Eliot Ness (3 page)

Johnson’s defense wasn’t good enough. Or it never had a chance to be,
for Golding immediately undermined it. The special agent in charge announced that the bailiff, William Beatty, had fired two shots at his men.
He said the wounded man, under guard in the hospital, would be charged with “obstructing justice and assaulting officers.” But eyewitness testimony was unanimous that the bailiff had no gun on the night of the raid and posed no threat. Beatty, it turned out, was running away from the agents—he thought they were gangsters robbing the place. Reporters didn’t doubt this version of events. Golding’s men cultivated a black-ops image and rarely identified themselves when they crashed through doors. They had arrived at the saloon on South State Street in four unmarked cars and raced into the joint wielding shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and sledgehammers.
When the police showed up fifteen minutes later, the special agents told them to turn right back around. “You get the hell out of here; we’ll handle this,” one of them told the officers. Added another, “It’s none of your business.”

Local law-enforcement officials took their cue from the newspapers. “I want to know whether a bunch of gun-toting roughnecks from the east side of New York can come into Chicago and shoot an unarmed man and then tell the police to go to hell,” Police Commissioner Michael Hughes demanded. The state prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Myron Caffey, the agent who shot Beatty. Newspaper headlines about the cocked-up raid continued to stretch across Chicago’s front pages day after day, turning Caffey into the most reviled man in the city.
Irey recalled that the special agent “had to go into hiding in the Federal Building, sleeping and eating in an Assistant United States Attorney’s office until his victim disappointed the critical Chicago press and recovered from his wound.”
On April 5, Caffey surrendered to the police.

Assistant Attorney General Willebrandt, alarmed by the reports coming into her office, decided to make an emergency trip to Chicago for a day of meetings. On her way into the Transportation Building, the Printers Row tower where the Prohibition Bureau kept its offices, she waved off reporters who tried to determine the reason for her visit. “
The situation here is so tense that I think it better for me to say nothing at all,” she said. In the bureau’s offices, rumors sprouted like mushrooms in the dark. Surely somebody was getting fired; surely there was going to be a shakeup.
In his meeting with Willebrandt, Johnson “begged that the special crew be withdrawn before somebody got lynched.” Golding scoffed at the U.S. attorney. He still refused to acknowledge that he or his men had done anything
wrong. He made it clear that he had no plans to slink out of town, no matter how bad the situation looked. Retreating wasn’t his style.

***

On May 31, 1928, two months after the Beatty shooting, Eliot Ness received orders to report to the special agency squad. He stared at the piece of paper, stunned. Most of the agents in the Chicago Prohibition office were desperate to distance themselves from Golding, whom the newspapers were now calling a rogue cop, a legal gangster. The papers reported that the Justice Department was investigating the special squad after dozens of barrels of confiscated beer had disappeared from a government warehouse on the West Side. Gossip circulated in the office about Golding attempting to get a traffic cop prosecuted for obstruction of justice for trying to give him a jaywalking ticket. But Eliot wasn’t one of Golding’s or the squad’s critics. He had requested the transfer. He was twenty-six years old and had just a year and a half in the bureau, but he felt disillusioned. He often gazed out his fourth-floor office window at South Dearborn Street below, his melancholic blue-black eyes soft and unfocused, unable to get himself out the door to do his job. The fug of corruption permeated the office. He suspected that his own partner was taking money from the booze syndicate. He knew of agents who socialized with gangsters. It disgusted him. He didn’t care what the newspapers or the police said about the special squad. He wanted to be a part of it.
He believed in Golding and his hard-boiled tactics. He believed that only ruthlessness could win the war against the bootleggers.

