Eliot Ness (6 page)

The Capone Fans

T
he Chicago Heights operation was an unmistakable success. The newspaper headlines said so, as did the memos the local Prohibition office sent to headquarters in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the one valuable conclusion the Chicago bureau office could draw from the demise of the Chicago Heights bootleg syndicate was that Joe Martino had been a small fish. He was mostly just a traffic cop directing booze between Chicago and the southern reaches of the state. Al Capone had owned him, just as Capone owned almost every bootlegger in northern Illinois.

This should not have been a surprise to the Prohibition Bureau. By now Alphonse Capone was the best-known man in Chicago. He had arrived in the city only nine years before, just as the Volstead Act was going into effect. At the time, he had been barely old enough to vote—not that he did—and as round and amiable as a vaudeville comic.
Kids and mothers loved him. He set himself up as Al Brown, secondhand furniture dealer, with a storefront at 2220 South Wabash Avenue. His business card and dusty shop didn’t fool anyone. The distinctive scars along the left side of his face suggested that Capone wasn’t always as amiable as he appeared on first meeting. He glommed on to the notorious Johnny Torrio, becoming his right-hand man while running whores and providing muscle whenever and wherever needed. Capone had a soft spot for the prostitution game, but, no dummy, he quickly pivoted to where the real action was.

If Capone had simply wanted to make a nice, crooked living, he could have stuck with hookers, gambling, and shakedown rackets. These were tried-and-true businesses, mature businesses. But bootlegging, particularly in the big cities, was for men of ambition. Bootleggers wanted more than a big wad of cash at the end of each day. They wanted status, too. “
We’re big business without high hats,” said Dean O’Banion, a flower-shop-owning gangster who controlled the Northside liquor trade—until he took a spray of bullets in 1924. Thugs finally could offer a service that respectable men wanted, and they were becoming wealthy beyond all conception by
offering it. (
Another local bootlegger, Terry Druggan, liked to show off his solid silver toilet seat.)

More than any of them, Capone became an object of fascination.
The social worker Jane Addams despaired over how boys were “tremendously aroused” at the very sight of Capone and his cohorts. When his bulletproof black sedan rumbled through a neighborhood—any neighborhood—kids would crane their necks “as eagerly as for a circus parade,” wrote the journalist Fred Pasley. “There goes Al,” they’d say, and whistle in admiration. How could they react any other way? The man had style. The man had money and power. It wasn’t as if kids—or anyone else—could look to the city’s hard-hearted industrialists for inspiration. The economy was booming, but for average Chicagoans, the boom was the sound of an anvil coming down on their heads. “
Morally,” the writer Nelson Algren said of bootleggers, “they are sounder than the ‘good’ people who run Chicago by complicity.” To young toughs around the city, the 1925 changing of the guard at the city’s biggest gang—from the forty-three-year-old Torrio, heading off into semi-retirement, to the twenty-six-year-old Capone—represented something special, proof that merit could be rewarded, even in America. Twelve-year-old Louis Terkel, a student at John McLaren Elementary School on the West Side (he would later become known as “Studs”), listened raptly when two older classmates schemed for membership in the Forty-twos—“junior members of the Syndicate . . . What the Toldeo Mud Hens are to the New York Giants.”

They dream of the Forty Two’s as North Shore matrons dream of the Social Register. An older brother of one and a young uncle of the other, Forty Two alumni, are in the employ of Al Capone, one of our city’s most highly regarded citizens. The uncle, a few years later, was seen floating down the drainage canal. And no water wings. It was a strange place for him to have gone swimming. The waters were polluted even then.

