Eliot Ness (10 page)

These ham-handed bribe attempts forced Eliot to reevaluate his trusting nature once and for all.
He knew the Mob must be approaching his men, too—and what did it mean if the guys didn’t tell him about the enticements? In the squad’s first couple of months, he and Seager periodically spied on their own agents, using Chicago police officers they believed they could trust. They told themselves it was just a fail-safe, to put their minds at ease, but sure enough, the information that came in occasionally proved disheartening.
Leeson would later tell his second wife that “there were certain Untouchables in the beginning that were let go because they took bribes.”

Eliot and Seager had no choice but to stay vigilant, even after the squad had been pared down to a core group. The Outfit believed in the power of payoffs like it was a religion; they would never give up trying to force cash on agents. “
Capone’s men would pop up from nowhere on a street and offer us money to lay off,” Chapman recalled years later. The offers weren’t just enticing. They were astounding. The amounts kept getting bigger and bigger. So whenever one of the squad’s raids turned up an empty warehouse, or a gangster disappeared right after a search warrant had been issued, Eliot would start to worry. And he and Seager would initiate a secret search for a new potential turncoat. By late spring, they had a couple of suspects—the usual suspects.

How Close It Had Been

W
illiam Gardner looked like a G-man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a cocky, loose-limbed walk and an emotionless stare. No one ever expressed surprise when he said he was a federal agent.

He never really felt like one. Gardner had been born on Indian land in North Dakota, his mother a teenage Chippewa girl, his father a white soldier he never knew. Gardner would be successfully assimilated into the wider society—he wore sharp Brooks Brothers suits and spoke the King’s English—but, half Indian and half white, he was never comfortable in it. The only place he ever believed he belonged was the playing field. He played college football for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a Native American boarding school/indoctrination camp whose stated purpose was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The institution almost always failed on both counts.

Gardner’s Carlisle team had been the best in the country, a sensation. (It was so good that the legendary Jim Thorpe was a second-stringer on the squad.) Gardner wasn’t the most talented guy out there, but he was the most reliable. He thrived on pressure. When the Indians found themselves up against it during their glorious 1907 season, they didn’t pull out the tricks—even though their coach, Pop Warner, was a proud innovator. They put the ball in Gardner’s hands. Who was going to stop this tall, fluid end who moved like a freight train? No one. When Carlisle played Harvard, disbelief among the Ivy League’s best soon turned to anger as Gardner ground out the yards play after play. The flower of America’s youth couldn’t accept being beaten by a bunch of Indians. Finally, Harvard defensive tackle Waldo Pierce snapped. Getting up after a tackle, he sucker-punched Gardner with a left hook to the jaw. They had to carry the Carlisle star off the field. But he would be back—and mighty Harvard would fall. To close out the season, the Indians crushed the University of Chicago, the Big Ten champion, a victory Coach Warner would later say gave him “greater satisfaction” than any other in his long career. Much of the credit for the win,
he said, belonged to Gardner, who “had his leg wrenched and his jaw broken . . . and played on to the finish without telling me a word about it, afraid I would send in a substitute.”

This courage was one of the things Eliot liked about William Gardner. He was well aware of Gardner’s football career and often brought it up in conversation. Eliot respected physical strength and quiet authority.
He would later describe Gardner admiringly as “a full-blooded Indian who was a very handsome boy, and a fashion plate. Bill must have weighed about 240 pounds and he was all muscle.”

That was certainly the man Eliot wanted to see, but it wasn’t the one he actually knew. Gardner’s upstanding courage and all-muscle physique were long gone by the time he joined the Capone squad. He was now middle-aged and alcoholic and angry at the world. Eliot was under no illusions about this. Along with his having been fired for laziness, Gardner’s record with the Prohibition Bureau was dotted with disappearances that his supervisors officially chalked up to family problems but were almost certainly alcoholic benders. And there was still another explanation for the disappearances, one even less palatable. Not long after Gardner returned to work in 1928, thanks to Senator Curtis’s intervention, an anonymous letter arrived at the New Jersey bureau office. It was from a man claiming to be a permit holder—someone, such as a pharmacist, who had a legal reason for obtaining alcohol. It was addressed to an agent who’d recently had a high-profile case.

