Authors: Douglas Perry
Eliot Ness (49 page)
Wilson, Keith,
123
,
149
,
150
,
155
,
166
,
205
,
246
wiretapping:
and allegations against Cloonan,
102
–4
of Capone’s people by Capone squad,
72
–76,
82
,
89
,
91
,
92
of Prohibition Bureau,
94
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU),
22
women:
Ness and,
4
,
5
,
11
,
12
,
82
,
117
,
217
–19,
233
,
234
,
259
,
270
–71
Prohibition and,
10
war effort and,
265
in Washington, D.C.,
264
Works Progress Administration (WPA),
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,
275
World War II,
246
,
252
–54,
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,
266
,
268
,
272
,
275
,
284
,
285
women and,
265
Wright, Howell,
244
Yellowley, E. C.,
14
,
21
,
25
,
39
,
91
Young, Clarence L.,
216
–17
youth-employment agency,
242
youth gangs,
185
–87,
188
,
241
,
242
crime-prevention bureau and,
241
–43
Zale, Tony,
28
Zalewski, Martin,
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,
173
,
211
,
244
–45
Zanesville, Ohio,
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–19,
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,
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Zappone, Anthony,
243
*
Twenty-five years later, in his memoir, Eliot would incorrectly remember the day he was given the job as September 28, 1929, a month before the stock market crash that hurtled the country into the worst economic tailspin in its history. He may have been remembering his return to school; the fall of 1929 was when he began a graduate-level police-administration course at his alma mater, taught by renowned criminologist August Vollmer.
*
Special Agent F. P. Neww and “special employee” E. A. Moore would be the first agents to join the team. They would stay with the squad for only a short period. That Albert Nabers didn’t even make the short list for consideration is another indication that Eliot had little or nothing to do with choosing the unit’s men.
*
Johnson also tapped another Detroit agent, Ulrich Berard, to join the squad, but Berard was soon returned to Michigan, perhaps in an effort to keep Rowe happy.
*
In 1967, the Supreme Court would overturn the “Olmstead standard,” deciding that Fourth Amendment protections extended to wherever a person had “a reasonable expectation of privacy,” thus necessitating a judge’s OK before police could put in a wire.
*
The secretary was probably Edna. Robsky remembered the name when relating the story years later, and it’s unlikely Eliot would have trusted any other secretary for such an assignment.
*
$3,800 in 1933 is about $65,000 in 2013 dollars.
*
He noted the serial number—678872—in official police files.
*
Until the Supreme Court decided in 1987 that Indian tribes could build casinos on reservations, the places in America where people could legally gamble were few and far between.
*
$139,000 in 1936 is equivalent to about $2 million in 2013.
*
Cadek, sentenced to two to twenty years in the Ohio Penitentiary, would take his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeal failed. The court refused to accept Cadek’s contention that “he could not be convicted of receiving bribes from bootleggers after state prohibition laws had been repealed.”
*
At the Expo’s revival the following summer, Eliot, by now fully briefed on the attractions, would attend the Aquafemme tryouts at the Allerton Hotel. Aquacade producer Billy Rose insisted the pool be maintained at a near-frigid temperature during the auditions to encourage tumescent nipples. When asked, an assistant in the safety department said the director was there in an “unofficial capacity.”
*
It was assumed that Eliot was a Republican, since he worked for a Republican administration, but he had never publicly laid claim to a political affiliation.
*
Cleveland held mayoral elections every two years until 1981, when the term was extended to four years.
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Years later, the foot patrol would come back into vogue, and “community policing” would be held up as a way to make officers once again a part of the neighborhoods they served.
*
Birns continued to ply his trade in Cleveland for another thirty years—until a car bomb killed him in 1975 at age seventy.
*
Eliot was spot-on with his art history. Renoir sat out the Franco-Prussian War in his late twenties and, shortly before his death at seventy-eight, he painted through World War I, too.
*
Reich would eventually spin out of control, inventing an “orgone energy accumulator”—essentially an orgasm machine—that was supposed to jack up the universe’s good vibes and thus increase “orgastic potency.” He would be put on trial for fraud in the 1950s.
*
In 1941, faced with a choice between his boss, the Republican incumbent Edward Blythin, and his friend, Democrat Frank Lausche, Eliot had publicly supported Blythin but couldn’t bring himself to vote.
*
Fraley would eventually use Eliot’s Cleveland years as the subject of his highly fictionalized sequel,
4 Against the Mob
.
*
$2,500 in 1927 is equivalent to about $32,000 in 2013.
*
The building, at Randolph and Washington Streets, was torn down in 1965 and replaced by the iconic Richard J. Daley Center.
*
The Bureau of Prohibition was promoted to independent status within the Treasury Department in April 1927, seven months after Eliot became an agent. The agency was undergoing long-overdue professionalization at the time, including the establishment of formal law-enforcement training for agents and the institution of the Special Agency Division.
*
Eliot’s birth date would be entered incorrectly in his college records, listing him as being born in 1903. Many news reports and even his cemetery memorial would give an incorrect age for him in the years that followed.
