The Evidence
The Case
You have been handed the file. You have not been handed a verdict.
The rise
He was born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1877 and grew up a boarder in Chicago. He rose through Illinois tax administration until he chaired the state body that set the value of other men’s property. In 1928 he opened the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, an art deco house that still runs today. In 1929 he opened Citizens’ State Bank.
When the Depression shut banks across the country, Malone sailed home from Germany to reopen his. He paid his depositors one hundred cents on the dollar, then crossed back over the ocean.
The fall
He had made enemies. In 1932 he ran for governor as a taxpayers’ candidate and lost. The next year, while he was abroad, a federal grand jury indicted him for tax evasion. In 1937 he stood trial in Chicago. The judge cut his key witness to two words and denied him probation. The jury convicted him.
Malone always said he was a marked man, tried for his politics rather than his arithmetic. He financed a pamphlet that named the men he blamed. The government said the numbers were the numbers.
Exile, prison, and a pardon
He spent years abroad and years in a federal cell. In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt pardoned him. He came home to Park Ridge and lived near the theatre he built, a convicted man the President had forgiven and the record had never cleared.
The first hung jury was his own family
His son thought him a crook. His daughter read the years abroad as flight. His wife kept the faith. His sister kept two columns in her scrapbook and let them stand. The book hands you the same file and asks for the verdict none of them could reach.