Eliot Ness (15 page)

Eliot recognized a few reporters in the crowd, and he stopped to give the obligatory statement.

“Of course, I am greatly honored by the appointment,” he said. “I have a keen sense of feeling of the responsibility that the office entails. I will bend every effort to fill the duties of the office creditably.”

Reporters weren’t willing to leave it at that. They trailed Eliot back to the Standard Building, throwing questions at him with every step. Eliot kept his head down as he walked, but he also answered the questions. He understood the importance of a strong first impression.

Asked about corruption on the police force and poor morale in the fire department, the new safety director said he hoped “to devise some method of properly rewarding policemen and firemen for efficient and honest work.” He admitted he had a lot of “homework” to do.

Eliot’s Untouchables experience inevitably came up during that walk back to the ATU offices, and reporters filled up their notebooks. In the next day’s papers, the story of Eliot and Albert Nabers’s Chicago Heights arrest of Mike Picchi would be retold, this time with Eliot creeping alone down a dark alley, noticing “the flash of light on metal” and throwing himself at his startled would-be assassin. The gun Eliot wrestled from him, the
Press
wrote, “now is one of Mr. Ness’ prized possessions.” (Eliot did not have Picchi’s gun.)

The pack of reporters followed Eliot up to his office in the Alcohol Tax Unit’s suite and continued to fire questions at him as he cleaned out his desk. “I am going to be a working safety director,” he said. “I will do undercover work to obtain my own evidence and acquaint myself personally with conditions.”

That engendered some double takes. He was going to do his own undercover work? No one knew what to make of such a statement. The directorship was a management job. A payroll-padding, speech-giving, hit-the-links-at-two job. Yet this new kid wasn’t even going to take the day to celebrate—he was getting right to work. When Eliot showed up at police headquarters for a look around, officers blanched. “
I’ve served under five safety directors and this is the first time I ever saw the face of one of them,” said one sergeant. City hall hangers-on received a similar shock when they heard about the mayor’s choice.

“What did that guy ever do to help elect Burton?” one befuddled Republican lifer bleated. A
Press
columnist gleefully responded in print.

Well, nothing is the answer. Mr. Ness didn’t even know Rees Davis, the Republican chairman who managed the political aspects of the Burton campaign, until Thursday, when the mayor introduced them.

Some political hacks and fixers refused to believe the newspaper reports. They’d seen goo-goos (good-government men) before, and most of them only gooed when a reporter was around. The next day, party men began showing up in the safety director’s office. One by one they sat before Eliot, hats on knees, overcoats slung over the back of a chair. They explained how things worked in the city, offered advice, and coolly asked for the expected consideration. Eliot listened, expressionless, head down.
He drew “doodlegrams” on a pad of paper until each caller finally was talked out, put his hat back on his head, and angrily walked out of the office.

***

Despite the quiet confidence he showed to the press and his new colleagues, Eliot knew he was taking a significant risk by accepting the safety director job. He’d never worked for or supervised a municipal police or fire department. He’d never overseen
any
big organization. And there would be no ordinary learning curve here. Now that Capone was gone from Chicago, Cleveland was arguably the most mobbed-up large city in the country, with the most corrupt police department. Recognizing the challenge, he turned for help to his former teacher, August Vollmer. Eliot had become a passionate acolyte of Vollmer’s after taking the former chief’s police-administration course at the University of Chicago. He’d made a point of staying in touch with “the old man” ever since.

Eliot chose his mentor well. Vollmer was widely viewed as the “father of modern law enforcement.” In 1909, Vollmer became the police chief in Berkeley, California, where he remade the small department through an intractable belief in the moral power of professionalism. He eliminated the political patronage system through which policemen had always been hired and promoted in the town, put cops on wheels—first bicycle, later motorcycle and automobile—and instituted formal training for new recruits, a rarity at the time. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, he sought recruits with college degrees, even advanced degrees. His police department may have been the first in the country to use blood, fiber, and soil analysis in criminal investigations, the first to use intelligence tests in hiring, the first to equip squad cars with two-way radios. The definitive proof that he was an iconoclast: he believed in crime-prevention measures. Indeed, he considered them more valuable than crime-solving skills. In the same vein, he aggressively argued against vice laws, insisting that sexual deviancy and drug and alcohol addiction were “first and last a medical problem,” not a police problem. Vollmer’s views were downright radical. Critics dubbed him soft on crime.

