Eliot Ness (8 page)

Kid Stuff

“T
here it is,” Joe Leeson said. He sounded relieved, as if the block-long building they had carefully staked out for a month might have been quietly lifted up and carried away in the night. The building, at 1632–1642 South Cicero Avenue, sat in a heap on the side of the road, like a fresh bear dropping. Leeson and Eliot watched from the cab of their idling truck as steam puffed from vents along the building’s sides, nearly invisible in the snow-lashed landscape. The nation’s freight rail loadings, a key indicator of Chicago’s economic health, were down thirty-two thousand from the previous week, and 25 percent from the previous year. This was no surprise. Gross national product had fallen by more than a third since the beginning of the downturn—and was still falling. The pain was spreading far and going deep. Yet Al Capone’s breweries blasted away, as hard and often as they dared. The agents had figured out that this brewery was producing at least a hundred barrels of product a day. Eliot wanted to take it down at the height of its production cycle.

The truck heaved and coughed in neutral as Eliot exchanged hand signals with agents in the car behind. They needed to be synchronized. The squad had spent weeks preparing for this moment. It was late March already. Their plans had been put on hold three weeks earlier by sixteen inches of fresh, fluffy snow, which buried parked cars and bleached city streets for miles. Even now, old piles of snow still choked alleys and clogged gutters, and a persistent gray mist cut visibility to a few feet. But the squad could wait no longer. The convoy had begun its slow trek up the main boulevard in Cicero shortly after dawn. The truck at the head of the pack had five men in it, including Eliot in the front passenger seat, wearing a leather football helmet. More men trailed in black sedans. Intent on the element of surprise, Eliot and his team—plus a handful of borrowed police officers—had planned the raid “as we would design a football play.” Everyone knew what he was supposed to do.

The Prohibition Bureau had long before learned that Capone’s breweries
were kept behind reinforced steel doors and came equipped with escape hatches. Most brewery raids over the years had bogged down right at the start. There’d be dozens of men balled up in front of the building, as if in a huge rugby scrum, loudly banging on the doors with sledgehammers and crowbars. By the time they actually made it inside, the brewers and sometimes all of the equipment were long gone.

Eliot’s raid would be different. The squad’s small size and insular method of working lowered the risk of any wayward cop or dry agent tipping off the Outfit. The more pressing issue was how best to quickly get inside the brewery’s walls and prevent escapes. To solve this problem the squad built a huge, snowplow-like battering ram, shaped almost like an arrowhead. The team worked on it in a government garage on the northwest side, usually late at night. They kept it hidden from other agents in the bureau; Eliot didn’t even tell Johnson about it. The battering ram would be the team’s secret weapon. For Eliot, the possibilities were electric. It was Arthur and Excalibur.

Eliot waved his hand, and Leeson put the heavy truck into low gear and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. Whiteness streaked past the windows. The battering ram vibrated against the grille as the truck slid and gained speed. There was a flash when it hit. Eliot blinked and peered through the windshield as the truck groaned. He could feel his heart bouncing around his ribcage; he could hear wood cracking. The truck lurched and then struck a second set of doors, this time solid steel. After a shaking, stuttering, endless moment, with Eliot holding onto the seat to keep from flying into Leeson’s lap, the steel seam sprang with a thunderous clap. The truck’s headlights shone into a dense, dark nothingness. Eliot could hear the tiny
thuck-thuck-thuck
of his men scaling ladders to the roof, the trailing sedans clumping to a stop behind the truck and officers jumping out. Everyone was doing his job. Things were happening, the plan was in motion, but Eliot saw only an empty building. No stills. No barrels of liquor. Nothing. “My heart sank,” he remembered. He sat there, stunned. He had failed. It had all been an elaborate ruse; the real brewery was somewhere else. He was sure of it.

But then, one of the agents—probably Leeson, the most experienced brewery raider on the team—spotted a blip of light from an interior door swinging shut, and yelled out. Eliot realized all at once what he was looking at. The Mob wouldn’t reinforce a dummy operation with solid-steel doors. It was just the front room that was a dummy, painted black to simulate a
vast empty building. Eliot leapt from the truck and raced toward the invisible door. As he banged through it, the brewery—the vats, the burners, the pumps—came violently into focus, as if being squeezed from a tube. Eliot and his men kept running “and were on the necks of five operators in less time than it takes to tell it.” The brewers, shocked and scared, gave up without a fight. The squad captured not only the clutch of men operating the brewery, but three trucks and all of the brewery’s equipment. A huge haul, an unprecedented haul, for a raid on a Capone operation.

