Eliot Ness (9 page)

The squad rented a basement apartment just off Cermak Road, not far from the Montmartre. Robsky’s job was to climb up the telephone pole in the alley behind the club and connect the line going into the building with the one going into the apartment, thus allowing the agents to listen in on every phone conversation coming in or out of Ralph’s inner sanctum. The problem was that Capone thugs prowled the alley around the clock. Ralph was notoriously dense, but he was probably aware that federal agents might try to tap his phone. Certainly he knew that assassins sent by his brother’s rivals would prefer to enter from the back of the building rather than the front. Whatever the reason for the goons, the squad had to get them out of the alley.

Eliot came up with a plan: on a bright, warm afternoon, Leeson and a handful of his fellow agents set out on “bait detail.” The men slowly cruised past the front of the Montmartre in a big black Cadillac, the top down, giving everyone and everything a good long look. They went around the block, and then chugged past the club again, this time at an even slower pace and with everyone in the car taking notes. The Outfit noticed the agents right off, and the unusual behavior made the boys nervous. A couple of hoods came out of the club to watch. After the agents spent about five more minutes circling the block, the flunkies had seen enough. They jumped into a car, pulled out into the street, and followed the Caddy. Now a second car full of dry agents came along, also with its top down, also with the agents giving everyone and everything the stink eye. While the first Cadillac took its pursuer on a leisurely tour of Cicero-area Mob hotspots—gambling dens, prostitution houses, speakeasies—the second Cadillac took over the job of slowly and suspiciously circling the Montmartre and the nearby Western Hotel, over and over.

As the second Cadillac got in on the action—with a third ready to go, if needed—Eliot and Robsky hoofed it over to the backside of the alley. The agents, both wearing workmen’s coveralls, peered in. It was a long, narrow passageway. A tailor’s shop had been stuffed into one of the corners like a finger in a dike. The alley’s walls rose higher, indicating the back of the speakeasy. Eliot stepped past the tailor’s hovel while Robsky, squatting in the shadows, put on his tool belt and spiked climbing shoes. Eliot spotted two gangsters midway down the alley: they were smoking cigarettes, the outlines of fat guns bunching up their coats. Finally, after yet another pass by the second Caddy, the back door to the speakeasy swung open, and the goons began nodding and yessing at someone. The door banged shut as the alley dwellers stubbed out their cigarettes, climbed into a sedan, and started it up. When the car turned out of the alley to join the convoy, Robsky hustled over to the telephone pole, with Eliot right behind him. Robsky looked up at the terminal box etched against a blinding blue infinity. “It seemed to be miles away,” the squad’s newest agent remembered thinking. “But, clamping my lips together and throwing one quick look at the unguarded back door of the Montmartre, I jammed my spikes into the pole and started my ascent. The higher I reached the more naked I felt, even though the figure of Ness standing tensely below me with drawn gun offered a certain amount of solace.”

A certain amount, but not enough. Robsky moved rapidly at first, with the crablike shuffle of telephone men everywhere: hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. He’d made it about halfway up the pole before he got a funny feeling.

He looked down. He was certain he’d heard something. He found Eliot directly below him, heater at the ready. Robsky’s eyes flicked over to the back of the club. He saw nothing. But someone could come banging through that door at any moment. Someone was sure to. He felt a prickle along his temples, another at the base of his spine. He’d begun to sweat. Panicked sweat. He closed his eyes, willed it away. He forced himself to look up. The terminal box stretched into the heavens. A pinprick at the top of the world. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Hand, hand, foot, foot—

Robsky froze. Someone had come through that door.
Shit
.

He didn’t look down. He listened, hugging the pole like it was a Teddy bear. It was nothing, he told himself. A passing car braking at a stop sign. A street vendor slamming open his drawer for a customer. It wasn’t the back door of the Montmartre Café. No way. He’d have heard gunshots by now.

He crab-walked higher. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Now he could see the terminal box. It was a real thing, with real dimensions. It
existed
.

