Eliot Ness (14 page)

Reaching the end of the hose, the agents fell into a small, black chamber. They climbed down farther, hand over hand, into nothingness. Reaching
the bottom, they scrabbled around until they managed to set off a buzzer, freezing them in their places. A trapdoor opened and a man appeared through the floor. He climbed up a ladder and opened a secret door—leading into the toilet stall next to the one Eliot had smashed with his ax. Finding no one, the man disappeared back through the trapdoor. The agents smiled at one another in the dark and, after a moment, quietly opened the trapdoor and climbed through it.

They were not disappointed by what they found on the other side. Hidden behind false walls and floors and buried beneath surface level were eight twenty-thousand-gallon vats, each of which could produce ten thousand gallons of mash every twenty-four hours. The gangsters had built a tunnel so they could use large quantities of city water, tapping into the water main under pressure, a significant engineering feat. The operation stole so much water that the Zanesville water department, unaware of what was going on, had installed an extra pump at its main facility.

Cocooned inside their illegal factory, the alcohol cookers had no idea the building had been taken over by federal agents. Eleven men, hard at work, looked up quizzically when the agents stepped into their large underground workspace. An escape tunnel led to the sewers, but, taken by surprise, none of the men even tried for it.

Eliot and a handful of his agents stayed in the building for hours, poking into every crevice, taking notes and samples, labeling equipment. Eliot exulted as he went about his labors. He’d finally made a big bust—a really big bust. This might effectively put the gang out of business. Among those who’d soon be arrested for their connection to the operation: a former Prohibition agent and a Zanesville city councilman.
After the agents finished up, they decided to walk over to the town’s little commercial district to get something to eat. Sitting in a diner on the muggy June afternoon, Eliot greedily devoured a plate of poached eggs. Then he spent fifteen minutes deciding what he wanted for dessert: an ice cream cone or a bottle of beer. After paying the check—he ultimately decided on the beer—he pushed away from the table with a satisfied grunt. His work here, he announced, was done.

That was even truer than he suspected.

Real Work

H
arold H. Burton, Cleveland’s newly elected Republican mayor, wanted a strong, independent-minded G-man to be his director of public safety. After all, it was a big job, the most important appointment the mayor made.
The director oversaw the police, fire, and building departments for the sixth-largest city in the country. More than two thousand employees reported to him—1,500 policemen, 1,200 firefighters and about 50 men in the building department. So in November 1935, just after his election, Burton went to Washington.

The mayor had just one candidate in his sights: U.S. Assistant Attorney General Joseph B. Keenan. Burton spent hours wheedling and cajoling the federal prosecutor, first at lunch and then again at dinner. The forty-seven-year-old Keenan had secured a sterling reputation by convicting kidnappers, the scourge of wealthy men and their families during the Depression. He was known as tough and fearless.
The second meeting between the mayor and the prosecutor broke up at midnight, with Keenan on the verge of saying yes. The next day, Burton visited the White House, where he met President Roosevelt. The president admitted he’d “hate to lose” Keenan. Burton nodded and said, “I think I’m going to get him.”

Cleveland’s newspapers plumped for the well-regarded federal prosecutor, with the
Plain Dealer
writing that “a Burton-Keenan combination . . . will restore respect for the law in this community and make the Cleveland underworld run to cover.” The challenge of taking on the city’s Mob appealed to Keenan, but he had trouble with the final hurdle, the one Burton knew would be a problem. Keenan feared getting bogged down in the city’s dirty politics and police corruption. Cleveland was notorious.
The mayor himself admitted that the city “had a reputation which was damaging us all over the United States. We were beginning to be tagged as a city unable to enforce the law.”

Indeed, the tag had already stuck. Keenan woke up in the morning with a queasy feeling in his stomach. He called Burton and turned him down.
The new mayor, sighed a
Plain Dealer
reporter traveling with him, would have to settle for “some man of the Keenan type for the vacant directorship.”

***

Burton returned to Cleveland in a bad mood. Stepping out of the plane at Municipal Airport, he climbed down to the tarmac in darkness, even though it was lunchtime. The winds off the lake had died away in the middle of the month, and with the lake frozen, the industrial city could only stew in its own effluent.
For the second week running, midday looked like midnight. The mayor could hardly blame Keenan for not wanting the job. Even when you put aside the problem of corruption, the assignment wasn’t all that appealing to someone who liked to get things done. The police and fire departments were underfunded and demoralized.
Under Mayor Harry L. Davis, whose administration would be recalled as “a classic example of boodling and incompetence,” the city couldn’t pay its bills and had been forced to issue scrip.
Just days after becoming mayor, Burton had to pink-slip sixteen hundred city employees as “an economy measure.” He would have to concentrate on digging the city out from its financial mess rather than increasing funding for any department, no matter how great the need.

