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and dropped to his knees at the top of the stairwell. The student agent turned and strode back to room 804. He leaned his head in. “I got him,” he announced.
    That hardly was the end of it. While the intern boasted about his marksmanship, Adams slowly righted himself and continued his flight. He made it down to the seventh floor before Agent Edward Gill, following the trail of blood, caught up to him. More office workers watched as Gill whacked the wounded man in the head with a blackjack. Gill and another raider carried the suspected liquor-syndicate accountant back up to the eighth floor and ran the gauntlet of gapers down the hallway. “Get into your offices, we’re government men,” the agents barked as they alternated between hefting and dragging Adams, periodically thumping him with their clubs. “For God’s sake,” Adams finally wailed to no one in particular, “call Mrs. Adams at Longbeach 4800 and tell her I’m shot.” Leaving the door to the office open, the agents dropped Adams into a chair and told him to open the cashbox or else. They put wet towels on his wound in a halfhearted attempt to stop the bleeding and continued to threaten him when he didn’t respond. Then they took the phone receivers off the hooks so they could concentrate on the safe without interruption. A woman from across the hall, after watching for half an hour as Adams bled through the clump of towels, decided she should call a doctor. Someone else had already called the newspapers, and the reporters beat the doctor to the scene. “Get out—we’ll smash your cameras and your faces,” a special agent bellowed when the hacks arrived in the doorway. This, they should have known by now, was not the best way to handle the press.
    “Hardboiled George Golding’s special prohibition squad shot a fleeing suspect yesterday in the City Hall Square building,” the
Chicago Tribune
blared. The city’s newspapers had plenty of eyewitnesses to feature, and none of them put the special agents in a positive light. Office workers had crowded around the hacks to tell about being violently shoved back into their offices “by a couple of boys who looked like college students and who dressed as such but who kept displaying gold badges and yelling, ‘We’re federal agents: get back.’” Miss Constance Bemis, a secretary, told reporters that Agent Franklin “acted as though he were in a frenzy” as he chased thesuspect. She added: “I was standing in the hall when the men ran out, the agent with gun in hand . . . I nearly fainted when I saw the other man crumple to the floor as the bullet struck him.”
    The papers railed against Golding’s “terrorist” tactics—first the Beatty shooting and now this—and called for his dismissal. Editorials and analysis about the raid dominated the city’s front pages. The
Tribune
even used the City Hall Square incident to indict the entire Prohibition Bureau. “All previous records for brutality, depravity, and utter ruthlessness in prohibition enforcement were broken during the last 60 days, when dry sleuths in widely scattered sections of the country killed three citizens, maimed dozens more, and even seduced a schoolgirl—all ‘in the line of duty.’” That proved to be the last straw. The killings and the ruined schoolgirl had nothing to do with Golding, but it was because of him that the news was now flying around the country on the wires. The special agent in charge wasn’t going to be able to brazen this one out.
    The state’s attorney charged Agents Franklin and Gill with “assault with intent to commit murder,” and neither U.S. Attorney Johnson nor the bureau publicly supported them, as they had Caffey. Willebrandt was so upset at Golding’s recklessness that she supposedly never spoke to him again. The Treasury Department called Golding back to Washington, and he left without a word to the press or his men. Yellowley, Chicago’s bureau administrator, abruptly disbanded