When he finally made it to the top, Robsky threw open the box and stared inside. There were at least a hundred and fifty terminals. He developed a headache. He glanced down—Eliot was still there, unmolested—and he turned back to the box. He quickly raked the lines. A secretary at the bureau was supposed to call the Montmartre at exactly four and flirt with the bartender so Robsky would recognize her voice. It was now about ten past.
*
Chapman had been assigned to the phone in the Cermak Road apartment, where he would be talking with Lahart at the office, two more recognizable voices in the babble. Robsky flipped down one row and across another. Nothing. He looked down at Eliot until he got his attention and shook his head. Eliot waved at him to keep trying. Robsky began flipping through the terminals again, his fingers cramping from the stress. His breathing became ragged. Hanging up there in plain sight, he felt like “a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.”
At last he hit one—Chapman, his distinctive booming laugh—and a minute later he got the secretary.
Bingo
. He gave Eliot the OK sign, slammed the door to the box, and began to work his way down the pole. He hit the ground with a spine-jarring thud, huffing, his face red from exertion and excitement. He beamed at Eliot, and his boss returned a dreamy smile. They ran out of the alley, pausing at the side of the building to pull themselves together. Robsky shrugged off his equipment. “Phew,” he said. “I still can’t get over thinking what would have happened if those monkeys had come back while I was up there at the top of the pole.”

Eliot eased the brim of his hat back with the barrel of his gun. He offered up a Sam Spade smile. “Why, Paul, I had this little old .38 all ready.”

Robsky couldn’t help laughing. Remembering the moment many years later, he wondered if Eliot somehow believed that he, and not Robsky, had done the hard part. Not that it really mattered. Robsky’s boss got the tough-guy talk out of his system there on the sidewalk, because he couldn’t do it anywhere else. This wasn’t something he could tell the press about. The two men hustled to their car. They began celebrating—banging the dashboard and whooping—as soon as they closed the doors behind them. They knew they’d just made a big score. Eliot wrote later: “This tap was kept alive for many, many months, and we learned a great deal about the operations and personnel of the gang through it.”

***

With wiretaps in place at almost all known Capone offices, the late winter and spring of 1931 became a swirl of activity for the squad. They hit a brewery at 2271-2273 Lumber Street on the South Side, crashing through four steel doors at the rear of what appeared to be a garage. “
The federal men found 140 barrels of beer, nineteen tanks of beer and wort and other equipment,” wrote the
Chicago Daily News
. The brewery, with a capacity of a hundred barrels a day, had been up and running for only a month. At a warehouse on Calumet Avenue, the special agents seized twelve thousand gallons of “iced beer ready for delivery for the weekend trade” and arrested James Calloway, Delaney’s chief assistant. (
Calloway was already under indictment for conspiracy for his role in trying to retake the equipment from the raided brewery on South Wabash Avenue.)
The agents ran a car off the road on the West Side and came away with $25,000 worth of wine.
On his own Eliot chased a truck through busy downtown Chicago until the fleeing vehicle crashed into a post on Clark Street. There were only eleven barrels of beer onboard, but the driver was a wanted man.
A few weeks later, the team took down a large still in suburban McHenry, north of Chicago.

During this raiding frenzy, Eliot became a regular at the Northwestern University forensic crime lab bankrolled by the Secret Six and run by Colonel Calvin Goddard. The lab was a one-of-a-kind experiment, predating even the FBI laboratory. Here Eliot met Leonarde Keeler, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy who was trying to gin up interest in his “Respondograph”—a lie-detector machine. Keeler was a disciple of police innovator August Vollmer, whose graduate-level police-administration course Eliot had recently taken at the University of Chicago. Eliot also became friendly with Clarence Muehlberger, the toxicologist for the Cook County coroner’s office. Eliot would grill Muehlberger about his expertise and its application to crime solving, watching him closely as he went about his business.
Chemist John R. Matchett remembered seeing Eliot time and again hanging around the offices late at night, a “rather handsome man about five feet ten inches”—people always seemed to think him shorter than he was—“always smiling, but very earnest about his work.” Goddard and his pioneering research into ballistics especially fascinated Eliot. The special agent turned over to Goddard every gun his squad confiscated, with the hope of being able to tie a murder around the neck of Al Capone or one of his top men.