You appear in the newspapers in the role of sleuth. You are to be commended for this work but you ought to start in your own office. You had a man named Gardner who loved to handle matters concerning alcohol and inspections. We understood that he was dismissed but one of my permit friends just told me today that he had word from that man who told him that he was on his way back and would report for work again soon. He said he had too many strong political friends to be sidetracked by you are [
sic
] that fellow Hanlon.

Now just a good tip. Gardner is a hustler and while a piker in some cases he is always busy getting his. I am a permit holder myself and I know. Some agent I believed named Connelly was at my place once while I mixed some of my denatured alcohol. This man told me I did not have to spoil it, just call Gradner [
sic
] on the telephone. He would fix things all right. This man Gradner [
sic
] at one time worked with Carife and Palmer and now my friend tells
me that Palmer says he was double crossed by this indian. Now I am going right myself with my permit and living up to all the government laws and I believe others ought to also. I could get along better if fellows like Gardner who is trying to holf [
sic
] up people were out of this work.

Eliot undoubtedly knew about this old corruption accusation against Gardner. Alexander Jamie, who signed off on Gardner’s transfer back to Chicago, mentioned it in memos to Washington. Of course, the charge didn’t necessarily mean anything. It came from an anonymous source, which suggested a bootlegger could be behind it. Still, taken with Gardner’s well-documented disappearances and insubordination over the years, it was troubling. Eliot decided to keep him out of the wiretap work, which he believed would bring the most useful evidence for court. And for field assignments, he often teamed him up with Lyle Chapman, his other problem agent.

Chapman was a morale killer, too, though in a different way than Gardner. Gardner was surly, but at least he kept to himself. Chapman was expansive, funny—and annoying.
His boss in Indianapolis had complained that Chapman needed to “get it out of his head that all the women in the country are crazy about him and . . . somebody is always abusing him.” With his bland good looks and bouncy personality, Chapman, though newly married, prided himself on being a cocksman and loved to talk about his exploits. This impressed his shy, self-effacing new supervisor in Chicago, for Eliot, despite being newly married himself, also couldn’t help being drawn to attractive young women out in the world. This shared eye for the ladies did not lead the two men into a close friendship, however. Chapman, unlike Eliot, seemed to view assignments that required long hours and late nights—the very definition of the Capone squad’s work—as a conspiracy by priggish supervisors to make him celibate. This was a problem, to say the least. Eliot, Johnson, and Froelich needed Chapman to be on his game. For all his flights of fancy, the man had a mind like a calculator. It was his job to sift and organize evidence from raids, wiretaps, informants, and prisoner interviews. More than that, he had to make sense of it all, to provide the U.S. district attorney’s office with a guidebook to Capone’s Volstead Act violations. Not many agents in the bureau could do this work well.

Chapman’s biggest problem seemed to be a desire for attention. Bureau administrators sent worried memos back and forth, especially after a report came in that at private parties Chapman “shows and reads . . . various official papers [from the Capone files] to any one that cares to listen, evidently
for the purpose of making himself appear as a ‘big shot.’” This obviously did not speak well of the agent’s judgment. He could single-handedly blow the Volstead case against Capone. He could ruin everything. Eliot would have to keep a close eye on him.

***

Eliot and Edna had never gotten around to taking a honeymoon. Eliot was too ambitious. He wanted to get ahead in the bureau, move up the ladder. In his five years with the Chicago office, he had never even considered taking a sick day. Now that he was leading his own unit, he worked even longer hours—through the night and every weekend. He stayed hyper-focused on the task at hand: Capone, always Capone. When it came right down to it, his only romance was with the Big Fella.

