Eliot Ness (28 page)

Slowly, he won over many of his critics. Despite facing severe budget problems, the city council found money to build baseball diamonds and basketball courts in the most depressed neighborhoods in the city. When Eliot’s revamp of the police force left the department with a handful of abandoned precinct houses, the safety director convinced the city to turn them over to the privately funded Boys Town. Kids from the neighborhood ran the former police stations as clubs and activity centers, using a system of self-government provided by the safety department. The department paid for the utilities and provided a security guard at each building.

More significant still, the crime-prevention bureau followed through on Eliot’s promise to the Tremont gangs by launching its own youth-employment agency. Establishing programs with some of the city’s largest companies, the bureau placed more than five hundred boys in three years. It also worked with the federal Works Progress Administration to create and fund a vocational training curriculum, with some of the classes held at the former precinct houses.
Next Eliot helped start up Boy Scout troops in the worst neighborhoods, with police officers and former gang leaders as Scout masters. Eliot became a troop leader himself. Having cops and former gang leaders as Scout masters, he said, “overcame any feeling that scouting was ‘baby’ stuff and gave the activity an additional attraction.” The Scouts had given up on Cleveland’s inner-city neighborhoods years before, after youth gangs beat up many of their boys, often tearing the uniforms off their backs. Now there were waiting lists for troops.

The success was undeniable. In three years, juvenile crime in the city dropped by more than 60 percent. Mayor Burton became a true believer in what he called “the experimental field of crime prevention.” He praised Eliot as the effort’s “originator” and leading light in Cleveland. He even began to parrot his safety director’s scientific-policing language. “For centuries, we have fought crime primarily by seeking to catch the criminal after the crime has been committed and then through his punishment to
lead or drive him and others to good citizenship,” the mayor said in his keynote address to the 1938 Rotary International Convention in San Francisco. “Today, the greater range of operation and greater number of criminals argue that we must deal with the floodwaters of crime as we now deal with the destructive flood of our great rivers. We must prevent the flood by study, control and diversion of the floodwaters at their respective sources. To do this we must direct the streams of growing boys in each community away from fields of crime to those of good citizenship.”

***

Eliot couldn’t have been surprised when, six months after privately calling out Lieutenant Molnar on his collusion with the Mob, new allegations about the officer arose.
A bar owner, Anthony Zappone, told the state liquor control board that Molnar had targeted him for harassment. The board wasn’t investigating Molnar; it was determining whether to renew Zappone’s liquor license after a pinball machine had been found in his bar. Pinball machines, along with all other forms of gambling, were illegal in Cleveland. Zappone brought up his dealings with Molnar as an indictment of the entire regulatory system in the city.

“For three and a half years I have been persecuted by Molnar because I refused to put him on my payroll,” he testified before the liquor board. “He is supposed to be a great raider, but I can show you a hundred and five bookie joints that are operating and twenty-six ‘vest pocket’ slot machines in places where liquor is sold.” He added: “There have been twenty-five or thirty convictions in Municipal Court for having pinball machines in cafes. Why is it that I am the only one of the proprietors who is called before the board because of a conviction? Molnar saw to it that I was called here. For years he has been trying to get me. His men come into my place and chase customers out. They come in after closing hours and try to get my bartenders to sell them liquor so they can get a charge that will put me out of business.”

On June 6, with Zappone’s charges appearing in all of the papers, Eliot ordered a departmental inquiry into Molnar. But the bar owner had used up all of his courage before the liquor control board. When police interviewed Zappone about the allegations, with Molnar present, he recanted his earlier testimony. He said he’d been misunderstood. The police department cleared Molnar of any wrongdoing.

Distracted, Eliot let it go. Less than a week after he ordered the official investigation into Molnar’s conduct, police found Angelo Lonardo,
arresting him at an apartment in suburban Shaker Heights.
When detectives brought Lonardo into the county jail, Eliot was waiting for him. The safety director personally interrogated the numbers king, but nothing would come of it. Lonardo, lounging in an expensive green suit and two-toned shoes, insisted he didn’t know the whereabouts of the remaining fugitives. Nine major players remained at large, including Little Angelo Scerria.

In July, with his key witnesses in hiding on the safety department dole but any potential trials on hold, Eliot opened another front in the policy war. He worked with police from the town of Bedford Township to arrest Myrtle Taylor, Frank Hoge (Frank was out on bail on the April charges), and Frank’s brother, among others, on entirely new gambling charges. Fritchey, meanwhile, was still doing his part for both Eliot and the
Cleveland Press
, hectoring known gambling associates about the whereabouts of Scerria and the others. “
Why doesn’t the
Press
go after the legalized racketeers in Washington?” Abe Pickus asked him before slamming a door in his face.

