Eliot Ness
Authors: Douglas Perry
ALSO BY DOUGLAS PERRY
The Girls of Murder City
VIKING
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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Douglas Perry
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Photograph credits
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: ATF promotional pamphlet;
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: Courtesy of Cleveland Public Library;
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: Author’s collection
Insert credits
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: Author’s collection;
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: Cleveland State University, Special Collections;
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: University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center;
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: Courtesy Scott Sroka;
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: Cleveland Public Library;
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: Ohio Historical Society;
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: The Cleveland Museum of Art—Ingalls Library
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Perry, Douglas, 1968–
Eliot Ness : the rise and fall of the man behind the Untouchables / Douglas Perry.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-698-15145-1
1. Ness, Eliot. 2. Detectives—United States—Biography. 3. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation I. Title.
HV7911.N45P47 2013
363.25092—dc23
[B] 2013018406
Version_1
For my mother
Introduction
The Real Eliot Ness
Chapter 4
Flaunting Their Badness
Chapter 9
How Close It Had Been
Chapter 11
A Real and Lasting Impression
Chapter 12
It’s Just Tuesday Night
Part II Center of the Universe
Chapter 16
This Guy Ness Is Crazy
Chapter 18
Right to the Heart of Things
Chapter 20
The Original Mystery Man
Chapter 23
The Virtues of Courage
Chapter 24
Gun, Blackjack, and Brass Knuckles
Chapter 27
An Unwelcome Surprise
The Real Eliot Ness
W
hen Walter Taylor arrived, Betty was still in the kitchen, standing over her husband’s body. She was sobbing fitfully, in a daze. Her ten-year-old son stood nearby, paralyzed by fear. A doctor was there, too, and someone else, a business partner of the man sprawled on the floor.
Taylor had witnessed this ghastly tableau many times over the years. He was the town’s deputy coroner and the editor of the local newspaper. But this time was different.
The dead man was lying on his back, his white shirt twisted across his bulk. In the sink basin, smashed glass sparkled in the dissipating light. He’d been getting a drink of water when the coronary hit. Betty had come in from the garden and turned the faucet off before she saw her husband there on the floor. She screamed, high and long and loud—loud enough to bring their son running from the neighbor’s yard. She continued to sob now, a guttural sound, too deep and raw for such a pretty woman. “It will be all right, Betty,” someone said, and that was as much as she could take. She started to collapse. The business partner grabbed her before she fell.
Taylor turned away. He’d seen enough.
He walked out of the kitchen, past the soot-stained mantel in the living room with the cherubic white angel suspended above it. The angel, its wings aflutter, gazed toward the trauma unfolding in the kitchen. Betty had made the piece. Someone had once told Taylor that she had been a student of a famous sculptor. Outside, Taylor found the neighbors milling about. The poor man had been sweating when he came up the walk, one of them said. He looked like he was in pain, another offered. Taylor moved away from the bystanders and picked up his pace. It was a warm, humid evening, and he was wearing a suit, but he ran all the way back to the office. He was a newsman. He had to let the world know it had just lost Eliot Ness.
***
The world didn’t much care. Taylor’s report went out on the Associated Press wire on that balmy spring day in 1957, but few newspapers bothered
publishing an obituary. The
New York Times
, America’s paper of record, did not take note of Ness’s death. In Chicago, the place of his birth and where he raised the once-famous “Untouchables” squad, the
Tribune
gave his life barely one hundred words.
It got his age wrong. Arnold Sagalyn, despite being a newspaper executive in the Washington, DC, area, heard about Ness’s death only because Betty called him a few days later. Sagalyn made a small noise, a kind of pained grunt, when Ness’s widow gave him the news. He thought of Eliot like a big brother.
Ness had taught Sagalyn how to carry a gun, how to unnerve a suspect, how to mix a drink. The call couldn’t have been easy for Betty, either. The reality of her husband’s death had settled on her by then, but she didn’t know Sagalyn well. He’d worked with Ness before she came on the scene. He’d been close with Eliot’s previous wife, Evaline. Betty called him because she had nowhere else to turn. Her husband had left her nothing but debts and dreams.
Sagalyn sent her some money.
