Eliot Ness (11 page)

***

A week after the Prohibition indictments, only sixteen of the sixty-eight men named with Capone had surrendered or been arrested. The Capone squad, along with a series of special police details, went in search of the rest, swooping down on the gang’s usual haunts.
They stormed the Lexington and Metropole hotels on South Michigan Avenue, marched into the Montmartre in Cicero, muscled their way into Joe Fusco’s “cabaret and pay-off joint” near the University of Chicago. Empty. Deserts. They’d all gone “on the lam.”

It was frustrating for the squad, but it also meant the world had fundamentally changed. Gangsters were no longer strutting around like they owned the town. Some of Capone’s most trusted lieutenants, stuck in hiding, couldn’t conduct business. (
Eliot would spot dashing Mob associate George Howlett, indicted along with Capone, at the Northwestern-Indiana football game. Howlett rushed out of the stadium, hopped into a new sports car, and roared off. Eliot zoomed out of the parking lot right behind him. By the end of the third quarter, Howlett was in the county jail, one more coconspirator scratched from the list of the missing.)

The wiretaps continued to bring in information. They showed that Capone’s captains had already begun talking about who should succeed the Big Fella.
Wrote the
Tribune
, in a scoop straight from Johnson and Prohibition administrator E. C. Yellowley: “In disputing among themselves, federal dry agents say, the gang captains have eliminated as possible successors to Capone all those who have been hit by federal convictions or charges. This means, say the special agents, that names little known are due to loom
up as the result of the gang’s reorganization. Four gangsters were mentioned by the federal men as heirs presumptive. They are Llewellyn Humphries, Rocco De Grasse, Frank Rio and Teddy Newberry.”

In other words, nobodies. Second-raters. Johnson was declaring victory. The Chicago Mob would go on—everyone knew there was no way to eliminate organized crime entirely—but it would be with a haggard expression and a noticeable limp. The U.S. district attorney pressed Eliot to keep up the pressure. Already, the Mob was in lockdown mode; men were jumpy and exhausted. They increasingly avoided their regular places of business. No one was willing to take a risk. That meant customers went thirsty and market share began to shrink. This new reality for the gang was unmistakable in many of Eliot’s handwritten wiretap transcripts (“In” represents the speaker on the phone being tapped):

Out:
Is Johnny there?

In:
No, he isn’t.

Out:
Well, listen, I got a truck down here at the [undecipherable] and I haven’t any more.

In:
How much do you need?

Out:
Around ten dollars.

In:
I can let you have it if you come after it.

Out:
I am not coming up there.

Another call complained about a delivery not arriving.

In:
You know we had a big place knocked off last night.

Out:
No, I didn’t know it.

In:
Yes, a big place at 51st and Halsted.

Out:
That is too bad.

In:
I am going down there now. You better meet me there and we will have a drink.

Out:
No, I can’t. There is nobody else here now.

To be sure, the Outfit wasn’t about to just roll over. Gangsters had mortgages to pay; they had children and gambling habits to feed. And they still had some tricks. On a steamy day in July, after staking out the building for days, the Capone squad and some borrowed Prohibition agents hit a garage in the 3400 block of North Clark Street, rushing in from both sides with
spirited whoops and hollers. When the men met up in the middle of the darkened interior, the only sound was their breathing and the odd cricket clicking away in the rafters. The place was empty except for them.

“
Well, boys, it looks like we’re dished again,” Eliot said, no doubt wondering if someone from his own team had tipped off the gang. One of the men pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his dripping brow—the squat building really packed in the heat—and out popped a fifty-cent piece. The coin bounced on the cement floor, spun, and rolled. And kept on rolling—until it dropped through a sewer grate. Everyone froze. No one wanted to lose even a dime these days, but that wasn’t it. The coin had made an odd little thunk when it landed inside the grate. The men gathered around the opening in the floor. Eliot kneeled down, wrenched open the grating, and peered in. He saw the edge of a crate. They had discovered a twelve-foot-square underground chamber. Over the next hour, they hauled out a hundred and nine crates, each one packed with the “finest imported liquors.” Eliot would estimate the value of the cache at $15,000. Plus fifty cents. They never found the dropped coin.