The question was, What kind of special agency squad was he joining? That George Golding took Eliot onto the team was a sure sign that the champagne had gone flat for the special agent in charge.
From their initial interview, Golding pegged Eliot as an odd duck. The candidate, Hardboiled noted, seemed unsure of himself, too eager to please. Golding had a good eye. Eliot surely was trying too hard. The young agent couldn’t believe he was being considered for the team. He’d put in the transfer request—weeks before—to make himself feel better, not because he thought he’d get it. He knew what his record was.
He was a college boy—University of Chicago, class of ’25—but his grades were awful.
He’d started his career at the consumer-reporting powerhouse Retail Credit Company, a definite plus, but he spent most of his year there doing clerical, not investigative, work. He hadn’t done much since coming to the Prohibition Bureau, either. Eighteen months was enough time to make a mark in the dry service, and yet Eliot could boast of no significant arrests, nothing to set himself apart. He’d
pretended to be a student down on the University of Illinois campus and busted a few coeds for drinking.
And he was among the few agents in the office who actually managed to pass the civil service exam. That was about it.
Golding put down that Eliot had landed at the bureau through family connections.

Nepotism certainly played a part in Eliot joining the bureau’s ranks. His brother-in-law was Alexander Jamie, Edna Stahle’s boss, a senior manager in the Chicago office. Eliot had always wanted to follow in Jamie’s footsteps. The forty-five-year-old assistant Prohibition administrator, a former FBI agent, had been something of a father figure to Eliot over the years. Eliot’s actual father, Peter Ness, rarely took a day off from the thriving wholesale bakery business he owned, so it was the tall, grim-faced Jamie who had taught Eliot how to drive a car and shoot a gun. It was Jamie who had taught him about the importance of honesty in all things. (Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, he told him.)

Ever since adolescence, Eliot had sought to make Jamie proud of him. He wanted to be just like his brother-in-law: upright, tough, uncompromising. As an agent, Eliot hadn’t scored many arrests so far, but he took the badge seriously—more seriously than most.
He carried the Prohibition Bureau’s rule book around in his jacket pocket every day. He trawled for speakeasies even on his own time. He was the kind of agent Jamie expected him to be. Crooked Prohibition agents had built-in radar for like-minded colleagues, and the meter never blipped when it settled on Eliot Ness. He fit all the do-gooder stereotypes. He still lived at home. He took his meals there and called his mother every day to let her know if he’d be late. He wore the same two suits over and over. As a junior agent, he earned $2,500 per year, which was enough for him. That was the problem. He couldn’t find a friend in the office. No one wanted anything to do with him.
*

Golding was an honest man, too, the questionable investigative tactics of his team notwithstanding, but he didn’t want to be Eliot’s friend any more than the crooked agents did. The special agent in charge was frustrated by his limited personnel options. When he and his team had arrived in Chicago eight months before, he could boast of having the bureau’s crème de la crème. No more. This Ness kid clearly was not qualified for the special squad, but Golding took him because few others wanted to work for the team anymore. Golding had even been forced to bring on college interns to fill stakeout shifts. The transfer to the elite squad moved Eliot from
Prohibition agent to special agent—skipping over the investigator grade entirely—but, in a telling bureaucratic decision, it came with no change in salary. (
A memo from Washington the week before his reassignment stated that “it is not desired to promote him at this time.”)
On June 5, Golding personally gave him the oath of office. Eliot replaced Caffey, now under indictment for murder.

Mama’s Boy

I
t didn’t take long for Eliot to get the action he craved, the kind that would impress a starry-eyed secretary during hushed, conspiratorial lunchtime conversations. Shortly before Eliot joined the team, Golding and his men had captured Juliano. Golding insisted the arrest justified the raid in which Beatty was shot, seeing as Juliano had been the target that night. Thus, the arrest justified Beatty’s shooting. This was how Golding thought. “
The way of the transgressor is hard, the Bible states, and it seems to me that the work of enforcing laws is no cinch,” he announced to the press. The special agent in charge had recovered his verve.