Such swimming jaunts had become rather commonplace. Capone—the Big Fella or Number One to his men, Scarface Al to the press—sought to lock down his new standing and expand his domain the only way he knew how: through terror. In 1926, seventy-six hoodlums were killed in Chicago as rival gangs fought it out over turf and hurt feelings. The following year, fifty-four more mobsters fell. Many of these killings happened in public, in drive-by machine-gun attacks. That meant civilians were falling, too—
including an assistant state’s attorney, William McSwiggin. Anyone walking in the Loop began to flinch, or outright panic, whenever they heard an automobile sliding around a corner at a decent clip. Many a man dived for cover only to have a taxicab scream past. The tension in the popular image of the bootlegger—glamorous modern-day prince, ugly cold-blooded killer—divided Chicagoans into two distinct classes: the romantic and the realistic, the stupid and the street-smart.
One night at the Paramount Club downtown, the actress and vaudevillian Mildred Harris, Charlie Chaplin’s ex, introduced a handsome young patron to fellow performer Sally Rand. “I want you to meet a sweet and lovely man,” Harris purred. Rand, a dancer at the club, was impressed with the man’s duds and manners—and flattered when he began hitting on her. But later, in the dressing room, one of the other dancers said, “You’re certainly in high society tonight. Machine Gun Jack McGurn.” Rand began to shake uncontrollably. She sneaked out the back door, forgetting her coat, and ran to her hotel, where she locked herself in her room.

Capone took offense at the suggestion there might be something wrong with the way he conducted business, whatever the reputation of McGurn, his chief hit man. This was the twentieth century. Laws were passé; the country had evolved beyond them.
He told the
Chicago Tribune
’s Genevieve Forbes Herrick: “They talk to me about not being on the legitimate. Why, lady,
nobody’s
on the legit. You know that and so do they.” Capone needn’t have worried so much about what delicate flowers like Sally Rand thought. Al couldn’t please everybody, but he could please enough of them. Unlike Torrio before him, the Big Fella loved to talk to the press. He loved to have his picture taken, as long as the camera got his good side. “‘
Public service’ is my motto,” he declared, flashing a pleasant, boyish smile that had become a front-page staple. By 1926, he was as recognizable in Chicago as Cubs pitching ace Grover Alexander, a regular Capone customer. He had become an honest-to-goodness hero to thousands, and not just to the kids on the street corner. Industrialists and bankers admired a good bootlegger, too.

The novelist Mary Borden, a native Chicagoan and an expatriate visiting her hometown for the first time in twelve years, was shocked to find herself one evening listening to a socialite “who spoke to me with tears in her eyes of Capone. I was already getting rather sick of the Scarface, but this suddenly made me feel quite ill; this sentimentality frightened me. I had heard, of course, of the Capone fans—he had more adorers, so I’d been told, than
any movie star—but I had not expected the friends of my childhood to be numbered among them.”

***

Even two years in, George E. Q. Johnson was still trying to figure out how to do his job.

The fifty-six-year-old Iowan’s reputation for unshakable honesty, along with a passing acquaintance with reformist U.S. senator Charles Deneen, had landed him the big office in Chicago’s U.S. district attorney’s office. His skills as a prosecutor, however, were suspect. During his thirty-year career in private practice, he had almost exclusively handled civil, not criminal, cases. For that entire time he remained little known outside his modest Swedish American community. But this inexperienced U.S. attorney did have the one characteristic that was absolutely essential for the job. When he came to Chicago from small-town Iowa as a young man, he began using the initial of his middle name so he would stand out from all the other George Johnsons in the big city. Not satisfied, he soon added a second, invented initial. You could say it was the E and the Q that would make him famous. Only a truly vain man would go after Al Capone.

Of course, even the vainest men in the city didn’t covet the task Johnson had given himself, especially now. One month after the dry bureau’s Chicago Heights raid, Chicago police sergeant Thomas Loftus answered a call reporting gunfire on the city’s North Side. He arrived at 2122 North Clark Street at eleven in the morning and stepped inside the dank, smoke-filled industrial building. He smelled burnt gunpowder and heard a wet scraping sound. Then he spotted a man on all fours crawling toward him. He recognized the man—Frank Gusenberg, a member of Bugs Moran’s crew, one of the few remaining gangs that didn’t answer to Capone. Gusenberg’s clothing was shredded, blood streaked behind him like an airplane contrail. Only then did the policeman notice the horrors beyond—the herd of men bloodily arrayed against a brick wall, steam from their gore rising softly into the cold February air. An eyeball oozed on the slick concrete floor like a poached egg.

