Eliot Ness (2 page)

Rising Star

Photos of employees collectively make up Eliot Ness’s face in artwork at the headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington, DC.

Hardboiled

E
dna Stahle opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling. She had no idea where she was. She’d been warned that might happen.

She was on the floor, that much was obvious. She rolled onto her side, got her knees under her, and rose slowly. She realized she was sweating. A wall heaved into view, and she reached out to steady herself.

She noticed other women in the room. Everyone was moving slowly, with measured steps. One of them let out a moan. They were beginning to understand what had happened to them.

Just the day before, Edna and the five other girls from the office thought they were being so grown-up. They had rented this cottage on Lake Michigan. They’d picked it out themselves, paid for it themselves, stocked it themselves. They didn’t tell anyone what they were up to. It was their secret.

The weekend had started innocently enough. The first thing they did was go for a swim. They banged into the lake like children, laughing and splashing one another, unselfconscious with no men around. They stood up to their waists, heat dazed, and looked out at the horizon, at the boats backlit along its edges. There were beautiful yachts on the lake all day. The girls didn’t know it, but bootleggers owned the grandest ones.
The gangsters had figured out that the big, gaudy vessels, laid out in rosewood, with “gold handles on the toilets and all that jazz,” were better for business—at least for now. The Coast Guard was suspicious of any fast little boat zipping across the lake, but it paid no mind to the pleasure cruisers, home to industrialists and politicians at play. “
So [gangsters] took these yachts and decorated them with pretty girls in bathing suits, like going out for a little sail. Load up and come back,” one of those pretty girls confided years later. This was a good time for them to be out there. It was a hot summer day—perfect for a little sail. Perfect for a drink. Back in the city, the bootleggers’ thirsty customers sat on shiny wooden barstools, sweat running down their faces. Nineteen twenty-eight had been surprisingly warm so far, starting early
and building to a record-breaking heat wave in July. Some club owners brazenly propped their doors open, allowing the pungent smell of beer to waft onto the sidewalks. Most of them kept a wad of cash ready in case a dry agent walked in—and a truncheon behind the bar in case he was honest.

None of the women at the rented cottage ever went to those “private clubs.” Pretty girls were always welcome; Prohibition had brought women into what long had been a male-only domain. But for the respectable ones, it was a dangerous game. A young woman couldn’t get away with drinking on her own or even with a girlfriend. She was going to be approached, time and again. And if a girl did accept a drink from a man?
One saloon regular put it succinctly: “If she had two drinks with him, and she didn’t lay her frame down, she was in a serious matter.” Worse yet for these particular young women now enjoying their lakeside holiday: at a saloon they might run into one of the men they worked for. After all, they didn’t slave away at just any office. They were all secretaries in the Chicago office of the Prohibition Bureau. That was why they had planned this secret drinking weekend at an out-of-the-way cottage way up on the lake, where no one would see them, let alone recognize them.

Now they realized they might have made a mistake. There was no way to tell what you were going to get from a bootlegger. How many times had they heard that? Coal tar dyes, industrial solvents, paint thinner, rat droppings. Anything could be in there. They’d read reports about men dying or going blind from drink.
One
drink. Women just like them had gone mad and killed their lovers. Of course, those were extreme cases. No one would say otherwise. The fact was, everyone they knew drank bootleg liquor. Everyone but them.

Edna settled herself at the kitchen table. Until this summer, the petite twenty-one-year-old had never tasted alcohol. The way her head felt now, she figured it would be a long time before she tried it again. The other women at the table had already resolved to take it easy all morning. Read books and sit on the beach.

Maybe they should drink some more, one of them said. Hair of the dog.

The women stared off into space, pondering that one. Maybe later, they decided. For now, they would do nothing, enjoy the quiet.

Early afternoon brought a knock on the door. One of the secretaries, decked out boyishly in a shapeless shift and bangs, opened up and found Eliot Ness standing on the porch, kneading his hat in his hands. She almost cried out. The women had cleaned themselves up by then. They’d come to
terms with the previous night and begun to relax about it. The liquor hadn’t been poisonous after all. They were chatting and laughing, talking about giving it another go. But now silence gripped the cottage. The women exchanged glances, their eyes wide. They invited Eliot in—they
had
to invite him in—but, as the nephew of one of the secretaries would remember the story, “with him there they were afraid to break out the booze. He was the kind of guy who probably would have arrested them.”

