Eliot Ness (23 page)

Eliot would make this case time and again throughout 1937. As he prepared to directly tackle the Mob, he knew he would need the public’s support. That meant getting even people who liked to gamble to back a gambling crackdown.

“
Two hundred thousand dollars a week is poured into the coffers of racket bosses in Cleveland as their ‘cut’ from gambling alone,” he told the Advertising Club in another speech on the subject. He informed the ad executives that the policy and clearing-house racket had “grown one
hundred percent since relief payments began,” that gangsters sucked money out of the economy by taking “from the poor boys, from persons on relief,” and that the government saw none of that money in tax revenue. He made a point of differentiating between a card game among friends and Mob-controlled gambling. “
The mild, unorganized and personal forms of gambling,” he said, were generally harmless, but “when organized crime outfits run gambling, it’s anything but harmless. Organized gambling activity is always controlled by racketeers and supplies them with heavy revenue with which to carry on their sinister, anti-social operations.”

The Mob used the cash it pulled down from gambling to muscle into legitimate enterprises, he pointed out. It laundered money by strong-arming businesses into putting hoodlums and prostitutes on the payroll. It took over unions, collecting dues from members and controlling prices for services and products. The corruption moved like a diseased fish from the gutting line to the finest restaurant, reaching all the way to the city’s highest public officials. Eliot had seen in Chicago what happened when the Mob took effective control of a city’s government and economy. Whatever your personal views of gambling, he told the city’s business leaders and opinion makers, you had to put them aside in the effort to stop the gangs.

***

Eliot planned to conduct a methodical investigation, as always, but not against one gangster at a time, as he had with corrupt police officers. He wanted to bring a massive single indictment against every leader in the sprawling organization, to sever the Mob’s head with one great swing of the ax. And he was determined to do this despite the inconvenient fact that Ohio did not have a conspiracy statute like the federal law the FBI used for such cases.

Eliot knew he would have to infiltrate the Mob to really get anywhere, but he also understood that insinuating one of his own men into the gang would be dangerous and time-consuming. So instead, he sought out double agents—gangsters he had something on and could manipulate. His decision to rely on these criminals led to spirited debate between his team and the county prosecutors. “
He got information from informers,” one former assistant prosecutor said years later. “He was a great believer in them. But you can get a paid spy to tell you anything.” An investigator on Eliot’s team would insist: “Those informers were very important. They risked their lives to do the right thing.”

One of those paid spies was a former numbers runner named Oscar
Williams. To get Williams to talk, Eliot promised to hide him out of town for as long as necessary, and to pay him $35 a week for living expenses. Justice didn’t come cheap in Cleveland.
In one interview session, Williams told Eliot about a time three thugs—Lonardo, Alex “Shondor” Birns, and Joe Artwell—kicked their way into a backroom game, wielding revolvers and sawed-off shotguns. They thumped Williams’s partner in the face and, as he lay bleeding on the floor, threatened to kill him on the spot. “I ought to smash your head,” Birns snarled when Williams tried to talk his way out of the situation. The smiling, slightly delirious look on Birns’s face would stick with Williams for the rest of his life.

Shondor Birns, Eliot was discovering, was unique in Cleveland. Like the most popular kid in school, Birns seemed to have immunity from the group loyalty expected of everyone else. He somehow managed to successfully cross between various rival factions in the city’s underworld. Everyone wanted the guy around.

He was even popular with the average Clevelander.
Birns cultivated a pleasant, roguish public image and often gave interviews to reporters. The press labeled him “Cleveland’s Public Nuisance No. 1” and “Cleveland’s number one racketeer,” but most people tossed around the appellations with a smile. Birns’s own smile frequently lit up his bland, Slavic face. He was a “dapper extrovert” known for wearing a beautiful woman on each arm and firing off a hyena-like cackle at popular nightclubs. Though only in his midthirties, he was hailed as the most arrested man in Cleveland. Over the years he’d been pinched for robbery, assault, bribery, and attempted murder, among other crimes, but there hadn’t been a conviction since he was a teenager. One anti-Burton politician cracked that he was “untouchable.”

Eliot decided to harass Birns at every opportunity. When he found out that Cleveland’s most arrested man spent winters in Florida, he contrived to get him booted from the Sunshine State for failing to register as a felon. As soon as Birns arrived back in Cleveland, police came calling. “Boy, I hardly had a chance to take my clothes out of the car before they picked me up,” he said at Central Police Station. Reporters, notified by the safety director, were waiting for him as he came out of the building.

