Eliot Ness (16 page)

By this time the gangsters had locked themselves into the main gambling room. “I looked through a hole [in the door] and saw one big fellow with a revolver,” Eliot recalled. “I told Cullitan I thought gas was what we ought to use.” He must have said it rather loudly, because the Harvard men began heading for an exit at the back of the gambling room. Eliot kicked in the door, but by then the long, wide room was empty.

Back in the entryway, Cullitan’s men pulled a ladder down from a trapdoor in the ceiling. They climbed up, muscled aside a bulletproof glass shield, and found themselves in a low-ceilinged room with sniper slits cut into the floor. The openings allowed for machine guns to be trained on the gambling room and the money room.

Cullitan and his men pushed into the money room next. They had found $52,000 at the Thomas Club earlier in the evening. “And that was after [only] morning business,” a reporter noted. “Imagine the money that must have passed from the public to this one gambling house in a full day.” At the Harvard, they came away with nothing. Not a dime. They didn’t even have the proprietors. Hebebrand and Patton had stepped into the money room a few minutes earlier—ostensibly to retrieve their hats and coats for the ride downtown—but they didn’t come back out. They climbed through a hidden window near the ceiling and dropped ten feet to the ground behind the building. The McGrath detectives did a double take when they went in after them. The good guys just couldn’t do anything right tonight.

Cullitan no doubt was embarrassed that the hours-long standoff at the Harvard Club resulted in no arrests. He had what little was left in the building hauled away—chairs, tables, phones, adding machines. The next day he had phone service to the club shut down.

“We have achieved our purpose—to put the Harvard and Thomas clubs out of business,” he declared to reporters.

***

The next morning, Eliot woke up a hero.

“
Eliot Ness last night showed the county of Cuyahoga in general and Sheriff John M. Sulzmann in particular that his reputation as a zealous, courageous law enforcement officer is no publicity build-up,” wrote one reporter.

Eliot, faced with a scrum of reporters when he arrived at the office, praised the officers who had joined him on the raid—and puffed himself up as well. “
It was a highly credible thing they did. . . . I went over to the station and found the boys just coming off duty and preparing to take off their uniforms and go home,” he said. “I told them the circumstances and informed them I was going out there if I had to go alone. I explained that I’d like to have some of them go along, but they didn’t have to volunteer. I told them I wouldn’t hold it against them if they didn’t go. Without an exception, they all agreed to go.” He then provided the newspapers with the names of the forty-two men.

Of course, he couldn’t leave it at that. The papers declared that he had proved something at the Harvard Club. That he had proved he had the right stuff for this job, that the Cleveland Mob was going to have a serious fight on its hands. Eliot liked the feel of all that praise. Speaking before a fawning audience at the Odovene Club a few days later, the safety director bragged shamelessly. “
About the time we got there, a newspaper man came bounding out and told us the tough babies were ready for trouble,” he said. “That was a welcome sound, because we were afraid we were missing something.”

He insisted he never before “saw such a situation, not even when, in the government service, I lived with the Mafia or raided repeatedly the Capone outfit. Those fellows at the Harvard Club are called gamblers, but they certainly have learned the technique of gangsters. I am confident that if Cullitan had gone in there he would be dead today. They were not bluffing, but meant business.”

The subject of Sheriff Sulzmann inevitably came up, and Eliot gripped the podium. He now knew that Cuyahoga County’s sheriff was a crook, and he didn’t mind saying so, especially to make a broader point. Before he and his officers had headed for the Harvard that night, he’d sent his executive assistant, John Flynn, to the county jail to check on the situation there.
Flynn “found six deputies just sitting—perhaps waiting for the millennium,” Eliot told his audience at the Odovene Club. He said the sheriff’s actions added up to dereliction of duty—and worse.

“
In any city where corruption continues, it follows that some officials are playing with the underworld,” he said. “If town officials are committed to a program of protection, police work becomes exceedingly difficult, and the officer on the beat, being discouraged from his duty, decides it is best to see as little crime as possible.

