Eliot Ness (12 page)

The final investigation report described how the Chapmans encouraged the girl to knock back highballs until stinking drunk, and how they sometimes kept her out until dawn. The investigators also learned that the agent was deep in debt, including owing $300 to Alexander Jamie. Agents in the Capone squad had each been receiving $150 a month in hazardous-duty pay, and Chapman needed every cent of it. When the extra pay ended in June 1931, the month Capone was indicted, Chapman’s spending did not see a similar drop-off. The investigation report alleged that “Mr. Eliot Ness knew of his financial struggle and stated that Mr. Jamie had some money at that time, which belonged to the Secret Six organization, but which was in a fund that was quite flexible, and that Mr. Ness arranged with Mr. Jamie for him [Chapman] to borrow the $300.00 for which he signed a note.” Chapman’s debts, the investigators noted, could make him susceptible to bribe offers, although in Jamie’s case the loan appeared to be more of a gift. The Secret Six head never asked for repayment or any interest payments (and never received either). Chapman, confronted by agents wielding this damning report, launched a desperate defense of his behavior, insisting that his nighttime escapades were an effort to satisfy his wife’s love of dancing and that he never took note of whether the “various clubs, hotels and ballrooms” they frequented served liquor. He declared that he was “opposed to the use of intoxicants and denies having consumed liquor on any of the occasions referred to . . .” He also insisted he had made good-faith payments on some of his bills and planned to pay off all of his debts.

It wasn’t much of a defense, but it was enough. Sort of. No charges would be brought against him. He didn’t even receive a letter of admonition. But in July he was furloughed, ending his government career.

***

The investigation into Chapman’s conduct surely embarrassed Eliot. It reflected poorly on him as a supervisor, bringing his judgment into question. But it was only the latest embarrassment. Eliot had already dealt with a far worse problem on his team.
In February 1932, according to a personnel memo,

Special Agents E. A. Doyle and Elliot [
sic
] Ness supervised telephones at the New Wabash Hotel, and at the Coliseum Garage in Chicago, Illinois, for the
purpose of obtaining evidence against violators in that city. (Case Jacket 122-B) Among the conversations intercepted and recorded by Special Agents Doyle and Ness were four that seemed to indicate that Special Agent Bernard V. (Barney) Cloonan was in collusion with certain violators in Chicago.

This discovery must have rocked Eliot. Until this time, he had given Cloonan glowing efficiency reports. He had come to rely on him as a dedicated agent, fearless and ready for any challenge. From the squad’s beginnings, Cloonan had been knee-deep in every raid and regularly served time on the wiretapped phones.

The phone conversations that cast suspicion on Cloonan were recorded over the course of two weeks. In a phone conversation on February 4, a known bootlegger—identified as “Hymie”—told Cloonan he’d left something for him at the usual place. The agents listening in were certain Hymie and Cloonan were talking about money. Three days later, Eliot and Doyle recorded Hymie and another bootlegger talking about an unnamed agent “who had helped us before.” One of the men said the agent had new information to pass along, presumably about impending raids. A week after that, on February 15, Hymie confirmed with an associate that “Barney” had been paid $100. After an investigation, the bureau determined that the conversations and other circumstantial evidence, when added up, “constituted collusion of a very reprehensible nature.” An internal report stated,

The “Barney” referred to in [the February 15] conversation was identified as being “the guy who used to be downstairs and is upstairs now.” This remark seems to constitute rather conclusive evidence that the man under discussion by these two violators, was Investigator Cloonan. There are two reasons for this assumption: The first is that Investigator Cloonan is generally known and referred to, even by members of his own family, as “Barney.” The second is that just a short time prior to the date of this conversation, Cloonan had been promoted from Agent to Special Agent; and had moved from the quarters of the Administrator, on the 4th floor of the Transportation Building, to the office of the Special Agent in Charge, which was located on the 12th floor of the same building. It is submitted that this seems conclusive evidence that the person referred to was Investigator Bernard V. (Barney) Cloonan.

And that wasn’t all. Eliot, surely hopeful that he might discover exculpatory evidence, dug deeper. He found only more bad news. A Chicago police
officer told him that Cloonan and a police officer named Tom Coen “shook down” speakeasies in 1931, when the Capone squad was tailing beer trucks every day and compiling a list of clubs that bought booze from the Outfit. Eliot slipped the charge into Cloonan’s file without comment.

Yet after an initial inquiry, the Prohibition Bureau did not undertake an official investigation. A personnel memo from two years later noted, simply: “These allegations were not gone into, for the reason that it was deemed inadvisable to do so at this time.” Why? We can only speculate. Maybe bureau overseers thought the evidence was too opaque, too open to interpretation. Maybe the U.S. district attorney’s office, worried about Capone’s pending appeal and its renewed Volstead case against the Mob boss, wanted to avoid any public revelations that might undercut evidence gathered by the “untouchables” squad. Cloonan was not questioned about any of the allegations; he never knew that his direct supervisor and bureau managers believed him to be crooked.