“Where’s the sun tan,” one hack asked him.

“Sun tan?” Birns said. “You can’t get any sun tan when you have to run around behind palm trees all day to keep the police away from you.”

“Say, we’ll quote you like that,” another reporter said. “That’s the nuts.”

“Yeah, the coconuts,” Birns joked.

The gangster knew the Cleveland authorities had tipped off police in Miami, and he wasn’t happy about it.

“Why can’t they leave a guy alone?” he said. “I can’t go anywhere without being picked up. They don’t give you any break. Oh, well, it was getting cold in Florida, anyway.”

Eliot surely enjoyed seeing Birns’s whiny complaints in the papers the next day. It wasn’t as good as a conviction, but it would do for now.

***

In the second half of 1937, Eliot began to increase the frequency of police raids on gambling halls and bookie joints. Poker, off-track betting, bingo, policy, slot machines: raiders found every variety of gambling in back rooms and basements across Cleveland. Gambling appeared to be the city’s favorite pastime.

The new year brought a breakthrough.
On January 6, 1938, police took over the central office of five big policy and clearing-house games in a building on Euclid Avenue. The hero of the day was Lieutenant Ernest Molnar, one of the department’s rising stars. He stormed the room with two young officers, but he didn’t just arrest the men inside and confiscate the “top sheets” and accounting books. He sat down at the phone bank and, for more than an hour, answered calls, leaving the Cleveland Mob in the dark about its own rackets.

It was a smart move, costing gangsters many thousands of dollars more than if Molnar had simply shut the room down. Information, after all, was power. Even with telephones and telegrams, the straight dope remained hard to come by; communication could be slow and unreliable, and facts difficult to verify. This made the criminal network that linked outfits in various cities extremely valuable. The interval between, say, the end of a horse race in New York and the public dissemination of results in Cleveland offered myriad possibilities for making money. One key call that Molnar took came in from Pittsburgh, with the caller asking for Frank Hoge.

“I told the man in Pittsburgh that I would take the number, and he said, ‘The stock number today is 098 and the exchange number is 152,’” Molnar told reporters. Today, the lieutenant boasted, gangsters who took advantage of information would lose big.

The everyday gambler, of course, also lost. Those who had already put down bets weren’t getting their money back just because the results went missing. Eliot could make something of this, too, in the public-relations
war against the gambling syndicate. Few of the city’s thousands of gamblers had much cash to spare for bets. Jobs remained difficult to find, and government relief had dried up. The state of Ohio, like the city of Cleveland, was effectively broke. The legislature in Columbus bickered over what to do about it, while in Cleveland some sixty-five thousand families on relief listened to their stomachs gurgle and grind. On the same day that Lieutenant Molnar made his big bust, Bishop Joseph Schrembs of the Cleveland Catholic diocese sent thumping telegrams to Governor Martin L. Davey and the state Senate committee on taxes and relief. “
Cleveland situation very critical,” it read. “Rural districts may smugly smile but day of retribution sure to come. French royalists at Versailles said to have laughed at the Paris population, saying, ‘Feed them cake.’ Paid with their heads for their ribaldry. Remember, empty stomachs and frozen bodies and evicted families do not reason. I beg of you stop bandying words and vote sufficient relief.”

In the days that followed, the legislature managed to pass a makeshift relief bill that put the burden on local governments and a hoped-for sale of bonds, and the Cleveland City Council pledged the city’s payroll as security for food orders. When Clevelanders received their belated relief checks, however, not everyone rushed to the grocer. Queues also formed for neighborhood policy and clearing-house games. Gamblers refused to be shamed into giving up their hobby. They needed the distraction from their lives. A few even went public with their dismay at the safety director’s crackdown, including one anonymous reader of the
Cleveland Press
.

To the Editor of the
Press
:

I play the horses. Sucker? You play the stock market. Sucker? Well, maybe and maybe not.

The stock market is in the same category with horse racing investments. They’re both gambling to some people. I envy the market investor. He doesn’t have to mingle with a bunch of rats and slink around like a rat himself. I’m tired of it. And so are the other two out of every five adults in this city. We are all tired of the stigma under which we must play the ponies.

And I don’t have to tell you that Mr. Ness is badly mistaken if he thinks for one minute that he or anyone else can stop booking in this or any other city. Where one is stopped two start.

