Eliot Ness (5 page)

As the calendar flipped to November, the head office told the agents they would have to make do with the evidence from their nocturnal treks around the Heights and their meetings with Giannini and Martino. Volstead violations and bribery were penny-ante stuff in the grand scheme of things, but better than nothing. Eliot and Albert obtained search warrants for eighteen stills. The stills were relatively small, but they were good enough to mobilize the special agency unit and garner the loan of a clutch of Prohibition agents.

However disappointed he must have been at being unable to put together a conspiracy case, Eliot decided to make the best of the situation.
That meant hitting the Cozy Corners hard, at the height of business. Eliot found himself teamed up not with Albert but with another young special agent looking to make his mark, Marty Lahart, a sparkly-eyed Irish kid who’d been one of Golding’s favorites. Accessorized with sawed-off shotguns and with a brood of Prohibition agents in tow, the two men stormed into the saloon. They planted their feet as if to release dueling jump shots and called out: “Everybody keep their places, this is a federal raid!” Stunned silence met the announcement, followed by the thump of weaponry hitting the floor. These were mostly customers and freelancers, not Martino’s men; nobody wanted a shoot-out with federal agents, especially when the G-men clearly had the drop on them. The Prohibition agents herded the saloons’ customers and staff to a wall and began to frisk them, while Lahart scooped up as many discarded guns as he could. He jammed four revolvers in his belt and slung a second shotgun over his shoulder. Eliot no doubt had told him about the delights on the second and third floors. Lahart took the stairs at a lope. “Everybody keep their places!” he yelled again as he bounded down the brothel’s hallway and banged open doors to expose the prostitutes in their natural habitat. These girls were not prone to hysterics. They’d seen a lot of violence; they’d been on the receiving end of it and accepted it as normal. One girl, nonplussed at the sight of Lahart weighed down with guns, cracked: “Look who’s here. Tom Mix.”

The Cozy Corners raid was about sending a message—and nothing else. The eighteen stills, hidden in houses and industrial buildings around town, were the real target. Agents spent the night smashing through doors and carting away brewing equipment and ledgers. “Luckily, the raids were
successful,” Eliot recalled, “and in most places we captured prisoners, machinery and alcohol.”

Not all the evidence made it into the evidence lockup.
Late that night, Eliot showed up on the doorstep of Armand Bollaert, his University of Chicago fraternity brother. Bollaert followed his friend out to the curb, where he found the trunk of Eliot’s car packed to the gunwales with liquor. “It was the most beautiful collection of booze in the city of Chicago,” Bollaert would remember years later. Without a word between them, the two men hefted the alcohol into the house.

***

You never knew what you were going to find on the side of the road in Chicago Heights, but a dead body was never a bad guess. That winter, it became a great guess.

Martino, inevitably, started the trend. On Thursday, November 29, with news trickling through town that an indictment had come down as a result of the raids, Eliot and Albert arrived at Martino’s home and politely knocked on the door. The gangster let them into the house, where the agents read him an arrest warrant. Martino had a revolver in his belt, and when the agents presented him with the warrant, he took out the gun and tossed it onto the floor. He stepped to the closet to retrieve his coat and hat, but he didn’t make it. He broke down. “
He became deathly sick and we had trouble getting him to the station,” Eliot reported.

Martino understood what his arrest meant: he was now a liability to his fellow Chicago Heights gangsters—and to Capone. Everyone knew prosecutors would offer him a deal to talk, and no one could say for sure he wouldn’t. He spent the night in jail, and in the morning he posted a $10,000 bond. Around midday, his driver dropped him in front of his “soft drink parlor” on East Sixteenth Street in the Heights, where he stood on the curb and considered the crisp afternoon. A black sedan turned the corner at Wallace Street and eased down the main drag. The windows were rolled down despite the cold. All at once, Martino toppled backward like a narcoleptic—the witnesses all said they heard nothing—and the car continued to glide along the street, slowly disappearing into the gray day. Martino sprawled on the sidewalk in his own gore, his hands still in his pockets. He’d been pierced by a profusion of bullets. Men, women, and children gathered around to gawk at the town’s best-known citizen. “
He apparently had not been [back] in the Heights for more than two minutes,” Eliot would marvel after seeing the police report.

