Eliot Ness (21 page)

The imbroglio must have been disillusioning for Eliot, who liked Flynn and had respected him. He moved quickly on a replacement. Robert W. Chamberlin was another lawyer and another former football hero (though in his case only a high school star, not college). More important: Chamberlin, who met Eliot and Edna when he rented his Bay Village guest cottage to the couple, was a close friend. Eliot felt confident he wouldn’t have to worry about his new assistant’s loyalties.

***

The successes in court, stretched out over eighteen months, were impressive. Juries convicted Cadek, Harwood, Burns, Nebe, and Sergeant James Price. Lieutenant Thomas J. Brady pleaded guilty. The string of trials raised Eliot’s profile, already high, into the stratosphere. Unlike Flynn, average Clevelanders didn’t consider the safety department’s myriad investigations of the police worthless. In Eliot they saw a white knight galloping forth to save them from an entrenched corruption that had paralyzed the city for years. The safety director’s name dominated headlines week after week.
Reporters surrounded him when he went to lunch every day, asking question after question as he tried to quickly eat a sandwich at his favorite diner.

The newsmen weren’t the only ones who trailed around after the safety director. The same faces could be found outside court during every police-officer trial, desperate to catch a glimpse of the most popular man in Cleveland. The fans gathered three and four deep beside the front steps, as if waiting for a parade. A small, bald man, as blissful and anxious in his excitement as a penned-up collie, hopped in place whenever Eliot stepped out of the courthouse. A tall, middle-aged woman waved cheerfully at Eliot, her arms high above her head, only to fall back into the jostling crowd whenever he looked her way. Mayor Burton, just like everyone else, recognized how popular his safety director was.
When he began to gear up for his reelection campaign early in 1937, he made a note to himself in the margin of a memo: “Need Ness.”
*
Eliot, though he had never been involved in any political campaign before, would accede to the mayor’s requests and go out on the stump for him, always attracting huge crowds. Calling Burton “my boss” and “a great man,” he urged Clevelanders to vote for him. The mayor breezed to reelection.

With Burton safely ensconced in office, and the corruption convictions piling up, more than twenty senior police officers hurried into retirement before the graft investigation could turn their way. Many others decided to keep their heads down. They stopped taking gangsters’ money, stopped collecting protection dues from shop owners and other small businessmen. “
By now the entire department knew that the kid, Ness, was for real, and plenty tough,” recalled Porter, the
Plain Dealer
columnist.
Even the Ohio Supreme Court, after rejecting Harwood’s appeal, credited the professionalism of the man the newspapers were calling Cleveland’s “Boy Wonder.”

“Other [police corruption] cases are on their way up and there will be others to come,” said Chief Justice Carl V. Weygandt, responding to a question about the safety director after giving a speech at a businessmen’s association luncheon. “I want to comment on the ones we have decided. May I tell you that the members of the Supreme Court have commented repeatedly on the outstanding completeness and care with which this group of cases was prepared. It would greatly relieve the reviewing courts if they were to get more cases prepared with the same care and thoroughness as the group to which I am alluding.”

A few weeks after that statement, another Cleveland policeman went to trial, with Eliot, as always, observing the proceedings every day. Following
a week of testimony and arguments, a jury found thirty-nine-year-old patrolman Gaylord Stotts not guilty of strong-arming $240 in bribes from a bootlegger in 1927, the first acquittal in the corruption push.
When the judge read the verdict, an eerie quiet fell over the courtroom. Stotts, confused, leaned over to his attorney. “Did he say not guilty?”

Social Workers

W
ith the corruption prosecutions heading down the home stretch, Eliot began to change the debate. The city should support its police force, he argued. Police officers deserved respect—and better pay and equipment.

“
Please remember,” he told a group of businessmen at the Hotel Cleveland, “that, although some of the dirt has been coming to the surface here lately, there are 1,500 members of the police department, with only a few splotched by the dirt.” He added that funding for the police force was “completely inadequate,” that Cleveland had the “smallest force, proportionately, of any of the ten largest cities in the country, with the safety problems here more complex than in most of those cities.” Because of pay delays, many officers had been forced to move in with relatives, to “stave off grocers and resort to other distasteful means in keeping body and soul together.”

Eliot made a compelling case, but it didn’t work. The city was still broke. When the safety director went before the city council to lobby for an additional tax to raise $240,000 a year for the police and fire departments, he received a cold reception. The departments would remain underfunded, and they would continue to have too few officers and firefighters.

The situation frustrated him, but, once the gloom lifted, Eliot realized it also gave him a license to experiment. The only way to solve the funding problem for the police was to dramatically reorganize the department and rethink its methods. Staring him in the face was the opportunity that August Vollmer had been dreaming about for decades. Eliot had to create an entirely new, entirely modern police force: he had no other choice. He would change what it meant to be a big-city policeman.