By now, with the press watching and Johnson preparing to bring Capone to trial, the Capone squad had become increasingly adventurous, its actions taking on a Three Musketeers quality. The battering ram wasn’t enough anymore. It was old hat, boring.
On the night of September 21, 1931, Eliot and three of his men crouched in the dark near the entrance to an industrial building at 222 East Twenty-fifth Street. When a truck pulled up to the entrance and tapped its horn for admittance, the agents slipped out of their hiding places and grabbed on to the back. They rode into the building, past the series of barricades, jumped off the truck’s bumper, and locked the doors. The warehouse’s four workers stood there gaping at them. None of them attempted to run. The agents looked around; the floor was covered with ice, forcing everyone to step gingerly or take a pratfall. The building was in the process of being turned into a full-scale brewery; the ice served as makeshift refrigeration. The agents kept everyone quiet until a second truck drove up to the entrance and the driver knocked. The agents opened the doors, guns drawn, hard smiles punched into their faces like puzzle pieces. The driver gave up without protest. His partner bounded out of the passenger seat and sprinted down the street. An agent took off after him. After a block, he rode the man to the ground.

Eliot found a phone and called the newspapers. Once the hacks showed up, the four Untouchables lapped the building with axes swinging. They
dumped three hundred gallons of beer and took into custody fifty-six cases of hard liquor. The reporters went home with their coat pockets clinking.

***

The Outfit, its strong-arm tactics and bribes largely ineffective, realized it had to do something different. So it began to adopt the Capone squad’s own methods. No agent noticed when men in coveralls scaled telephone poles along Dearborn Street outside the Transportation Building.
In the weeks that followed, the phone company received dozens of complaints from downtown customers about disconnections and strange clicks. When it investigated, the utility discovered that several lines into the Prohibition Bureau’s offices had been tapped. An anonymous agent told a reporter that the Mob had been listening to Eliot’s calls for three months, but
the young leader of the Capone squad denied it. Eliot would be embarrassed about it even years later; he would claim in
The Untouchables
that he discovered the tap himself.

The tapped phones surely helped the Outfit sidestep a fair number of raids, and it probably also allowed some indicted mobsters on the lam to stay on the lam. But it wasn’t enough to hold back the tide. The following March, with the squad locking down evidence for a possible Capone trial on Prohibition violations, Eliot turned in a report detailing the team’s major work. He wrote:

From the inception of the organization of the special group . . . six breweries with total equipment valued at $140,000 were seized. Observation of the workings of these breweries indicated that the total income based upon the wholesale [price] of beer manufactured would have totaled $9,154,200 annually. Five large beer distributing plants were seized in addition to the breweries. The total amount of beer seized in the breweries and plants was approximately 200,000 gallons having a wholesale value to the Capone organization of $343,750. Twenty-five trucks and two cars were seized, the value of which totaled approximately $30,950. Many of these trucks were large trucks exceeding ten tons and some of them were specifically constructed. Four stills were seized with an approximate value of $12,000. 403,500 gallons of alcohol mash were seized in connection with these stills, value of said mash approximating $4,000.

As Eliot’s memo makes clear, the Untouchables did not shut down the Capone booze operation. Far from it. Soon after a brewery or cleaning plant
or distribution facility would get knocked out, another would pop up somewhere else. Few saloons ever saw a break in their deliveries. That said, the raiders were undeniably having an impact. Costs were up, consistent revenue harder to come by. There was also the psychological effect, the siege mentality that now infected the syndicate.
The
Chicago Daily News
wrote that Eliot Ness was “the especial thorn in the side of the Capone mob,” estimating that the young agents’ team had stopped output that would have totaled $2 million. “In addition to their steady drain on Capone’s war chest,” the newspaper continued, “the special agents have kept the Capone legal staff busy defending thirty-one men arrested in these raids. Capone’s high-priced lawyers have had to prepare for the defense of Capone and sixty-eight others indicted for conspiracy.”

What made all of this particularly bad news for the Outfit: it couldn’t raise prices. For the first time since Prohibition began, the cost of a glass of “real beer” in Chicago had dropped, from 25 cents to 15 cents.
The Outfit was getting hit with a double whammy: the Untouchables and the Depression. So far, the syndicate had refused to lower prices, keeping them at $55 per barrel, but saloonkeepers cut their prices anyway. They didn’t have a choice. Customers increasingly went elsewhere and paid less for near beer. Some club owners took their lives in their hands by driving to Joliet or farther downstate to buy beer outside of Capone’s purview for $35 a barrel. Their saloons often received warnings: rocks tossed through windows, customers harassed on the way into the bars. The warnings sometimes worked, sometimes not. The fact was, the gang’s makeshift leadership didn’t inspire the same fear as Capone, who was preoccupied with his coming tax trial.
On a Sunday in July, truck drivers even dared to go on strike after the syndicate announced pay cuts, forcing Joe Fusco and Bert Delaney to make deliveries themselves.