Years later, Eliot would call his mission to dry up Capone “an obsession.” This was the moment it became one. In those excited, wild minutes after Leeson pounded down on the accelerator and the truck jumped forward, Eliot felt “a certain sense of exhilaration, maybe even exultation.” He felt
alive
. It would ruin him for normal life for years. He had been so careful and deliberate through the years, a follower of rules, an inveterate worrier. Now he had found a new god. From here on out he would do almost anything to recapture the emotional high that came from crashing through Al Capone’s doors.

Standing in the middle of the room, Eliot took it all in. There were nineteen vats, each capable of holding about fifteen hundred gallons. Some thirty thousand gallons were on site and ready to be shipped. He knew that nothing like this had ever been captured before. Not in Chicago. Chapman moved around the room like a quartermaster. He wrote down the number of each truck, examined every piece of brewing equipment. He couldn’t stop smiling. A valuable piece of hard evidence connecting Capone to bootlegging would be found on this day, in this building: a truck the gangster had bought before he stopped putting his name to things. “Circumstances connected Al Capone with this purchase, with the activities of the racket and also with income from the fruit of the racket,” Eliot wrote. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

The truck seizure was meaningful, but the biggest catch of the day was a person, not a thing: Steve Svoboda, Capone’s chief brewmaster. Stocky, cow-faced, with a wide, pessimistic mouth like a dried-up old nun, Svoboda stared at the floor as beer sluiced around his feet. Behind him, agents smashed barrels and opened up the spigots of the vats. Soon they would all be wading ankle-high through beery foam.

***

The Capone network shuddered only for a moment. The press praised the unprecedented assault (Eliot clipped and saved the news reports), but that
didn’t matter much to the Outfit. Svoboda made bail and returned to brewing, production shifted to other breweries, business went on as usual. Which was exactly what the Capone squad had hoped would happen.
The team’s agents continued tailing trucks coming out of the barrel-cleaning plant, which inevitably led to new discoveries: another cleaning facility, a sales office where clerks took orders from speakeasies. Wiretaps followed, leading the squad to more breweries and providing them with a nearly definitive list of Capone’s customers.

On Saturday, April 11, the squad took down a second large brewery, this one at 3136 South Wabash Avenue in Chicago.
The seizure of the two breweries—the one in Cicero and now this one—would cost the Capone syndicate about $10,000 a day in revenue, Eliot told reporters as his men packed prisoners into a paddy wagon. The raid had been an almost perfect replication of the Cicero assault, except this time with better weather. The squad once again used the battering ram and once again arrested Svoboda, who didn’t even bother trying to run. “
We were to arrest him again and again as we took subsequent breweries,” Eliot wrote in the first draft of his memoir. Evidence gathered in these raids—along with Eliot’s testimony—would be used to indict Svoboda on Prohibition charges, putting pressure on the brewer to testify against others. One more thing for Capone to worry about.

The raid may have been a carbon copy of the earlier brewery mugging, but the aftermath wasn’t. After busting up dozens of barrels of beer, hauling away prisoners, and posing for newspaper photographers, Eliot and his agents shut the doors to the building—the large tanks and pumps still inside—and climbed into their cars. They drove off, leaving no one to keep an eye on the place. Darkness fell, and as the hours passed the street remained silent, with no police guard anywhere. A surprising oversight, but perhaps understandable considering all the excitement.

The Mob noticed. An eyewitness report captured the scene the next morning:

At 11 o clock four sedans swept into the neighborhood. For twenty minutes they cruised about. Nothing was seen to arouse suspicion. Then the four cars took up strategic positions so that from four street corners they could sight a car approaching from any direction.

With the sentinel cars posted, another car rolled into the neighborhood, up the street and in front of the brewery. The car halted and Bert Delaney . . . hopped out with two other men. He sauntered to the brewery door, took a key
out and unlocked the door. He and his companions walked in and away went the car that had carried them there.

A few minutes’ wait and a five-ton truck appeared and rolled up and into the brewery.

