Eliot Ness (33 page)

One of Porter’s colleagues used baseball language (the World Series was coming up) to offer advice: “It is time now for Ness, in fact for the Republican party, to send for the professionals before all chance of winning in the Cleveland political league is kicked away. The campaign the former safety director just concluded was so distinguished by bush league political performance that in the absence of replacements it is horrible to contemplate what Mayor Thomas A. Burke will do to him in the championship series.”

Faced with an embarrassment at the polls in November, Eliot finally did get desperate. He called on Burke “publicly to disavow Communists and Communist sympathizers who are supporting his political camp.” There had been no indication that communists had infiltrated city government or had any love for Burke, a middle-of-the-road, business-friendly Democrat. The
Plain Dealer
called it a “sleazy insinuation.” Burke mostly ignored it.

Eliot then promoted a goofy idea to devolve power in the city, saying he would set up thirty or so branch city halls around the city. He followed that with an accusation that the Burke administration was using bulldozers to push garbage into the lake to give the appearance of competence with basic services. Porter cut him with a particularly fine knife, writing that Eliot “believes himself to be running for mayor of Cleveland.”

Rain came on Election Day, but the bad weather seemed to keep only Eliot’s supporters at home. The incumbent scored a staggering landslide victory, taking 67 percent of the vote. Burke even won the traditional Republican wards. The Democrats expected the big victory, but at the same time they gave a sigh of relief. They couldn’t know for sure that the old Ness magic was gone until the final vote came in. “Eliot missed the boat,” Burke’s executive secretary John Patrick Butler observed. “He should have run for mayor in 1941, against Frank Lausche, who was then a comparative unknown with a name hard to pronounce. He could have beat Lausche then because at that time Ness was the most famous man in the city and the most admired.”

Early in the evening on Election Day, Eliot stepped up to the front door of the mayor’s twelve-room home on the East Side. He knocked softly.
When Burke opened the door, Eliot, hat in hand, smiled and gave a little wave. “Naturally, I am disappointed,” he told the mayor. “But it is more important that the democratic process has taken place. There were some things I wanted to do in this town.” He sighed and smiled again. “Congratulations,” he added, as if just remembering why he’d come.

Burke, trying to recover from his surprise at finding Eliot on his doorstep, stammered, “Nice campaign,” and invited him in. The mayor was hosting a victory party for staff and supporters. Radio station WGAR was broadcasting from the sunroom, and Eliot sat down and gave his concession speech, with the mayor watching.

Tomorrow Eliot would have to return to the boredom of the Diebold boardroom, so he quickly got drunk. The large, brick house, which once belonged to Harold Burton, rocked with cheering and applause. Eliot soon embraced the spirit of the party. He slapped backs and accepted flutes of champagne. At the height of the festivities, he toasted the victor and cheerfully lamented his failed expedition into political life.

“Who’d want an honest politician anyway?” he cracked.

Eliot-Am-Big-U-ous Ness

T
he election proved to be the tipping point. Eliot would never really be taken seriously again.

In 1951, the Diebold board dumped him as chairman. The decision had been a long time coming. Eliot had pushed the company into new product areas, such as office equipment, and he’d led the takeover of York Safe & Lock Company, but all that ambition and activity had come early in his tenure. He hadn’t been on top of things for quite a while. Managers complained about his inability to focus on details. His directives and goals sometimes contradicted each other. He often seemed distracted, out of his depth. At the same time that Diebold cut him loose, the Middle East Company, where Eliot served as vice president and treasurer, was slowly flaming out. He put some of his own cash into the operation in hopes of propping it up, a big mistake. Eliot had made a hefty $24,000 per year at Diebold, but he had never been very good with money. Almost overnight, his financial situation turned dire.

He had to scrabble for work. His corporate career was deader than Al Capone, so he turned to retail. He sold electronics and frozen hamburger patties. He worked at a bookstore. One day, he paid a visit to Alvin Sutton, hoping there might be some consulting or investigative work he could do for his old department. Sutton liked and respected Eliot; he recognized that the police department—indeed, the entire city—was much better off because of Eliot’s time as safety director. But he couldn’t help him as long as Burke was mayor. Eliot then showed up at the public-relations firm that had handled his mayoral campaign. “I’d regard it as a favor if you could put me on the payroll for about sixty dollars a week,” he told his former flack. He left the office without a job offer.