“Why cut us?” one driver reportedly told Fusco. “You still charge $55 a barrel for the beer. We take all the chances and do all the work in this hot weather.”

“All the saloonkeepers owe us money,” Fusco told the men. “They’re hard up and we can’t make them pay. You’ve got to take a wage cut.”

The drivers didn’t buy that argument. On Monday, they again stayed home. Barrels of beer piled up at warehouses. The next day, Fusco brought out his enforcers, and after a few beatings and threats, everyone went back to work.

A Real and Lasting Impression

O
n October 5, 1931, Al Capone went on trial for tax evasion. He tried to maintain his dignity, his above-it-all swagger, during this unsettling new phase of his bossdom, but it wasn’t easy. Stepping out of his bulletproof sedan on the trial’s first day and looking around—at the photographers standing atop their cars along Clark Street, the gawkers shoving and pushing to get close to the courthouse entrance—he understood that Chicago no longer viewed him as Good-Hearted Al. This mob of reporters and store clerks and housewives wanted to see him humiliated.

Eliot was already sitting in Judge James Wilkerson’s sixth-floor courtroom when Capone came through the heavy, magnificently arched doors. The special agent craned his neck like everyone else. At last, the man he had been harassing for months became real to him. Not a bogeyman, just a man. A balding, fat, moon-faced young man in a shiny blue suit. An expensively dressed schlub. Eliot stared at the mobster with unrelieved fascination, his jaw clenched. “
That’s the first [time] that Eliot Ness ever saw Al Capone,” insisted Berardi, whose colleagues furiously blasted away with their cameras as Capone strode into the courtroom, their flashbulbs disgorging thick puffs of smoke in the Mob boss’s face. Berardi, with a miniature camera hidden in his hat, had found a seat in the front row, where he patiently waited for his opportunity to snap a page-one photo.

Despite the turnabout in Capone’s popularity, no one could confidently predict the trial’s outcome.
George Johnson had been nervous enough about the case’s strength that he negotiated a plea deal with Capone’s lawyers back in July that would have put the gangster in prison for two and a half years. The attorney general signed off on it, but then the newspapers weighed in. Two and a half years for
Capone
? That was some sweet deal, they said. Papers across the country expressed their outrage at the leniency. A few editorials actually suggested that Judge Wilkerson had been bought off. That changed everything. At the eleventh hour the judge unexpectedly declared that he alone would decide the punishment,
regardless of the plea deal, forcing Capone’s attorneys to call the whole thing off.

Johnson, it turned out, had dodged a bullet. He had a winning hand—and the right judge to carry it through. On the first day of the trial, having received information that Capone’s men had a list of the prospective jurors, Wilkerson switched jury pools with another judge. For the first time the Big Fella began to sweat the outcome. Sitting at the defendant’s table throughout the first week, he stewed as men he employed—and in some cases had made wealthy—stepped up to the witness stand for the prosecution: mousy little Leslie Shumway, who kept the books at various Capone gambling joints; suave Edward “Easy Eddie” O’Hare, a lawyer and racetrack owner; oily Parker Henderson Jr., Capone’s lackey in Miami; Fred Ries, a Capone gambling-house flunky. Capone’s lawyer, Michael Ahern, preened and bellowed, accusing the prosecutors of this and that, and that and this, but it didn’t help.
Frank Wilson had broken the code for Capone’s confiscated ledgers, allowing the prosecution to unravel the Mob boss’s business finances and pinpoint his “salary.” Johnson, taking over for assistant prosecutor Dwight Green for the closing arguments, easily swatted away Ahern’s depiction of Capone as a latter-day Robin Hood.

“
Did this Robin Hood buy $8,000 worth of belt buckles for the unemployed?” he drawled. “Was his $6,000 meat bill in a few weeks for the hungry? Did he buy $27 shirts for the shivering men who sleep under Wacker Drive?”

The
Tribune
marveled at the performance: “Mr. Johnson was earnest, so much so that he was almost evangelical at times, clenching his fist, shaking his gray head, clamping his lean jaws together as he bit into evidence and tore into the defense theories.”

It worked—all of it. The trial lasted all of two weeks, and on October 17, after eight hours and ten minutes of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. Al Capone was guilty on five counts. Women in the courtroom gasped. Reporters dashed into the hallway. The defendant sat stone-faced, his heavy shoulders rolled forward. By now, he had expected the guilty verdict.