One thing you could say about Hardboiled Golding, he was consistent. He never learned from his mistakes. By summer, the Beatty debacle had receded in the public’s mind, which to Golding meant it never happened. He was ready for action again.
On August 21, a few weeks after Edna and the other secretaries had had their secret weekend holiday, Golding’s special agents burst into rooms 803 and 804 of the City Hall Square office building downtown, seeking records for the Northside booze syndicate.
*
This was the first major raid by the squad in which Eliot played a key role; he was charged with securing the first room. Golding would praise a handful of agents in his official report (Eliot was among those he singled out), but no one outside of the special squad would view the mission as a success. That was because in the second room, room 804, a man named Merle Adams had responded to the intrusion by punching an agent in the jaw and fleeing, sliding out the door on freshly polished shoes and scrambling down the hall like an overeager puppy. One of the raiders, Arthur Franklin, gave chase, pulling out his revolver as he leapt into the hallway. Up until this point, office workers along the length of the floor had been watching from doorways, agape at what appeared to be an audacious robbery. Now screams echoed in the enclosed space, and men and women rushed inside their
offices and underneath desks. A deafening pop resounded throughout the floor. This prompted more screams and gasps from the scattering peanut gallery. Franklin—a twenty-three-year-old “student dry agent,” it would turn out—watched as the fleeing man issued a small “Ooopphhhh!” and dropped to his knees at the top of the stairwell. The student agent turned and strode back to room 804. He leaned his head in. “I got him,” he announced.

That hardly was the end of it. While the intern boasted about his marksmanship, Adams slowly righted himself and continued his flight. He made it down to the seventh floor before Agent Edward Gill, following the trail of blood, caught up to him. More office workers watched as Gill whacked the wounded man in the head with a blackjack. Gill and another raider carried the suspected liquor-syndicate accountant back up to the eighth floor and ran the gauntlet of gapers down the hallway. “Get into your offices, we’re government men,” the agents barked as they alternated between hefting and dragging Adams, periodically thumping him with their clubs. “For God’s sake,” Adams finally wailed to no one in particular, “call Mrs. Adams at Longbeach 4800 and tell her I’m shot.” Leaving the door to the office open, the agents dropped Adams into a chair and told him to open the cashbox or else. They put wet towels on his wound in a halfhearted attempt to stop the bleeding and continued to threaten him when he didn’t respond. Then they took the phone receivers off the hooks so they could concentrate on the safe without interruption. A woman from across the hall, after watching for half an hour as Adams bled through the clump of towels, decided she should call a doctor. Someone else had already called the newspapers, and the reporters beat the doctor to the scene. “Get out—we’ll smash your cameras and your faces,” a special agent bellowed when the hacks arrived in the doorway. This, they should have known by now, was not the best way to handle the press.

“Hardboiled George Golding’s special prohibition squad shot a fleeing suspect yesterday in the City Hall Square building,” the
Chicago Tribune
blared. The city’s newspapers had plenty of eyewitnesses to feature, and none of them put the special agents in a positive light. Office workers had crowded around the hacks to tell about being violently shoved back into their offices “by a couple of boys who looked like college students and who dressed as such but who kept displaying gold badges and yelling, ‘We’re federal agents: get back.’” Miss Constance Bemis, a secretary, told reporters that Agent Franklin “acted as though he were in a frenzy” as he chased the
suspect. She added: “I was standing in the hall when the men ran out, the agent with gun in hand . . . I nearly fainted when I saw the other man crumple to the floor as the bullet struck him.”

The papers railed against Golding’s “terrorist” tactics—first the Beatty shooting and now this—and called for his dismissal. Editorials and analysis about the raid dominated the city’s front pages. The
Tribune
even used the City Hall Square incident to indict the entire Prohibition Bureau. “
All previous records for brutality, depravity, and utter ruthlessness in prohibition enforcement were broken during the last 60 days, when dry sleuths in widely scattered sections of the country killed three citizens, maimed dozens more, and even seduced a schoolgirl—all ‘in the line of duty.’” That proved to be the last straw. The killings and the ruined schoolgirl had nothing to do with Golding, but it was because of him that the news was now flying around the country on the wires. The special agent in charge wasn’t going to be able to brazen this one out.

