Eliot Ness (13 page)

Center of the Universe

The Cleveland Police Department’s first batch of sharpshooters receives a congratulatory audience at city hall with Ness and Mayor Harold Burton (to Ness’s left).

Chasing Moonshine

I
n late August 1934, on the hottest day since a record-breaking string of hundred-degree scorchers the month before, a fourteen-year-old girl was paddling around in Lake Erie when she noticed someone below the surface waving at her. She pushed her head under for a better look. No, it wasn’t someone. Not quite. The girl screamed and rushed out of the water, heaving and spitting.

She’d seen a hand. A ragged stump of a hand.

Other disturbing reports followed. A fisherman snagged a clump of blond hair on his line. A ferryboat worker swore he glimpsed a human head rolling around in his boat’s wake. Two men swimming in the lake saw strange blobs bobbing in the water. One of the swimmers jabbed at it with a stick. “It was flesh of some kind. It wasn’t a fish,” he insisted.

Finally, proof: On the morning of September 5, Frank LaGassie, a thirty-four-year-old Photostat operator, was walking along the shore on Cleveland’s East Side when he came upon what appeared to be a waterlogged chunk of tree trunk. It was actually the lower torso of a woman, the legs amputated at the knees.

Police arrived to stare at the gruesome find along with LaGassie. After searching unsuccessfully for the rest of the woman, they delivered the torso to the morgue. The next day, the Cuyahoga County coroner, Arthur J. Pearce, determined that the woman had been dead for about six months and had been in the water for at least half that time. He calculated that she had been about five and a half feet tall, one hundred fifteen pounds, and somewhere in her thirties. He noted that the skin was rough and reddened from the use of some kind of preservative, which explained why the torso remained largely intact after so much time in the water.

No one knew what to make of it. The coroner couldn’t even say for sure that the woman had been murdered. The police called the victim the Lady of the Lake.

***

Stories about the Lady of the Lake appeared on the front pages of Cleveland’s newspapers for more than a week. Eliot read all three of the city’s dailies, but he probably didn’t pay much attention to the grisly mystery. Murder and missing persons weren’t part of his domain. It was still just alcohol.
He and Edna had moved to Cleveland in August so Eliot could become the chief investigator for the Alcohol Tax Unit’s Northern District of Ohio. After just a year in Cincinnati, where he’d been assistant investigator in charge, it was a nice promotion for him. His salary remained at $3,800, but he felt he was back in the big time.

Cleveland, after all, was a great city—or at least it had been very close to greatness. This gray, densely packed burg of nine hundred thousand had boomed throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century on the strength of its heavy manufacturing.
Sixty-five percent of the population was “foreign-blooded”—Italians and Russians, Poles and Slovaks and Mexicans—and there were jobs for every one of them. The city’s central location on the banks of Lake Erie made it ideally suited for a leadership position in railroads and shipping, steel and automobiles. It was first in the nation in producing iron castings, plumbing fixtures, paints, and printing presses.

The city had also become the center of modern art—truly modern art: mechanistic, mass-produced, forward-looking. Clevelanders were reinventing industrial design. Outfits like the art-deco furniture maker Rorimer and Brooks and ceramics pioneer Cowan Pottery introduced the burgeoning Cleveland School to the rest of the world. More traditional artistic endeavors came running along behind. The Cleveland Museum of Art, housed in a $1.25 million neoclassical pile on the East Side, opened in 1916. Three years later, the museum debuted the Annual Exhibition of Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen, which soon would become the foremost art competition in the Great Lakes region. Locals called it the May Show. The Cleveland Orchestra launched two years after the art museum and quickly challenged it for local acclaim. Artur Rodzin´ski became music director in 1933 and, with a single-minded dedication to structure and a clean sound, pushed the orchestra toward international prestige.

Of course, none of this high-art pretentiousness made the slightest bit of difference now. In 1929, a hefty 41 percent of Cleveland’s workers had been employed in manufacturing-related jobs, helping to build America into the greatest economic force in the world. The city, the sixth largest in the country, had almost no unemployment. But following the stock market crash
that began in October, businesses suddenly began to shut down. Fear spread quickly.
In February 1930, some two thousand men tried to storm a city council meeting, sparking a small riot. One man ended up with a broken back, another a fractured skull. The violent protest didn’t help the situation. The council could do nothing to stop the economic slide.
By the end of the year, a hundred thousand of the metropolitan area’s manufacturing jobs were gone.