The newspapers ran with the story for weeks, until the horror lodged deep in the city’s collective consciousness. “Can you imagine standing seven guys against the wall and running a machine gun and killing all of them?” said one Chicagoan, who, like millions of others, greedily read every word printed about the slayings. “
You’d have to be crazy, right? Got to be doped up, no matter what kind of enemies they are.”
The St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre, as the killings came to be called, “was the worst thing that ever happened to Chicago as far as racketeering went.” After years of winks and chuckles about the gang wars, public opinion had finally turned. Wives worried endlessly about their husbands’ safety downtown during the day. Mothers kept their children from public playgrounds. Fear gripped every social stratum in the city. The violence, agreed the newspapers and politicians and everyone else, had to stop. Enough was enough. Even gangsters from other locales gaped at what was happening in the Second City.
New York’s Lucky Luciano, after a visit, called Chicago “a real goddam crazy place. Nobody’s safe in the street.”

The public’s obsession with the Valentine’s Day murders, which everyone assumed Capone had ordered, meant life became harder for George Johnson. Johnson had been pursuing a tax-fraud case against Capone from almost the day he took the oath as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Tax fraud wasn’t an exciting course of action, but it looked like a promising one—at least to Johnson. U.S. Attorney General William Mitchell wasn’t convinced. From Mitchell’s vantage point in Washington, Johnson had been futzing around with tax statements for a couple of years now and had nothing meaningful to show for it, while Capone was lining people up against walls and mowing them down. So he sent backup to Chicago in the form of U.S. Assistant Attorney General William Froelich. Johnson suddenly realized his job might be on the line.
He wrote a long, defensive reply to Mitchell, insisting “that I am quite able to do this.” He knew income-tax charges worked against gangsters. He was convinced it was the best way to get Capone. After all, the tax laws had already been used to nail Al’s brother Ralph and Al’s bagman Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, both convicted of tax evasion. But Johnson took Mitchell’s hint: a tax case, no matter how promising, was no longer good enough.
As the Internal Revenue agents working the case wrote: “Alphonse Capone is, without a doubt, the best advertised and most talked of gangster in the United States today. . . . [He] has been mentioned in connection with practically every major crime committed in Chicago within the last few years.” Capone, in short, had become a PR problem.
President Hoover, and so Attorney General Mitchell, wouldn’t be satisfied with a mere conviction. They wanted to make an example of Capone.

Good-Hearted Al

J
ohnson understood the challenge he faced.

Golding had been a disaster, but Johnson, like Willebrandt, wasn’t willing to walk away from the special agency squad.
Willebrandt had once said she refused to believe that “out of our one hundred and twenty million population . . . it is impossible to find four thousand men in the United States who cannot be bought.” Johnson wasn’t sure about four thousand, but he knew there were indeed men out there who couldn’t be bought: he was one of them. He became determined to find some of the others.