Not everyone was so sympathetic. David Cowles, the superintendent of criminal identification for the Cleveland Police Department, had also worked with Ness during the glory years.
But unlike Sagalyn, he didn’t owe his career to the “fair-haired boy.” He thought Ness had hogged the headlines. “
The last time I saw Eliot, he didn’t have two pair of shoes to wear,” Cowles would recall when asked about his former boss. “He was a heavy drinker. . . . I think he had four or five wives, didn’t he?”
Broke, alcoholic, and dead from a massive heart attack at just fifty-five. Such a fate for Eliot Ness was inconceivable to most everyone who knew him during his long law-enforcement career. This was the golden boy who crashed Al Capone’s party in Chicago.
The young, irrepressible top cop in Cleveland who announced “there was no room for traitors in the police department”—and then set out to prove it. The detective savant who, like his fictional hero Sherlock Holmes, could stun a stranger by deducing some core aspect of his character simply by observing the twitch of his lip. (
As one of the resident experts on the crime quiz show
Masterminds, Attention!
, he solved the mysteries so quickly the radio program burned through its material at twice the expected rate and had to go off the air.)
“
He really captured the imagination of the public in his early years,” John Patrick Butler, a former aide for Cleveland mayor Thomas Burke, would recall years later.
By the time of Ness’s death, however, that hero worship was long gone. He hadn’t been a lawman for more than a decade. Desperate for money, his ambitious business plans in shambles, Ness had been working on a memoir
when he collapsed in his kitchen in the tiny town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania. The book hadn’t been his idea. His business partner, Joe Phelps, was a childhood friend of Oscar Fraley, a hack for United Press International. On a trip to New York, Phelps and Ness met the journalist at a bar, and Ness sat quietly while the two old pals played “remember when.”
During a lull in the conversation, Phelps had jerked a thumb at Ness and said, “You’ll have to get Eliot to tell you about his experience as a Prohibition agent in Chicago. He’s the guy who dried up Al Capone. Maybe you never heard of him, but it’s real gangbuster stuff: killings, raids and the works. It was plenty dangerous.”
Ness smiled bashfully and shrugged. “
It was dangerous,” he said.
At Phelps’s urging, Ness offered up some old stories. Fraley, fascinated, told his new drinking companion he should write a book, that it could bring him a nice chunk of change. Ness shrugged again, but Fraley wouldn’t let it go. He said he’d write it for him. Some weeks later, Fraley called Ness at home in Coudersport. He told him he had pitched a book proposal to New York publishers, and he’d found one that wanted a memoir about the Untouchables. Ness stared at the telephone receiver. “
I can hardly believe it,” he finally said. “You think it will be interesting?”
Fraley had no doubt that it would be. Ness thought of himself as a failure—it had been a long time since the Capone days—but Fraley knew Ness was an American icon waiting to be discovered. Or, more accurately, rediscovered. Not that Fraley was concerned about accuracy. He would take a series of conversations he had with Ness, along with an outline Ness wrote for him, and stretch them like Silly Putty. He added a lot of
biff!
s and
pow!
s and tommy guns going
rat-a-tat-tat!
He threw in some hard-boiled dialogue cribbed from private-dick movies. He wrote a pulp novel.
Worried about what he considered Ness’s “fetish” for honesty, he tried to convince him that this was the way things were done in publishing, that they had “literary license.”
***
The truth about Eliot Ness has been up for grabs ever since. Thanks to Fraley’s
The Untouchables
, published seven months after Ness’s death, Ness received more credit for taking down Al Capone than he deserved. This has rankled many Capone stakeholders over the years, as Fraley’s book begat a top-rated TV series in the 1960s, which begat a blockbuster movie in the 1980s, which begat more TV shows and novels and comic books and movies that continue to appear.
George E. Q. Johnson Jr., son of the U.S.
attorney who hired Ness to harass Capone’s operations, told an interviewer that the Untouchables’ work “was damaging to Al Capone, an annoyance, but resulted in no convictions. There were no convictions of any consequence for violations of Prohibition laws, because it was unenforceable.” An income-tax case, he pointed out, got Capone.