No one had any illusions about why the powerful Joe Martino now had to be swept up like a kicked Halloween pumpkin.
Assistant District Attorney Dan Anderson told reporters that the new indictment clearly had served as the gangster’s death warrant.

What was left of the Chicago Heights liquor ring began to unravel fast. A day after the murder, a massive explosion rocked Wellington Avenue on the West Side. Brewer Nick Guletto, noticeably nervous since being arrested along with Martino, had apparently gotten careless while operating a five-hundred-gallon still. He staggered from the building and collapsed. He died shortly after arriving at the county hospital.
Ten days later, an unidentified man—police suspected it was Johnny Giannini, also named in the indictment—was found outside of town with two bullet holes in his head. He’d been thrown from a car.

After another three days, a fourth body turned up.
At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, December 12, a man walking to work on 127th Street found a corpse lolling in a drainage ditch. The way the limbs were twisted, he obviously hadn’t fallen where he lay. The dead man had been shot through the right eye four times.

The police at the scene didn’t recognize the victim. Just another expendable junior goon, they figured. But shortly after the corpse arrived at a funeral home near the Kensington police station, someone identified him. The dead man wasn’t a mobster. He was Frank Basile. The police placed a call to the Chicago Prohibition office. Within the hour, a clutch of federal agents arrived at the funeral home, rolling up in matching black sedans.
They fished a calendar out of Basile’s pocket. It had been filled out until 6:30 Monday evening.

U.S. Attorney Johnson, his mind on the bigger picture, made a bloodless public statement about the murder. “
Basile was a government witness and was to have been one in the future,” he said. “There is no doubt why he was killed. We will cooperate with the police to solve this murder.” Eliot took the news much harder. Basile wasn’t just a government witness to him; he was a colleague and a friend.
When he saw Basile at the funeral home, laid out on a slab in a rubber body bag, he “felt hot tears stinging the corner of my eyes, a roaring in my ears.” He barely held it together. Had he been responsible for Frank’s death? Because he pushed so hard at that meeting with Martino that the man in the silk shirt felt compelled to offer his services? Because he couldn’t understand Italian—or Neapolitan or whatever the hell it was—and needed his friend to tell him what was said? He would
never know. He’d tell Edna—and many others over the years—about Frank Basile.

However unsettled he might have been, Eliot refused to be cowed by the murder of one of the bureau’s own. He became even more determined to bring down the booze ring: it was now personal. He and Albert made a point of being seen going about their business in the Heights, even though their cover as corrupt agents had been blown with the raid.
They kept at it even after the police arrested a suspect in Basile’s murder: a small-time goombah named Tony Feltrin. They kept at it even after news got out that Feltrin had been found hanging by his necktie in a cell at the Kensington police station. Coasting around town in their government sedan, Eliot couldn’t help but feel eyes on him at all times. Everyone seemed to understand that this was now war. He and Albert kept sawed-off shotguns in their coat pockets.
At restaurants, Eliot recalled, “We always took a corner table as the danger of our undertaking was becoming more imminent.” The jumpiness, the constant worry, became a habit. More than two decades later, long after leaving law enforcement, Eliot would still always sit at corner tables in restaurants, his back to the wall.
He quietly, bashfully, smiled when friends ribbed him about it.