Delaney was one of Capone’s brewers, second only to Svoboda.
He was directing the two men as they loaded a 2,500-gallon tank onto the truck when a sudden, violent cacophony outside spun him around. The drivers of the sentinel cars were pounding on their horns. None of the men in the brewery had time to react: federal agents appeared out of the shadows, surrounding them. They had been hiding in and around the building all night, slapping themselves to stay awake, peeing quietly in dark corners. One of the lookout cars screamed past the building, the horn wailing. Delaney watched it disappear from sight. He sat on the truck’s fender and put his head in his hands.

***

Two days later, jacked up on success, Eliot took his men out to the site of his first big bust as a Prohibition agent: Chicago Heights.

This was not one of the squad’s carefully planned operations. The boys simply felt like knocking some heads, and so with nothing on the drawing board ready for action, their leader decided they’d do it the old-fashioned way. Once they reached the Heights’s city limits, Eliot stopped his car, got out, and took a big whiff. The others did the same.

What do you know—it worked. Following their noses, the agents walked up to a quaint Victorian-style house on Sixth Avenue on the east side of town. It turned out it wasn’t actually a house, just the frame of one. Inside was one large room where a group of men operated a distillery. Smaller stills chugged away in the basement and in the faux double garage behind the house. The agents dumped more than thirty thousand gallons of mash before they went on their way.

They drove down the street, around a few corners, and once again Eliot stopped his car, got out, and sniffed. Reporters caught up to the agents at their next port of call. This time they found beer rather than the hard stuff. Coming out of the makeshift brewery, Eliot beckoned the reporters over. “We secured convictions against fifty-six men in this neighborhood last year,” he told them. “We were just checking up today.” The squad ended the day with some sixty-five thousand gallons of alcohol mash and five Capone bootleggers to add to their ledgers.

The impromptu raids, not surprisingly, proved an embarrassment to the local police, who had no idea they were coming. Major Harry Stafford, installed as police chief after the dry bureau’s temporary takeover of the town in January 1929, arrived at police headquarters as Eliot and his men were walking out. “I can’t understand it,” Stafford told Eliot. “These fellows must have just slipped in. We’ve been keeping an awfully close check on things out here.”

Eliot was feeling confident after his run of success; he felt like a new man. He gave Stafford a little smile, savoring the moment like a postcoital cigarette. “I’ll be back,” he said, and swept out the door.

***

Eliot’s sense of smell may have been excellent, but Johnson and Froelich were more interested in his hearing. Back in 1928 the U.S. Supreme Court had knocked down Seattle bootlegger Roy Olmstead’s contention that phone wiretaps violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ever since, law enforcement had been sticking in wires on the flimsiest pretenses.
*
Johnson and Froelich were especially keen to put taps to use, approving them on phones for virtually every office and backroom lounge that might have some connection to the liquor network.
That meant Eliot would get to make use of the newest addition to the team: Paul Robsky, who had arrived early in April. The short, pigeon-chested former marine was itching to get in on the action. He’d spent the past three months in Philadelphia after being transferred from the cotton-mill town of Greenville, South Carolina. So far he hated big-city life, which as far as he could tell consisted of nothing but pointless stakeouts and even more pointless paperwork. He preferred the Southern style of bootleg enforcement.
Almost every day in Greenville he had undertaken a high-speed car chase through the mountains, with gravel flying and squirrels exploding on his grille. Yeee-ha! He claimed to have run thirty cars off the road in one month. “Working with Ness was kid stuff compared with running down those moonshiners in South Carolina,” he’d tell a reporter years later.

In the Capone squad, Leeson handled the car chases, such as they were. Eliot brought Robsky in for the more pressing need: raking phone terminals, still a relatively rare technical skill, which Robsky had picked up while
in the military. The new guy’s first assignment: Ralph Capone’s headquarters at the Montmartre Café in Cicero. Al’s brother, who’d already been convicted of income-tax evasion, headed up the Outfit’s bottling operation. Ralph’s piece of the pie was key to building a Volstead case against Al and other high-level members of the gang. Ralphie and his crew frequently took orders and dispatched deliveries from the phone at the end of the speakeasy’s bar. That being the case, they guarded the establishment like a prison. The operation would be the first of many wiretapping assignments for Robsky, but it also would be the hairiest, which was exactly what he needed to realize the Capone squad was the right gig for him. It also helped him to bond with Eliot, no small thing since Robsky hated all authority figures as a matter of course.