Eliot Ness (4 page)

Chicago had become the symbol of all that had gone so wrong in the war on liquor. Willebrandt understood that the federal government
had
to take a stand there. She had sent Golding because the city needed her best general. And when he flamed out, poisoning public opinion, she decided to keep the special agency squad in place, even with three of its members facing murder charges. The fight would go on. For Prohibition, it was Chicago or bust.

***

It really couldn’t have worked out better for Eliot. He was one of the few special agents on Golding’s team to be kept on in Chicago. He’d received valuable experience under a daring leader but not so much that he’d ended up in the dock. And now he would serve under his own brother-in-law, who was more careful and professional than Golding, and who took Eliot’s best interests to heart.

It was far from certain, however, that Alexander Jamie would be able to remain in his new position for long. Before returning to Washington, Golding had done his best to destroy the man who was his logical successor.
Jamie “is lazy and takes three hours to do that which another man would do in fifteen minutes,” Golding wrote in a memo to Yellowley. “He is sort of Bolsheviki, all the time expressing to other agents statements relative to his political power . . . and how he could have the Administrator’s post or mine whenever he desired.” The attack almost worked. Yellowley fired Jamie, only to have Johnson intervene on the assistant administrator’s behalf. Jamie was unemployed for twenty-four hours before he was returned to the bureau’s ranks and given the promotion—albeit without additional pay—to acting special agent in charge. Though he probably never saw Golding’s memo, Jamie knew Hardboiled had gone around the office
slandering him. Already he was self-conscious about having only a grammar-school education and having gotten his start as an investigator by informing on union efforts for the Pullman Company, the Chicago maker of railroad cars and a notorious union buster. (
When Eliot was in college, Jamie helped him land second-shift work at the Pullman plant as a stacker, a dangerous and physically draining job.) Now that Jamie had the position he’d always wanted, albeit on an interim basis, he was determined to prove that he belonged in the corner office. The disastrous Beatty and Adams shootings notwithstanding, he intended to lead an active, aggressive special agency unit.

To that end, his first target as acting special agent in charge was a big one: Chicago Heights, the industrial town about thirty miles directly south of downtown Chicago that Lorenzo Juliano called home. Nearby Inland Steel, producing a million tons of ingots every year, promised the Heights economic stability, which helped bring one of the first major highways straight through town, giving the burg the nickname “The Crossroads of the Nation.” The highway also made it a perfect place for bootleggers. Jamie and other bureau muckety-mucks believed the town was central to the syndicate’s statewide operations. They had good reason to think so: a lot always seemed to be going down in this small workingman’s city of twenty-two thousand.
The dry law, the
Tribune
declared, had “transformed the peaceful industrial community with its happy homes into a haven for a great alcohol cooking ring, a terrain of contention, locale of alky wars and a battle ground of bootleggers.” In 1926, the Heights’s preeminent liquor boss, the Sicilian gangster Philip Piazza, had been ostentatiously murdered in front of his café in the middle of the day. Since then, more than twenty men had been killed in the town’s “alky wars.” Another Sicilian, Joe Martino, president of the local branch of the Unione Sicilione, stepped forward after Piazza fell, but others also were in the mix. The Torrio gang had been taken over by Al Capone after rival bootleggers seriously wounded Torrio in a 1925 attack.
The Outfit’s influence stretched across most of the metropolitan area, and that included the Heights. Still, much of the violence seemed to be spurred not by Martino or Capone but by the trigger- and bomb-happy Juliano, a dapper, chubby man with a sleek little mustache fit for a cinema comic.
The police believed him to be responsible for at least eight murders, including the beating death of a paramour he suspected of being a double agent. But the blood continued to flow even after Juliano’s capture.
Earlier in the year, gangsters had shot to death South Chicago Heights
police chief Lester Gilbert, who had resisted bribery attempts and even seized some of the bootleggers’ trucks. No one had been arrested for the murder.

