Lead By Crime Boss James “Big Jim” Kennally

quote steal Old Lincoln's bones, or at least so. One of the men told the woman that he had met in the town shortly before their caper. He even told her the details, like exactly when they planned to do it. That woman reported the information to the authorities, who then warned the tomb's custodian, that was a man named John

Carroll Power. Power reported it to the Lincoln Monument Association, the local group who oversaw the tomb, but nothing was done about it, and when the gang sobered up and realized what they had admitted to, they fled the scene. John Carroll Power went on to write a book about the attempted crime, and in it says, quote, it seemed to the authorities so incredible that no attention was given to it. Power continued quote, Whiskey alone is entitled to

the credit of having thwarted this well laid scheme. There's an alternate version of that story. There's actually two alternates. The second version involved a counterfeiter named Thomas Sharp in his gang instead of the Logan County Boys. In preparation, Sharp's men moved to Springfield, Illinois, where they opened a dance hall and a saloon. Unfortunately for the men, though this part of the story remains the same, Sharp bragged about their plans to a woman, Bell Bruce, who in

turn informed the police. With their scheme compromised, Sharp and his men had no other choice but to abort the plan and return home. The third version here it's it's basically the same exact premise, but the gang was Ben Sheridan and four of his men. Canally would need a new plan to spring his man, Benjamin Boyd from prison. Wait, who you may be wondering, that's right. This plan wasn't really about ransoming of presidential corpse. That was just a

means to an end. Canally was the leader of one of the nation's largest counterfeiting rings, and Benjamin Boyd was his engraver. He needed to spring Boyd from behind bars, so Canally hatched a second scheme, another attempt at stealing Lincoln's corpse, and it went like this. A new team would steal the coffin from the tomb and haulot by wagon two hundred miles north to the Indiana Dunes. That's where they'd hold it until the state of Illinois paid a ransom of two dollars in cash to get it back,

and the gang got a full pardon for Boyd. But Canally's mistake here in his second round was who he allowed to have a role in the caper. So let's take a look at the players. First, of course, there's a man at the top, James Connally. Big Jim Connally was, as we said, a crime boss who led a successful Midwestern counterfeiting racket. He also was co owner of a drinking establishment called The Hub, which was located at two

nine West Madison Street in Chicago. It was well known and friendly to counterfeiters, and it is featured in this story. Connally was a man once described by a local reporter as quote a born crook. He may have been a wholesaler of counterfeit bills during the time of the Lincoln Caper, but Connally had spent time in prison. He had served a five year sentence in the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet for passing a bogus fifth dollar bill in Peoria. And then these are his men for the new and

improved Lincoln job. One Benjamin Boyd was the man with the plates. He was an engraver, and he was at the time of his story serving a sentence at the State Penitentiary in Juliet. He is ultimately the reason for this crime, so he is on this list. Two Terence Mullin was a counterfeiter, bartender and co owner of the Hub with James Canally. Three Jack Hughes was a counterfeiter and a close friend of Terence Mullein. For Lewis Swiegels was a small time thief, possibly from Wisconsin. He is

the wild card here in this group. One important fact unknown to the Canally gang is that Lewis was an informant or what was known as a roper, to the Chicago Secret Service. I'm also going to note here that a friend of Swiegel's, a man named Bill Brown, also known as Bill Neely, is mentioned in some but definitely not all accounts of this story as a wagon driver. He, like Swiggles, is also mentioned as with the Secret Service

and pretending to be on Canally's team. Bill is a man who may or may not have been present at this caper and five. Patrick Tyrrell was head of the Secret Service bureau in Chicago. Tyrrell was the agent who had chased Benjamin Boyd for more than eight months through five states before he caught him in the small Mississippi River town of Fulton, Illinois. Tyrrell, at the time of this story was running Swiggles as an informant. Let's clear up any confusion about why U. S. Secret Service agent