Which is not to say Eliot’s worrying was pure paranoia. Chicago’s Prohibition Bureau office, noticing the collection of bodies piling up in little Chicago Heights, decided there was a conspiracy case there after all. The bureau ratcheted up its investigation once again, focusing anew on tying the liquor ring’s operations to city officials. Yellowley and Jamie pushed for more evidence, which meant more harassment at clubs and “soda parlors,” more interviews with suspects, more eavesdropping on conversations—and more violence from increasingly harried and desperate bootleggers.
Three days after Christmas, while on one of their cruising tours of the town, Eliot and Albert noticed “a flashy new car” with a lone occupant right behind them for block after block. Albert punched down on the accelerator of their Cadillac—and so did the car behind. Next he slowed to a crawl, and so did their pursuer. Finally, following Eliot’s direction, he swung into a residential neighborhood, found a narrow street, and slid the car “diagonally across the street . . . forming a block for the car behind us.” Eliot leapt from the Caddy and grabbed the driver, pinning his arms to the wheel. Albert ran around the back of the car and pushed the barrel of his shotgun through the open passenger-side window. The man, who appeared to speak only Italian, was unfamiliar to them; they couldn’t recall ever seeing him
at the Cozy Corners or any of the other gang hangouts in the area. But they found a gun on him, the numbers filed off. It was loaded with dumdum bullets, the kind that expands on impact, spreading the damage. Eliot, still thinking about his friend Frank, still blaming himself, believed he was the target.

“This gun,” he said, “was obviously meant for me.”

Flaunting Their Badness

A
t 5 a.m. on January 6, 1929, a dozen Chicago police cruisers arrived at an undeveloped lot on East Ninety-fifth Street. The cars carried officers three abreast in the front and back seats. None of them knew why they had been sent to this desolate spot early on a Sunday morning. Then a small army of federal agents climbed out of parked sedans, their collars pulled up high, hats squashed down low. The agents fanned out in the subfreezing morning air, providing instructions to the cops, handing out arrest warrants. When a policeman clapped his hands to ward off the cold, he was told to cut it out. Agents gave each car a specific assignment and a time frame within which to accomplish it. Police officers were traded out with Prohibition agents so that each automobile was mixed. The cars idled in the lot for no more than fifteen minutes, the mission hammered home emphatically. Then doors slammed, engines revved, and the cars pulled onto the street and ripped southward, heading for the Chicago Heights city limits.

This was the new world order. Republican Herbert Hoover, an unabashed dry, had just been elected president of the United States in a landslide over the Democrats’ wet candidate, Al Smith. The president-elect publicly declared that the country faced a law-and-order crisis, and so the Chicago Prohibition office wanted to make clear to Washington that it was vigorously pursuing its mission. On Friday Jamie had told the press that Chicago Heights was “a Mafia nest and [bootlegging] ring operating in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and New York.” The Chicago office made sure the newspapers knew about the arrest of the man who had been following Eliot and Albert, a hoodlum called Mike Picchi. “
George E. Q. Johnson and State’s Attorney John A. Swanson cooperated yesterday in the speedy indictment of an alleged Chicago Heights bootleg gangster, suspected of plotting the assassination of two prohibition agents,” the
Tribune
reported. Jamie and Johnson were setting the scene for what was to come next.

Now, three days after that report, the papers were going to have a much bigger story. Someone arrested in the November raids clearly had talked,
despite the best efforts of the area’s Mob enforcers. The caravan of police and federal agents crossed into Chicago Heights shortly before dawn, crunching over the icy back roads where gangsters had been enthusiastically tossing bodies the past two months. The two lead cars, one of them carrying Chicago’s deputy police commissioner, John Stege, split off from the rest and headed for city hall, where police headquarters was located. “It was felt that unless we took over the station,” Eliot wrote, “hoodlums throughout the town would be given the alarm from the police station itself.”

On days like this, Stege truly loved his life. He was a tubby little gray-haired man with round granny glasses and a double chin that swung like a hammock, but he carried himself with flair. He used to write a column for the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
headed by a photo of him holding a tommy gun. Somehow he pulled off the look. Now he told his men to wait on the front steps for a minute so he could enter the Chicago Heights police station alone. With daylight beginning to rub through the morning blackness, he turned and strut-waddled through the station’s front doors. He held his badge above his head so the gold would catch the overhead lights.