Jamie decided he would break the Chicago Heights syndicate by taking out Martino and infusing the town’s bootlegging ranks with fears of turncoats. Of course, such a bold objective would require undercover work. It would require agents who knew the area, who understood the far South Side. His young brother-in-law, he recognized, fit the bill. The South Side was the city’s—the region’s—industrial heartland, its own world, cut off as if by an impassable moat from the glamorous bustle of downtown Chicago and the wild bohemia of the North Side.
Instead of classical skyscrapers and elegant townhouses, the South Side offered “ungainly, picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses.” The noise—“a mighty clattering and reverberating of . . . echoes”—was ceaseless.

This was Eliot Ness’s world; he grew up on the far South Side and identified as a Southsider, not a Chicagoan. The difference from the rest of the city—in attitude, in outlook, in experience—was unmistakable. On the far South Side, men came home from work singed and defeated, a retreating army. Everyone drank, the men so they could face another day, the women so they could face their husbands. “
I would not want to live there for anything in the world,” the Italian playwright Giuseppe Giacosa wrote after visiting Chicago in 1898. He would not have thought differently four years later when Eliot was born, on April 19, 1902.
*
He would not have thought differently eighteen years after that, when Eliot, still with no experience of any other part of town, graduated from Christian Fenger High School. Giacosa hated most everything he saw in the city, with its “extraordinary number of sad and grieved persons,” but he thought the South Side was by far the worst. Smoke hung from the air there like drapery. The neighborhood streets, hemmed in by steel plants and ironworks, “seemed to smolder a vast unyielding conflagration,” the mammoth blast furnaces glowing orange and white throughout the night. Children on the way to school clumped through hard granules of soot that fell from the sky like hail, through a deadened landscape where not even “a ghost of the sun shines.”

Eliot’s neighborhood, Kensington, started out as a railroad stop called Calumet Junction. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads met there in 1852 during the track-building boom that settled the West and made Chicago a central player in the country’s life. In the four decades that followed, immigrant Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Italians poured into the area. The nearby company town of Pullman, with its nine thousand worker-residents, banned saloons, so Kensington served the need, earning the nickname Bumtown. Eliot arrived on the scene in the wake of a catastrophic Pullman strike that had radicalized the area. Bumtown was where embittered unionists came to drink, shout about injustice, and fall down. (During his seven years with the railroad-car company, Jamie spent his evenings following these men from pub to pub.) During the World War, crowds in Kensington jeered as young men from the neighborhood marched off to boot camp, because the boys wore the same uniform as the federal soldiers who had beaten down strikers back in 1894. The kids of the far South Side were notoriously aggressive, innately mean. The area produced first-rate athletes in unusual numbers during the first half of the twentieth century, boys like Tony Zale (Gary, Indiana) and George Mikan (Joliet) and Dick Butkus (Roseland), boys who would do anything to win, to escape.

Eliot didn’t seem to fit.
He was a mama’s boy, the youngest—by far—of five children. His mother, Emma, a Norwegian immigrant like her husband, missed her three grown daughters, who had married and left the house, and so she coddled young Eliot. Unlike his older brother, Charles, Eliot grew into a soft, amiable, unthreatening personality. Well into his teens, he reveled in his mother’s attention, in being seen as a good boy. At the same time, he struggled with blue moods. He would come home from school and shut himself up in his room to hide his depression. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings. He hated being asked questions. He liked to keep to himself. His mother indulged this solitariness. “Although he has a store of wit, he’s very shy in using it,” his high school yearbook noted. He wasn’t a joiner. As an adolescent, he became a dedicated football fan (he followed the powerhouse University of Chicago Maroons), but even though he was a good athlete, he never tried out for a team. He played tennis, an individual pursuit, a sissified country-club sport. Still, the South Side’s influence ultimately proved every bit as powerful as Emma Ness’s. He spent hours hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, day after day, until he was the best player at his school. After he landed a part-time job at a
clothing store, he obsessively practiced his sales pitch in front of a mirror, determined to sell more suits than even the full-time staff. Whatever caught his interest, he became determined to win at it, to be the best. That’s the way it had always been for Eliot. That’s what Alexander Jamie was counting on now.

The Special Agents

D
on Kooken liked to be seen. It was the best way to be undercover: walk around town like you have a purpose, make eye contact with people and smile, get a haircut in the first chair of the downtown barbershop.