It only got worse. The Standard Bank collapsed in 1931, setting off a panic. The same year, the president of Cleveland Trust Company, one of the Midwest’s biggest banks, had to carry bags of cash into the lobby to calm hundreds of depositors and stop a run. By 1933, a third of Cuyahoga County’s work force had no work. Cleveland drastically cut its budget to address falling revenue and dialed back basic services to help fund relief efforts.

The city was falling apart. Streets and sidewalks pitted by freezing weather remained unfixed. Blocks of apartments, vacant save for squatters, devolved into kindling. The downtown lakefront, which should have been the city’s pride, became “Tin Can Plaza.”
Broke, out-of-work Clevelanders—“the lowest and loneliest of the down-and-out”—set up a “Hoover City” there just weeks after the stock market shocks. Hoover City residents lived in huts made from wooden crates and soiled sheets. Well-to-do businessmen occasionally walked over from downtown towers and paid residents a few pennies for permission to crawl inside the hovels for a look around. Some of these mindless thrill seekers would be building their own ramshackle huts in Tin Can Plaza soon enough.

***

One industry, inevitably, remained immune to the Great Depression.

“
Cleveland’s bootleg output today—despite state monopoly—is greater than the city’s consumption of legal liquor,” wrote the
Cleveland News
in January 1935, citing Alcohol Tax Unit studies. The reason: the tax on alcohol was significant. That meant anyone who could put out spirits without the federal and state taxes would find a large, willing customer base—and stood to make a huge profit. Counterfeiting brand labels and bottles became a big business itself. The ATU believed there were “eight or nine big illicit liquor syndicates operating in Cleveland,” pulling down profits that rivaled what the bootleggers of the Prohibition years had made. Pretty much every tavern in the city sold bootleg booze, some without even realizing it.

W. K. Bruner, the head of Cleveland’s Alcohol Tax Unit office and a tough
ex-marine, brought in the former Untouchables chief in hopes of improving morale and sparking a new urgency in the ranks. Eliot, at thirty-two, still looked like a college senior, but unlike in Cincinnati, he wouldn’t have to face skepticism from his troops. Bruner knew all about the Capone squad, and he made sure his forty-five men did, too. He even called local reporters and told them he had the famous Chicago gangbuster on his team. The new chief investigator helped his cause by getting right to work, taking charge of a raid during his first day on the job. Eliot would set a scorching raid-a-day pace for more than a month. Having become adept at interrogation while in Chicago, he time and again forced low-level still operators to give up work routines and the names of superiors. Arrests for liquor violations immediately jumped. He had hit his stride as a federal agent. He was confident and eager to show off his chops.

“
He was a very great person,” said Mary Louise Gosney, Eliot’s administrative assistant in both Cincinnati and Cleveland. “He really had wing—that is, inspiration and vision.”

George Mulvanity, a Georgetown University graduate who went on to become one of the ATU’s most decorated agents over a forty-year career, would insist that Eliot was the best boss he ever had. “He was rather quiet, considerate of the other men,” he said in 1972. “He wasn’t pushy. I enjoyed working with him.”

The two men had similar personalities: modest, reserved, a dry sense of humor, obsessively dedicated to hard work. Mulvanity became Eliot’s agent of choice for stakeouts and long nights trailing trucks they suspected of carrying sugar or molasses.
Eliot “was a real eagle eye,” Mulvanity said. One time, when they were driving back to Cleveland after a day of meetings at the Toledo office, the chief investigator told Mulvanity to follow an automobile he’d spotted up ahead. The younger agent didn’t see anything suspicious about the sedan or its occupants, but he did as he was told. “When we stopped and searched the car, we found a hundred gallons of whisky in the trunk,” he marveled.

Eliot’s skills proved a boon for the office: the team made eighty-two arrests and seized fifty-four stills in less than six months.
Bruner crowed to his superiors in Washington that his agents “worked day and night” and had the gangs on the run. Moonshiners around the state, afraid that liquor agents could come barreling through the door at any moment, increasingly cranked out “scared whiskey,” so-called because the cook sped
up the fermentation process by adding battery acid or other toxic—or simply disgusting—components to the mash.