The state’s attorney charged Agents Franklin and Gill with “assault with intent to commit murder,” and neither U.S. Attorney Johnson nor the bureau publicly supported them, as they had Caffey. Willebrandt was so upset at Golding’s recklessness that she supposedly never spoke to him again. The Treasury Department called Golding back to Washington, and he left without a word to the press or his men. Yellowley, Chicago’s bureau administrator, abruptly disbanded Golding’s squad, calling a press conference to make the announcement.
The Prohibition Bureau dismissed a handful of the special agents from the service and reassigned the rest.
Two weeks later, Yellowley named Jamie as the acting special agent in charge and told him to build an entirely new team.

***

Just a few years before, prohibitionists even in their worst nightmares wouldn’t have been able to conjure up the need for someone like George Golding—or even Alexander Jamie. At first the federal prohibition force was primarily a PR outfit. Veteran temperance activist Georgia Hopley, hired by what was then the Prohibition Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, spent the first two years of the dry era on the road, heralding the Eighteenth Amendment.
*
She loved the assignment. The stout, stern-faced woman, always in her signature birdcage dresses, found herself inspired by
the transformation she was seeing everywhere: sober faces, healthy faces. America on the rise.
At one stop in 1922 a reporter asked her if more women were drinking today than ever before. Hopley snorted, but with a smile, as if a child had said something funny. “A certain type, perhaps,” she said. “But not the backbone of the nation.”

Hopley saw what she wanted to see.
She loved to quote “the highest authority of the Nation,” President Warren G. Harding, a personal friend, on the glories of dry America: “In every community men and women have had an opportunity now to know what prohibition means. They know that debts are more promptly paid, families better fed and clothed, and more money finds its way into the savings banks. The liquor traffic was destructive of much that was most precious in American life. In another generation I believe that liquor will have disappeared not only from our politics but from our memories.”

The president, of course, did not for a minute believe his own words. White House staff, if not President Harding’s good friend Miss Hopley, had seen the great man casually drinking alcohol in the Oval Office on more than one occasion. But even such a sight could not possibly have swayed the dusty-dry sisters and brothers of the movement. It made sense in those early years that Georgia Hopley would serve as the public face of the dry force. The prohibition movement had been founded and largely driven by women—women who had seen husbands, brothers, and fathers destroyed by drink, their weekly paychecks washed away, their children gone hungry.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the movement began to pick up momentum, the typical American adult knocked back ninety bottles of 80-proof liquor every year. The rise in the popularity of spirits, thanks in part to modern distilling innovations, had created a new class of drunks: addled, unrepentant, irredeemable. Something had to be done. Righteous members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Hopley’s predecessors, sought to change hearts and minds by gathering in front of saloons to pray and cry.

Yet even decades later, after years of the WCTU marching through the streets of major cities, of the Anti-Saloon League declaring (and proving) that its sole purpose was “administering political retribution” against politicians who opposed prohibition, few Americans seemed to believe a booze ban could ever actually happen. When the Volstead Act—the Eighteenth Amendment’s enforcement arm—went into effect in January 1920, a full year after the constitutional amendment was adopted, the new reality
caught many by surprise, emotionally if not intellectually. “
The whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse,” Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane wrote in his diary the day before the liquor ban officially took hold. True enough, the world was now skew-jee, but prohibitionists, despite their astounding legislative success, proved to be deadly wrong about what would occur next. Most activists believed that removing the temptation—the brewery-owned saloons on almost every commercial corner of every decent-size town in the country—would cause the desire to fade away, like smoke from a dying fire. Never mind that the booze business was—or had been—the fifth largest in the country, or that to millions of Americans drinking was as culturally significant as marriage. Never mind that the timing was particularly poor. The World War, finally ended in 1919, had brought about a most unexpected lucidity. Millions of Americans suddenly seemed to accept that life was short and ugly, and that maybe there was nothing to come after it. The war had changed everything—art, music, politics, literature. The old world had been swept away completely, as if it never existed. Americans in the 1920s wanted to listen to jazz and to dance, and they did. They wanted to buy automobiles and drive them fast, and they did. Most of all, they wanted to drink. Prohibition—a strange remnant of that old world, somehow renewed—had to be defied. They might not have been able to articulate why, but legions of Americans felt a kind of moral imperative to defy it. No law had ever inspired such contempt across the country.