The state and city governments are passing up a sweet revenue. I don’t think I’ll ever see the day when they license bookmakers, but if they do then,
and then only, will bookmaking racketeers be wiped out. Why? Because now if you make a sizable bet you’re never sure the bookmaker will be around when time comes to collect. Licensed bookies couldn’t do that because of the large bond they would be required to post. The horse players assured of honest dealing would go to the licensed bookie (of which there would be a limited number) and illegal booking will die of its own accord. The state and city would have another source of revenue and everybody will be happy. So help me.

Pony Boy

Eliot liked this letter. He had long believed that gambling should be legalized—as long as it was tightly regulated, like the stock market now was.
He snipped Pony Boy’s letter out of the paper and saved it.

Against Racketeers

A
t the same time that Eliot’s drive against the Mob was picking up steam, he also took on another challenge: union racketeering. He decided to target two of the most powerful men in the city: Donald A. Campbell, president of the Painters District Council, and Campbell’s partner John E. McGee, president of the Laborers District Council.

His interest in labor corruption wasn’t new.
Back in September 1936, Eliot submitted an eighty-one-page report to the county prosecutor on a “shakedown racket” at the Northern Ohio Food Terminal, where “a gang in the guise of a labor union” extracted bribes to unload trucks. Those who refused to pay—or dared to unload their own trucks—faced severe beatings. Eliot soon learned that the labor shenanigans went far beyond the Food Terminal. Many of the city’s labor leaders, including Campbell and McGee, had gained their positions “through sluggings, shootings and intimidation,” and they ran rackets that rivaled any that the Mayfield Road Mob controlled.

Eliot had met Campbell shortly after becoming safety director, running into him by chance on a downtown street. At the time, he was investigating the attempted murder of the labor leader Frank Converse. New in the job and fishing around for potential allies, he asked Campbell if he knew who did it. The thirty-eight-year-old painters’ union boss reacted as if he’d been slapped. He told Eliot that he should know the answer to his own question and walked away from him. Eliot, his antenna raised, returned to the office and opened a file on Campbell.

“
Being union officials gives Campbell and McDonnell a nice ‘in,’” Eliot told Neil McGill after beginning an investigation of Campbell and painters-union business agent James McDonnell. “They can put ‘stop work’ orders on the builders, or make things otherwise pretty damn nasty for them. Their approach is always the same—pay . . . or else!”
He believed Campbell, McDonnell, and McGee had extorted millions of dollars from businessmen and kept hundreds of their union members from working during the very worst of the economic depression.

McGill didn’t need to be told about Campbell and McGee. Cleveland was a union town. That meant nothing got built, torn down, repaired, moved, installed, painted, or unloaded without organized labor having its say about it. The county prosecutor’s office had targeted Campbell and McGee back in 1933 and ’34, when Campbell was head of the glaziers’ union and the city was enduring an endless wave of window smashings. Cullitan talked Chief Matowitz into putting six officers, working in two-man shifts twenty-four hours a day, on the union leaders. Campbell and McGee mocked the move. One morning, the swaggering labor bosses hired a five-piece orchestra and put them in an open touring sedan. Like the musicians, the union men dressed in formal wear, including top hats and silk gloves. They climbed into a second open sedan. Off the two cars went, with the sure knowledge that the policemen on their tail would follow dutifully along. The orchestra played “Me and My Shadow,” over and over, as the three cars—Campbell and McGee’s, the musicians’, and the policemen’s—slowly lapped downtown Cleveland, with a guffawing Campbell and McGee waving and tossing candy to people who stopped to watch. The police soon ended the round-the-clock surveillance. Cullitan never brought charges.

But that was then. Eliot would not be so easily scared off. As with the police-corruption investigation, he went after the victims.
Over several months, the safety director and investigators Keith Wilson, Tom Clothey, and Dick Jones followed the trail around the country: to Toledo, Columbus, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Saint Louis. They garnered testimony from dozens of businessmen who had left Cleveland because of the constant shakedowns. They learned that the state-of-the-art, nine-thousand-seat arena that businessman A. C. Sutphin built for his American Hockey League team, the Cleveland Barons, had been held up for ransom. “
These people had us just where they wanted us,” admitted Carl Lezeus, the arena’s general manager. When the arena’s grand opening was imminent, with only the painting and installation of seats left to do, the union workers suddenly went missing. They wouldn’t show up to finish the job until Campbell received a $1,000 bribe. “A postponement would have cost us a lot of money,” Lezeus told Eliot. “We did the only thing we could do—paid the $1,000.”