***

Late in 1940, Michael Harwood walked out of the London Prison Farm near Columbus after serving two years and seven months. The other convicted former police officers would soon join him back in the free world. For Eliot, it must have been like seeing the ghost of Christmas past—the successes of his early years come back to taunt him. Such high-profile victories were increasingly difficult to come by.

After four years of thrills, Eliot had settled into a routine. Waiting for his policy fugitives to surface, he did his best to fill time with small-scale investigations.
He arrested Howell Wright, a member of the Cleveland Library board, for extracting bribes from binderies that hoped to secure or hold onto the library’s business. Wright was convicted and sentenced to two to twenty years. Eliot also went after the city’s marijuana dealers, recruiting a young female high school teacher to work undercover for him. “
She’s real sharp, knows her way around,” he enthused to McGill. He would net convictions of two large-scale pushers and guilty pleas from three other dealers who turned state’s witness. The teacher wanted to keep working for Eliot, but Evaline, jealous of the woman, put the kibosh on that.

Early in 1940, Francis Sweeney had popped up again. He checked out of the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home to visit an ailing niece in a Cleveland hospital. Cowles sent Merylo and Zalewski to interview him, to make sure Sweeney realized that the police knew his every move. This appears to be the first time the torso case’s lead detectives had heard the name Francis
Sweeney; Eliot had never shared the safety department’s files on the doctor. “
During our questioning, Dr. Sweeney was pacing the floor forward and back, as though he were dictating a business letter,” Merylo wrote in his report. He added that he did not consider Sweeney a suspect in the torso murders; he believed the doctor was just one more kook. Eliot took the report as a sign of success. Merylo described Sweeney as “fat and soft,” “delicate,” and not “the type of person” who could overpower, kill, and dismember a man. To Eliot, the report proved that Sweeney had lost his murderous edge in the two years since the safety department had targeted him. The Mad Butcher hadn’t struck since 1938, and Clevelanders were beginning to forget about him. Eliot made sure Sweeney returned to the veterans’ home in Sandusky and then put the case out of his mind, too. Soon, Chief Matowitz would take Merylo and Zalewski off the torso case and put them back in the regular homicide rotation. The torso murders were officially over.

Despite these successes, Eliot’s inability to track down the remaining Mob fugitives weighed on him—and his reputation. The city council and the Civil Service Commission had become increasingly hostile to the safety department’s budget, with its padded “common labor” expenditures for witness protection and the Unknowns.
Eliot told his investigators they might have to find other jobs in the coming year. Considering this possibility, his assistant Bob Chamberlin began encouraging Eliot to go after a new job himself. The previous fall Mayor Burton had run for the U.S. Senate and, with Eliot’s support in Cleveland, won a thumping victory. Before leaving office, he appointed the city’s little-known law director, Edward Blythin, to finish out his term as mayor. Chamberlin told Eliot that the appointment was Burton’s way of encouraging Eliot to run for the office in 1941. The Welsh-born Blythin’s slurry accent and bookish personality made him ill-suited to being anything but a placeholder mayor. Chamberlin believed that if Eliot declared himself a candidate early, the Republican machine would back him and the Democrats would essentially concede the race, offering up little more than token opposition. Another friend, municipal court judge and Democrat Frank Lausche, also urged him to run, insisting he would win in a walk. But Eliot waved away the suggestion. Evaline recalled it becoming a kind of game Eliot and Lausche played when they got together for drinks or dinner. “
Eliot would tell Frank that he ought to run for mayor and Frank would insist that Eliot run. I never thought that Eliot was seriously interested in politics. He was not a political person.”
Jack Kennon, a longtime Cleveland reporter, believed politics bored the safety
director. He considered Eliot a detective in temperament as well as training. “The constant excitement of his job is what keeps him there and is one chief reason the mayoralty post has no appeal for Ness,” he wrote.

Unlike Eliot, Lausche was a political person. He’d become publicly known in the city by vocally supporting Eliot’s gambling crackdown, signing off on warrants for many of the city’s highest profile policy operators. When Eliot declined to run for mayor, Lausche jumped into the race, and he breezed to the Democratic nomination. Eliot was close with Lausche personally, but in the general election he felt duty-bound to support the Republican Blythin, who was his boss and represented the continuation of the Burton administration. When Lausche won and decided to keep Eliot in the safety director’s job, it caused a major break between the new mayor and the head of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.