Everyone in the Heights knew Kooken was a Prohibition agent, and that was fine with him. He was undercover not as a bootlegger or a small-time hood but as a corrupt G-man.
So he wasn’t surprised in the fall of 1928 when a short, well-dressed Italian, with “a stickpin about the size of a lump of sugar,” approached him on the street. The man fell into step with Kooken and stuck out a bejeweled hand. He didn’t introduce himself, but Kooken knew who he was. This was Johnny Giannini, one of Joe Martino’s factotums.

Kooken played along. A Hoosier farm boy and former railroad man, he had built an impressive record with the bureau, where he had become known for his honesty. After Kooken reported the approach, Jamie assigned Albert Nabers, Eliot’s new partner, and Eliot to go with the more experienced agent to meet Giannini. The agents drove over the next day. Eliot knew the Heights well enough to have spent as little time there as possible while growing up. The town’s small downtown had some class, especially the Hotel Victoria, designed by Louis Sullivan, but it was a thin facade. Three blocks in any direction and you felt like you might be set upon by wild dogs. The
woof-chunk
of heavy machinery could be heard everywhere, all the time; in many parts of town it could be felt, a perpetual mini-earthquake, rattling cups and nerves. For Eliot, it was the feel of home, the feel of the South Side. The three agents strode into the downtown Cozy Corners saloon in iconic Wild West style, screwing their expressions into the kind of hardened, cynical looks they figured dirty agents had. A uniformed policeman stood at the bar, shooting the breeze with the bartender. Kooken sidled over and showed his badge. Neither the barkeep nor the cop blanched: they were expecting him. The bartender poured drinks—real drinks, not colas or near beer—and the dry agents found a booth in the back.

Eliot had hit it off right away with Nabers, a war veteran and a fellow college man.
Years later he would describe Albert as “the handsomest man I have ever seen. He was built like a Greek God, with natural, light wavy hair.” The Georgia native, only recently assigned to Chicago, had a gregarious, open-faced personality, as alien to Southside Chicagoans as Swahili. Eliot began inviting Albert to dinner at the Ness home on South Park Avenue. They didn’t talk much about their work while under the Nesses’ roof.
Emma disapproved of her youngest son’s career choice. A devout Christian Scientist, she hated the idea of her sweet-tempered boy spending his days around all those dishonest men in the dry service. Eliot, who as a child had dutifully attended church with his parents, tried to bring his mother around. “
If there’s anything you taught me, mother, it’s to be honest,” he told her. Eliot’s father apparently didn’t have an opinion on the subject. The baby of the family was—and remained—an afterthought to Peter Ness, who now, in his old age, wanted only to concentrate on the bakery he had spent so many years making a success. He had been nearly fifty years old when Eliot was born, and he’d already raised a clutch of children while struggling to get his business going. Eliot had worked at the bakery throughout his adolescence, but he never felt like he really got his father’s attention.
Peter had more than twenty bakers to oversee, as well as “store girls” and drivers and a stable man. He paid attention to every detail. Later in life Eliot would try to put a positive spin on this monomania. “
He never had a lot to say, but when he did speak, I knew it was something worth listening to,” he said of his father. “I always took it to heart because I didn’t see him all that much.” With his singular focus, Peter didn’t like anything to upset his equilibrium, at work or at home. Emotions were kept on an even keel around him, never too high or too low. Eliot learned early to hold back his feelings, to express himself only in reasonable tones. This could be stressful. While in grade school he began a lifelong habit of biting his fingernails, gnawing away whenever he faced a decision or a school exam.

Eliot’s nervousness, his inclination to bottle up his feelings, no doubt made Albert Nabers attractive as a colleague and friend. Albert was loud. He was larger than life. Eliot viewed him as the brother he never had, one close to his own age and who shared his interests. (Eliot’s brother, Charles, was more than a decade older than him, his three sisters older still.) They might not have talked about it over dinner at the Ness home, but the two young federal agents relished their work. It was no moral crusade for them, as it had been for the dry movement’s founders; they weren’t concerned with
the rightness or wrongness of an after-work beer. But the call proved no less powerful. They had the sense they were doing something important. Neither man understood what exactly that something was—not yet, anyway—but for now, the objective was almost beside the point. What mattered was that
they
mattered.