Patrick Tyrrell would be pursuing a bunch of counterfeiters. It's

as simple as this. The role of the Secret Service wasn't the same when it was created in eighteen sixty five as it is today and since the assassination attempt of President McKinley in nineteen o one, and the group is tasked with the full time protection of the President of the United States, but a hundred and fifty seven years ago they were created as a bureau in the Treasury Department, and task was suppressing widespread counterfeiting, which was

a huge problem throughout the country at the time. Nearly one third of all US currency and circulation at the end of the Civil War was counterfeit. That's an estimate that we've seen rise up to nearly one half in some account. The Secret Service Division's goal was to stabilize the country's financial system. In eighteen sixty seven, the Secret Services responsibilities grew to include some new things. Here's what it looked like, according to their website, detecting persons perpetrating

frauds against the government. This appropriation resulted in investigations into the Ku Klux Klan, non conforming distillers, smugglers, mail robbers, land frauds, and a number of other infractions against federal laws. The Canally Gang was a group of counterfeiters operating out of the Midwest, and they were doing well for themselves until their expert bill engraver moneymaker Benjamin Boyd, was arrested

and jailed. It said Boyd may have been the best in the country and that much of the counterfeit currency around the country could be traced back to him until that is, when he was captured in Fulton in eighteen seventy five. He was convicted on charges of forging a fifty dollar bill, It's reported, and sentenced to ten years at Juliet. Making counterfeit money meant your currency had to

look identical, exactly like the real currency. One of Boyd's five dollar plates was so perfect that more than three hundred thousand bills were known to have been printed from it and passed without mishap by their one gang alone. The U. S. Treasury finally paid him its ultimate tribute. The department recalled it's genuine fives from circulation without Boyd and his talent. With those plates, the criminals were suddenly

out of business. Boyd was the one with the skills, and the way they saw it, ransoming Lincoln's body was the only way now to get Boyd out of prison and then get back to business. I do have to wonder why they were like, this is the only possible. It's got to involve Lincoln. Period. We are going to take a moment for a word from our sponsor, and when we're back we will talk about which cemetery Abraham Lincoln is buried in and why welcome back to Criminalia.

Lewis swiggles is quote the boss body snatcher in Chicago. We'll see about that. Shortly after ten p a month April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, while attending a performance of the play Are American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington, d C. President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth. He died at seven two am on April fift eighteen sixty five, and it's estimated his body has moved as

many as seventeen times since its original burial. After his assassination, it was debated where the president's body would be buried. The town leaders of Springfield, Illinois, saw the potential of this tomb for their local economy, and they argued that he should be buried within the limits of the city

that he had called home. But Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, wanted his body to be interred at oak Ridge Cemetery, just north of Springfield, and according to records, that was what he had wanted, and the oak Ridge Cemetery was selected. Oakridge was located about two miles outside of town, and it didn't have the kind of security you might imagine a presidential grave might be given. For instance, there was no night watchman to patrol the area that

was going to house the president's tomb. At first, the remains of both Abraham and his son Willie, who had died of typhoid fever at age eleven during his father's presidency, were placed in the public receiving bolt from May until mid December of eighteen sixty five, while the final tomb

was being constructed. From December eighteen sixty five through September of eighteen seventy one, the remains of the president and two of his sons, Willie and also Eddie, who had died of pulmonary tuberculosis at age four, were moved into a temporary above ground tomb constructed on the northeast side of the hill at Oak Ridge. Over the years, his tomb has undergone several transformations. Lincoln's body was long considered at high risk from grave robbers, which brings us back

to Canal He's gang. The men converged on Chicago, and it was at the Hub where they worked out their plan. Terence Mullen was in He and Kennally were close partners. Jack Hughes, too was in Hughes was excellent not at making phony money, but at passing phony bills. He's described as an honest looking man, all was well dressed and with a respectable beard. His days were spent going from store to store, making one small purchase at each and