Still, the mayor was determined to find a new face for the safety director’s office, someone far removed from the gang of entrenched political crooks and hacks who usually vied for it.
The most recent director, Martin I. Lavelle, had been consumed by scandal over the summer when a speedboat party he was hosting ended with a young woman, a city hall clerk, falling overboard and drowning. The party was cohosted by a well-known gangster named Marty O’Boyle, whose brother Anthony soon would be indicted for his role in the Zanesville bootlegging operation that Eliot’s ATU crew had taken down. In spite of public outrage over the incident, Mayor Davis had refused to fire his safety director.

The mayor had his priorities. Davis wanted the city to run wide open, and you needed a compliant safety director for that. Lavelle didn’t cause waves, except out on the lake. A week after the funeral for the drowned clerk, a city hall reporter, wanting to move on from the endless speedboat-party coverage, asked the safety director if he would “launch a drive on the numerous gambling establishments” in the city, seeing as two prominent gambling-hall bosses had just been convicted of federal tax evasion. Lavelle’s only response: “That’s up to the chief of police.”

The chief, of course, did nothing. George J. Matowitz was an honest cop, but he knew his survival at police headquarters depended on his knowing when to look the other way.

***

Burton hadn’t been the Republican establishment’s choice for mayor—the incumbent, Davis, held that honor—but he ran anyway as an independent-minded reformer. Now, after winning, he was told he could be accepted back into the fold by picking loyal party men and palm greasers for his administration’s key posts. He never considered doing so.

Wes Lawrence, the
Plain Dealer
’s federal reporter, happened to be at the paper’s city desk when Keenan’s decision to stay in Washington reached the newsroom. Editors began bandying about possible candidates for the safety director job.

“
Ness would be just the kind of guy Burton needs,” Lawrence said. When he received surprised looks, he added: “But it seems impossible that Burton would offer him the job. He’s strictly nonpolitical. Harold tries to be independent, but he’s still a Republican. I don’t think Ness has any politics.”

Lawrence wasn’t the only reporter in town who thought Eliot might be a good man for the job. On December 8, even though the mayor’s office had said nothing about Eliot being a candidate, the
Cleveland Press
presented him as the front-runner for the position—and Eliot embraced the idea.

He is Eliot Ness, University of Chicago graduate who headed the small band of young men known as the “untouchables” because they spurned offers of lucrative bribes from the Al Capone interests and wrecked the Capone breweries.

His blue eyes twinkling good-naturedly, Mr. Ness said he was reluctant to comment on reports that he has the “inside track” with Mayor Harold H. Burton for the safety directorship.

“I would like to get the job,” he said. “I would like to see what I could do. But, whoever does get that job will have his hands full.”

The
Press
went on to state, incorrectly, that Eliot had spent two years in Chicago as a private investigator before joining the Prohibition Bureau. It leaned hard on the Capone angle, and Eliot obliged. “Yes,” he said in response to a question, “the same tactics we used against Capone and others could be used in combating crime in Cleveland. All crime is alike. The main thing is to get the evidence and submit it fully.”

After the newspaper article appeared, colleagues with longtime experience in Cleveland warned Eliot that he would be taking on “an impossible mission” with the safety director job, that the corruption and racketeering went too deep in the city. Eliot listened carefully, and then ignored their advice. He viewed the safety director position as key to turning Cleveland around, and he frankly said so. He relished the challenge. The liquor beat certainly wasn’t what it used to be.
He was now arresting people simply for possessing empty liquor bottles; new federal regulations required “purchasers of liquor” to destroy empties. He was ready for a new and bigger mission.

At first, the Ness boomlet annoyed Mayor Burton. He had never heard of Eliot Ness until just a couple of months before, when the Zanesville operation hit the newspapers. But now, with editorials praising the federal agent and positive recommendations coming in from Cleveland ATU chief Bruner and others, he decided to give Eliot an interview. As their meeting approached, Eliot bubbled with nervous enthusiasm. He’d never been so excited about a job possibility. “I will accept the position if it is offered,” he told reporters. “It would be an opportunity to do some real work, but it would be a tough assignment.”

Working for Burton seemed like a natural next step to him. The new mayor had pledged there would be “no political pressure or influence on the police” in his administration. He said he would “not tolerate the playing of politics or the extending of special privileges.” To everyone’s shock, the former city law director actually meant it. Burton, at forty-seven, was a small, balding, nondescript man with deep bags under his eyes. The son of a college professor, he had gone to Harvard Law School and served as an infantry officer in the World War, earning a Purple Heart. He began his political career on the East Cleveland Board of Education. Formal, precise, and religious, he prided himself on being a man of his word. Already, city hall veterans were calling him “The Boy Scout,” which was the same moniker Eliot had carried in Chicago. The two Boy Scouts spent well over an hour together for the official job interview. Each walked away impressed with the other. They spoke again later in the day.