Mulvanity paid close attention to how Eliot went about his job. “I learned a lot from him,” he would say years later. He often drank with Eliot at a neighborhood tavern. The two men drove to work together, dropping Mulvanity’s son Francis at school on the way. With saloongoers becoming violently ill and sometimes dying from scared whiskey, Eliot and Mulvanity talked about whether the ATU was actually making things better. In the years immediately after Prohibition, the moral high ground had dribbled away to almost nothing. It was just about the tax revenue now. That was all the government cared about. How did that make the ATU any different from the Mob? Mulvanity recalled that Eliot struggled with this. The chief investigator sometimes wondered aloud if he should get into another line of work. But then a tip would come in, and Eliot would clap his hands, jump to his feet, and head out the door.
Years later Mulvanity told his son that Eliot “liked to imbibe and he liked women.” Young Francis took that to mean that Eliot wasn’t a faithful husband, and that he had “demons.” This view into his supervisor’s personal life didn’t alter George Mulvanity’s opinion of Eliot as an agent.

“Ness worked hard, took every risk he asked his men to take,” said Francis Mulvanity. “He was honest and likable. My father respected him.”

***

All of those risks, taken week in and week out, ultimately led here, a block-long brick building in south-central Ohio.

Eliot had been in the building nearly an hour before he spotted anyone. As he looked up from inspecting a grate in the floor, he saw a man casually pass through the hallway about fifty feet away. Springing to his feet, Eliot hefted his ax and ran after him. One long, dark corridor turned into another, and he blundered down them, his feet thudding, the ax jumping on his shoulder. The only unlocked door was at the end. He shouldered through it and skidded into a locker room. A stopped clock glowered from a wall, as if he’d stepped into Miss Havisham’s parlor. Waxwork-like clothes hung on hooks across from a shower. Dust covered everything. Eliot poked his head into each bathroom stall, opened every locker. The man who had ghosted past him wasn’t here—and yet there was no other door he could have gone through. Eliot rapped on the walls, one by one. His curiosity piqued by a hollow sound, he attacked the plaster behind a toilet.

The noise attracted other agents. They found Eliot standing in the middle of a chalky mess. “I believe you’re seeing things,” one told him.

Eliot tried to catch his breath. “I thought I saw a man, but I guess I didn’t.”

It was dawning on the agents that they might have tapped a dry hole. Frustrated, they decided to step out for a smoke. Climbing the stairs to the roof, the men listened to the building’s emptiness echo in their ears.
Eliot’s charge as chief investigator was to bring down what his boss called “the main bootleg gang” in Ohio, a ruthless group comprising remnants of Detroit’s Purple Gang and various local outfits. So far he hadn’t had much luck. They’d arrested plenty of independent moonshiners in Eliot’s first nine months on the job, but they’d only nibbled around the edges of the more organized gangs. This operation was supposed to be the breakthrough.
Months of interrogations, wiretaps, and surveillance had led them to this former industrial pottery kiln in Zanesville, about 150 miles south of Cleveland. Two dozen agents had surrounded the three-story building at dawn. They surprised the three watchmen on duty, but they hadn’t been able to find anyone else on the premises.

Eliot had learned over the years to pay attention to details.
One time, after raiding a small distillery and finding no one home, he noticed perspiration droplets on the floor and followed them upstairs and into an attic, where he discovered a bootlegger folded up in a corner.
Another time, he stopped to chat with kids playing stickball in the street, and they told him about a “haunted house” in the neighborhood where they said a woman had been murdered. The boys insisted they heard “strange noises” and “smelled funny smells” outside the house, which raised Eliot’s antennae. The boys took him to the house, and sure enough, Eliot smelled funny smells and heard strange noises, too. Inside, he discovered a large still churning away.

As the agents stood smoking on the roof of the Zanesville building, Eliot noticed one of those important details: a vent emitting a steady stream of mist. The agents went over for a closer look. Quieting one another, they realized they could hear something—maybe engines humming inside the building. Their spirits lifted: they were in the right place after all. They pulled apart a skylight next to the vent and dropped a fire hose into the darkness. “Down we go,” Eliot said.