Vollmer went on to become police chief of booming Los Angeles in 1923, declaring that he would clean up the department through scientific management. “I am going to strip all the mystery and hokum from police work and place it on the basis of efficiency,” he said. Despite some notable successes—he created a police academy and reorganized the two-thousand-man department into discrete disciplines—his tenure ended abruptly after just a year. The city’s power players turned against him after they realized he really meant to run crooked cops out of the department and shut down the city’s gambling dens. When his opponents ginned up a sex scandal—a doe-eyed divorcée brought a breach-of-promise suit against him, insisting that he made love to her like a “cave man”—he decided he’d had enough of the big city. He would spend most of the rest of his life in academia, teaching his “Berkeley system” to criminology students across the country.

Eliot, unaware of the vehemence of the opposition his mentor’s methods had kicked up in LA, planned to be the first man to fully install Vollmer’s system in a major American city. The goal thrilled him. He would come up with few truly original ideas during his police career, but he would prove to be the foremost pioneer in adapting Vollmer’s ideas to a large department.
Sitting down to his typewriter a day after taking the oath of office as safety director, Eliot informed the fifty-nine-year-old éminence grise of American police work that he had a new job and “am facing problems which, because of your many years of experience, would seem minor.” He then asked for advice on how best to revamp the way Cleveland’s police department handled promotions. He said he planned to remake the city’s force based on Vollmer’s tenets of professionalization. He closed the letter: “I feel, and for many years have felt, that my connection with you at the University of Chicago was one of the most beneficial things in my life.”

During that first full day on the job, Eliot, Police Chief Matowitz, and Fire Chief Joseph Granger had posed for newspaper photographers at city hall. When one of the photogs requested a shot of just Eliot and the police chief, Matowitz lost his temper. A reporter had asked the chief earlier in the day if he feared he might be fired. The challenging query, along with an initial meeting with Eliot, had gotten to the chief. Matowitz believed the photographer wanted the picture for a story about him getting the ax. He refused to pose alone with Eliot, berated the photographer “in sulfurous language,” and stormed off. Mayor Burton, witnessing the hissy fit, stewed at Matowitz’s “ripe and incoherent remarks.”

Eliot was unfazed by the outburst. He had no intention of firing the
fifty-three-year-old police chief. And he figured it worked to his advantage to have Matowitz feeling insecure in his position. He expected the chief to do his bidding, and sure enough, the chief would do it.

The next night, determined to prove himself to the rank and file as well as to the brass, Eliot tagged along with two patrolmen on their rounds in the “Roaring Third,” the city’s notorious vice district.
A sergeant loaned him a gun, a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber service revolver with a five-inch barrel. He would keep it throughout his tenure as safety director.
*
The two patrolmen took Eliot on a tour of the neighborhood, from East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue to East Fifty-fifth Street and Woodland Avenue. They pointed out gambling parlors that superiors had ordered patrolmen to leave alone and the hangouts of gangsters who were also beyond the law. At 2 a.m., they came upon a brothel on Orange Avenue where nearly naked girls wiggled suggestively in the windows, inviting men to come inside for a better look. Eliot decided it was time for action. Using a corner call box, Eliot called the nearest precinct station and told them to send over a paddy wagon and a patrol car.

A few minutes later, the patrolmen stepped up to the brothel’s front door while Eliot covered the back. When he came around the side of the house, Eliot saw the back door wide open. Inside, the dank rooms were empty, except for the two patrolmen who’d just banged through the front entrance. “That was a quick getaway,” Eliot said, laughing. He knew what had happened: the place had been tipped off.