Johnson had listened to Willebrandt’s discourses on Prohibition enforcement over the years. He had approved of many of her proposals, such as specialized training for dry agents and the transfer of the Prohibition Bureau from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department, both of which had eventually come to pass. By the fall of 1930, however, Willebrandt was gone. She had finally resigned in frustration and returned home to California to take up a private practice. But Johnson had not given up. With Mitchell providing pressure through Froelich, Johnson had pushed ahead in his fight against Capone, egged on by the gangster’s continued consolidation of power in the months after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The U.S. attorney now decided he would adapt Willebrandt’s dream of an incorruptible bureau—an impossibility—into an idea that
was
possible: a small, incorruptible team within Chicago’s special agency squad. And this time he would create it himself, rather than send away to Washington for it.
The Justice Department had been encouraging Johnson for months to make a “greater effort . . . to reach the sources of the bootleggers’ supply and get at the revenue which finances the organized gangs.” He would make this objective a priority, and turn it to his own aims. His special squad within the special squad, acting entirely on its own, would be limited to one goal only: squeezing Al Capone’s income stream. Johnson figured there could be no better way to make the Big Fella buck and scream, to make him lose focus on what should matter most to him—being careful. You
make a man angry, and he gets sloppy. The U.S. attorney’s tax case needed Capone to get a little sloppy.

At the end of October 1930, Alexander Jamie requested an indefinite unpaid leave from the Bureau of Prohibition so he could take over the Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime, popularly known as the Secret Six, a private, extralegal group dedicated to bringing crime under control in Chicago. The prominent local businessmen who bankrolled the committee had deemed it necessary because the police and the local Prohibition office were so corrupt and chronically underfunded. Jamie was taking Don Kooken with him as his deputy director. In a letter he included with his leave-request form, he made a bold recommendation. “
As Mr. Kooken and myself are leaving the office, the question naturally arises as to someone to take the position of Special Agent in Charge,” he wrote. “Insofar as I may be permitted to suggest, I would like to recommend to you for this position, Special Agent Eliot Ness who is the oldest Special Agent in this office in point of service and for approximately a year and a half has been considered my second assistant. Mr. Ness is known to you personally, as is also his reputation for honesty and ability to hold such a position.”

The twenty-eight-year-old assistant to Jamie’s assistant did not get the job. The older and far more experienced W. E. Bennett was named the special agent in charge in Chicago. But Jamie did not abandon his lobbying campaign on behalf of his brother-in-law. A short time later, on the recommendation of the new chief of the Secret Six, George Johnson opened up Eliot’s federal personnel file.
He noted that the agent had been commended for his “coolness, aggressiveness and fearlessness in raids.” This was gravy: Johnson greatly respected Jamie’s opinion and trusted that he would recommend the right man for the job. The Swedish American federal prosecutor took a good look at the photo clipped to the inside cover, at Eliot’s stoic Scandinavian expression and perfectly coiffed blond hair. The young agent in the picture looked trustworthy and decent, just as Jamie had said. Johnson believed that honesty, loyalty, and reliability, not experience, would count above all else for the leader of his new operation. He sent for Eliot Ness.

Johnson’s interview was perfunctory. After just a few minutes, he stood up and shook Eliot’s hand. Everybody in the Chicago Prohibition office knew the U.S. attorney was putting together a special “Capone squad,” and Eliot had hoped he would be chosen for the effort.
When Johnson told him he not only was on the team but would be its operational leader—Froelich
would serve as the unit’s administrative supervisor—Eliot couldn’t believe it. He would later recall that he “felt like leaping out of my chair and doing a jig right there in the office of the United States District Attorney.”

***

Legend has it that Eliot personally selected the men who would become known collectively as the Untouchables. “
The success of the entire venture,” he wrote in his memoir, “was predicated on there being no ‘bad apples.’” To that end, he wrote, he went through mounds of personnel files delivered from Washington, picked out the agents with the best records, and put them “under the ‘microscope.’” He weeded out any agent who had the slightest hitch in his background until he was left with only the most accomplished and upstanding men in the entire bureau.

In reality, Eliot, Johnson, and Froelich took pretty much anyone they could get.
Good men were hard to come by in the Bureau of Prohibition, and so regional administrators resisted giving up their best agents, insisting the requested men were in the middle of cases or had subpoenas pending or specific skills the office could not do without.