At least they thought they did, and working an undercover operation with Don Kooken surely helped that perception. After a few minutes of sipping their drinks and pretending to chitchat at the Cozy Corners, the agents looked up to find Giannini coming toward them, a big smile thumbtacked to his face.
Kooken took charge of the conversation, and he impressed Eliot with the way he charmed the Italian with his “slow, quiet, Indiana drawl.” Soon enough, Giannini passed over $250. The four men clinked glasses, drank, laughed. The gangster seemed pleased with himself. He already had “things pretty well arranged with the police and Prohibition Department,” Giannini said, but he admitted this was a real coup.
Eliot couldn’t help but swell with pride. “We, of course, were the Special Agents,” he would report.

The dry agents left the saloon a bit tipsy and feeling good about themselves, but they knew this successful meeting was only the beginning. No one—certainly not Jamie—cared about nailing small fry like Johnny Giannini.
The bureau wanted to build a conspiracy case, “which would include corrupt police, city officials, and perhaps Prohibition agents.” Which meant the three agents had to prove to the syndicate that they deserved to make
real
money, that they had ambition. A couple of nights after the bonhomie at the Cozy Corners, Kooken took Eliot and Albert on a tour of the Heights.
Their chauffeur was Frank Basile, a smiley twenty-seven-year-old who had been a member of a “Kensington cooking gang” before getting busted on Volstead violations.
Basile, who spoke fluent Italian, had turned government informer to stay out of jail, and now he worked for the Chicago Prohibition office for $5 a day and expenses. He and Eliot, both from Kensington and the same age, knew each other from the neighborhood. They quickly became close; Eliot considered him all but a fellow agent.

Basile drove the men up and down the Heights’s outer streets, and it didn’t take long before first one and then another car fell in behind them. The next night, the dry agents slowly toured another part of town, and again two sedans mimicked their pace and their every turn. Both nights they ended up at the Cozy Corners for some drinks. It was a fine place to be—a haven for bootleggers from all over the region who used the
sparkling new highway that cut through the small city. “
They would leave their cars with the bartender, and the cars would be driven away by members of the Chicago Heights alcohol mob,” Eliot would relate later. “The drivers from out of town would stay at the bar, drinking, or avail themselves of what the brothel located on the second and third floors had to offer.”

Eliot did not admit to availing himself of the offerings on the second and third floors, but he and his partners did do a fair amount of drinking on the ground level. While in college Eliot had discovered that he enjoyed booze, and becoming a Prohibition agent hadn’t changed that. He had an illicit drink almost every evening—often more than one—before heading home to his parents’ house. And now he was drinking as part of the job—and getting a bit loud about it, laughing and slapping backs.
Even Basile joined in, pretending he didn’t understand when anyone spoke Italian to him; he was posing as “just Mexican,” just a boozer. It was an enjoyable way for the men to build up their bona fides.

That done, Kooken and his two junior agents returned to the Heights on another night, this time leaving their car on a back road outside of town and walking in through farm fields and empty lots, each taking a separate route. They met up in an alley after satisfying themselves that they’d avoided the “Mafia scouts”—fledgling gangsters at unofficial checkpoints, gas-station attendants on the edge of town, grandmothers peering out living-room windows. Now, keeping to the shadows, they followed their noses, for the stink of fermenting mash was almost impossible to hide. They put in miles during the night, staying low in the darkness as they came up on farmhouses and squat suburban homes, and then doubling back again for a second pass.
The men found more than a dozen illegal brewing operations and took “careful notes,” which they knew they’d need for search warrants. The next day, and for the rest of the week, they made sure to be back out in the open, especially at the Cozy Corners, laughing it up, drinking, being seen. Finally, they sought out Giannini again. They made plain they knew where most of the stills in the Heights were—and that they wanted to be real partners with the Martino crew. Giannini excused himself, leaving the three special agents and Basile to sit and worry. Albert slammed back a whiskey; Eliot chewed on his thumb. Soon, two large men loomed over the table.

“
Come and talk to the boss,” the twin statuary said.

The agents stepped through to a back room, where they found Giannini
and a “big, swarthy,” heavy-shouldered man—Joe Martino. They barely bothered with pleasantries. Eliot, assigned the role of eager beaver, laid it out for the don of Chicago Heights: a full partnership, all aspects of the business, including gambling and the other rackets. They could provide protection for everyone in the organization—everyone they knew about. Martino gave the kid a hard-eyed appraisal, before sitting back and sweeping the lot of them with a half-lidded gaze.

