Chicago letters on Florida witnesses in the contempt case, written during the tax trial (October 1931)

Part 28 of the FBI Vault’s Capone file, scans 11–12 and 33. Both are “personal and confidential” letters from W. A. McSwain, Special Agent in Charge at Chicago, to the Director about “Alphonse Capone, Contempt of Court”. The first, dated October 6th, 1931, is serial 69-180-87; the second, dated October 19, 1931, is serial 69-180-89. Most of the rest of Part 28 is newspaper coverage of the 1931 tax trial and verdict, which this page does not reproduce.

In the first letter McSwain writes that Inspector H. H. Clegg had told him that United States Attorney George E. Q. Johnson had interviewed persons in Florida “who were never contacted by Special Agents of the Bureau of Investigation.” McSwain obtained the full list of subpoenaed witnesses from William Froelich, Special Assistant to the Attorney General, and found that all of them had been interviewed by Bureau agents. Two others, Charles Clarke, a Special Agent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and Raymond Brown, an attorney for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, both of Jacksonville, “appeared voluntarily and testified.” Froelich called their testimony “immaterial and irrelevant.” McSwain could not yet get a transcript “due to the present trial of subject Capone, on a charge of failure to make proper income tax returns.”

The supplementary letter of October 19 reports from the transcript that Clarke, of the Treasury’s Intelligence Unit, testified he accompanied Deputy U.S. Marshal Cooper when a grand jury subpoena was served on Capone, and that Brown testified he saw Capone at the Sharkey–Stribling prize fight at Miami Beach on February 27, 1929. It confirms Froelich’s view that the testimony was “rather immaterial, and at best only cumulative.” The first letter was read from the page image stored here; the second follows the research index, which checked it against the image and notes that a year on the page is garbled.