In November and December 1930, after much bureaucratic wrangling, a handful of agents from around the country received orders to report to U.S. District Attorney Johnson for “temporary detail on special work.” (Eliot himself wouldn’t be officially put under Johnson’s direction until December 8, which suggests he may not have had anything to do with selecting the team’s original members.)
*
With a few exceptions, the agents assembled for the team were not the bureau’s standouts. Some would qualify as misfits, a couple bordered on incompetent.
Eliot, via his cowriter Oscar Fraley in
The Untouchables
, would write that he had specific, definitive qualities in mind for the team members: “single, no older than thirty, both the mental and physical stamina to work long hours and the courage and ability to use fist or gun. Nor would mere ‘muscle men’ do because each had to have special investigative techniques at his command.” This checklist was straight out of George Golding’s playbook; Golding liked to take young college men, blank slates he could mold into his own image. Eliot liked the idea of that, and it would become a famous part of Untouchables lore, but it’s not what he ended up with. All of the agents in the squad were older
than him, some by more than a decade. Most were married and had children. Thanks to Eliot’s memoir, ten men—plus Eliot, their boss—have been credited as the team’s members, but in fact there never was a set lineup. Agents moved in and out of the unit during its brief existence for various official and nonofficial reasons; some worked on the operation for just a week or two before returning to their regular assignments. Only a few men stayed the course with Eliot from beginning to end.

George Golding’s special agency unit had been the inspiration for the Capone squad, the operational and philosophical starting point. But though Eliot continued to admire the former special agent in charge, he would not run things like Golding had. Hardboiled Golding, for all his hail-fellow bonhomie, didn’t like people. He didn’t trust them, didn’t think about their families or off-duty lives. He put their names in books, kept score, waited for them to turn on him or show they were fuck-ups. They usually proved him right, one way or another, and look where that had gotten him: bureaucratic oblivion in Washington. Eliot had learned a few things from Golding, tricks he would use for years to come, but he never took up his suspicious nature. He believed the best of people—until proven wrong. That would be his approach to the Capone squad, to the men who would help define his reputation.

From the start, three men were obvious picks for the team. Joe Leeson, a celebrated agent in Detroit, was Don Kooken’s brother-in-law and thus could be counted on to be a reliable man.
Johnson had worked with Marty Lahart, the Golding veteran, and been duly impressed by the “tall, happy Irishman.” Another former Golding man, Samuel Seager, was one of Jamie’s favorites.
*

Seager was just shy of forty when he joined the Capone squad. A former upholsterer and chiropractic student, his only law-enforcement experience before signing up for the Prohibition Bureau was as a prison guard in upstate New York. Despite this, he had proved himself an exceptionally capable agent, a natural-born cop. Jamie thought so highly of Seager that a couple of years earlier he had blocked the agent’s request to transfer to another city. Seager had been shocked by the gung-ho amateurishness of the Golding operation and had wanted out.
Jamie instead sent him on temporary assignment to southern Illinois, where, according to reports signed by
Jamie, he single-handedly broke up a major bootlegging operation in East Saint Louis. Seager, known to friends as “Maurice,” was one of the first men to report for duty with the Capone squad. Eliot, though not yet formally assigned to the operation, brought Seager up to speed on the plans for the team. Maurice would immediately see something special in Eliot: intelligence, determination, the capacity for loyalty. He would become Eliot’s closest, most trusted colleague in the unit.

Joe Leeson’s family connection to Kooken, now with the Secret Six, wasn’t his only calling card for the special squad.
He was known in the bureau as “the best ‘tail car’ man in the country,” which Eliot figured would be a valuable skill in tracking Capone’s men and shipments. And having worked for two years in the Detroit division, he knew the ins and outs of that city’s Purple Gang, which supplied Canadian booze to Chicago’s bootleggers. Leeson’s boss in Detroit, Ernest Rowe, fought hard to keep him in Michigan’s biggest city. After receiving Johnson’s request for Leeson’s services, Rowe sent a beseeching telex to Washington, listing a series of reasons why he couldn’t spare the man. When he was instructed to send him anyway, Rowe wrote that Leeson would report to Chicago on December 22, and added that he “keenly feels the loss of this man. He is one of our best agents.”
*