The following week, Capone returned to court. Before another packed room, Judge Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years in the clink, plus $50,000 in fines. Once again, gasps popped around the room. Court officers hustled Capone into the hall and toward the elevator for transporting prisoners.

“What do you say, Al?” a reporter yelled out.

The greatest and most-feared gang boss in American history stopped and turned. “
It was a blow to the belt, but what can you expect when the whole community is prejudiced against you?” he whined. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting more than five years for income-tax evasion.”

***

In May 1932, federal agents put Alphonse Capone on a train to Atlanta, where a prison cell waited. Chicago was done with him. The Mob boss, who was beginning to shows signs of mental degradation from untreated syphilis, would never return to the Second City. But the Prohibition Bureau’s war against Capone’s organization didn’t end with its leader heading off to the pen. Now there would be a succession battle.
In June, a machine-gun volley eviscerated one of the chief candidates for the big chair, George “Red” Barker.
Six months later, another potential boss, Ted Newberry, would be murdered. Police considered Joe Fusco and one of Capone’s brothers the chief suspects.

Despite the continuation of Mob violence, Eliot experienced a letdown. The cause of prohibition had never appealed to him. He wanted to do a good job for its own sake, for the principle of law and order, and because he saw how organized crime destroyed civic life. But with Capone gone, he now struggled with motivation. He always had difficulty finding emotional highs; only the lows came naturally to him. Shortly after Capone’s conviction, he said to Robsky: “
Did you ever think you wanted something more than anything else in the world and then, after you got it, it wasn’t half as good as you expected? Has that ever happened to you?” For Eliot, this feeling of emptiness would recur time and again throughout his life. Periods of intense productivity would be followed by melancholy and feelings of inadequacy.

After the trial, the Capone squad as a separate unit was officially disbanded. Eliot tried to keep as many of his agents—his band of brothers—as he could. Seager, Chapman, Cloonan, Leeson, and Robsky all would stay on in Chicago and continue to work under Eliot in the special agency unit, where he was now the assistant special agent in charge. In January 1932, Eliot derailed an attempt to reassign Robsky to another city.
M. L. Harney, Chicago’s new Prohibition administrator, wrote to Washington that Robsky “has acquired a wide knowledge of the activities and personnel of Chicago beer and alcohol gangs, which would make him particularly valuable to Mr. Ness in his new assignment.” Harney added: “I do not need to elaborate on the situation which confronts me in Chicago. I have an ambition to
make a real and lasting impression on the hoodlums who have monopolized the illicit liquor industry in this vicinity, and I need the assistance of every capable Investigator that I can acquire.”

Looking to reignite his own spark, Eliot didn’t let his Untouchables bask in their accomplishments: he put them right back to work.
On January 21, with Capone still sitting in the Cook County Jail, Eliot and a dozen agents raided a brewery at 2024 South State Street. They arrested five men and confiscated $75,000 worth of booze and brewing equipment. In May, Eliot launched a series of coordinated raids that shut down thirty-three saloons. His team also raided farms up in Lake County, where the Bugs Moran and Roger Touhy gangs ran stills. The press speculated that a new push was on to dry up the city before the summer political conventions. Both the Republicans and the Democrats were coming to the Second City to nominate their presidential candidates.

The agents’ success was readily apparent. The syndicate no longer made deliveries in mammoth trucks that even civilians could tell were filled with beer. Now runners used ordinary automobiles that were tricked out to conceal their loads. After nabbing two men as they unloaded beer from a car outside a State Street nightclub, Eliot crowed to reporters:

The automobile was a Ford coach. It was fixed up for the specific purpose of delivering barrels of beer. All seats were taken out except the driver’s. When the door on the side is opened, skids are automatically lowered to the ground. Then the barrels are rolled out on these skids. This is a radical departure from the old Capone method of making deliveries in huge and expensive trucks. We have seized so many of their trucks that the syndicate is running short on finances. Also, they probably thought they could fool the agents with these small automobiles.

By now, he had become blasé—even mindless—about the danger inherent in his work. The sharp hunger he had felt during the Capone squad days had dissipated, leading to a casual recklessness as he adjusted to what he viewed as a less important assignment. One night he was headed home to change for a black-tie event downtown—his appearance in newspaper columns led to occasional invitations to society parties—when he somehow ended up finding and smashing up a still in an empty private residence. The home invasion, undertaken single-handedly, made him late for the ball.
So he called Armand Bollaert, his old fraternity pal, and asked him to
swing by his apartment for his tuxedo and bring it over. Bollaert pulled up to the house and handed over the tux, but reinforcements hadn’t shown up yet to cart away the brewing equipment. Eliot asked Bollaert to guard the home until his agents arrived while he went to a nearby police station to shower and change. His friend agreed, but, once Eliot roared off in his car, Bollaert became terrified. He realized gangsters could show up at any moment to discover their still smashed, with him waiting out front like an idiot. “I sat there what seemed like five hours,” he remembered. “I wasn’t very happy. I could envision all sorts of things.”

