The following are excerpts from several books on the assassination of William McSwiggin, Assistant State's Attorney of Cook County, in front of Harry Madigan's Pony Inn, April 27, 1926. The excerpts give you some background and insight on what it must have been like in Chicago in the 1920s - a time when our Harry and John Madigan ran a saloon.
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Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man, Fred D. Pasley, Ayer Co., 1987, page 128
"The debacle of the police department may be said to date from a triple machine-gunning the night of April 27, 1926, when there died William H. McSwiggin, assistant State's attorney of Cook County; Thomas Duffy, barber, beer peddler, and precinct captain in McSwiggin's faction of the Republican party, and James J. Doherty, gangster, who McSwiggin had previously prosecuted for murder, Doherty being acquitted.
"They were riding about together, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, visiting the saloons and speakeasies of Capone's West Side territory. Duffy and Doherty were henchmen of the brothers Myles and Klondike O'Donnell, the guerrillas of the bootleg war, aligned sometimes with the O'Banions, again with the Capones, depending on the financial advantages presented -- but generally going it alone.
"They had had a sort of entente with Capone when he entered Cicero, but had called it off. Now they were his bitter enemies and business rivals. For months they had been muscling in on the West Side beer trade while he was busy with Weiss, Drucci, and Moran on the north. One of the customers they had taken away from him was
Harry Madigan at 5615 West Roosevelt Road, Cicero.
" 'When I wanted to start a saloon in Cicero more than a year ago, Capone wouldn't let me,' Madigan told Chief of Detectives Schoemaker. 'I finally obtained strong political pressure and was able to open.' "
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Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone, by John Kobler, New York, copyright 1971. Reprinted: Da Capo, a member of the Perseus Book Group, 2003, page 173
"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 [sic] 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.'"
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Capone: The Man and the Era, Laurence Bergreen, Simon & Schuster, 1994, page 164
"... [He did] not know that among the men accompanying "Klondike" O'Donnell was Billy McSwiggin, the prosecutor Al like to call his friend. The 'rifle with a big round magazine' that Capone had bestowed on his associate was, of course, a machine gun. Several other Capone henchmen joined the man who had warned Capone. Together they walked to the back of the hotel, entered their waiting automobiles, and formed a five-car convoy consisting of a lead car, two cars following to block traffic if necessary, Capone's chauffeured limousine tailing at a distance of fifty feet, and finally another car well behind the limousine. The convoy arrived within moments at the
Pony Inn. At half past eight, McSwiggin, Hanley, Doherty, Duffy, and the O'Donnell brothers staggered out of the
Pony Inn, heading for the Lincoln and the next stop on their spree, and as they did so Capone and his men watched from the safety of their five-car convey.
"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 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."