They actually weren’t too worried about that. True enough, he was the new agent on the special squad, the most hardcore unit in the office. But they were pretty sure he hadn’t driven all the way up there to bust them.
He’d come because he was “sweet on one of the girls.” Which was just fine with them. In fact, it was exciting. Because all of the girls were sweet on him.

Eliot stepped into the room, into the light. The women watched him with sucked-in breath. It wasn’t that he had matinee-idol looks. He didn’t. He had a soft, indistinct face, a face that blended into the background of photographs. But he was tall—easily six feet in his stocking feet—with a rangy, athletic build. And there was such sadness in his eyes, even when he was smiling. Those blue eyes told everything. They told you he was cerebral and sensitive and maybe a little troubled down deep in his soul. Women could see this—or feel it. He just gave off a vibe.

Edna had caught it right off. Eliot would always pause by her desk when he was in the office and give her a smile. She loved the way he talked to her. He was amiable and jokey with the men, slapping backs and all that, but he would settle down as soon as he turned his gaze on the assistant administrator’s secretary. He’d sit on the edge of her desk, his voice muted, those sad eyes at half-mast, and Edna would gaze up at him as the rest of the bustling office hurtled off into the cosmos. She couldn’t understand why this incredible man was interested in her.

Edna Margaret Stahle was not beautiful. She knew it. She hated her mousy brown hair and her bony, plain face. She had a nice figure going for her—a long torso and boyish curves, the body of a natural-born flapper—but she didn’t know that. No one else did, either. The social revolution that had brought women the vote and the Charleston hadn’t yet made it out to Kensington, the far South Side neighborhood where Edna had grown up in a squat, cramped house on Union Street, just a few blocks from the Ness home. Edna wore high-collared blouses and calf-length wool skirts, usually topped with a heavy overcoat. Nobody saw her curves. She rode the
streetcar to the Prohibition Bureau offices every day, her head always down, too shy to meet anyone’s gaze.
On the weekend, she clattered around town on a secondhand bicycle, gliding through intersections with her eyes closed. The bike riding was her escape, her way of clearing her head. She needed it. Edna was studious and serious. She worked hard. She was determined to never make a mistake at anything.

Until she started dating Eliot. Then her attention to detail began to slip, just a little. In her first federal efficiency report after she and Eliot began seeing each other, her marks fell, an unprecedented occurrence. Dating Eliot—a special agent, a college man—had opened her up, made her realize she was stronger and braver and more interesting than she ever could have imagined. That was why she had gone up to the lake with the girls. She took chances now. She’d try almost anything, especially when she was with Eliot. “
We used to double-date,” Eliot’s fraternity brother, Armand Bollaert, would recall years later, grinning, “and we used to have some very interesting escapades.” Those escapades had lodged in Edna’s consciousness, fluttered in her stomach. She had started daydreaming about Eliot—or, more to her nature, worrying about him. About
them
. All she had to do was look around this cottage. These women, her colleagues and new drinking buddies, were shocked that Eliot was standing there before them. And they loved it. “
Women threw themselves at Eliot,” one of his longtime friends would remember years later. “That was his trouble.”

He clearly didn’t feel like he was in trouble. A roomful of young women couldn’t make him nervous—not anymore. Joining the special agency squad had boosted Eliot’s confidence. In the weeks that followed the appointment, he had used a billy club when he’d had to. He and the boys had kicked gangsters down staircases and whacked suspects with phone books. They carried shotguns as naturally as most men carried briefcases.
Carpe diem
was now young Eliot’s motto.

This dichotomy—between the “very modest man, very pleasant, very sophisticated,” as one female friend put it, and the tough guy who liked to call Chicago’s gangsters “yellowbellies” because they usually shot their enemies in the back—proved an irresistible mix. It had certainly made an impression on this crowd. “Hello, Mr. Ness,” they said, almost in unison, as he moved into the cottage, causing him to flap his hat in casual acknowledgment. The women all smiled at him, but after a quick scan of the room, Eliot’s eyes fell on Edna. She tried not to give herself away.