For this reason, Edna would be almost entirely overlooked in the Ness mythos that would rise up in the decades ahead. She was easily eclipsed by the high drama that happened night after night in the Capone brewery hunt. She appears nowhere in
The Untouchables
, Eliot’s memoir, even though the book’s action takes place when she ostensibly was the most important person in his life. (Her name was replaced with “Betty,” the name of Eliot’s wife at the time of the book’s writing, a woman Eliot didn’t meet until years after the Capone squad had disbanded.) Edna may not have minded being overlooked by history. She liked to keep a low profile. She would never use her famous married name for attention or profit. “
Her greatest wish was not to be known,” longtime friend Maxine Huntington would say years later. Maybe so, but Alexander Jamie’s former secretary certainly was well known in the Chicago Prohibition office, in Eliot’s world. She understood her husband’s work life better than any other woman ever would. That made her the perfect companion for Eliot, at least at this moment in his life, when work was everything. She was a law-and-order true believer herself. After the excitement of a raid, Eliot would lay in bed in their little apartment, Edna next to him, and roll the night’s events over in his mind—the cocked guns and the screaming and the running.
He’d sometimes shudder at “how close it had been.” He would break out in a cold sweat thinking about it. He never told Edna about these moments of panic. He feared she wouldn’t understand. Nothing ever put her in a panic. She was tough. Eliot liked that about her.

***

Edna worried about her husband, but she also egged him on. Eliot worked twelve, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, for weeks at a time. Edna never
complained. Her father, a factory worker, had regularly clocked double shifts to feed his family, so Eliot’s dedication to work was normal to her. On top of that, she was a part of it all; she worked right there in the Prohibition office, handled important paperwork, read the telexes. She saw that Eliot’s long hours were beginning to pay off. Thanks to the Capone squad’s raids—and the new safeguards and payoffs undertaken by the Outfit as a result—costs had spiked for the gang.
By late spring, saloon owners had noticed that the syndicate’s thirty-two-gallon barrels—the very ones the squad continued to follow around the city and back to the cleaning facility near Comiskey Park—were now being delivered with just thirty gallons of beer in them. When called on it, the goons told the beer sellers they were mistaken. The saloons continued to pay for thirty-two gallons while receiving less.

Frustrated by the diminished profit margin, the Outfit turned to harassing Eliot and his men.
The Mob stole their cars and abandoned them miles away. It spread rumors about them. It called the Prohibition Bureau office and threatened whoever answered the phone. Gangsters began tailing the agents and hanging around outside their homes. “
I remember twice Ness and I drove fast to my apartment when [my wife] reported hoods were outside and she was scared,” Chapman recalled.
One night Eliot caught a junior gangster lurking outside the Stahle family home. The man wasn’t carrying a weapon, and he left without putting up a fight. Eliot’s car was stolen at least twice. After he got it back the second time, he came out of his apartment the next morning to find it on blocks, the front wheels missing. Agent Dan Vaccarelli had been on assignment with the Capone squad for only a few days when his car disappeared. Lahart and Seeley also reported their cars stolen. The bureau was able to confirm the harassment when Prohibition agents arrested a mobbed-up nimrod named Albert Richter in suburban Winnetka. Searching his pockets, they pulled out a piece of paper with a list of fifteen license-plate numbers and descriptions of makes and models. All of the cars on the list belonged to agents on or working with the Capone squad.

Sensing the federal authorities closing in on Big Al, Capone’s remaining rivals tried to take advantage. They moved in on his turf, or at least nibbled around the edges. They sent flunkies to be government informants. They knocked off delivery trucks just like the Capone squad. Chicagoans opened up the paper every morning expecting to read about the next St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Everyone knew what was going to happen when Scarface Al and his thousand-strong army became desperate.

The Untouchables

O
n June 5, 1931, the government alleged in a twenty-two-count indictment that Alphonse Capone had earned at least $1,038,654.84 between 1924 and 1929. This haul, needless to say, was entirely illicit. He hadn’t paid any taxes on it, putting him well over one hundred thousand dollars in arrears. The tax case, acknowledged IRS special agent Frank Wilson, one of its chief architects, was “circumstantial in character,” seeing as Capone had no bank accounts, nothing in his name, and dealt only in cash. But the government had already proven it could use tax cases to put mobsters behind bars and keep them there. George Johnson planned to rely on the testimony of Capone associates who had the threat of long prison sentences hanging over them. After more than two long years of work, the tax men finally had a swagger about them.