Eliot had gotten out of law enforcement at the wrong time. Science and technology were triumphant after the war. Americans conquered polio and broke the sound barrier. Vernon Stouffer, Eliot’s former witness against the Cleveland Mob, helped pioneer the frozen dinner. Scientific thinking
spread through policing, too. Training academies, crime labs, internal-affairs bureaus, and crime-prevention programs became the norm in big-city police departments. Clannishness in the ranks began to fall away, and more men with college degrees joined the profession. Organized crime didn’t disappear but it definitely was on the run. To survive, mobsters were increasingly forced to embrace something novel: anonymity.

Eliot observed this transformation with satisfaction, knowing he’d played a part in setting it in motion.
Betty would say that “he was always serious about law enforcement.” He viewed it as the highest calling. But by the time he reached fifty in 1952, he seemed to recognize that he no longer had what it took to run a police department. While he was still at Diebold, he’d shown interest in becoming Detroit’s police chief, but the city’s mayor, Albert Cobo, had been put off by Eliot’s run for office in Cleveland.
Cobo didn’t want a man with political ambitions in the job. That was the last serious attempt Eliot made at restarting his old life. After his visit with Sutton, he stopped trying to find police work, his one true love.

***

Eliot had given up on policing, but his crime-busting past still periodically reappeared, like a haunting.
Francis Sweeney found out where Eliot lived and began sending him letters and postcards, addressing them to “Eliot (Esophogotic) Ness” or “Eliot-Am-Big-U-ous Ness.” These messages offered nothing but nutty, childish wordplay, but they terrified Betty. Eliot told her to ignore them.

The torso murders in Cleveland had officially stopped in 1938 at twelve.
Detective Merylo, however, had reached the conclusion that the case was much bigger than Cleveland, that the murderer rode the rails and used boxcars as a traveling “murder laboratory.” In his final report on the torso case, in 1943, he wrote that he “believed and still do at this time that one person is responsible for all of these murders between here and Pittsburgh, Pa., including New Castle, Pa. and Youngstown, O. which now figure to 27 victims.” This was a minority opinion. Panic about the serial killer had dribbled away as World War II began to dominate both the newspapers and people’s lives. Many Clevelanders, remembering an old headline, believed the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run had been caught.
In 1939 Cuyahoga County sheriff Martin O’Donnell had arrested a ratty fifty-two-year-old Slav immigrant named Frank Dolezal. After a two-day interrogation in which the suspect was beaten and denied food, Dolezal confessed to murdering Flo Polillo, an acquaintance of his. The confession hit the front page
of every newspaper in the region, but ultimately prosecutors lost faith in its accuracy. The case went before a grand jury, but only on a manslaughter charge. A month later, with the case in free fall, guards found Dolezal hanged in his cell, quite possibly after another brutal interrogation. The press had moved on to other subjects by then. Dolezal’s death wouldn’t garner anything close to the media attention his arrest had.

Sweeney, meanwhile, increasingly spent his time in veterans’ hospitals, lost in his delusions. By the early 1950s, along with the letters to Eliot, he was peppering the press and various law-enforcement agencies with nonsensical missives. He declared himself Ness’s “Paranoidal-Nemesis.” He even sent a letter to the FBI, warning J. Edgar Hoover of “Nessism.” From at least 1956, Sweeney’s stays in the hospital became compulsory. He would die in 1964 at the age of seventy.

***

It took Eliot nearly four years to secure a meaningful position after Diebold. He was finally hired as president of both Guaranty Paper Corporation and Fidelity Check Corporation, subsidiaries of the North Ridge Industrial Corporation. He, Betty, and Bobby soon would move from Cleveland to Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where North Ridge set up its headquarters in two rented buildings downtown. Eliot fit in easily in the town: like him, the small rural community had been in decline for years. “He was dead broke, just like the rest of us,” said Coudersport storeowner Lewis Wilkinson, whose wife, Dorothy, landed a secretarial job at North Ridge. Eliot found he loved the small-town life. Everyone was friendly, if not necessarily open, and Eliot reciprocated. He had lunch most weekdays at Mackey’s Restaurant downtown, either by himself or, during the summer, with Bobby. He said hello and smiled at folks but he didn’t try to strike up conversations. He felt both at home and hidden away.