Reporters weren’t the only ones pushing for Eliot. Keith Wilson, Eliot’s right-hand man at the ATU office, had called editors at the Cleveland newspapers on November 11, the day of Burton’s inauguration. He pointed out that, as chief investigator of the local federal liquor squad, Eliot already knew how the city’s Mob operated and was well aware of the situation in
the police department. Tom Clothey, another agent in the ATU office, talked Eliot up among his contacts in the city government. And Joe Keenan, after turning Burton down, told the mayor he should consider Eliot. Keenan suggested Burton call Dwight Green, one of Johnson’s assistant prosecutors during the Capone case (and later a governor of Illinois).

Eliot’s partisans didn’t just raise his profile; they played hardball. Rumors suddenly spread that U.S. Secret Service agent William Harper had been seen around town with various underworld figures. Harper was Eliot’s chief competition for the job.

***

The mayor took the search for a safety director far more seriously than anyone had expected. He knew something had to be done about the city’s institutionalized crime, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy. Early in his administration, he frequently wore a police inspector’s badge to reinforce his commitment. Some said he also carried a police revolver tucked into his pocket.

By the middle of December, after a week of excited newspaper coverage, Eliot’s candidacy had become a symbol—and a test—of the mayor’s reform credentials. Sure, Burton could talk a good game, and yes, he’d taken some encouraging first steps. But would he have the courage to put someone like Eliot Ness into high city office? In a column published just hours before the mayor made his decision, the
Plain Dealer
’s Philip Porter dared to believe:

Harold Burton’s brief administration has been full of surprises, but none was more pleasant to the insiders who admire ability than his sudden serious consideration of Eliot Ness for safety director. If Burton actually makes the appointment, the strictly political boys will be gibbering incoherently.

Porter marveled at how Ness, this man “without the slightest trace of political connection,” could be a serious candidate for safety director of the city of Cleveland. It was almost inconceivable. The columnist threw aside any pretense of journalistic objectivity, admitting that reporters who had covered Ness “admire his courage and his skill, and they like him personally. Few government officials have won them in such a short time as he has. . . . It’s a pretty safe rule that when reporters respect and admire an official, he’s the goods. They see so many phonies that they can smell them out like bird dogs.”

By now Eliot had won over Burton, too. Shortly before noon on
Wednesday, December 11, the mayor called the ATU’s offices at the Standard Building downtown. He offered Eliot the job, and Eliot immediately accepted. Burton told him to come right over to city hall to take the oath of office.

Eliot, nattily dressed in a double-breasted, gray-striped suit and red tie, walked over to city hall, skipped up the wide concrete front steps and ambled down to the mayor’s office. As always in the first months of a new administration, the place was mobbed by men hoping for a nod. Eliot slipped into the back of the reception area. “For some time,” wrote a reporter who didn’t recognize him at first, Eliot “stood patiently with a horde of job-seekers in the mayor’s outer office.” Finally, someone recognized him and insisted he come through. Safely ensconced in the inner sanctum, he vigorously shook the mayor’s hand and sat, keeping his overcoat on.

Joseph Crowley, the city’s assistant law director, arrived to give the oath of office. The picture of the oath-taking that ran in the afternoon papers shows a grim-faced Eliot with his hand held high above his head, like a boy who’s concerned the teacher will overlook him during attendance. When the new public safety director shook Crowley’s hand at the end of the ceremony, his annual salary had just doubled, to $7,500. (This would be a nice surprise for Eliot; he hadn’t even asked about the pay during the interview process.) At thirty-three, he was by far the youngest safety directory in the city’s history. Within an hour, Crowley put out a statement declaring that Eliot would have “complete freedom in developing the law-enforcement policies of the city.”

***

Eliot’s arrival at the mayor’s office, and the reason for it, quickly washed through city hall. When he, Burton, and Crowley came out of the office, they found city employees jamming the corridor, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the new safety director. They noted the “heavy layer of pomade” in his hair, the well-tailored suit, the shy smile. “He did not present the formidable, bellicose appearance that Americans expect in their law enforcement officers,” wrote George Condon, a longtime Cleveland reporter. Not that it mattered; his youth and his reputation as the man who busted Capone were enough to impress people. As Eliot came through the gauntlet, men shook his hand, slapped his back, and offered congratulations. A few whistled and whooped. The mayor told him he shouldn’t expect this kind of welcome every day.