paying with a crisp new counterfeit bill. In September of eighteen seventy four, in Washington Heights, Illinois, Hughes was arrested by Secret Service agents and he was indicted for passing five counterfeit bills. Hughes had jumped bail, though, and was being sought by what seemed to be every policeman in Chicago when he joined the plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln's

corpse and free Benjamin Boyd. But Kenneally needed more hands, rely doable strong men to pull off this heist, so the guys approached a man named Lewis Swiegel's, a small time crook and sometimes horse thief who had become a frequent customer of the pub. Involving Louis Wiggles was the beginning of the end really of this plan. Remember Lewis was a federal informant whose job it was to report back on any of the gang's criminal activities. So well,

let's just keep going. During his con fab with the group, when Mullen asked what Swiegel's occupation was, he replied, quote, I'm the boss body snatcher of Chicago. That might be a strange statement to make in a job interview today, but in the late eighteen hundreds it might not have been so much the oddity, and certainly not among thieves.

Stealing and supplying corpses was, of course a big business for those who were getting paid by medical schools to supply fresh cadavers, but there are no laws to punish body snatchers, at least not in most of the state. Anyway, these guys were snatching a body, and if you didn't have anybody snatching experience, wouldn't you want the boss body snatcher of Chicago on your team? Of course you would. He made the cut. As the counterfeiters created their plan,

Louis shared every detail with the secret Services. Patrick Tyrrell. Tyrelle in turn told Lincoln's only surviving son, Robert, a Chicago attorney, but asked that Robert let the plot move forward so he could catch the kidnappers in the act. Catching them in the act would likely increase the chance of conviction, so Robert agreed. On November six, six, Mullen, Hughes, and Swiegels cut a train from Chicago to Springfield. Connally did not join them. Little did they know, though, that

they were being tailed. Tyrrell was in the rear passenger car with two hired operatives from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago. Those were men named John C. McGinn and George hay. During the afternoon, two additional men were also brought in, detectives John McDonald and John English. The gang was also being tailed by a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter. The next night, on the seventh, Mullen and the gang made their attempt, but things didn't go exactly as planned,

or really they didn't go very well at all. In fact, things have been described as having gone poorly for both the cops and the robbers. It was election night. The presidential contest between Republican Rutherford Behayes and Democrats Samuel Tilden was heated, and it was a pretty good assumption that most Springfield residents would be downtown celebrating and waiting for results to come in. They certainly would not be anywhere

near oak Ridge Cemetery. So to keep the attempted heist all together, we're going to take a moment for a word from our sponsor here, and when we're back, we'll talk about how Canally's gang not only did not have the skills for burglary, they didn't even bring the right tools for the job. Welcome back to Criminalia. So did the Canally counterfeiters get Benjamin Boyd out of prison? Let's find out. We mentioned earlier how oak Ridge Cemetery was

a bit lacking in security measures. To enter the tomb, the gang would only have to break up padlock to reach Lincoln's white marble sarcophagus. According to Thomas Crawwell, author of Stealing Lincoln's Body Quote, there was no night watchman, and the custodian of the tomb lived in Springfield to three miles away. The only security, if you call it, that,

was a single padlock. Swiegels later said, as reported in the Illinois State Journal on November that while Mullin's gang were capable counterfeiters, they did not have the skills for burglary, especially when it came to bringing the right tools. Tyrrell his agents, plus the Pinkerton detectives, arrived at the tomb before Canali's gang hid and waited for the counterfeiters to

show up. When Mullin and his men did show, they quietly sneaked up to the monument, but immediately their problems began. Mullin brought along a carpet bag containing quote, a can of blasting powder and a fathom of fuse, a hammer, steel punch drills, a steel saw, a file, and other various small tools they needed to saw the metal padlock off the door to the catacomb, but the saw they had brought with them was flimsy. In fact, it was so flimsy it broke in the process. Not a bunch

to runaway and regroup. Instead, they used a three sided metal file and it worked, but it took them half an hour just to get the one lock off. Once they were inside, they used a crowbar to open the sarcophagus lid, but then the problems just kept coming. The inner lid was secured by several copper dowels, which they removed.