A week later, it was the Capone squad’s turn. Their evidence brought another indictment of the Mob boss, along with sixty-eight other gangsters, for violation of Prohibition laws and conspiracy. This indictment alleged more than five thousand offenses, most involving the transportation of beer. Through various methods—such as the Capone squad staking out barrel-cleaning facilities and counting the average turnover—Johnson argued that the gross amount of beer the syndicate sold in a year “exceeded $13,000,000.00” in value. As with the tax case, the evidence here was chiefly circumstantial. They would have to strong-arm Capone’s indicted associates—distribution chief Joe Fusco and brewmasters Steve Svoboda and Bert Delaney, among others—into admitting that the man referred to in wiretapped conversations as Snorky, the Big Fella, and Number One was Capone. They could sort of link to Capone a couple of trucks confiscated in brewery raids in March and April; the trucks had passed through the Big Fella’s hands before he became the boss and started keeping everything at arm’s length.

The tax case against Capone would come first, though the bootlegging indictment would serve as an important fallback plan in case the tax
charges failed to stick. Johnson worried that the Capone moneymen he was counting on to sell out the big man on the witness stand were wavering. They were “fearful and reluctant,” Johnson wrote to U.S. Attorney General William Mitchell. The deciding factor for the tax case going first, despite the shaky witnesses, was that prosecutors believed it would be easier to work up a jury’s outrage over tax cheating—especially during a depression, when the government needed every dime it could get—than over providing liquor to willing customers. But while the tax case offered the best shot at conviction, the press naturally found the Prohibition charges sexier. The
Chicago Tribune
’s report leaned hard on the confiscated trucks:

The sensational rise of Al Capone on a tidal wave of beer, ministering to a $20,000,000 a year thirst in a decade of Volsteadism, is told by the government’s evidence in the conspiracy case which is expected to hasten the fall of the chief of gang chiefs.

The beginning of that evidence, federal investigators disclosed yesterday, goes back to the incorporation in 1921, under the laws of Illinois, of the World Motor Service company, ostensibly a commercial trucking concern. . . . The first step after the organization of the new company was the purchase of four trucks of five tons capacity each. Two of these, the government’s evidence will show, were bought by Al Brown, the purchasing agent and general handy man for the company.

Al Brown was the name used by Al Capone after he was brought to Chicago from the Brooklyn Five Points gang in 1919 to serve as bodyguard for Big Jim Colosimo, and later for Johnny Torrio, who displaced Colosimo. . . .

To clinch all this evidence against the “big shots” of the gang—the small fry having been caught tending breweries—the federal men have the reports of conversations on tapped telephone wires. These reports, say the agents, link the alleged conspirators together.

The article ended with a hat tip to the Capone squad: “United States Attorney Johnson yesterday praised the work of the eight young men of the special prohibition detail, headed by Eliot Ness, who perfected the conspiracy case. They worked at the risk of death and resisted the temptation of bribes several times as high as their salaries for a year, Mr. Johnson said.”

This brief mention was the beginning of the legend that in the decades ahead would reach America’s TV screens and movie theaters. Subsequent
news stories about the squad declared that all of the agents had graduated from college, which meant they were the country’s elite. Fewer than 5 percent of American adults then had a college degree. The reports also insisted that the squad’s average age was just thirty. Both claims were untrue, but truth wasn’t important. The Capone squad had a catchy new nickname: “the untouchables.” The Associated Press announced:

The “untouchables,” eight young prohibition agents whose zeal and incorruptibility defied danger and lavish temptation to pile up evidence for the conspiracy indictment against “Scarface” Al Capone and his booze syndicate, today received their reward.

It was a declaration by United States District Attorney George E. Q. Johnson, director of the Government’s campaign against Capone cohorts, that all the praise heaped on him for the dogged pursuit of the gangsters should be shared with the eight members of the special unit. They were the men on the firing line.