Eliot tried to stay out of it, and to lower his profile. He turned his attention to the fire department, asking for new firefighting equipment and funding for a training school. The proposal didn’t go anywhere, because a month after the election, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, slinging the United States into the Second World War. Within weeks, Chamberlin, Wilson, and Clothey—Eliot’s closest friends in the safety department—headed for Washington, DC, or boot camp. Mayor Lausche was a friend, too, but Eliot recognized that the new mayor couldn’t support him like Burton had. The city council finally brought the ax down on his budget, ending the era of the Unknowns. It was official: the fun was gone.

L’Affaire Ness

A
t 4:45 on an icy March morning in 1942, Eliot and Evaline hurtled down Bulkley Boulevard, heading home after a long night of drinking at the Hotel Hollenden. The couple was laughing, with Evaline telling her husband about how she had “told off” a rude reporter, when the car began to slide. Eliot didn’t realize what was happening at first. He pumped the brake, but it didn’t do any good. The car crossed into the oncoming lane. Eliot shut his eyes against a sudden glare of light.

The impact slammed Evaline against the passenger-side door. Eliot cracked his face against the steering wheel, loosening his front teeth. He then spun into the door, his elbow cracking against the handle. When the car came to a rest, Eliot turned to find his wife slumped down in her seat, unconscious. He frantically shook her until she opened her eyes. She groggily insisted she was all right, that she just had the wind knocked out of her.

Eliot climbed out of the car to check on the other driver. Robert Sims, a twenty-one-year-old machinist at the Addressograph-Multigraph plant, appeared to be OK. His knee hurt, he said, that was all. He’d find out later the kneecap was broken.

Eliot told Sims to stay in the vehicle; he was going to move his own car off the road and then return. He eased the sedan down Bulkley a few hundred feet to an open area. He walked back to the crash site, where he found Sims’s car on the side of the road, empty, the door hanging open. Another car appeared out of the early-morning gloom, inching along. The driver told him that a motorist had taken Sims to the Fairview Park Hospital. Eliot, wiping blood from his mouth, thanked the man and walked back to his auto. Evaline was still groggy—from drink or the accident, or both. She insisted on being taken home, not to the hospital. She then passed out again.

At the boathouse, after putting his wife to bed and cleaning himself up, Eliot called the hospital. A nurse told him Sims couldn’t come to the phone—he was giving an accident report to the police. She handed the phone to Patrolman Joseph Koneval. The officer asked for the caller’s name,
but Eliot, not expecting to be talking to a policeman, panicked and refused to give it. Later in the day, Eliot called his traffic commissioner, Martin Blecke, and gave an accident report over the phone.

The official report wouldn’t be filed for more than two days, and when it finally was, it was incomplete. The statements of the drivers—and the name of one of them, Eliot—were missing from the record. The only tip-off that the accident involved an important person was the inclusion of Eliot’s personalized license plate, EN-1. That was all a reporter from the
Press
needed. He caught up with Blecke and asked about the missing information. “If the report wasn’t filled out correctly, I will call in the patrolman who made it,” Blecke said. He disappeared into his office and closed the door.

The reporter could smell a big story. He kept digging, and the
Press
soon published a damning little expose on the “Ness Cover-Up.” The story suggested that the accident report got “lost” on Blecke’s desk, perhaps at Eliot’s direction. The traffic commissioner admitted he’d had the report in his office for a day after talking to the director, “but I wasn’t covering anyone then and I am not covering anyone now,” he said. Eliot didn’t do himself any good by keeping his head down and trying to brazen it out. “As for Director Ness’ explanation of the unusual handling of the accident report,” the paper wrote, “Ness said there was ‘no mystery’ about the report because it was ‘always available.’”

Once the
Press
published its broadside, the story took on an unstoppable momentum. Radio stations and the city’s other papers weighed in with righteous clucking about the behavior of the man who had done more than his share of righteous clucking over the past six years. Sims’s father called reporters, declaring himself “dumbfounded” that on the day of the accident the police couldn’t tell him who the other driver was. “I had to get in touch with the Cleveland Automobile Club to find who it was listed to,” Ralph Sims said. The press’s accusations about a cover up led to conspiracy theories, with some city hall insiders speculating that a very drunk Evaline, not Eliot, was driving the car.

Stung by the press reports and by everyone’s apparent willingness to believe the worst, Eliot agreed to be interviewed by a reporter in his city hall office. He knew he had made a mistake by refusing to tell the officer at the hospital his name—and that his attempt to set things right by calling Blecke had only made the situation worse. As the reporter began the interview, Eliot sat at his desk, fidgeting, his eyes jumping about the room. He sighed, long and deep.

“It was very slippery and the thing just happened like
that
,” he said, snapping his fingers. “My first thought was for my wife, because I thought she was the most seriously injured. She had had the wind knocked out of her. After she regained consciousness I got out of my car and went over to the other driver and told him who I was.