Eliot could take some comfort from the fact that Al Capone wasn’t completely gone from his life. In the spring, while the raids continued on Capone’s successors, Eliot and his men increasingly spent their time organizing and cross-referencing evidence for a “new booze conspiracy indictment” against the convicted Mob boss. The previous fall, Eliot had sent Chapman on a tour of Midwest Prohibition offices to gather up evidence related to the Capone syndicate.
The assignment took Eliot’s “pencil detective” to Detroit; Springfield, Ohio; and a trio of small towns in Indiana—Michigan City, South Bend, and Hammond. Evidence gained through Chapman’s travels—as well as through recent raids in the Chicago area—would be tallied up and put to use against the sixty-eight other men who’d been indicted along with Capone the previous June.
Johnson told the press that the Volstead case against Capone was “airtight,” but he added that he did not have any plans to take it to trial. The objective was to keep the indictment current, and so make Capone ineligible for parole. Even more important, it would be kept ready in case Capone managed to win an appeal on his income-tax conviction.

Back in Chicago, Chapman shut himself in a small office in the Transportation Building and buckled down to work, transcribing testimony, linking it up with specific seizures, and figuring out how the money went up the chain to Capone. On September 7, 1932, he reported to Harney that “I think I am going ahead in good shape. I have completed all evidence in the case for the years 1930, 1929, and 1928. This includes the Cotton Club and the Montmartre cases, which were both large and held me back quite a bit, because they were new to me, and I had to familiarize myself with these two angles before I could analyze the evidence. I have found a big wooden box full of the evidence in these cases and have gone over it thoroughly. However, before I am satisfied with my write-up of the evidence in these cases, I would like to have Goddard, Lahart, or one of the agents
participating go over it and see if I have missed any vital points. There is an awful mass of evidence in all these various events in Case 122-B, and while it is slow work, I think that, with the ideas in mind that you gave me, I am on the right track, and will bring out a thorough and fine report.”

Chapman was now the star, the man who could make connections in a chaotic mess of material. But a month after that upbeat memo to his bosses, things took a bad turn for him, though he didn’t know it. The agent had been spotted at Vanity Fair on the North Side, a nightclub that Prohibition Bureau managers considered “a questionable place for Government officers to be.” The bureau secretly opened an investigation and discovered that he was “frequenting places where liquor is sold and . . . consuming liquor not in the line of duty.” In the early years of Prohibition, the bureau didn’t pay much mind to what agents did during their off hours. They didn’t have to, seeing as many agents were temperance veterans or had come highly recommended by prohibition activists. They figured agents would be self-policing. But with the professionalization of the bureau in the middle 1920s, and with repeal forces gaining strength, administrators now made an effort to see that agents met the standards they enforced. At least they did so until it potentially got in the way of high-profile work. Everett H. Kubler, the chief of the bureau’s Special Inspection Division, recommended that the investigation of Chapman be held in abeyance. “Chapman is now, and has for some time, been engaged in writing the report of the Capone investigation, and [the Chicago office] believes it would be to the best interests of the Government if this investigation was not begun until that report is practically completed.”

So the bureau let Chapman finish his work unmolested. The agent spent the entire autumn and early winter organizing and cross-referencing “all the testimony of witnesses in a certain event or seizure, then drawing off, from that testimony, the particular points which incriminate the defendants.” The final case file was the size of the phone book, and his superiors judged the work excellent. But once that work had been tidily done up with a new bow, undercover agents spread out around Chicago searching for a different kind of testimony: evidence that Chapman wasn’t fit to remain in the dry agency. The investigation, taken up in earnest in April 1933, ultimately would charge that Chapman and his wife frequented notorious speakeasies. Worse, the Chapmans often brought along a teenage girl, Viola Bourke, who investigators suspected had been “sexually corrupted” by the couple. Chapman’s seduction method, Miss Bourke said in an interview with agents, included his taking her to the Transportation Building after
hours, where he showed her evidence from the Capone case file, including “some photostatic copies of checks which he said had been signed by Al Capone himself, under another name.”