***

By early January Eliot had begun to settle in. He rented an apartment at 10017 Lake Avenue on the West Side, just over the Cuyahoga River from downtown, to comply with the requirement that city employees live within the city limits. (Edna, at least for now, mostly remained at the cottage in suburban Bay Village that they’d been renting since moving to the area.) Eliot wrote again to Vollmer, who had sent him some sample training materials. The letter started out with gossipy news about other Vollmer acolytes, including Alexander Jamie’s son, a childhood friend who the year before had offered Eliot a job in Minnesota. “I guess you knew that Wallace Jamie was Assistant Safety Director at St. Paul and conducted a very thorough investigation of the police force and racketeers in that city,” Eliot wrote. “He is now working on a special job at considerable remuneration in Boston and has resigned from his post at St. Paul.”

The pleasantries done, Eliot turned to the task he had before him. He insisted he was “appointed here absolutely non-political,” and that he had the support and trust of the mayor. He laid out his objectives: First, clean out corruption in the police department, and then modernize it. Next, attack the Mob. He admitted that reforming the police force would be no small task. “The department here is exactly as it was about forty years ago as far as selection, promotion, training, etc., is concerned,” he wrote. He added that civil service was a problem, because “absolutely no recognition is given for anything except the ability to pass a written examination, which you can appreciate is extremely detrimental to the morale of the department as a whole.” He said he already was working with the civil-service examiner on a new examination for chief of detectives.

Eliot had a plan for ridding the police department of crooks, he told Vollmer. “The situation here is in a sense similar to that of Chicago in the early thirties when the business men organized the Secret Six for the purpose of coping with the situation,” he wrote. “I am going to receive some help along a similar line here but am proceeding cautiously on it in order that I do not become associated with any movement which may prove embarrassing or binding upon the work I hope to do as a whole.”

Eliot was being modest—or careful, in case the plan didn’t go well. Bringing the Secret Six model to Cleveland had been his idea. In fact, he had insisted on it. During his job interview with Burton, he said he would take the position only if he could hire secret investigators who reported solely to him. He saw this as the only effective way to ferret out policemen on the Mob’s payroll. He told the mayor that he, Burton, would have to find a way to pay for them “out of unofficial funds.” The demand stunned the mayor. Such a thing had never crossed his mind. To Burton, it smacked of vigilantism—or even fascism.
But Eliot, undaunted, told the mayor about the precedent in Chicago, and suggested he hit up friends in the business community who’d had enough of Mob rule in the city. Burton called around to acquaintances in Chicago to find out what this Secret Six thing was all about. He liked what he heard. A few days later, when he offered Eliot the job, the mayor said he would do his best to get him his unofficial investigators. That brought Eliot into his new position on a wave of confidence. He expected to have the police force cleaned up enough to begin an all-out attack on the Mob by the end of his first year in office. He couldn’t wait.
He wrote to Vollmer:

Racketeering here is rampant and the racketeers have virtual control of business and industry, much more so than is apparent on the surface. Almost every business association in the city is paying some sort of tribute to a well-organized Sicilian gang here. This angle, of course, is old stuff to me and will probably be one of the simplest.

That was the kind of bluster that had made Eliot’s name in Chicago. But he’d discover that attacking Cleveland’s gangs wouldn’t be quite as simple as he thought.

Tough Babies

O
n January 10, Charles McNamee walked up to the Harvard Club’s front door at about 5 p.m. Pulling out a search warrant, he informed the doorman that he had come to raid the club.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” the doorman roared, sweeping the assistant prosecutor aside with a burly forearm. McNamee crashed into the side of the building and fell to his knees.

The half-dozen men behind McNamee, many of them brandishing truncheons, pressed forward—but they couldn’t get past the guard. The doorman was a massive creature. He stood on the front step, punching and kicking like a hockey goalie in sudden-death overtime. The rumpus brought one of the club’s owners, James “Shimmy” Patton, to the door.

