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1921–1923
Agnes Szabo came of age in South Bend in the first dry years, raised first in a family saloon and then, after the law changed, in the "soft drink parlor" that succeeded it. As a teenager she ran the Chicago road: shuttling whiskey between Chicago and South Bend in a Hudson sedan, her younger siblings in the car, on the era's ordinary commerce of the route. She operated, in the Indiana Historical Bureau's account drawn from the newspapers of record, at the wholesale level — and the wholesale supply she bought was the government's own seizures. She paid up to $2,700 in cash for 135 cases of confiscated liquor, resold to her by the officers and judges who had seized it. Constable Dan Melloy not only sold her seized whiskey; he once personally escorted her to Chicago for a resupply.
Federal agents arrested her in 1921, and Szabo answered by naming names. The indictments that followed her account numbered more than sixty officials — and this page prints their geography exactly, because it is the point on which retelling most often inflates the case: the indicted men were Gary's and Lake County's. Mayor Boswell O. Johnson of Gary, City Judge William M. Dunn, the Lake County prosecutor, police officers, detectives, and former sheriffs stood charged with offenses from liquor violations to conspiracy, obstruction, and rigged elections. South Bend's documented part in the affair is Szabo herself: her upbringing here, her Chicago–South Bend run, and a resale pipeline that ran through officers and judges of the region. The scandal she detonated was Lake County's; the match was struck from this city.
Her own disposition closes the case at its true size. Federal Judge Albert B. Anderson, presiding, called her "an extraordinary criminal," sentenced her to six months, then reconsidered and let her go home before she had served the time. The press of record carried her boasts and her renunciation alike: the Indianapolis Times of March 16, 1923, carried her claim that "75% of South Bend was in on the bootlegging trade" — her claim, printed as hers — and in December 1922 the same paper had headlined "Girl Queen of Booze Runners Quits Trade." In 1923, outside a courthouse, she declared: "No more liquor for the Szabo family." When the family relocated to a rural farm and resumed its liquor operation, Judge Anderson filed an injunction to shut it down. The "Bootleg Queen" of the headlines was, in the documents, a South Bend teenager whose wholesale business existed because enforcement itself was for sale — the decade's sharpest documented statement about this city's dry years, and it comes from the court record, not from lore.
Sources:
- Indiana Historical Bureau, Indiana History Blog, the Agnes Szabo account (drawing on Hoosier State Chronicles and Chronicling America newspapers)
- Indianapolis Times, March 16, 1923, and December 9, 1922; Richmond Palladium, January 25, 1923; Lake County Times and Decatur Daily Democrat, as cited in the Bureau's account