison St., his widow told jurors that she didn’t know of her husband having enemies, and that she never heard of him being threatened.

“There was a quiet grimness about the mourners in the Doherty house,” the Tribune noted, “as if they sensed the jurors belief that the plotted death of Doherty, the gangster, had resulted inadvertently in the murders of Prosecutor McSwiggin and Duffy.”

Yet even if McSwiggin wasn’t the target, his boss, Cook County State’s Attorney Robert Crowe, was put on the hot seat.

The investigation quickly sent McSwiggin’s fair-haired image down the drain. Crowe’s boy-wonder assistant was revealed to be a buddy of gangsters.

Perhaps looking to distance himself from the embarrassing details, Crowe turned the McSwiggin investigation over to a special grand jury led by Illinois Attorney General Oscar Carlstrom.

Say what you will about McSwiggin, he was a prodigy. The son of a cop who didn’t make enough to pick up the tab for college, McSwiggin worked his way through DePaul Law School as a department store salesman, a theater usher and a delivery wagon driver.

He became a courtroom star while still in his early 20s. “When he was on a case he worked twenty-four hours a day,” Crowe said of McSwiggin.

On the last day of his life, McSwiggin, 26, had dinner at his parents’ home at 4946 W. Washington Blvd. Telling them he was going out to play cards or grab a beer in Cicero, he was picked up by Duffy. Doherty, and the O’Donnell brothers, Myles and William “Klondike,” were also in the car.

They all went back a long way. Just a year earlier, McSwiggin had unsuccessfully prosecuted Doherty and Myles O’Donnell for murder. But in that time and place, childhood buddies were often emotionally bound for life. It didn’t matter if one enforced the law and the other broke it.

On that fateful night, the group stopped at a saloon on an empty stretch of Roosevelt Road in Cicero. As they exited Klondike’s Lincoln sedan, another car pulled up and an occupant sprayed them with bursts of machine-gun fire. The O’Donnell brothers hit the dirt and survived. So too did Ed Hanley, an ex-cop who had joined the group en route.

A motorist took the wounded Duffy to West Suburban Hospital where he died the following day. McSwiggin and Doherty were also fatally wounded. Hanley and the O’Donnells loaded them into the Lincoln and sped off. McSwiggin and Doherty expired, and their corpses were dumped in Berwyn.

A pedestrian came upon the bodies at 16th Street and Wisconsin Avenue and notified the Berwyn police. That started a chain reaction of the shocking news that a public official had been assassinated. When it reached Crowe, he ordered raids on “every beer runner, every gunman, and every other racketeer in reach of an officer of the law,” the Tribune reported. “All the cigar shops, gambling houses, and saloons were stripped of their occupants.”

The Chicago police and Cook County highway police responded promptly. But Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Savage was angered by the Cicero cops lackadaisical attitude in the face of three brutal murders. Stomping into a police station, he demanded to see the officer in charge. “The captain is gone,” he was told.

“Go and get him out of bed and tell him to get here and in charge, or I’ll turn your police station upside down,” Savage replied.

The attorney general, like the state’s attorney before him, wrestled unsuccessfully with the question of who ordered the hit and why.

Al Capone, the infamous gangster who had set up shop in Cicero, quickly became a prime suspect but initially was nowhere to be found. Upon surfacing, he was arrested but denied having it in for McSwiggin.

“I didn’t kill him,” Capone reportedly said. “I liked the kid.”

Capone was freed for lack of evidence, and on Sept. 8 a special grand jury was empaneled

“I am positive that I know who killed McSwiggin,” special prosecutor Charles McDonald said. “I am hopeful that this grand jury will solve the puzzling features of the case.”

That proved easier said than done. Courtroom kibitzers had rival theories about what face card McDonald might be holding.

Perhaps Capone’s name — which in many reports of the time was given as Caponi — was prematurely scratched off the suspects’ list. Word on the street was that Doherty demanded a share of Capone’s lucrative beer business, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“With methodical preparation Caponi sent out his scouts to report on Doherty’s movements,” the Tribune reported. “And on May 28, last, he answered Doherty’s defiance.”

Another theory held that McSwiggin was killed while gathering evidence for the prosecution of Martin Durkin. A car thief accused of killing a federal agent, Durkin’s arrest had been followed by death threats. One recipient was McSwiggin’s boss, the state’s attorney.

McSwiggin’s father, a police sergeant, joined the search for his killer, pressing a prisoner who was in custody for a separate crime and who was an alleged confederate of Capone’s for information. The man said he knew nothing but wished he could help.

“You can’t help me,” Sgt. McSwiggin retorted. “They killed me too, when they killed my boy. But you can help yourself by telling.”

On July 15, 1927, the investigation into McSwiggin’s murder was closed. It “had failed to uncover any information on who killed McSwiggin,” the grand jury’s final report acknowledged.

The tale was occasionally revisited and given a new spin.

In 1960, John Lyle wrote a Tribune story crediting the McSwiggin case with ultimately sending Capone to prison. In the wake of the murder, a raid on a Capone betting parlor, the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, turned up a bookkeeping ledger.

The ledger was tossed aside and left to “gather dust for four years.” Finally reexamined by investigators, it was found to record income Capone hadn’t reported to the Internal Revenue Service, and led to his 1931 conviction as a tax dodger, according to Lyle’s account.

The McSwiggin murder remains unsolved, although the special grand jury cleared him of being targeted because of any underhanded activity on his part.

“McSwiggin was on a legitimate errand at the time, when one gang fired at another gang, and we think that the murderers had no knowledge of the identity or position of the young man who became their victim.”

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