The report added that seven of the eight agents “remain anonymous for various reasons.” Eliot, quoted briefly in the article, was the lone exception. The decision to have Eliot and only Eliot speak for the group was probably made by Johnson, who wanted to control the flow of information about the Capone case. (Most of the agents currently with the team received recognition within the federal law-enforcement bureaucracy. The week after the indictments came down, an agencywide Prohibition Bureau newsletter heralded the Capone squad’s role in the case. “The whole accomplishment represents splendid unity of action between agents of the Intelligence Unit of the Treasury and the Bureau of Prohibition under direction of U.S. Attorney Johnson of Chicago,” the newsletter said. “Great credit is due to Asst. Special Agent in Charge Eliot Ness, Chicago, and to Agent Jos. D. Leeson, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Special Agent Lyle B. Chapman, Detroit, Div. Credit is also due to Special Agents: Saml. M. Seager, Warren E. Stutzman, Paul W. Robsky, Martin J. Lahart, Bernard V. Cloonan, all of Chicago; Special Agent Robert D. Sterling, Detroit, Mich., and Special Agent M. King, Richmond, Va.”)

Despite the internal huzzahs, Eliot’s appearance in the newspapers sparked resentments that some of the squad members would carry with them for years. After weeks of talking to the press, the twenty-eight-year-old special agent had become a local celebrity—and he clearly loved every
minute of it. In one of his first interviews after the indictments, he showed off his fancy college education by saying he didn’t approve of the nickname the press had given the team, because “untouchable” was the name for members of India’s lowest caste. Colleagues noticed that Eliot seemed to walk a little taller, act a little cheerier, after being interviewed by a reporter. This was undoubtedly true (Eliot would bask in the media spotlight throughout his career), but he didn’t seek out reporters
only
for his ego. Influenced by the noted criminologist August Vollmer, he also believed that talking to the press helped law enforcement; news coverage made police efforts appear bigger and better, their success inevitable. Openness with the press, Vollmer had said during the University of Chicago police-administration course Eliot took in 1929, made the public more likely to support the police and punctured the criminal class’s confidence. Eliot now saw that Vollmer was right. Even mobsters believed the squad’s press notices. A Capone goon recognized one of Eliot’s men on the street one day and marched up to him. “Everyone here in Chicago gets along good with each other,” he said. “Why not you?”

With such encouraging results, Eliot wasn’t above giving reporters an incentive for providing good press. “The United States government had, still has, a large warehouse on Thirty-ninth between Halsted Street and Ashland Avenue,” recalled Tony Berardi, the
Chicago American
photographer, in 1999. “Whenever they raided a place and took the booze, they’d take it there. Eliot Ness would call the newspaper office and say, ‘Listen, send one of your cameramen out here without any cameras.’ He did that to me a couple of times. We’d go out there without any cameras and he’d fill our camera cases full of booze, and we’d take it to the office and split it.” The
American
was one of the papers read by Eliot’s parents.

On the same day the short article about the “untouchables” went out on the Associated Press wire, the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, the
American
’s sister paper, produced the first profile of Eliot. The young special agent puffed up when he talked about his decision to become a Prohibition agent. “It offered a lot of excitement . . . for there certainly is a thrill in pitting your wits against others’,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think that I could stand the monotony of an office.” The reporter, Priscilla Higinbotham, wrote that while Eliot wasn’t a rabid dry, he believed strongly “in wiping out the evils that the law has brought about. It is not only his desire to run Capone and his henchmen out of town, but he particularly wishes to destroy the corruptive influences in politics that have resulted from the Capone reign.”
This had become a pet subject of Eliot’s, ever since he had tuned in to a conversation on one of the wiretapped lines and learned that Capone had both candidates for a Cicero office in his pocket, one of whom claimed to be a reform man. Eliot hated hypocrisy.

