The inept gang who tried to snatch Lincoln's body

In 1876, Abraham Lincoln's body lay within an aboveground white marble sarcophagus in a handsome tomb on the grounds of Springfield, Illinois' Oak Ridge Cemetery.

The only thing standing between the body and any would-be grave robbers was a single padlock on the tomb's chamber door. His sarcophagus wasn't at all burglarproof: Its lid was sealed, not with cement, but with the less permanent plaster of Paris. There was no groundskeeper, no security. After all, who would want to steal Lincoln's body? 

Enter a gang of Irish counterfeiters from Chicago led by a small-time crime boss named Big Jim Kennally. Early in 1876, Kennally's best engraver of counterfeit plates, Benjamin Boyd, had been sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary in Joliet. To pressure the governor to release his man, Kennally recruited two members of his gang, Terence Mullen, a saloonkeeper, and Jack Hughes, a sometimes manufacturer of counterfeit nickels, to kidnap Lincoln's body. For ransom, they would demand $200,000 in cash and a full pardon for Boyd.

With the lack of security, the gang should have had an easy time of acquiring the body, but neither Mullen or Hughes had any body-snatching experience. So, they invited a man named Lewis Swegles, who they thought was a grave robber, to help them. They couldn't have made a worse choice because Swegles was a paid informant—a "roper"—of the Secret Service.

Swegles reported every detail of the plot to his boss, Patrick D. Tyrrell, chief of the Chicago district office of the Secret Service. On the night he accompanied Mullen and Hughes to Oak Ridge Cemetery, Tyrrell and his agents were lying in wait for them at Lincoln's tomb. 

Despite being career criminals, they didn't know how to pick a lock, so they cut through the padlock with a file. Once inside the chamber, they found they could not lift Lincoln's 500-pound cedar-and-lead coffin. The men were considering their options when a detective's pistol accidentally went off outside. Mullen and Hughes bolted, but it wasn't much of a getaway—they headed straight back to their saloon in Chicago where Tyrrell arrested them a couple days later.