Edna hadn’t told anyone in the office that she and Eliot were dating. He
might have shown up to check on her story that it was a girls-only weekend, and that was fine with Edna. She was happy to see him. She was always happy to see him. She stood, took Eliot’s hat, and hung it on a rack. Then she turned to the room and offered to make a round of drinks for everyone. The other women gasped in shock. Eliot began to laugh; he couldn’t help it. This set Edna to giggling. Slowly, the others joined in. Everyone laughed a little too hard.

***

Eliot wasn’t supposed to be a member of the special squad. He might have impressed the women in the office, but he didn’t have the same effect on the supervisors. It was widely believed that he lacked the chops for high-level duty. He certainly didn’t have the pedigree. The special agents, after all, had been handpicked and trained in the nation’s capital. Many were Ivy League graduates, tops in their classes. Eliot had been just an ordinary Prohibition agent, a local boy.

The Special Agency Division stood apart from the rest of the Prohibition Bureau.
The division oversaw ten “small, highly trained mobile forces of investigators,” each led by a special agent in charge. Their mission: to handle large-scale liquor conspiracies beyond the scope and training of the average Prohibition office, and to clean out dishonest agents wherever they found them. George Golding, a cocky, barrel-chested former New York City cop, led the twenty-man team dispatched to Chicago. Another George—George E. Q. Johnson, the new U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois—considered the team’s assignment to the city a significant coup. Many in the Treasury Department, home to the Prohibition Bureau, believed Golding to be the best lawman in the federal government. He had plenty of fans in the Justice Department as well. Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrandt, who was in charge of Prohibition cases, said a hundred George Goldings could dry out the entire country.

Johnson was satisfied to get the one and only. The U.S. attorney had dedicated himself to bringing down the region’s booze syndicate. But he realized that before he could take on the liquor gangs, he had to roust the criminals within the Prohibition Bureau itself—or at the very least bypass them.
The Chicago Prohibition office had recently forced out most of the longtime temperance activists who had joined the agency through political patronage. But the crooks were proving harder to dislodge. The problem had been going on from the very beginning.
In 1922, two years after the arrival of the constitutional amendment that banned the sale, manufacture,
and transportation of alcohol, a local federal grand jury had declared that “almost without exception [Prohibition] agents are not men of the type of intelligence and character qualified to be charged with this difficult and important duty and Federal law.” That was understating the matter. Dozens of dry agents in the office were on the Mob’s payroll. Some were even full-fledged members of a gang. With Golding in place, Johnson believed this shameful state of affairs could finally change.
He and Chicago’s Prohibition administrator, E. C. Yellowley, announced that “no dry agents or other government employees violating the law will be dealt with leniently.”

Landing in the city in the fall of 1927, Golding met with reporters on his first day on the job. The big, brash New Yorker charmed them right down to their toes, telling them eye-popping tales of derring-do and insisting that his tenure in the nation’s second city was going to be “all action.”
The newspapers dubbed him “Hardboiled Golding” and announced that the war against the gangs finally was in good hands. Hardboiled wanted to have an immediate impact, before the glowing headlines about the team’s arrival could molder in birdcages. He big-footed ongoing investigations into the booze syndicate and his agents started shouldering their way through locked doors, usually with reporters right behind them. “
The agents swooped down on unsuspecting Chicago, their eyes blazing and their guns in hand,” recalled Elmer Irey, head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Intelligence Unit, which provided training to the Special Agency Division. “The chief of this new group led his men through miles of popping photographers’ flash guns as he rounded up dozens of illicit backroom gin mills and bathroom alcohol stills. He even knocked off a few breweries.”

But Hardboiled Golding’s hero worship would be short-lived.
In March 1928, one of Golding’s men shot an off-duty municipal court bailiff in the back while the team was raiding a saloon on the South Side. Overnight, the glowing press notices ground to a halt. The newspapers, careful to stay with public opinion, responded to the shooting with outrage. They questioned the raiders’ competence, forcing Johnson to defend the squad in a makeshift press conference. The U.S. attorney insisted the special agents were cracking down on the “Kensington–Chicago Heights alcohol ring, to whom this department attributes at least three murders.” He added that the squad was seeking Chicago Heights gangster Lorenzo Juliano, along with evidence that the mobster was responsible for setting off a bomb at the home of U.S. senator Charles Deneen, a well-known foe of gang rule.