The profile’s theme, however, was Eliot’s gung-ho boyishness. “It’s funny, I think, when you back up a truck to a brewery door and smash it in,” he told Higinbotham. “And then find some individuals inside that you hadn’t expected.” Asked about the dangers of his job, Eliot reached back to the meeting with Joe Martino in Chicago Heights. He didn’t mention Frank Basile’s murder and the guilt he felt over it. He kept it light. When he told the reporter about the dead-eyed Italian leaning into Martino and asking, “Shall I put a knife into him?” Eliot chuckled and said: “We had thought everything was going so well, too.”

Such insouciance—with those sad blue eyes, and that sweet, boyish smile—won over the twenty-two-year-old “girl” reporter. She left him with an embarrassing flush painting her cheeks. Her article would describe him strictly in heroic terms. It closed with Eliot heading out for a “tennis engagement”: “This, he explained, was just a ‘workout’ necessary to prepare him for more hours and hours of intensive work to insure Alphonse Capone’s ultimate sojourn behind bars.”

***

Eliot didn’t mean to sound flip when talking about such serious matters. Part of it was bravado. Reporters allowed him to be someone else, someone
more
than he thought he was. His confidence had bloomed since becoming a special agent back in 1928, but his insecurities couldn’t be entirely banished. They were as much a part of him as his boyish face. He wanted to convince reporters—and himself—that he was up to any task.

However flippant he may have sounded, Americans loved it. Fan mail started to flow into the Prohibition Bureau offices in Chicago. A representative sampling captures a country that no longer had a taste for “anything goes,” a country that wanted its freedom, but safety and respect, too. Wrote Darwin H. Clark, an advertising man from Los Angeles:

Dear Mr. Ness:

Just a note to express my hearty congratulations to you and your associates for the good work you have done in landing Al Capone, and we hope others of his gang, behind bars.

I feel, like thousands of others in this territory, utmost respect for men of
your caliber that cannot be touched by the lawless in a city such as Chicago. Your intelligence, courage and integrity deserve a great deal of commendation, and I hope you will keep up the good work.

Another man in California, a former Chicagoan, wrote:

Dear Mr. Ness,

God bless you and the others for the good work you have done. . . . Keep up the good work, as those rats surely will bob up again when they think no one is watching.

Even many repeal activists jumped on the Untouchables’ bandwagon. Halbert Louis Hoard, the editor of the
Jefferson County Union
in Wisconsin, understood that the gangsters hardly wanted to be rid of Volstead. He wrote to Eliot:

Dear Mr. Ness,

I am 100 percent wet, but I applaud you for your bravery. The sooner you put these bootlegger drys where they can’t vote for Prohibition, the quicker we can get a repeal of the 18th amendment. I’m for you.

Newspaper editorialists picked up on the enthusiasm. The
Hollywood Daily Citizen
wrote that “the country owes to this young man and the other unnamed workers who assisted him a great debt of gratitude.” The editorial continued:

There is an inspiration in that young fellow’s work not only for other young men but for the older people who have grown discouraged in the battle for good government. No soldier on the battle field ever performed more heroic work than has Eliot Ness performed. He should be honored as are the heroes of the battle field honored.

This country needs more of the heroism displayed by Eliot Ness—more of war heroism in peace time.

This being America, such amazing press meant there was money to be made. A publicity man, Raymond Schwartz, wrote to Eliot offering to put his story, in his own words, in magazines across the country. He proposed a series of five or ten articles, “short but very brisk,” about the special
agent’s work chasing down Al Capone. He said “the proceeds should run well into the thousands,” with Eliot splitting it with the magazine wire service.

Eliot didn’t take Schwartz up on the offer; it’s possible his superiors at the bureau considered it unseemly. For now he would have to ride the publicity wave without remuneration. He continued to give interviews in his office and at raid sites. He tipped off the papers about arrests. Reporters inevitably found their way to the Ness family home, too. Emma, intimately familiar with the press her son had received, gushed that Eliot had been the best-behaved, most honest boy ever. Eliot’s father said nothing. Or at least nothing memorable—he was never quoted. Eliot noticed. In a moment of rare emotional candor, he admitted to a reporter that he wished he knew his father better.