From Cleveland’s founding, policing had been built around the patrolman walking a beat. That no longer could be the case. The department didn’t have enough bodies anymore to use foot power to cover a sprawling city with nearly a million people in it. Cleveland had boomed for decades before the Depression began to reverse its fortunes. The police force’s ranks
had never kept up with population and geographic growth. To address the manpower problem, Eliot abandoned the precinct system and reorganized the department into districts. He closed seven police stations. Officers increasingly would spend their shifts in cars. (
Eliot would rent a fleet of new cars because the city didn’t have the money for capital investments.)
Each patrol car would be equipped with a novelty: a two-way radio, hooked up to a centralized radio bureau—what Eliot insisted would become “the very nerve center of the Police Department.” No longer would beat cops have to hustle to the nearest Murphy call box, sometimes blocks from a crime scene.
Thirty-two new cars, Eliot announced, would “constitute the basic patrol, and they patrol 24 hours a day in three 8-hour shifts,” each guided by the radio bureau. The cars were painted bright colors to make them more visible. Some officers thought the tricolor scheme made the cars look ridiculous, but it worked. They were so distinctive that people noticed and remembered them, giving the impression that the cars were everywhere, all the time. Eliot also started a motorcycle unit and a mounted unit, both of which were partially funded through private sources. Indeed, he pursued every possible innovation that might save on personnel and overall costs: specially designated pursuit cars, high-powered binoculars to spot “thieves preying on parked autos,” Teletype updates sent regularly between station houses, motion-picture cameras “triggered automatically to catch bank robbers.” Eliot also directed David Cowles, the head of the scientific bureau, to buy the latest equipment for his lab and to ramp up ballistics work.

One of the most ambitious innovations—and the only one that was actually manpower-intensive—was Eliot’s crime-prevention campaign, which focused on young gang members. He didn’t care that most of his senior officers thought the idea foolish. Policemen tended to mock the new-wave academics who defined crime as a disease caused by an unhealthy environment, but Eliot took the social scientists seriously.
He thought policemen should be intimately involved in their community—“the policeman as social worker,” as August Vollmer put it. More than that, Eliot believed in redemption. People and lives could change, especially if they were young. He empathized with troubled kids from poor and broken homes. He wanted to save them.
As an experiment, he sent plainclothed officers, mostly new recruits, into the Tremont neighborhood south of downtown. Tremont was one of the worst pits in Cleveland: brutally ugly and rundown, with a juvenile delinquency rate three times higher than the
rest of the city. In short order, the officers identified forty-five youth gangs in the area.

One of the most fearsome gangs set up its headquarters in an alley. “
The leader is 24 years old, 5 ft. 5 in. tall, weighs 150 lbs., has blue eyes and chestnut hair and the upper part of his face is scarred from a knife wound,” a report to the safety director stated. “The gang’s principal infractions of law include car stealing, box car breaking, shop lifting, house and store breaking, at one time dope peddling, and a tendency to interfere with and to prostitute women and young girls.”

Another of the gangs called itself the Jefferson Club or Moxie’s Gang. “
They meet in a pool room,” a Tremont undercover officer reported. “They work in unison. They go out ten or fifteen in a group, expecting to eliminate opposition by force of their numbers. Their deeds are performed with precision. They are smart and when property is obtained it is quickly disposed of. Nothing is left on their hands for the Police to identify. . . . The leader is 6 feet 2 inches tall, has dark hair, dark eyes, says little and is very handy with a knife. Practically all members carry black jacks.”

For years, the police had more or less left these youth gangs alone, pursuing individuals for specific crimes but rarely focusing on the gangs themselves. (The Mob mostly left them alone, too, deciding they were too volatile to co-opt or use for recruiting purposes.) Eliot decided he would break this pattern, but not in the way anyone expected. He toured Tremont, dodging debris thrown from upper-floor windows and shouldering through the rotted doors of buildings that were abandoned or should have been.
He cornered gang members and invited them to a local church for a meeting and a free dinner. On the designated night, dozens of boys showed up. It didn’t go well: the leaders of two rival gangs fell into an argument, and one pulled out a gun and shot the other in the hip right in front of the safety director.

Eliot didn’t give up. He held more meetings with the gangs, where he told war stories straight from police files, getting the kids laughing and nodding. In his talks, he gave special attention to the story of Joe Filkowski, a legend among the Tremont crews.
A tough kid from the Flats, Filkowski’s criminal career spanned fifteen years, until he was convicted in 1932 of murdering a man during a payroll robbery on the West Side.
Eliot, the scientific policeman, brought out a ledger. He showed the young gangsters that, taking into account the amount of money Filkowski was
known to have stolen (and then doubling it) and the amount of time he’d spent in prison, he had “earned” seventeen cents an hour for his criminal career.