“Now what about it?” he continued. “We hear the man on the street asking what harm there is in gambling. Now, I’m not a reformer, but let me tell you one or two things. Those gamblers said they had a gold mine out there. I am told that for $60,000 to $70,000 to change hands in one evening was not unusual. Is there any effect from that on legitimate business, do you think?”

After the reception he received at the Odovene Club, Eliot decided he wanted to keep the glowing headlines coming. He had planned on attacking the Cleveland Mob after reforming the police department; it was pointless to do so beforehand. But now he chose to go ahead and launch a hasty, very public assault on Mob-run gambling in the city. It would be an initial, probing thrust in anticipation of a much bigger push down the road; he was putting the gangs on notice.
He told Lieutenant Michael Blackwell, a rising star in the department, to throw a scare into gamblers across the city, to get them twitching every time they heard the click of a shoe in the stairwell outside.

Blackwell could do that. The ambitious, honest young officer loved to kick in doors and yell, “This is the police!” In the weeks ahead, he and his men would charge into gambling rooms across the city, swinging sledgehammers and waving guns. They pounded furniture into kindling, ripped out telephone wires, blew open safes full of money. A later addition to the raiding team described how he became swept up by the fervor of the squad’s work:

The excitement generated in these raids was contagious, and I quickly found myself wading in alongside my fellow raiders, breaking a sturdy leg off of a heavy oak table or swinging a metal chair to demolish vulnerable gambling room equipment. The enormous exertion expended would leave me sweating and exhausted, but also exhilarated. I had struck a blow at the gambling gang owners whose activities and bribes were corrupting the police and other city officials.

Along with Blackwell’s actions, detectives began a sweep of the Third and Fourth Precincts to disrupt the Mob’s rotation of girls into its whorehouses, which often operated near gambling dens.
The police moved out every girl in the district who couldn’t prove she had an established residence.

The push appeared to have an immediate effect.
A local manufacturer of
negligees and women’s silk underwear sent Eliot a letter declaring that, because of the crackdown, he had been “obliged to lay off almost half my factory help.” Eliot put the letter in a frame.
The
Plain Dealer
exulted that “now the gamblers never know when the police will arrive or where and that uncertainty is no small factor in cutting down the evil here.” Letters to the editor poured into the newspapers in support of the safety director. “It is not only refreshing in thought but encouraging in civic spirit to find that we now have a director of public safety as independent in thought, fearless in action and supremely indifferent to the demands of the politicians as Eliot Ness has proved himself to be,” read a typical one.

Yet the gambling racket proved much more difficult to hurt than Eliot expected. Too often gambling operators
did
know when to expect a raid. Gambling was deeply entrenched in the community; police officers in every precinct protected it. Most of the places Blackwell and his men smashed to bits would reopen in another back room a few days later. The joints began to move around every day, making it impossible for the special unit to stay on top of them.

Even the Harvard Club was up and running again a couple of weeks after Eliot’s now-famous raid. Asked by a reporter about a rollicking new casino on Harvard Avenue, just down the street from the building Cullitan had shuttered, Newburgh Heights police marshal Frank Ptak offered a predictable response.

“I know nothing about it.”

This Guy Ness Is Crazy

J
anuary was wreathed in darkness. A thick blanket of smoke had smothered the city for a month, squeezing out everything but a collective mood of gloom and anxiety.
Cleveland “was well on its way toward winning the dubious honor of being known as ‘The Dark City,’” the
Press
wrote. The lack of sunshine wasn’t the only problem. A cold spell gripped the region, the worst in more than a year.
In the early morning blackness of Sunday, January 26, the watchman at the Hart Manufacturing plant on East Twentieth Street periodically stopped during his foot patrols to stamp and shimmy in place. It didn’t help. The cold hit like a fast-acting poison. The watchman didn’t see anything suspicious during his shift. He didn’t see anything at all save for the dirty snow underfoot, the breath fogging the air in front of him.

It wasn’t until midmorning that anyone noticed the two baskets on the ground behind the factory. At about 11 a.m., a woman bent down and peeked under the burlap sacks that covered them. She continued on through an alley and around the corner to the White Front Meat Market on Central Avenue. She announced there was a basket of hams sitting against a wall behind the Hart building. The butcher, concerned that someone had broken into his shop overnight, went out to take a look. When he returned, shaken, he called the police.