Eliot typically went to the laboratory alone. He worried about being seen
as different, as the weird guy at the bureau, and he knew his interest in the crime lab wouldn’t help his image. Most cops and dry agents viewed the new field of police science with deep skepticism. A few years later, with Capone behind bars and headlines hard to come by, Northwestern sold the crime lab to the Chicago Police Department. The transition did not go smoothly. The criminologist Fred E. Inbau, who worked at the lab, invited command officers to come in so he could walk them through this new resource they had. “
I have never met such a hostile group in my life,” he would recall. “I just about got on my knees and said, ‘Gentlemen, this is
your
laboratory. We didn’t ask you to come in here to instruct you. We just want to show you what you now have that you didn’t before.’” Inbau made it through his presentation, showing off the ballistics-matching equipment, the microscopes for examining soil specimens, and Keeler’s lie-detecting machine, but tension hung over the room. “The ones who had some feeling of understanding or sympathy about it were afraid to even ask questions,” Inbau said. “They didn’t know what image this would create among their colleagues who professed that they could do the job without all of this jazz.”

The promise of modern science thrilled Eliot, but for the most part he filed away his burgeoning knowledge for later use. It was the future of law enforcement, a future he was determined to bring about, but it could not be the present. He recognized that success against the Outfit would depend on old-fashioned police methods. Throughout the team’s first months, he and his agents spent almost every night sitting in cars in the bruising late winter cold, their muscles twitching, their hands and feet so icy they felt scalded. They would take turns, one trying to sleep as the others kept watch. Eliot took pages of notes every night, describing everything he saw. He seemed to love every minute of it. Growing up in a house filled with memories of older siblings who were grown and long gone, he had in some ways always felt separate, alone in the universe. Now he felt that he was a part of something. Something substantive, something he could lose himself in.

It was a family, of sorts. Leeson, a former navy man, the quietest of the group, became the unit’s unofficial cook.
Years later, in another life, he would always prepare the meal for dinner parties, then hand his wife the apron before the guests arrived and insist she take credit for it. He was less embarrassed about his culinary skill when around his fellow squad members. He would cook up simple, meat-heavy dishes and take them out to the
men on stakeout duty. His wife, Dorothy, was a worrier. Almost as soon as he left the house, a pot of stew under his arm, she’d start calling around—to the office and the other agents’ homes—looking for him. All of the agents and their wives got to know her well.

The Capone squad lived in a hermetic, hothouse world of its own, like scientists racing against the clock to find a cure for a pandemic. To others working in the Prohibition Bureau offices, the team seemed to go everywhere together, always whispering to one another, communicating with nods and smiles. By now Eliot had earned respect around the office. His kindly manner and easy smile made people comfortable. As he walked through the halls in the morning he would light up when someone—anyone—said hello, as if he wanted to see no one else in the world.
Agents and support staff noticed how, despite the stress he was under, he “never raised his voice or dressed down his men in front of others.” This didn’t necessarily mean he handled stress better than anyone else. Like Dorothy Leeson, he was a congenital worrier.
Stanley Slesick, one of the Prohibition agents Eliot would tap to provide backup for large operations, always knew when a raid was coming. Eliot, he said, was a “nervous” man, and it showed in his eyes, his pallor. “He’d always bite his fingernails,” Slesick said.

***

Eliot had good reason to be nervous. He wanted to believe in every member of his team, but the fact was he couldn’t be sure whom he could trust. Even reporters had begun to speculate among themselves about the squad’s agents. “
He and the six or seven other people that were called the Untouchables, I don’t know whether they were untouchable,” former
Chicago American
photographer Tony Berardi would recall. Berardi had made his reputation by snapping pictures of gangsters; he came to know many of them—and their business—well. He understood how things worked. “I think they were touchable,” he said of the Capone squad.

So did Eliot. He realized everyone potentially was. After the Cicero raid in March, an envoy from the Outfit told Eliot they’d match his annual salary every month if he played along. Eliot threw the messenger out of his office and immediately informed Johnson and Froelich about the bribe attempt. The next day, an informant who worked both sides told Eliot that the gang had dug up incriminating evidence on him. “
They have information that you got your job under false pretenses,” the informant said. “Wouldn’t that go pretty hard against you on the witness stand?” Eliot told the man he wouldn’t need his services anymore.