“How do I know you can put in the fix?” he said.

The agents waved their badges like backup singers. “Money will do anything,” one of them said.

“How much?”

Kooken smiled. “First we’ve got to see how much it’s worth to you.”

Eliot, “the hungry one,” threw his knowledge of the syndicate’s operations in Martino’s face. The forty-five-year-old Mob boss had managed to stay out of jail—and the cemetery—for years while running a good-size bootlegging ring in a particularly violent corner of Chicagoland, but he apparently bought what this greenhorn agent was selling. He joked about owning Kooken, and local cops galore, and that he would own this pushy new kid, too. That made Eliot push harder still. The young agent loved the opportunity to assume a role, to take on a bigger and bolder personality than his own.
He and Martino “had quite an argument about the amount to be paid,” Eliot recounted later.
Finally, they grudgingly agreed on a weekly payment amounting to a thousand dollars a month, and the special agents shoved away from the table. No one seemed especially happy with how they were leaving things.

Frank Basile, who’d been standing by the door like a servant, looked ashen as the agents turned toward him. He took Eliot’s arm. “
The silk-shirted Italian has just asked Johnny whether or not he should let you have the knife in the back,” he whispered. The words penetrated slowly. Eliot stood there paralyzed. He noticed, for the first time, a lithe, stone-faced man in the background. He was indeed wearing a silk shirt. The other men in the room seemed to melt in place, Wicked Witch–like, leaving only this blank-eyed killer. “
I felt young and alone at that minute,” Eliot would admit years later. He felt like an amateur. Until Basile pointed him out, he hadn’t even
noticed
this man who was proposing to kill him. Basile—his eyes locked on Eliot, searching for proof that he’d been heard—said the agent’s name, snapping Eliot back into real time. Eliot knew now, if there’d
ever been any doubt, that this was no game. He managed to leave without turning his back to the mystery man.

Eliot kept his paralyzing fear to himself. He didn’t tell the other agents what the silk-shirted man had said. He was too ashamed. He couldn’t accept that his fear was a normal and reasonable reaction. So the murderous query—spoken in Italian by the gangster, who assumed none of the federal men understood the language—did not get factored into the agents’ next move. Even if Eliot hadn’t been embarrassed by his terror, he wouldn’t have dared hold back the operation. He believed they were close. A thousand dollars for the three of them—Basile was just the driver and got nothing—was a good start, but not exactly a partnership. They had more work to do to prove their worth to Martino, to prove their power. There was only one way to do that: show the Mob why they should be taken seriously.

Not long after the meeting, Eliot and Albert stood on the side of the highway outside of town, stamping their feet and clapping their hands to beat back the creeping numbness in their extremities. It was late and there wasn’t much traffic, but eventually the cold night disgorged two sets of massive headlamps. The agents stepped into the road and brought the booze-laden trucks to a gurgling, sliding halt.
Moving quickly, shouting over one another, they yanked the drivers out of their cabs, “squeezed their balls and beat the shit out of them, hit them with clubs,” recalled a bootlegger who worked with Martino. “It looked as though the shipment would not be delivered, but then money changed hands, and the trucks got through,” the bootlegger said, amazed at the audacity of the move. Martino’s crew, he said, now understood that the agents “wanted to be a fifty percent partner in the stills and the whorehouses.”

Eliot and Albert continued to hang around the Cozy Corners and collect their money, which they dutifully turned over to Jamie. Kooken moved on to another case, but the two younger agents made it clear to Giannini that they would take Kooken’s share as well every week.
They also began pocketing $100 for each independent “alky cooker” in the area they reported to the Martino gang. The weekly grind of taking bribes and getting drunk soon paled, though. Nothing ever came of it. Their hijacking gambit hadn’t paid off. They had made a place for themselves in the crew, but while they were taking in good money week after week, they weren’t being given more responsibility. They couldn’t find out who else the gang was bribing or how
exactly Martino’s distribution network worked. “
It was apparent,” Eliot wrote, “that we were not going to be taken into the confidence of the gang any further.”