McNamee, a professional and proud of it, was back on his feet by now. Reflexively, he shot his cuffs, straightened his tie. “I’ve got a search and seizure warrant for this place,” he announced. He’d been joined on the doorstep by fellow assistant prosecutor Frank Celebrezze, who nodded tentatively.

Patton stared at the men. “The hell you do,” he snarled. The squat, pug-like gangster hadn’t been tipped off about a raid, so clearly McNamee and Celebrezze were here by mistake. “Where’s that goddam Cullitan?” he barked. He looked out into the beige winter evening, trying to locate Cuyahoga County prosecutor Frank T. Cullitan. He wanted to go straight to the top to register his complaint.

“He’s closing down the Thomas Club,” McNamee said.

Patton’s mind whirled. None of this made sense. The men McNamee and Celebrezze had brought with them clearly weren’t deputies. Cuyahoga County sheriff John Sulzmann worked closely with the suburban casinos. Sulzmann believed absolutely in what he called “home rule”—meaning the sheriff didn’t do anything about crime in a particular town unless the mayor specifically asked him to. Patton glared at the men stacked up in front of his doorman. He definitely didn’t see any badges.

The gangster snickered—it was a pathetic display of humanity arrayed before him—but he held himself in check. He understood the value of violence. He also understood that you didn’t start throwing haymakers at high-profile public officials unless you had to. “You fellows are prosecutors,” he told McNamee and Celebrezze. “You just step aside and let those other fellows you’ve got with you try to get in here. We’ll mow ’em down.”

By now the club’s security detail had arrived. Wielding Thompson submachine guns, they fanned out behind Patton like Ziegfeld girls.

“Anyone that goes in there gets their goddam head knocked off,” Patton declared, loud enough for everyone to hear.

The gangster’s “hard-boiled attitude” shocked McNamee and Celebrezze. They—and Cullitan—had figured even gangsters would stand aside when representatives of the county prosecutor, search warrant in hand, came calling. A wave of panic gripped the badgeless “special constables” behind the assistant prosecutors. They had been hired from the John J. McGrath Detective Agency for the night. They hadn’t expected this kind of trouble either. The private dicks yelled at Patton’s men to put down their weapons, to go back inside. The calls quickly grew high-pitched and shrill. Patton’s minions stood their ground.

The standoff continued for about half an hour, until a line of cars rolled up, blasting their horns. It was County Prosecutor Cullitan and more McGrath men, flush with victory. They’d met no resistance at the Thomas Club in Maple Heights. Cullitan climbed out of the lead car and buttoned up his coat. Looking around, he realized things hadn’t gone so smoothly here. After a brief consultation with McNamee, he approached Patton.

“Mr. Patton,” he said, “I’ve tried every decent way I could—”

The gangster stopped him with a raised hand. “No, you haven’t.” He meant Cullitan hadn’t tried pocketing bribes. He hadn’t tried looking the other way.

“This is my job to close this place,” the prosecutor said.

“Why don’t you quit your job?” Patton answered. He threw back his shoulders and smiled, pleased with himself.

At the gaming tables inside, gamblers slowly realized the standoff out front was serious. Some of them recognized the county prosecutor from his campaign signs. Shopkeepers and insurance agents and doctors started to stream out the back door. The notorious bank robber Alvin Karpis, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s foremost “public enemies,” coolly retrieved his coat from the money-counting room and sauntered into the night along with the
panicked regulars. Employees began to load everything—the roulette wheels and slot machines and blackjack tables—into vans parked behind the building.

By this time, the private detectives in the front had put away their clubs and hunched in on themselves. They’d seen enough of those machine-gun barrels. They had wives and children they wanted to go home to. Arthur Hebebrand, Patton’s business partner, stepped outside to judge the situation. To make sure Cullitan understood their resolve, he told the prosecutor: “If an arrest is made, you won’t go out of here alive.” Cullitan believed him. He walked to a gas station, followed by a clutch of Patton and Hebebrand’s men. Finding a telephone box, he called the county sheriff’s office and pleaded for assistance. As expected, he was rebuffed. The message from Sulzmann: “Mr. Cullitan should call the mayor of Newburgh Heights and let him ask for assistance if he thinks he needs it. That is in accord with my home rule policy.” Cullitan slammed down the phone. He had already tried and failed to reach Newburgh Heights mayor Jerry Sticha.