Eliot loved this part of the job.
A critic once described Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, one of Eliot’s heroes since childhood, as “a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and
bull-dog.” That description fit Eliot, too. And as with the fictional Holmes, there could be no personal life, no interior life, so long as the game was afoot. Night after night Edna ate dinner alone as Eliot tracked down one more witness or followed the money through one more pair of hands. Eliot personally convinced Vernon Stouffer of the popular Stouffer’s restaurant to cooperate, even though the restaurateur, worried about the impact on his business, had refused to help Cullitan four years earlier. Campbell and McGee had made Stouffer cough up $1,200 before they would allow union glaziers and painters to finish work they’d begun at Stouffer’s restaurant. Campbell later came back for an extra ten bucks. Stouffer asked for a receipt for the sawbuck so he could put it on the company expense account.
Campbell snarled, “Go to hell. I don’t give receipts.” Once Stouffer stepped forward, several other signature Cleveland retailers—the owners of the Samuel stores, Lerner stores, and the Avon Shop—followed his lead and sat down with the safety director. “
When I approached them they could hardly believe that a cleanup was going on,” Eliot later said.

When Cullitan convened a grand jury to sift through Eliot’s evidence, the labor leaders realized they faced a serious threat this time.
On December 1, 1937, McGee stood up at a packed Cleveland Federation of Labor meeting and declared that the union’s members had nothing to worry about. No one could convict him of anything, because he hadn’t done anything wrong, he insisted. “The grand jury has been there three weeks and nothing has come out,” he said. “And I don’t think anything is going to come out.”

Then McGee changed the subject, bringing up a recent steel strike in the city.
Workers had violently struck Republic Steel Corporation over the summer, and Eliot, by following Mayor Burton’s policy of “strict neutrality,” became a union villain during the fight. It had been an ugly face-off during long, brutally hot days. Early on, Eliot had taken Burton with him to shut down an airfield the company was using to resupply “scab” workers. He expected to be hailed as a labor hero, but instead, strikers staking out the field set upon the safety director’s car, rocking it and banging on it so furiously that Eliot had to wave his service revolver to get the men to back off. The union could never trust a Republican administration. After Eliot sent in policemen to stop strikers from beating replacement workers on their way into the mills, hundreds of union men marched on city hall. Standing below Eliot’s office window, they chanted “Traitor! Traitor!” and unfurled a huge banner that read, “The Police and Militia Can’t Beat This Strike.” Eliot stepped out on his balcony to see what was going on and was met by a
thunderclap of boos that grew and grew until he disappeared back into his office. Now, four months later, McGee understood that attacking the most popular man in Cleveland could work—at least with a union audience. He told of a recent meeting in which the sniveling, two-faced safety director tried to curry favor with McGee and turn him against Campbell. “McGee, I like you. I’ve always liked you,” Eliot supposedly said. At which point the heroic labor leader cut him off. “I don’t like you, and you don’t like me,” he sneered. “Let’s cut that stuff out.” Done with his reenactment, McGee threw back his head and held up a fist. He declared that Eliot Ness was trying to destroy the union for daring to have “aggressive leadership.” The hall roared to its feet.

Campbell, perhaps trying to reel in the expectations his partner was building up, followed with his own speech. He said there would be indictments, because “you can’t find a grand jury that would have guts enough to return a no-bill. We’ll be indicted on general principles, and the prosecutor won’t need any evidence in court. All he’ll have to do is bring in copies of the newspapers. If we go into that jug in Columbus [the state penitentiary], we’ll go in with a smile because we have put thousands to work.” The hall again erupted in cheers, and the celebration carried out into the street after the meeting broke up.

Eliot had spies in the hall taking notes on what was said. He realized that attacking Campbell and McGee personally would only build up their credibility among union men.
When asked about the charge that he was against unions, he said, simply, “I am against racketeers in labor. I am against racketeers in the police department. I am against racketeers.”

***

Campbell was right: the grand jury didn’t have the guts to return a no-bill. He and McGee were indicted later in December. The grand jury charged them with “exacting tribute” from builders and business owners by threatening to withhold union labor. (McDonnell was also indicted but would be tried separately.)

