William “Bill” C. McHugh: Evanston police chief in the 1980 FALN arrest

By Bob Seidenberg

In a career that ran from beat officer to Chief of the Evanston Police Department, William “Bill” C. McHugh considered the arrest as a “once in a lifetime moment,” he once said.

Carlos Alberto Torres, number one on the FBI’s most-wanted list, and eight other members of the revolutionary Puerto Rican FALN  group, were crammed into a van parked a few blocks from the lake on Hamilton Avenue on a cloudless Tuesday, April 4, 1980.

The group, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertoriquena, advocated Puerto Rican independence and had been connected with dozens of bombings in New York and Chicago.

Their ultimate goal was to rob an armored truck carrying $200,000 in cash that parked at a Northwestern University loading dock, officials later reported.

A call from an unidentified woman on the block tipped police off to suspicious behavior.

“They would take turns out of their [van] jogging, and she called because they were jogging and smoking cigarettes, and she didn’t think that [jogging] was consistent with smoking cigarettes,” recalled James “Jay” Lytle, who was Evanston’s mayor at the time.

Five Evanston police officers, three from uniform patrol and two from traffic, responded to the call, finding the van parked in front of the Hamilton address, with all the joggers still inside, the Evanston Review reported at the time in its account.

The officers moved forward with arrests after noticing the false mustache of one of the suspects drooping as he attempted to move away from the van.

Another of the suspects, the van’s driver, when officer Douglas Glanz asked to see her license, rolled up the window, police reported, fumbling in her purse for what turned out to be a gun.

In all, 14 weapons were found — including several from an arrest a few days before.

They included two shotguns, one rifle and eleven handguns.

“I’m startled that it didn’t end in a bloodbath,” McHugh told reporter Review reporter Frank Santos afterwards. “It could have if the men had been trigger-happy or nervous.”

Praise poured in from law enforcement agencies across the country for the police response — regarded as the largest single arrest of suspected terrorists— marveling at police’s cool handling of the incident, including their meticulous cataloging of evidence afterward

“They were extremely organized,” pointed out Lytle. “The one officer that came up to them [the FALN suspects] was extremely disciplined. When he saw the gun…he didn’t immediately go to his mic [radio], just you know, have a good day,’ and then three minutes later there’s four squadrons there.”

McHugh, police chief of the Evanston Police Department from 1969 to 1981, died Monday, May 4. He was 100.

Visitation services are to be held from 4 to 8 p.m. Monday , May 18 at Kelley & Spalding Funeral Home, 1787 Deerfield Road in Highland Park.

A funeral mass is to be held the next day, Tuesday, May 19th at 10:30 a.m., at Holy Cross Church, 724 Elder Lane, Deerfield.

Born July 11, 1925, McHugh was a product of the Great Depression and later served in the United States Navy aboard a minesweeper in both the Atlantic and Pacific campaigns.

Sworn in as an Evanston police officer Oct. 13, 1952, he rose through the ranks and was appointed Chief of Police in 1969.

The chief was “old-school,” acknowledged retired Deputy Chief Sam Pettineo, who joined the department in 1976, in that “what he said was the rule and he was not happy when expectations were not met.”

At the same time, he was responsible for a number of reforms during his tenure, Pettineo said in a text, following some of the seminal ideas Chicago Police Superintendent O.W. Wilson had set forth in an influential book on police administration, Pettineo said. They included increased education for officers, and mandatory education for supervisors, many of whom attended the School of Police Staff & Command at Northwestern University’s nationally-known Traffic Institute.

“The agenda at that time was increased professionalism throughout the Department,” Pettineo said.

In that vein, McHugh was responsible for forming a number of number of specialized units within the department to meet community needs, Pettineo said, such as the department’s drug/gang unit, victim services, and community relations.

Three of his subordinates would go on to become chief of Department — Frank Kaminski, Ernest Jacobi, and William “Bill” Logan, who was named the department’s first Black chief in 1984.

“Bill Logan was his own man,but Bill McHugh promoted him first to Captain and then to Deputy Chief,” Pettineo pointed out. “A lot of police departments weren’t really enlightened about affirmative action and race relations back in the day. I think that setting the stage for Chief Logan to be in a position to be the first black chief in Evanston was monumentally progressive at the time.”

Though the FALN suspects marked his biggest arrest, McHugh counted as his proudest accomplishment the department’s violence-free record during the 31 consecutive days during the Viet Nam era where protesters marched against the war as well as in support of open housing.

Rather than creating an adversarial situation, McHugh said both sides — police and dissident leaders — opened channels early onto ensure peaceful demonstrations. “We were able to sit and talk with them and they would let us know what they were going to do,” he recalled in a 1981 interview, “and we would let them know what we would do.”

He faced criticism in later years about rising crime rates and a drop in morale, even after the department’s spectacular FALN arrests. The issue arose in the 1981 mayoral election with Lytle’s opponent, Jack Korshak, calling for the chief to step down, maintaining the department needed younger and more dynamic leadership.

Instead of debating his critics, the chief pointed out rising crime “is a community as well as a police problem.”

He also deferred casting the statistics in a better light or changing the format in which they are presented to the public.

“We [police] are not committing the crime, and we are not going to stop reporting it,” said McHugh, whose retirement announcement came a month after the election.

After stepping down as Evanston Police Chief, McHugh later served 11 years as police chief in Bartlett, Illinois. During his time in law enforcement, McHugh graduated from the FBI Academy, earned a master’s degree in political science, and received the Medal of Honor from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.

To send flowers to the family or plant a tree, visit the Kelly Spalding Funeral Home site https//kelleyspaldingfuneralhome.com