Inside the baskets, detectives discovered two human thighs, an arm, a hand, and the lower part of a woman’s torso, all neatly wrapped in newspaper. The basket and its contents were coated in coal dust, suggesting an initial hiding place for the remains. Patrolmen began to scour the area. They found two pairs of white women’s underwear, also wrapped in newspaper.

Police identified the remains through fingerprints as those of a local barmaid, Florence Polillo, aka Florence Martin, Florence Sawdey, and Clara Dunn. The autopsy determined that “before her death, her entire reproductive system had been removed along with half her appendix.” The report indicated that “all the cut surfaces had clean edges,” meaning the dismemberment had been done with a surgeon’s skill.

The newspapers jumped on the gruesome discovery. They competed for the biggest, most startling headline—“Woman Slain, Head Sought in Coal Bins”—and offered up every lurid detail about the find. They catalogued the body parts, piece by piece, as if this could help readers solve the case. Only rarely—and incidentally—did they provide a glimpse of the victim as a real person. “She usually ironed on Saturday, and when I found she wasn’t there, I was worried,” her landlady told the
Press
. “She never gave us any trouble, and the only bad habit I noticed was that she would go out occasionally and get a quart of liquor—bad liquor, too—and drink it all by her lonesome in her room.”
The city’s smallest paper, the
Cleveland News
, made a connection between the “hams” left behind the Hart building and the dismembered Lady of the Lake from more than a year before. The paper pointed out that police still didn’t have an ID for the victim of that now-forgotten 1934 case.

The Lady of the Lake wasn’t the only connection to be made.
Four months before, in September 1935, a grisly double murder had baffled police. Two boys found a headless, emasculated man along a slope of Jackass Hill in Kingsbury Run, an industrial ghetto on the east side of the city. The corpse lolled on its side, as if the man had just drifted into a midday nap when something horrific happened. Drained of blood, he was naked except for cotton socks. Later in the day, another headless, emasculated corpse, older and stockier, was found nearby. A reddish-black discoloration to the bodies, like with the Lady of the Lake, led investigators to believe the killer had tried to burn the corpses. Sweeping the area, patrolmen stumbled over the heads and genitals in the underbrush.

The younger headless man was identified through fingerprints as Edward Andrassy, a twenty-nine-year-old knockabout and former psych-ward orderly. (The police weren’t able to identify the older man.) Investigators learned that Andrassy was an occasional marijuana dealer, and that a few weeks before his murder he had gotten into a bar fight with someone associated with the Mayfield Road Mob, the city’s most powerful gang. His father said that “Edward lived in continual fear of his life.” The idea that his murder was a gang hit made some sense. This recent spate of bizarre killings might all be about the Mob sending some kind of message. Florence Polillo was a part-time prostitute, another racket run by the underworld. Middle-aged, chubby, and depressive, she wasn’t
their
kind of prostitute, but still, the Mob didn’t like freelancers. It was a long shot, but it was as good a guess as any.

Police worked the gangster angle of the Andrassy case hard. Tips poured into Central Station, overwhelming the secretarial staff, but not all the calls came from cranks.
Dudley McDowell, a security officer for the New York Central Railroad, had spotted a swank green coupe in Kingsbury Run on numerous occasions before the double murder. Clean, expensive cars were a rarity in the Run. The coupe’s driver always scanned the area with binoculars from the top of Jackass Hill before climbing into the car and blasting away. McDowell, a professional, had taken down the car’s license-plate number as a matter of routine.

Through the plate number, police identified the car’s owner as Philip Russo. Detectives went to the man’s house on East 140th Street, but the place had been abandoned. Russo had disappeared.

