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Al Capone — Part 7
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A Gangland Victim—Wiliam E. MoSwigyin, assistant state's
attorney, as he looked when his reputation as
earning
“the hanging prosecutor.” Ke was shot by machine gun bullets while in company with members of the O'Donnell mob.
department, shortly after the long series of investigations
ad begun into the mystery: “It was Al Capone, together
with three of his henchmen, Frank Rio, Frank Diamond,
and Bob McCullough.” Sergt. McSwiggin was positive.
He had inside information, he said, which he had given
to the authorities, Two material witnesses were also named,
Edward Moore and Willie Heeney. Moore proved, however,
that he was in the loop, and nothing of value was gained
from questioning Heeney.
But the dead man’s father’s charges inflamed the public
stil] more, and the question “Who killed McSwiggin?” wax
now linked with another one, “Where is Capone?” But
Al was nowhere to be found. The atmosphere was entirely
too much for him, and, shortly after the first smoking
headlines announcing the murder appeared, Alphonse was in
his great armor-plated automobile, speeding over the high-
ways to a secret hide-out somewhere in Indiana.
‘But he came back. He came back a few days jater in a
grand manner which must have been impressive to “Little
Hymie” Weiss. Capone dictated the terms by which he
would surrender to the detectives from Mr. Crowe's office,
and he was met at the Indiana state line. Capone is not
a great talker, but he says plenty when the public is occa-
sionally favored with his utterances. And this time it got
dynamite.
“Of course I didn’t kill McSwiggin,” he said. “Why
should I? I liked the kid. Only the day before he got
knocked off he was over at my place and when he went
home I gave him a bottle of Scotch for his old man. If
I'd wanted to knock him off, 7 could have done it then,
couldn’t 1? We had him on’the spot. I'm no squawker,
but get a load of this. I paid McSwiggin and I paid him
plenty, and I got what I was paying for.”
Mr, Capone's precipitate flight had looked bad but he
had a good answer for that question, too. “I was afraid
that some saphead copper would plug’me on sight, just to
get himself promoted.” Capone was released three days
after his surrender. At this time it was reported that
“Fur’ Sammons, having fallen out with“Klondike,"had com-
mitted the murders out of revenge. And so, one day, “Fur”
728)
limped inte Crowe's office on crutches. “See these legs,”
he said, pointing, “Well, I was over calling on my ‘sweetie!
at the Beauty Parlor, when some of these ‘grease
balls’ let me have it.” The McSwiggin murder continued a
mystery, but the mystery of the Beauty Shop shooting
had been solved.
As an aftermath of the McSwiggin murder there were
a series of raids in Cicero with such outstanding haunts
of vice being temporarily knocked off as “The Ship,” “The
Stockade,” and “The Hawthorne Smoke Shop,” all Capone
institutions, Despite this gesture on the part of the police
the McSwiggin case pointed very definitely to the fact the
Big Fellow of Gangland was not “Little Hymie” Weiss,
or William “Klondike” O’Donnell or any of the others. The
Big Fellow was Al Capone. “When I wanted to open &
saloon in Cicero,” said Harry Madigan, owner of the saloon
in front of which Meswitt in fell, “I got a visit from A}
Capone. He told me I couldn’t go into business there.
I finally got some political pressure myself and opened
up anyway. Al came around shortly after and told me
that I would have to buy my beer from him, and not the
O’Donnells. So I did.”
King A! could see the handwriting on the front pages
however, and he knew that peace in Gangland was about
as desirable to Chicagoans ag good beer.
The O’Donnells have been going great guns except
for one Federal “rap” which they could not beat in
the courts. This concerned their disasterous raid on
the Morand Government Warehouse in the Valley, their
old stamping ground. The warehouse ends
ined thousands
of barrels of excellent whisky and it was James “Fur”
Sammons who conceived the bright idea of siphoning it
with a hose. And so one night, a watchman making his
rounds, discovered that bars on a window of the second
floor had been cut and that through a small rubber hose
of great length now lying on the ground, thousands of
gallons of the precious liquid had been siphoned. He gave
the alarm. When Pat Roche, ace of the investigators,
surveyed the scene, he gave instructions that the equip-
ment should not be disturbed and that the matter was to
cg
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