The presentation worked. Eliot was constitutionally shy, but somehow he could project a swaggering confidence—and irresistible charm—when he needed to. This was especially the case with kids. “
He had an instinct about children and an understanding of their needs,” Elisabeth Seaver would attest years later. He didn’t see himself in these hardened, rebellious boys: he’d never been poor and desperate. What he saw was lost potential, paths never to be taken. They broke his heart.

During his time as Berkeley’s police chief,
Vollmer had kept a city map on his office wall on which he stuck a pin for each juvenile delinquent in the small town. The pin would be removed when the “problem child” was placed in an institution or graduated from school. Eliot now did the same for the gangs of Tremont. He knew his map would be much harder to clear than his mentor’s, so he started by offering the gangs a “deal.” He wanted to establish boys’ clubs and Boy Scout troops for the younger gang members and other boys in the neighborhood. If the older boys got behind the effort—meaning they didn’t harass kids for joining the Scouts or for going to the clubs—he’d help them find jobs and promised that the city would build baseball diamonds and basketball courts in the area. When Chief Matowitz heard about this offer, he let out a string of expletives. He thought it was crazy to go into business with gang members.

Tremont’s youth gangs weren’t Eliot’s only passion project. Along with its high crime rate, Cleveland was the second deadliest city in the country for motorists. Automobile accidents were a mundane, unsexy urban problem, but a serious one, and Eliot took it up with enthusiasm.
He established an accident-prevention bureau and put in charge a veteran, respected officer, Edward Donohue. The bureau immediately launched an ambitious program: “The Three E’s of Safety—Enforcement, Engineering and Education.” As with everything he undertook, Eliot committed himself completely to the task. He hired a traffic engineer from the Northwestern University Traffic Safety Institute and went with him to the city’s most dangerous traffic spots to take notes. As a result, curbs were rounded, safety islands built, traffic signals installed. The bureau equipped “manslaughter squads” with cameras and other gear, such as instruments to measure skid marks at crash scenes. Conviction rates in traffic-accident cases quickly
doubled, reaching 96 percent. The bureau launched a public-relations campaign to educate Clevelanders on safe driving, an effort that went above and beyond that of any other city. Donohue started special programs in schools and civic clubs. He and Eliot urged churches to give safety sermons. And everywhere on the roads drivers saw signs: “Cleveland Values Your Life—Protect It” and “100 Are Alive Today.” Eliot probably went a bit far when he ordered patrols to randomly stop cars to test their brakes and lights, but few drivers protested.

The animating force behind all of this activity—the safety campaign, the youth-gang outreach, the binoculars and two-way radios—was one clear idea: that law enforcement should be put on a “scientific” footing in Cleveland, not just in the lab but in every aspect of the police department’s work. “
At the end of the month or at a designated time, statistical records of crime, indicating the volume, the nature, the location, the time of happening, and the particular kind of crime, will be analyzed by the Captain in charge of a district, the lieutenant who may be in general supervisory command of several zones, and the officers comprising the zone and adjacent zones,” Eliot wrote in a typical directive. The idea was to flood trouble spots with officers and to use lonely patrol cars to cover larger, quieter areas. Reporters who covered the police were uniformly impressed with the changes in the department—and they were quick to credit the safety director.
Philip Porter wrote that Eliot “looked less like a detective or private eye than anyone could imagine. He had a baby face, a soft voice, a disarming youthful ingenuousness. But he had a brilliant mind.” Command officers in the department, though they mostly liked the safety director personally, tended to be a little less enthusiastic about the upheaval. “
He was not too opinionated and had some good ideas for the police department, although some of them were naïve,” recalled Frank Story, who would go on to become Cleveland’s police chief in the 1950s.

However naïve some of the ideas were, the effects of Eliot’s efforts proved striking.
An internal history of the Cleveland Police Department from the 1960s described the reorganization under Eliot as “the most significant in the history of the City of Cleveland. Nothing like this had ever been done before.” It added: “To Cleveland belongs the credit of being the first large city in the country to substitute a full motorized radio-controlled patrol system for the old foot-patrol method of policing. . . . Cleveland’s experience has proved that the substitution of the zone car for foot patrol not only reduced enormously the cost of police protection but it reduced crime to
limits not considered possible back in the 1920s.”
*
But Eliot didn’t need to wait for the judgment of history.
Just eighteen months after he began instituting his changes, crime in the city fell more than anyone could have hoped for—25 percent—while arrests and convictions rose 20 percent. And in 1938, the National Safety Council would name Cleveland the “safest big city in America,” after the city cut its traffic deaths nearly in half. Requests for the safety director to give talks about his successes came in from towns and cities across the country. Eliot would turn down almost all of them. He already had too much to do.