Eliot seemed happy to drop the matter. He blamed himself for Cloonan’s apparent perfidy, or at least he blamed himself for not recognizing that his agent was susceptible to corruption. He also blamed larger forces at work. The rules of society had changed over the course of Prohibition.
Eliot could never take a bribe—
never
—but he understood how another man, even a good man, could. He didn’t hold it against Cloonan. In the end, he didn’t seem to care that the higher-ups had squelched the investigation.

Within a couple of weeks, the bureau transferred Cloonan to the special agency unit in Denver. The Capone squad now truly was a thing of the past.
A month later, Eliot was promoted to chief investigator of the Chicago regional office.

***

The promotion did not mean a great deal to Eliot. Repeal was marching toward its own special spot in the Constitution, and everyone in the bureau recognized what that meant. Pink slips started wafting through Prohibition offices in the spring of 1933. William Gardner, well known in the bureau for being a drunk and a troublemaker, joined Chapman on the chopping block. No political pressure could help him this time.
A few months later, the bureau also booted Paul Robsky to the curb. The Chicago office saw its numbers drop by almost half, reducing what once had been the largest regional dry office to fewer than two hundred souls. The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, issued an executive order on consolidating government agencies. He needed money for the ambitious relief
programs he had in mind, and so every department in the federal government would have to tighten its belt. Soon rumors began to swirl that the Chicago Prohibition office would take another 50 percent hit.
Every dry agent in the city, the
Tribune
reported, was “on the anxious seat.”

Bureau managers spent much of the summer fending off congressmen and their staff. In June, with the demise of Prohibition unmistakably on the horizon, a Chicago agent named Al Wolff exemplified politics’ power to trump reality. When Wolff was one of hundreds of men furloughed in anticipation of repeal, Illinois congressman Adolph J. Sabath fired off a threatening telegram to the dry force’s director. “
It is most peculiar that of all the men selected to be released from the service one of them should be Albert H. Wolff Prohibition Inspector in Chicago who is a real active Democrat and in whom the National Committeeman of Illinois is greatly interested. Someone else should be let go in his place.” Wolff was rehired. Fifty years later Wolff would insist—like dozens of former federal agents before him, some of whom had never set foot in Chicago—that he had been a part of the famous “flying squad” that took down the most famous gangster in the world.
He called himself “the last Untouchable.”

Wolff and the other remaining Prohibition agents did little work during the hot, draggy summer. What was the point? The sale of 3.2 percent beer had been legalized in March, making enforcement a real pain. A sip didn’t tell you much; you had to get the chemist involved. Raids slowed to a trickle as state conventions began to take up repeal resolutions. There was no suspense; everyone knew the Twenty-first Amendment would be adopted, freeing up the taps and dooming the Bureau of Prohibition. Agents sat around the office, fretting over their bank balances and searching the want ads; secretaries ratcheted up their eye-batting in hopes of landing a husband while there was still time.

Another cull came in the fall, and Eliot survived that one, too. Like Wolff, he would be there until the bitter end.

It’s Just Tuesday Night

A
t 4:29 p.m., on December 5, 1933, the news reached Chicago that the federal ban on alcohol was history. The announcement proved anticlimactic. The wettest city of the dry years remained quiet.

“
Crowds were gathered in a few of the loop bars, but what cheers were heard were sporadic, and there was no general hilarity, although the real celebration was expected to come later in the evening,” reported the
Herald and Examiner
. The paper added that “little groups of four and five girls, homeward bound from loop offices and shops, were frequently seen at the bar ordering ‘sidecars’ and ‘manhattans’ and other mixed drinks in a manner that indicated they were not novices.” No one could mistake the implication. The saloon would not become the husband’s refuge once again. Women were publicly in the sauce and were staying there, which bar owners thought was just fine. Downtown, the longest queue could be found not at a flashy drinking spot but at the Federal Building, where dealers—including many longtime bootleggers—rushed to pay newly adopted federal liquor license fees.

At about seven o’ clock, a reporter named Warren Brown walked over to a popular downtown hotel and asked the maître d’ what the younger generation was drinking on the first night in fourteen years that anyone could legally buy and consume liquor. “What else do they know, but gin and what they call ‘hootch’?” replied the maître d’. “Wine? They don’t know anything about wine. They don’t order wine with their dinners. They wouldn’t know how to drink wine with their dinners if they did.”

Later, his notebook full, Brown stepped into the hotel’s elevator. A fellow passenger was already in the box, rubbing his hands together, his cheeks flushed. “I suppose you’re getting ready for a big night?” the man asked the elevator operator.

“Me?” said the operator. He smirked, and turned back to the controls. “I have been getting it all the time, as much as I want, whenever I wanted it. It’s just Tuesday night to me.”