Not everyone joining the team was accustomed to such high praise.
On December 15, William Jennings Gardner reported to Johnson for assignment to the Capone squad. Eliot was thrilled. The forty-six-year-old Gardner also had been on Golding’s team, before being transferred to Syracuse, New York. Better yet, he had been a college football hero. Eliot admired athletic prowess more than almost anything else; he believed that success on the field of play corresponded with strong moral fiber and was specifically predictive of success in law enforcement. His fandom, in fact, blinded him: Gardner’s Prohibition Bureau personnel file couldn’t have been put “under the microscope” without bursting into flames. In the fall of 1927, the rangy North Dakotan, then working in the New Jersey office, had been fired from the bureau for laziness and repeated insubordination. He was saved only through the sustained application of political pressure. “
I am exceedingly interested in the case of W. J. Gardiner [
sic
], recently dismissed from the service in New Jersey,” U.S. senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota wrote to Seymour Lowman, U.S. assistant secretary of the Treasury for Prohibition.
The senator, keen to exploit his prerogatives, even for the benefit of a dodgy Prohibition agent, continued awkwardly: “Since he is a North Dakota man, I have been more especially interested in his case and being quite well acquainted with him was rather dumbfounded when the word of his dismissal came through. . . . Is it possible that he was let out of the service through petty jealousies and the fact that he was a man of extraordinary ability who might be overshadowing some of the other officials just above him?”

Lowman did not flinch at the implied threat. The former lieutenant governor of New York was a dedicated and honest dry who fiercely opposed his state’s wet governor, Al Smith.
A week before receiving Nye’s letter, Lowman told a reporter, “There are many incompetent and crooked men in the service. Bribery is rampant. There are many wolves in sheep’s clothing. We are after them. . . . Some days my arm gets tired signing orders of dismissal.” He did not rescind Gardner’s firing.

But Gardner, who was half Chippewa and played politics with swinging elbows, did not leave it there. He turned to another powerful patron, U.S. senator Charles Curtis, one of the first men of known Native American descent to reach high public office. Curtis liked to proudly declaim that he was “one-eighth Kaw Indian and one hundred percent Republican.” In just a few months, the Kansan would become Herbert Hoover’s vice presidential running mate, but first he went to battle for one of his own. Curtis, it turned out, had more oomph than his colleague from North Dakota.
Prohibition Bureau commissioner J. M. Doran wrote to Curtis in March 1928:

The Administrator under whom Mr. Gardner was formerly employed reported that he was lazy and inefficient. In view of your interest in the matter, however, we will give him another opportunity to demonstrate his fitness for the service by appointing him as a Special Employee for a period of sixty days. At the end of that time, if his services are satisfactory to the Special Agent in Charge at Chicago, under whom he will be assigned to duty, steps will be taken to bring about his continuance in the service.

So Gardner was assigned to Chicago—the beating heart of Prohibition resistance—and to the squad specifically charged with cleaning up the Chicago office. For everyone else, assignment to Golding’s prestigious team was a reward for exceptional work, or at the very least a sign of professional promise (e.g., young Harvard men willing to bypass banking careers in
favor of busting heads for a mere $2,600 a year). For this politically connected troublemaker, by far the oldest man in the unit, it was a punishment, most likely with the expectation that he would wash out under the glare of publicity that followed Hardboiled Golding’s operations. That didn’t happen, but not because Gardner had reformed himself. He just happened to not be around when the special squad imploded. Indeed, it appears that he viewed the assignment as a no-show job, or perhaps that was how Golding, who had always picked his own men, had defined it for him. Gardner’s personnel file offers not one word about his work during the five months he was a special agent in Chicago; it simply notes his report date and then his reassignment to upstate New York.