They balanced it crosswise across the foot of the sarcophagus, removed the piece at its head, and then slid lincoln cedar covered lead coffin part of the way out, but they were only able to pull it out about a foot. Lincoln's five pound coffin was simply too heavy for them to move. Mullins sent Swiegels to find another pair of hands, and that is the moment when the informants signaled to Tyrrell that it was time to start their raid. Why did it take so long to tip off Tyrell and

his men? The signal from Swiegels was the lighting of a cigar, but that required Lewis to go outside, and he hadn't had a chance because he'd been tasked with holding a lantern while Mullin and Hughes worked. But finally he had his chance. The agents sprung from their hiding places and dashed to the scene of Mullin's men. In their excitement, one agent accidentally fired his weapon. Startled by

the gunfire, the kidnappers fled. When the agents got to the sarcophagus, all that was left on the scene were the crowbar, a broken saw, and a few other scattered tools not to be Deterred by their own error, the Secret Service agents and Pinkerton detectives fanned out in an effort to catch Mullin and his men. Tyrrell, it's reported, took to the tubs roof where he spied a couple

of men down below. Without any verification. He shot at them and they returned fire, and when Tyrell called for backup, one of the men on the ground called out, quote, Tyrrell, is that you That's right. Tyrell and the authorities were shooting at each other and their own people. Tyrrell reported to Secret Service headquarters that it was quote one of the most unfortunate nights I have ever experienced. Yet God

protected us in doing right well. Tyrrell was busy swallowing his pride on that last act at Lincoln's tomb, Mullen and Hughes made their way back to the Hub. It took a few days, but Tyrell finally arrested them. Also at the Hub, grave robbing and body snatching laws were, like we said, barely in existence, if at all, because that wasn't a crime, nor were they facing any specific

counterfeiting charges from the attempt at theft. Mullen and Hughes faced charges of petty theft, which would have been for trying to steal Lincoln's coffin, which had cost reportedly at most seventy five dollars. The two men were tried the following May and both were convicted. Hughes and Mullen were sentenced to Juliet Penitentiary for quote one year each, one day of which is to be in solitary confinement, and

the balance at hard Labor. Prison. Records do show that each served his full sentence, after which he was disappeared without a trace. They were, if you didn't recognize it, sent to the same prison from which they had been trying to spring their engraver, Benjamin Boyd. When the first reports of the attempted body snatching were published, many people, including other detectives and other newspaper editors, thought the whole thing was a hoax. Quote. In some cities, the Lincoln

break in didn't get any coverage. That is according again to Thomas Crawell, and he continued quote. In some cases newspapers printed the story, but they told their readers it wasn't true. But once it was verified, it was blamed on a whole lot of people. None of whom were James Cannally, Terence Mullen, or Jack Hughes. Some people blamed the Democrats, while others pointed fingers at the former Confederates

in Illinois. Rumors in Chicago suggested that it was a plan by one of the detectives to help him win election for chief of Police. A few days after Mullin and his men attempted their theft and ransoming, Lincoln's coffin was moved to the tomb's earthen floorid basement for safety, hidden in an unmarked grave, on September one, he was permanently buried at Robert's request, ten ft beneath the catacomb

and an enclosure of concrete and steel. Today, the Lincoln Tomb State Historic Site is the final resting place of Abraham Lincoln, his wife Mary, and three of their four sons, Edward, William, and Thomas, who was known as Tad. Their eldest son, Robert, died in ninety six at a j d two, and he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In nineteen sixty, the Lincoln Tomb was designated a National Historic Landmark, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places

in nineteen sixty six. Today it is operated by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. The president's remains are in a concrete vault, still ten ft below the marble floor of the burial chamber, just as Robert had requested back in nineteen o one. Crypts in the chamber south wall hold the remains of Abraham's wife Mary, and sons Edward, Willie