He fished in his pocket for more change, picked up the receiver again.

***

Cleveland had plenty of gambling parlors. They were hidden behind storefronts and jammed into the back rooms of laundries. Anyone stepping into one of these rooms would not be impressed. They typically looked abandoned—except for the fact that they were filled with people. The Mob made millions of dollars every year on these ramshackle places.

In the suburbs, however, Cleveland’s gangs may have pocketed even more money from gambling than they did in the city, and they didn’t have to make much of an effort to disguise their operations. No one in the ’burbs seemed to know that gambling was illegal. That was because gangsters owned a handful of local governments in the towns surrounding Cleveland, especially to the southeast of the city. At the huge casinos in these burgs, you had to ring a buzzer at the front door, and you had to stare down a beady eye that peered at you through the sliding slot. But this was mostly just for show, for the fizz of illegitimacy that heightened the excitement of the experience.
*

“
Long before there was a Las Vegas, there was Cleveland, and its place on the gambling map was most prominent,” recalled reporter George Condon. The Thomas Club in Maple Heights and the Harvard Club in Newburgh
Heights were the two best-known casinos in the region. The Harvard had grand pretensions. It was located in a former industrial building, but it had a fancy plantation-house facade stuck on the front. The club’s operators, Patton and Hebebrand, had recently taken over from the original owner, Billy Fergus.
The police found Fergus buried in a limestone quarry, his head split open by three bullets. The Harvard’s staff wore crisp uniforms and showed off the latest games and equipment, most of which were fixed. The club had limousines on call to pick up gamblers in downtown Cleveland at any time of the day or night.

The Harvard Club boasted some eighteen hundred “members.” The Thomas had about two thousand.
Forty years later, one member would recall the Thomas as “a clean-cut place. You never had any riff-raff out there. No stabbings, no crime and no bombings like you see all the time these days. They were very good to the people in the area. They employed people, helped the needy with coal in the winter and baskets of food, things like that. It was a really nice place to go to.”

Not everyone agreed with this assessment of the casino. The club had a “special window” for strapped gamblers to cash relief checks. One man tried to kill himself after a particularly disastrous night at the gaming tables. “Have my body cremated and give my ashes to the Thomas Club. They have everything else,” he wrote in a suicide note.

Decent people recognized that gambling was an evil, and they had facts on their side. No matter what the clubs’ members believed, the plain truth was that the areas where gambling thrived had more robberies, assaults, and prostitutes than anywhere else. Cullitan certainly didn’t have to be convinced. He considered gambling a plague on civilized society. He believed he was doing God’s work when he set off for the suburbs that January afternoon, search warrant in his pocket.

***

The Cuyahoga County prosecutor tracked Eliot down at a city council meeting. An aide summoned the safety director to a nearby office to take the call.

“They’re threatening to open fire,” Cullitan heaved into the phone, his voice cracking with fear and stress. He told Eliot that the sheriff had refused to come to his assistance, that he was in a desperate situation. “We need help,” he said.

The first time Eliot had laid eyes on Frank T. Cullitan, a couple of weeks before, he couldn’t have been too impressed. The county prosecutor looked
like a political hack at fifty paces. He had the fat red face and squinty pinprick eyes of the quintessential city hall hanger-on. He’d slap you on the back for no reason, his pendulous chin swinging, his laugh echoing down the long hall of the county courthouse, a laugh directed at nothing.

But first impressions could fool you. Eliot had heard good things about Cullitan. He’d heard he was honest. He’d heard he wanted to do the right thing. Burton said he admired the man, even though Cullitan was a Democrat. Eliot decided to give the prosecutor the benefit of the doubt.

“Hold everything,” he said into the phone. “I’m on my way.”