“Where are the keys to this joint?” he bellowed, unable to suppress a smile.

Within moments, as Stege’s men began to file through the door, he was unlocking the station’s jail cells. They were empty except for one containing three women. Stege shooed them out.

“We’ll need all the room we have in a few minutes,” he said.

The desk sergeant huffed at this. “Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?”

Stege’s answer: “We’re running the place for a while.”

The outsiders placed everyone in the station house under arrest, except for those actually facing charges—the three women. They sent the women, all freelance prostitutes, out into the streets. Stege happily let news photographers take pictures as he put the Chicago Heights policemen into their own cells. He smiled proudly as the flashbulbs popped. He had been forced to resign from the Chicago Police Department eighteen months before when a newspaper revealed he had been convicted of murder when he was fifteen. He was a good cop, though, a reformed man, and everyone who worked with him knew it. So when the scandal subsided, the city had quietly brought him back into the department. This was his chance to prove to the public that he deserved the second chance.

The feds were happy to give Stege his moment. He was a longtime critic of gangster chic, decrying how smirking, well-dressed hoods “flaunt their badness, boast of their bloody conquests, jeer at the widows of their victims, scoff at the suggestion of retributive justice.” He had shown contempt for the city’s mobsters years before it became socially acceptable to do so.

With the police station under federal control, the hundred or so officers and agents out in the Heights could take their quarry by surprise. The raiders pulled up in front of small clapboard houses, two-story brick apartment buildings, and a warehouse that served as the syndicate’s “distributing depot.” They broke into twenty private residences, pulling men out of their beds, their wives screaming, children crying. Some of the hoodlums managed to take flight, with agents running them down in the street. Agents and officers reported in at the police station with their knees scraped up and hands bruised, their prisoners missing teeth. One bootlegger sat in a cell and sobbed into his hands. As a general rule, dry agents described mobsters strictly as dead-eyed murderers, nothing more. Eliot would do the same in his public comments, but he didn’t actually have such a black-and-white view of them. He hated arresting men at their homes, in front of their wives and children. “It was astonishing what good family men some of them were,” he would tell his wife two decades later.
He added: “There would be a lot of emotion at the separation of the women and children from their men. In fact one of the hoodlums took it so hard he was sick all the way to the police station.”

Agents brought twenty-five gangsters to the Chicago Heights police station that morning, along with dozens of guns and hundreds of boxes of ammunition. Over at the distribution depot on East Fourteenth Street, men with axes split open barrels and watched beer rush into the street. They also found four hundred slot machines, which they bashed up with ball-peen hammers. At his office in downtown Chicago, George E. Q. Johnson took responsibility for the town’s takedown, declaring that Chicago Heights “had fallen into the hands of a syndicate which made millions of dollars through its monopoly of slot machines and booze.” The
Tribune
triumphantly announced that “Chicago Heights, known as the most lawless town in Cook county, has been cleaned up.”

By midday, paddy wagons ferried prisoners into the Loop, delivering them to the detectives’ bureau for questioning. Later, the police brought Picchi into the county jail so all of the Heights goons could give the suspected assassin a good long look. No one admitted knowing him.

“None of the prisoners is talking,” Jamie told the press. “Their silence smacks of the Mafia.” He insisted they planned on charging Picchi with the murder of Joe Martino.

Standing around in the Prohibition Bureau office, Eliot watched Jamie grandstand for reporters. He watched agents laughing and roughhousing. He didn’t want to join the celebration. He felt carved out, like he’d been kicked in the stomach. The exhilaration of the chase hadn’t lasted long; now a black cloud was following along behind it. This was nothing new to Eliot. He had battled depression his whole life and never understood where it came from or what it meant. Deciding not to wait for his brother-in-law, he climbed into his car and drove home.