“I had told Mr. Sims that we would follow him to the hospital but Mrs. Ness said she was feeling better and would rather go home,” he continued. “After I got home I immediately called the hospital and talked to someone. I didn’t know who he was. The person at the other end of the wire asked who was talking and I said the other party. . . . I wanted to make sure that the injured man was all right, but I didn’t identify myself. I said that I would have my insurance adjusters on the job in the morning. . . . At no time did he say he was a policeman.”

Eliot gazed at the reporter for a long time, trying to gauge his sympathies. “I have never regretted anything more in my life,” he said. “I felt I was discharging my duties to the others involved. Obviously, I was trying to avoid publicity.”

The interview did not shut down the scandal. The battering in the press continued, the accident rehashed time and again in editorials and gossip columns. Newsmen and politicians who had long tired of Eliot’s golden-boy image embraced the vicious stories. It wasn’t until nearly a week later that the official police report reached the newspapers, where it was buried on the back pages. Written by Koneval’s partner, Patrolman James Webster, and submitted before he knew the safety director was involved in the collision, the report declared:

The injured man [Sims] stated that after the collision the other driver stopped and came back to his auto and asked if he were injured, and assisted in every way to get him to the hospital and told him he would be taken care of.

In considering the fact that there was no liquor involved and that the injured man showed no desire to prosecute, and also the time of day and condition of the pavement, I did not think it was necessary to make any further investigation . . .

After a short meeting with Eliot, Mayor Lausche tried to put an end to what the
Press
was calling “L’Affaire Ness.” “So far as I am concerned, it is a closed matter,” the mayor told reporters. “If there was any delinquency
about filing the report, Mr. Ness already has more than paid the penalty. If it were not for the position he occupies, the accident would not have commanded the attention it did and would have called only for a routine investigation.”

Six days later, Eliot attempted to change the subject by announcing an updated plan for improving the fire department. This included replacing a station house, building a maintenance facility, and purchasing two thirty-foot fireboats. It wasn’t enough to turn the tide. Just as newspaper columnists were running out of ways to tweak Eliot over the car accident, news broke of four white teenage schoolgirls having sex with black nightclub entertainers, possibly with money exchanging hands. The newspaper story shocked the city. The scandal worsened when rumors circulated that one of the girls had also had sex with Cleveland police officers. Charges now flew that Eliot hadn’t done anything to clean up prostitution during his long tenure as safety director, leading to a culture of promiscuity in many Cleveland neighborhoods.
Prostitution was “just as deep and just as open as it was during the regime of Mayor Harry L. Davis,” said Jane Hunter, a prominent African American activist in the city and founder of the social-service organization the Phillis Wheatley Association.

Mrs. Hunter was trying to keep blame from falling on the black community, but her accusation was true enough. Eliot had targeted brothels controlled by the Mob, but otherwise he’d paid little attention to lifestyle sex crimes such as fornication, sodomy, and bigamy. Eliot agreed with August Vollmer that sexual deviancy was an issue for social workers and doctors, not the police. A student of police history, he believed that a crackdown on vice for its own sake was doomed to fail in a big city and was a good way for a police department to get bogged down. He didn’t want to make the same mistake Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had made in New York and Police Chief Francis O’Neill had made in Chicago. Both of them had led unsuccessful vice campaigns that had damaged their careers. As a result, Eliot had ended up doing too little—and now it had come back on him. Underage white girls were being corrupted in the city—by Negroes, no less—and the safety director had done nothing about it. A new wave of condemnation washed through the newspapers.

Eliot read every word printed about him. He cut out and saved even the most damning and unfounded accusations. The way coverage of the teen-sex scandal focused on him, rather than on the men actually involved in the aberrant behavior, showed him that he had lost his moral authority in
the city. He fell into a depression. As far as he was concerned, this latest brouhaha served as proof that the criticism he’d faced over the car accident had been deserved and probably had been a long time coming. He had always assumed he would suffer cosmic retribution for failing to live up to his own expectations; now it had arrived. He stopped going out to the nightclubs after work. He stopped taking meetings with anyone but his safety department staff.
With Evaline working long hours on a Higbee’s campaign every evening, he holed up at the boathouse, drinking alone and listening to recordings of Shakespeare’s tragedies from his extensive record collection. He took long drives, too.
He had always liked to drive—his high school yearbook had proclaimed him “an automobilist”—but it wasn’t speed he was after but simply the feeling of motion, the illusion that he was going somewhere.
When, after a few weeks, he finally surfaced from his self-imposed social and professional exile, he had made a decision: it was time to leave the best job he’d ever had.