The new public safety director’s priorities were clear. When a reporter had asked him whether Cleveland would follow New York’s lead in cracking down on women wearing shorts in public, he had snorted derisively. “
They may wear all the shorts they want to on the street,” he said. Eliot was a leg man—Edna had a great pair of stems—but that wasn’t the reason for his attitude. He was sending a bigger message: he didn’t care about the penny-ante stuff. New York officials could waste their time on things like public dress codes for women. He was Captain Ahab hunting his big fish. Cleveland, like Chicago before it, was overrun with gangsters. And gangsters undermined society and degraded their fellow man. The Mob and public corruption would be his focus.

Eliot called the county jail. He couldn’t believe the sheriff had refused Cullitan’s appeal for help. There must have been some sort of misunderstanding. “The prosecutor informs me he is in danger of his life,” he said. “Will you send him assistance?” The man on the line said Sulzmann was home with the flu and couldn’t be reached. Eliot didn’t know what to make of that response. “Will you go out or won’t you?” he demanded. Finally, he received a definitive answer: no.

Furious, Eliot drove over to Cleveland’s Central Police Station, where he rounded up men coming off duty. He asked for volunteers. This would be unofficial duty, he said. There would be no extra pay, and there might be danger. To his surprise, the men liked the sound of that. Forty-two officers agreed to go. Eliot clapped his hands. They would head out to Newburgh Heights in a convoy, he said. The mayor had already given his safety director the go-ahead, but only as backup to Cullitan’s men. Eliot and his officers were not to serve warrants or make arrests. They were acting as private citizens.

***

Even after that panicked call from Cullitan, Eliot was surprised at what he found along Harvard Avenue: a tense, crowded standoff that stretched into
the street, blocking traffic. Prostitutes wearing little more than negligees and high heels lingered around the property’s periphery, wary of going back inside the club, unwilling to go home without a payday. At a nearby gas station, the county prosecutor stood against a wall, helpless, surrounded by “many tough-looking ‘birds.’”

“While the prosecutor’s deputies were laying siege to the Harvard Club, the prosecutor himself was besieged,” Eliot recalled later. “I would be unable to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. Even my fullest powers of description could not give you the picture as it was. I told our driver to open up his siren and split a way through the crowd.”

Eliot stepped out of the lead car and shook hands with Cullitan. The safety director was wearing a tan fedora and a long, camel’s-hair topcoat. He’d put on a crisp new shirt before heading out. “We are here to protect you, and to do that we must go where you go,” Eliot told him. He nodded toward the Harvard Club.

The two men crossed the street, followed by Eliot’s off-duty police officers. Eliot, to his surprise, realized that all of Cullitan’s private eyes were clumped in front of the building. When he’d told the prosecutor to hold everything, he meant to keep people from leaving the building. He’d assumed Cullitan’s hired guns had surrounded the place.

It was 10:30 by now; the standoff had been going on for five hours. The county prosecutor’s detectives had clearly lost their taste for battle. Eliot noticed newspapermen standing around, notepads in hand. Despite Mayor Burton’s orders, he decided to take charge.

He addressed his men: “Let’s have a fight here. All right? Let’s go.”

Eliot strode up to the club’s front door. He was unarmed, but the forty-two cops—“private citizens”—behind him wielded shotguns, pistols, truncheons, and tear-gas guns. Eliot hammered on the door and called out for the occupants to open up. The slider in the door flew back. “It’s Ness. It’s that goddam Eliot Ness,” someone inside the club said. Everyone had heard about the new safety director’s raids on Capone back in the day. The lock turned and the door swung open. Eliot disappeared inside. A moment later, he reappeared.

“All right,” he said to Cullitan, “let your men go in there and serve their warrants. We’ll back them up.”

Cullitan’s temporary constables, followed by newspapermen, marched into the room. The “Harvard men,” as Eliot would call them, fell back, but not very far. They wouldn’t let the McGrath detectives make their way
beyond the front room. Eliot worried about keeping everyone cool. Looking outside, he saw that his officers were “just aching for something to happen.”