***

Eliot took little interest in the gruesome case of the prostitute in the picnic baskets. It was one isolated murder, he figured. No doubt the work of a lunatic, someone who’d inevitably be caught soon. Besides, he was too wrapped up in the mundane details of his new job, the kind of details no reporter or headline writer could possibly find interesting. He was fascinated by the science of traffic safety, for example. Cleveland was one of the most dangerous cities in the country for motorists, and Eliot decided he would change that.
He declared that the traffic division no longer would be “the Siberia of the police department.” Also the city’s police stations and firehouses were in terrible condition—vermin-ridden, moldering, filled with useless, antiquated equipment. He wanted to fix that, too.

The fire department was not one of Eliot’s top priorities during his first months in office, but that didn’t mean he neglected it. Though he had no experience with firefighting, he immediately reimagined the typical fire official’s typical day. He believed firemen should feel the same sense of urgency in their work, day in and day out, as police officers.
He declared that when they weren’t fighting fires or taking care of their equipment, firemen should be focused on fire prevention, “instead of just hanging around in their fire stations waiting to respond to fire alarms.” He sent out orders that officials in each battalion would conduct daily—not weekly or monthly but
daily
—inspections of commercial and industrial buildings within their area. Faced with concerns about men being taken out of their firehouses, he announced that he would equip battalion cars with two-way radios, allowing inspectors to react just as quickly to a call as if they were in the station. Eliot ignored complaints from the department brass that he didn’t know
what he was talking about. “
People resent change,” he said with a shrug. “There are folks who start out: ‘This guy Ness is crazy.’ That’s part of the job.”

The city’s lawmakers, so far, were not among the resentful. With cheers for the Harvard Club takedown still rolling through the newspapers, Eliot convinced the council to pony up precious funding for the city’s first-ever police training school. He considered this a game-changing victory. Some big-city police departments offered formalized training to recruits—this was mostly started during Prohibition in response to the rapid rise in organized crime—but these continued to be the exceptions. Many departments, including Cleveland’s, simply handed new officers a badge and a gun on their first day and sent them out on the streets. They were expected to learn the job entirely by doing it, at best with tips and mentoring from veteran policemen.

Throughout the winter and spring, Eliot would oversee every aspect of the training school’s establishment and launch. He found classroom space, designed the curriculum, and selected the instructors. The instructors included local jiujitsu expert Dewey Mitchell, the police laboratory’s majordomo David Cowles, and various senior officers in the department. He selected trainees, too, personally recruiting student leaders at local colleges. (He also quietly recruited African Americans, believing they would do a better job policing their own neighborhoods than white officers.)

Eliot made it clear to the academy’s first class that they would be a new breed of police officer in Cleveland. “
If people have been accustomed to giving you things for nothing prior to your becoming a policeman, I suppose it’s all right for you to continue to accept those things,” he told the group of cadets. “However, if people who never gave you anything for free before now want to give you something without charge, you can conclude they are buying your badge and uniform.”

Along with giving advice, Eliot served as an instructor, too. He especially enjoyed helping out with the self-defense courses.
The
Press
ran a series of photos of the young, good-looking safety director showing off holds and escape moves. “Suppose you were a bandit and told Safety Director Eliot Ness to ‘stick ’em up,’” the paper offered. “He might surprise you in any one of 30 different ways. And the next thing you’d know, you’d be on the ground. You might have a broken leg, a broken arm or ‘just be stunned.’”

“He has become as quick as a cat,” Dewey Mitchell said proudly.

By now, a legend had been born. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be Eliot
Ness. Mayor Burton’s son, a college student, asked his father if he could spend the summer working for the safety director. By the end of Billy Burton’s first week, Eliot had him staking out a bookie joint. Before school let out, Eliot spoke to hundreds of elementary-school boys who sported their official Dick Tracy badges. “
You have a badge just like mine,” Eliot said, prompting a wave of cheers and whistles.
At about the same time, an unshaven man in a dirty overcoat walked into the mayor’s office and told the secretary he was there for his meeting with the mayor. When asked for his name, he said “Eliot Ness.” He disappeared before security arrived. A few days later, the same man walked into the safety director’s office, sat down at Eliot’s desk and got to work. This time, one of Eliot’s men grabbed him. He was turned over to police for a psychiatric evaluation.