and Tad. Tad, the Lincoln's youngest son, died of heart failure in July of eighteen seventy one at the age of eighteen, and it's actually his remains that were the first to be interred in what is today's Presidential Tomb. The remains of his father and his two brothers joined him on September nineteenth, eighteen seventy one. Mary was laid to rest there in July of eighteen eighty two, just

a few days after her death. I liked that when I was learning about this story, it's often described as being one that has been forgotten in history, that Lincoln went on tour for about two weeks after he'd been assassinated, and no one then ever talks about the fact that his afterlife was not secure. He only had a padlock. I didn't know that. One thing we do not talk about in this episode, my dear, is any sort of embolming fluid. So I was wondering if perhaps you might

step into your area here and have a nice cold glass. Yes, come have some embolming fluid. I bet anyone who knows my mind, even marginally could guess what the most inspirational two words of this episode were, and feel free to tag that on Twitter. That is non conforming distiller. Oh my gosh. So when every single time I had to read that, I was always like, I want to dive deeply into exactly what that means, but I also don't want to know at all. I want my assumption of

what that means. We're going to talk a little about a possibility, which is moonshine, because that's, of course what I thought of, And moonshine is a fascinating thing and has a really fascinating history. It started to be made in the US in the late eighteenth century because of the whiskey texts. There was a whole whiskey rebellion associated with that, but that is very different and much bigger story.

But the thing is today, right, you can buy moonshine at liquor stores and beautiful packaging in a variety of tempting and delicious flavors. And you may be like, wait, is this really made in a still in the forest at night? Probably not. That is, of course, where moonshine gets its name, is that people were doing it in the dead of night, out in the woods, often under

the light of the moon. But some of the problem with labeling something as moonshine or not is that you can kind of label a lot of things moonshine because the definition of moonshine is really flexible. It's not like other spirits where they're very specific guidelines. It can be made with any fermentable starter, and it is now considered by a lot of people to be a craft spirit. A lot of people are really starting their own moonshine

distilleries and making some very interesting stuff. But it's a really good neutral spirit, and it mixes with a lot of stuff. I will tell you I love nothing more in the autumn than getting my pumpkin moonshine and using it in everything. But today we're just going with your standard moonshine. If you really wanted to go with a flavor. I would say pick apple here, but here we go. This is just called non conforming distiller and it is

a very simple recipe and really great. If you, like us, are in the Northern Hemisphere headed into those hot months, this might be one that you'll want to drink a lot of. It is an ounce and a half of moonshine line, three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice, three quarters of an ounce of hybiscus syrup, and you're gonna shake that and a shaker with ice, pour it over fresh ice, strain it out of that ice you used, and then you will top it not with bubbles, but

with four ounces of unsweetened apple juice. And it takes on this fun sort of apply hibiscus flavor. It's very refreshing. It has a surprisingly soft flavor. It's not too bity because of the the hybiscus flavor and the lemon really

take any bite off the moonshine. It's quite lovely and you can drink a lot of it without realizing it, and don't if you are really a bubbles person like I love bubbly drinks more than still drinks, so I would normally put maybe just a little a little splash of lemon lime soda on top, or even a ginger ale if you want more in that flavor range. That would be great for as we head in the latter

half of summer towards autumn. But the easiest thing on earth if you want to make the mock tail version, just leave the moonshine out, because the lemon and hibiscus and apple juice is just great on its own and makes a very beautiful, pretty colored, yummy, yummy drink. So that is the non conforming distiller a little tiptoe into moonshine country, Although please buy your moonshine from a liquor

store where it is actually like. It may not be regulated regarding what can be called it, but it's a little bit safer than something you might get out of a roadside stamp from a forest. Still, so yes, please buy your moonshine from a reputable liquor store. That's just for safety. It is for your safety. We hope that you have made this through unscathed and that you don't get arrested for any foolish crimes like stealing a president's body,

and we hope that you've enjoyed this time. We certainly thank you for spending it with us, and we will see you right back here next week with another tail of body snatching. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.