Instead of the tranquility and good will the prohibitionists had expected, the Eighteenth Amendment brought turmoil and violence. And, somehow, alcohol. It was everywhere, more so than ever before. The Volstead Act hardly worried anyone. Indeed, for the right kind of entrepreneur, the possibilities of Prohibition proved endless. A huge, long-established industry had been wiped off the books with the arrival of the constitutional amendment, but the trucks, equipment, supply chains, relationships, know-how, and other accoutrements of the liquor business were still there in the real world, waiting for a new breed of men who didn’t mind taking new kinds of risks. The spoils would go to those who thought big—and showed no mercy. In Chicago, the country’s second largest city, vice king Johnny Torrio was such a man. Torrio brought in a twenty-one-year-old hood from Brooklyn named Al Capone shortly before the Volstead Act went into effect. Torrio’s gang took control of many of Chicago’s breweries, whose owners at first saw the gangsters as saviors. Without the
underworld’s intervention, the brewers would have had to produce yogurt or soft drinks to stay in operation, and where was the self-respect in that?

Few members of Congress—or managers in Washington’s Prohibition offices, for that matter—had anticipated this. Gangsters were now industrialists. The new economic landscape meant hoodlums suddenly did everything on a much bigger scale than they ever had before. Such was especially the case in Chicago, which overnight became the headquarters of Prohibition resistance. Once upon a time the city’s hoods ducked into alleys when they saw a copper. Now they greeted him warmly and slipped him an envelope. They had no other choice; any half-competent patrolman with a functional nose could find beer being brewed in the city. Next came payoffs to judges and politicians.
The notoriously corrupt William “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s mayor since 1915, had primed the city for the gangland takeover of its police department and judicial system. By 1923, as much as a million illicit dollars a month were going into the pockets of Chicago officialdom.
A visit the following year showed Mabel Willebrandt just how bad things were. In the nation’s second-largest city, she sneered, police suffered from “sleeping sickness”—her picturesque way of saying they were taking money to look the other way. When Prohibition agents conducted raids on speakeasies, they usually found cops happily drinking at the bar.

This scared Willebrandt.
Trying to enforce the law, she said, was “like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter.” The assistant attorney general hadn’t been a prohibitionist before she joined the Justice Department.
She freely admitted that she’d “had liquor in my own home in California.” But she and her allies believed that if the government allowed the Volstead Act to go unenforced, terror and violence would take over society. Criminal gangs would run the country. That was why, in the middle of the decade, she had helped run Hopley and other temperance veterans out of the bureau and replaced them with a force of professionally trained law-enforcement agents. Of course, by then it was too late. Gang control had already arrived—again, especially in Chicago. “
The skies were black with smoke from ‘alky’ cooking plants, beer was as easy to get as water, and it was a foolhardy policeman who dared molest a citizen peddling whiskey that would eat a hole in a battleship,” noted Elmer Irey. No place in America took to illicit drinking like Chicago. Songwriter Fred Fisher called it “that toddlin’ town,” and he meant it literally. Hundreds of men stumbled and twirled around the downtown Loop every evening, looking for a taxi or the
steps to the elevated trains. The booze that inspired most of these late-night interpretive dances came from Torrio’s so-called Outfit, which dominated the bootlegging scene from its headquarters in the western suburb of Cicero. “
Chicago, the world’s Fourth City, has fallen,” a local reporter wrote of the Outfit’s sudden and extreme rise to power. This news quickly spread far beyond the Chicago metropolitan area.
When Torrio’s forces, led by young Capone, took over Cicero’s elections in 1924, the
New York Times
highlighted the Chicago Problem on its front page, declaring that “bullets, bricks, blackjacks and fists were used generally instead of ballots to decide the issue.”
The election, wrote another paper, was the underworld “announcing that it realized its power.”