Now he just needed North Ridge Industrial to take off. The company’s chairman and founder, G. Frank Shampanore, had come up with a new chemical formula for watermarking paper to prevent fraud. North Ridge was a small, unproven company just getting up on its feet, but its directors didn’t want Eliot for his management experience. They hired him—at $150 a week, plus company stock—for his name value and his address book. That was fine with Eliot, who threw himself into sales calls. He spent weeks making phone calls and writing letters in search of clients and investors. He put the arm on many of his old associates in Cleveland, offering them stock options and exclusive franchises, but no one took him up on his pitch. He
set up a meeting with longtime friend Delo Mook, the bank executive, but Mook didn’t sign up for the product, either. He told Eliot the watermarks on his samples weren’t as good as the current standard. These Cleveland-area power brokers had once respected or feared Eliot, but now they pitied him. He seemed so pathetic in his rumpled suit, his face puffy and red. “Eliot had run out of gas,” said an old friend. “He was still a fairly young man, but he simply ran out of gas. He didn’t know which way to turn.”

Betty, accustomed to being admired for her looks and her talent, tried to keep up appearances. The strain began to show around her eyes, in the way she would purse her lips when she fell into thought. “She was quite vivacious, but she was somewhat subdued except for people she knew,” said Franny Taft, a friend of Betty’s. “So there were two Bettys. She was certainly very popular with the friends she had. They were protective of her, especially after she started to drink too much. She became a little depressed later in her life. She had a problem with alcohol.”

This was an occupational hazard for any wife of Eliot Ness. “They were partying people,” acknowledged their housekeeper, Corrine Lawson. By that Lawson meant they went out drinking a lot. They didn’t throw parties like Eliot and Evaline had. That took too much effort. By now, drinking had undeniably become central to Eliot’s life. He didn’t just drink every day. He got drunk every day. “He always had scotch and soda,” said Lawson. “He loved his Cutty Sark.” A drinking buddy from this period, Jack Foyle, called him “a very lonesome man” who clearly was in the grip of alcoholism. “I would have two drinks and he’d have twenty-two,” Foyle said. Eliot became a regular at the Old Hickory Tavern in Coudersport, but he usually sat by himself and stayed out of conversations. When he had his fill, he would find his way home, settle in on the couch in the living room, and put on recordings of Paul Robeson reciting Shakespeare. He’d listen to the actor’s sonorous voice echo around the room until he passed out.

***

North Ridge Industrial had begun to take on water even before Eliot arrived on the scene. The company suffered through a series of aborted attempts to get a production facility up and running, with the chief problem being Shampanore’s insistence on handling everything himself. North Ridge’s vice president, Joseph E. Phelps, would later claim that Shampanore was a charlatan. “He surrounded the entire activity with a great deal of secrecy and mystery,” he wrote in a report to the Pennsylvania Securities Commission. “He stated that he had been pledged by various departments of the
Federal Government such as the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department to keep the process and operation absolutely secret, so that he was not free to disclose the entire process to even his own officers and directors and employees.” William Ayers, North Ridge’s director of research and development, called Shampanore “a spellbinder . . . who was able to captivate all who came along with his grandiose schemes.” Shampanore’s stories of secret meetings with government officials had certainly fascinated Eliot. When Eliot started to figure out that they were all just hot air, he couldn’t hide his shock. His relationship with North Ridge’s founder fell apart; the two men began to avoid each other in the office. Eliot suspected Shampanore wanted to force him out of the company.

“Eliot was very depressed and felt victimized. He went out of his way not to let others see it,” recalled a Coudersport acquaintance. “Deep down inside, he felt guilty and ashamed for failing to adequately provide for his wife and son.”

Eliot’s increasingly desperate attempts to save the company—a company he no longer really believed in—took him out on the road a lot, which frustrated him. He wanted to be a better father to Bobby than he believed his own father had been to him, but he didn’t have much time to spend with the boy. When he was home, he was so exhausted—mentally and physically—he could barely move. He would sit down with a drink and promise Bobby that tomorrow he would play catch with him, tomorrow they would go fishing. He always meant it when he said it. But tomorrow would come and as often as not he’d put on a suit, get in the car—a five-year-old Ford convertible with the back window missing—and head out of town for more sales calls. “Betty tried to be understanding,” a friend recalled, “but she felt abandoned at times.”