Campbell and McGee came to trial in February 1938. The two men, staring straight ahead from the defendants’ table, seemed stunned by the amount of evidence rolled out against them. Eliot’s team had tracked down just about everyone the labor leaders had ever come into contact with. With Eliot sitting with the prosecutors, Cullitan and assistant prosecutor Charles McNamee showed that contractors and business owners often had to pay thousands of dollars beyond the honest cost of the work to get their
projects done. As a result, the number of building permits in Cleveland had plummeted far below that of similar-size cities around the country. McNamee told the jury that before Campbell had schemed his way into a leadership position of the glaziers’ union, he’d been arrested repeatedly for picking pockets and stealing cars. McGee, for his part, had been arrested more than twenty times.

Vernon Stouffer dominated the trial’s second day. The respected restaurateur, with his low, resonant voice, told of the defendants shaking him down for hundreds of dollars and then coming back time and again for more. Jurors watched the witness with rapt attention as he laid out how Campbell and McGee held his business hostage. McGee’s attorney, William Corrigan, realized his client was in deep trouble. After Stouffer stepped down, Corrigan rose, straightened his suit jacket, and dramatically asked for a mistrial. Eliot Ness, he declared, was putting his client in a “precarious position.” Judge Alva R. Corlett sent the jury out of the room. The safety director’s celebrity, Corrigan continued, made his presence at the prosecutors’ table prejudicial. “This is not an ordinary trial,” Corrigan said. “This—”

Corlett cut him off. “These defendants are getting the same kind of trial, as far as this court is concerned, as any humble defendant,” he said. “It is just an ordinary trial to the court.”

“But for the city it is not,” Corrigan insisted. “Here’s the safety director sitting right here. Never in my thirty years’ experience have I ever seen—”

“He doesn’t impress the court,” the judge insisted.

“But how about the jury?” Corrigan asked.

Eliot unconsciously turned to look at the empty jury box, a small smile inching across his face. Judge Corlett followed the safety director’s gaze, but he quickly snapped back to Corrigan and waved for him to sit down. He would allow Ness to remain in the courtroom and to sit wherever he wanted, he said. But in a sop to the defense, he told the jurors when they returned that he hoped they would be “no more impressed by Eliot Ness than by anyone else in this courtroom.” The directive caused a wave of laughter to roll through the room. No more impressed by Director Ness than anyone else? The idea was ridiculous. Flustered by the response, the judge banged his gavel. He had bailiffs remove those spectators he deemed to be laughing the hardest.

***

The court proceedings dragged on, but they didn’t get any better for the defendants. In March, after a twenty-four-day trial, the jury of six men and six women convicted Campbell and McGee of extortion.
Cutting off requests for bail pending appeal, Corlett immediately sentenced the pair to serve one to five years. Officers hustled the union leaders, dazed by the verdict, out of the courtroom and into a car for the drive to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. Eliot saw the men to the waiting sedan, and gave the roof a satisfied tap as it pulled away from the curb. Three deputies accompanied Campbell and McGee on the ride down to the state pen. They refused the new convicts’ appeals to stop for something to eat or even to relieve themselves. Arriving at the prison at 7:30, the union bosses stepped out of the car amid a flurry of popping flashbulbs, their eyes betraying the unease of men coming to terms with a terrible new reality. They spent the night in a holding cell, awaiting their prison clothes and numbers. Neither managed to sleep.

The next day in the
Cleveland News
, a reader cheekily wrote in a letter to the editor: “
I was one of the spectators when McGee and Campbell made their famous auto parade through the downtown streets, and I recall that each one of them wore a brand-new plug hat. Can you tell me if either gentleman wore his plug hat on the recent trip through the streets of Columbus to the penitentiary?” The same edition of the paper brought news that the Miller United Shoe Company would remodel its fourteen Cleveland-area stores. The company, wary of having to deal with Campbell and McGee, had held off on doing the work for years.

Three days after the convictions, Mayor Burton wrote to Eliot. It was as effusive as the reserved, buttoned-up mayor got.

Dear Eliot:

Confirming and developing my oral statement immediately following my receipt of the news of the conviction of Campbell and McGee, this letter is to express to you my official and personal appreciation of the exceptional public service which you rendered in this case.

This case and the long investigation leading up to it has dealt with one of the worst conditions in Cleveland. From the first day that you joined us, you have in a quiet and modest way led the attack on this evil. The conviction of Campbell and McGee marks a major victory in the battle and I believe marks the turning point in our campaign to drive out the rackets. . . .