***

The best of the bunch from the Capone squad continued in liquor enforcement after the end of the Prohibition Bureau. Repeal, after all, did not put an end to bootlegging. The legalization of alcohol meant real revenue, desperately needed revenue, for the federal government. Men were needed to make sure everybody was paying up. Longstanding bootleg operations, the
Chicago Tribune
pointed out, “continue to operate wildcat and compete unfairly with the legitimate concerns by evading the $5 a barrel tax, and by using gang tactics to force saloonkeepers to buy their products.”

Joe Leeson moved over to the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU), the Prohibition Bureau’s bureaucratic successor. He was quickly identified as a rising star in the agency. Sam Seager became a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s Intelligence Unit, working under Elmer Irey. He became an expert at fingerprint and handwriting identification and was soon tapped to head up the Buffalo division. Marty Lahart stayed with the Chicago Prohibition office until the arrival of repeal, when he moved to the Alcohol Tax Unit and transferred to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Two months after the Prohibition Bureau discharged Paul Robsky, the government brought him back on a temporary basis. By the end of the year, the Justice Department had hired him full-time and sent him back to Greenville, South Carolina.

Cloonan remained in the Denver Prohibition office until July 1933, when, lacking strong references from Chicago, he was furloughed in anticipation of Prohibition’s repeal. But since no official investigation had been opened against him, the Alcohol Tax Unit rehired him in February 1934. Some weeks later, the agency assigned him to Chicago, and that’s when red flags popped up. This time the agency launched a thorough investigation. His faltering marriage was laid out in bureaucratic detail, including that he “had not provided food and clothes” for his estranged wife and their adopted son, and that “Cloonan had struck [his wife] with his fists and had otherwise abused her, on three separate occasions.” He also owed money to his mother and sister. In the end, though, the evidence wasn’t enough to fire him. His domestic troubles ultimately were his own business. And too much time had passed to reach a definitive conclusion about the bribery allegations, though the report determined there was “considerable evidence tending to show that in February, 1932, Cloonan was in collusion with certain violators, and was accepting money from them.” Cloonan was not disciplined and, again, was not informed that he’d been investigated.
He would continue to work for the ATU, though with few opportunities for advancement.

As for Eliot, in September 1933 he joined the Justice Department’s Alcohol Beverage Unit, a transition agency for Prohibition Bureau agents during the march to repeal. (It would later evolve into the Treasury’s Alcohol Tax Unit.) He’d gained some nice publicity as the public face of the “Untouchables,” but ultimately it didn’t mean much. Al Capone’s fame would continue to grow after he disappeared into the federal prison system. His gangster credentials transcended Prohibition. He hadn’t just trafficked in illegal liquor; he was the highest-profile, most successful, and most vicious gangster in American history. Eliot’s celebrity, however, would fade away almost as quickly as it had arrived, like a fever breaking. His fame was inextricably linked to the dry years, an era everyone wanted to forget even before it was officially over. But at least the government was happy with him.
The unit’s Midwest administrator gave Eliot an impressive raise, to $3,800 a year, and assigned him to Cincinnati.
*
The raise took some of the sting out of having to move away from his hometown, but only some of it. When he arrived at his new posting he found he was completely unknown in the office; no one had heard of the Untouchables. He felt like he was starting over.

Eliot had a secure career as a liquor cop, which was no small thing during the Great Depression.
But what he really wanted was to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then called the Division of Investigation. He wanted a broader purview than alcohol. He submitted an application, and on October 30, George E. Q. Johnson wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of the division, a young administrator named J. Edgar Hoover.

Dear Mr. Hoover:

Mr. Elliot [
sic
] Ness, who is at the present time an assistant investigator in charge in the office at Cincinnati, Ohio, (prohibition department) informed me today that he has pending an application for appointment with the Bureau as a regular agent.

I saw a great deal of Mr. Ness while I was United States Attorney. He is a graduate of University of Chicago, is intelligent and has a fine experience.

During the Government’s investigation of the Capone gang and their ramifications he had a special division working which reported to the United
States Attorney; under his direction these men did a splendid piece of work. His integrity was never questioned and I recommend him to you without reservations.

Yours very truly,

GEORGE E. Q. JOHNSON

Eliot thanked Johnson in a letter from Cincinnati, dated November 6, 1933. “Throughout my connection with the Government,” he wrote, “I have been constantly benefited by action taken in my behalf by you, and I know that this again will prove very beneficial.” He was wrong about that last part. His record with the Prohibition Bureau, backed up by Johnson’s recommendation, should have made him an excellent candidate for the Division of Investigation, but that turned out to be the problem. Unlike the liquor agents in Cincinnati, Hoover
had
read the accounts of the Untouchables that had gone out on the national wires. And he would not allow anybody into his agency who might possibly upstage him. He squelched the application. Unsatisfied with that, he began a low-level interagency smear campaign against him.
Even ten years later, with Eliot out of federal service, Hoover would still warn his agents to “beware of Ness.”