The professional debunkers followed hard and fast. They slathered their own countermyth onto Ness, insisting he was an incompetent and a glory hound, a liar and a drunk. Some even suggested that the Capone hunt turned him into a wild man, a rogue agent. “
Eliot changed. The niceties of the law no longer meant all that much to him,” said Al Wolff, a former federal Prohibition agent in Chicago. “He bent a few rules and even broke a few. We didn’t always see eye to eye on that.”
All of this has taken a toll.
Thirty years after Ness’s death, the
Los Angeles Times
wrote that the Untouchables’ leader had committed suicide. A reader had to call the paper and demand a correction.
Ken Burns, promoting his 2011 television documentary about Prohibition, said that Ness was nothing but “a PR invention.” Burns’s codirector, Lynn Novick, added: “He raided a few old breweries and busted up some stale beer. Then, after he retired, he wrote a book in which he just made stuff up.”
The thing that gets overlooked, even after all these years, is that Ness didn’t need Oscar Fraley’s help to be a hero. Fans of the Robert Stack TV series and the Kevin Costner movie and the various novels and comic books can all legitimately lay claim to Ness being one of the most influential and successful lawmen of the twentieth century. Scarface Al is only one small reason for this. Ness was just thirty years old when Capone was marched off to prison and the Untouchables disbanded. It was the beginning of Ness’s career, and far from the highlight. Three years later, in the heart of the Great Depression, he moved to Cleveland. The
Cleveland Press
, in announcing Ness’s appointment as the city’s public safety director, pointed out that he had nothing to do with the case in Chicago that sent Capone to prison. This was not a criticism. The newspaper presented Ness as a savior, the man they had all been waiting for. Cleveland was the sixth-largest city in the country and arguably the most corrupt. Ness announced he would clean up the town—all by himself, if he had to. “
I am going to be out (in the field). And I’ll cover this town pretty well.”
Marion Kelly, a longtime Cleveland police reporter, would remember him as “the sexiest man I’d ever known.” She insisted “he wasn’t handsome or flashy, but women were drawn to him.”
Louise Jamie, who was related to
Ness through marriage, believed he personified the very best the country had to offer. “He never carried a gun,” she said. “He was very private. He was typical of the English-Norwegian, the backbone of America. Even the gangsters knew it. There is honor among thieves, you see, if they respect you. Nobody ever shot Eliot for that reason.”
Novelists and screenwriters have used these images to conjure up the man they wanted Ness to be. He was the tough, golly-gee G-man, quick to blush, even downright priggish, but willing to do what needed to be done for God and country. It’s a compelling, all-American portrait, but it’s also wrong. Or, at least, woefully incomplete.
Like the comic-book superheroes popularized during his career, Ness had an earthbound alter ego. In his case, it was his real self. He was, by all accounts, modest, kind, shy. Which only seemed to make his actions on the job all the more impressive. There was simply no explaining them. “
There is nothing about Ness’ appearance to inspire fear,” the
Cleveland News
wrote in 1940 during the racketeering trial of a union boss. “But the shadowy characters who sometimes drift into the Criminal Courts Building point him out with awe. ‘There goes Ness,’ they say as though they were indicating Wyatt Earp, the two-gun sharpshooter of the gold rush days.” During another racketeering trial, Ness’s reputation and its possible effect on jurors so unnerved the defense attorneys they tried to get him banned from the courtroom.
Work obsessed Eliot Ness, so much so that he couldn’t help but ruin his marriages with it. He never could separate his public self from his private self. The two inevitably rolled together. He could be a heroic figure in his personal life as well as his professional one; he found scandal in both as well. Women fell in love with him on trains and from across crowded rooms. He loved to shoot guns and to dance, and he was good at both. (He was good at everything he did; he steered clear of activities that didn’t come naturally to him.) He was a hard partier—so hard that he never figured out how to come down from the high. So hard that it undermined his reputation and, ultimately, helped end his life at what should have been not much more than the midway point.
Once he was dead and gone, the rest of the world caught up with Chicago and Cleveland, and became fascinated by Ness. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know about the “real” man. “
Tell me, what kind of guy was this Eliot Ness?” the mobster Lucky Luciano asked Oscar Fraley in the early 1960s. Fraley fielded this question frequently.
Back on that night when the reporter had first met Ness, the former Prohibition agent had described his Untouchables’ adventures as “dangerous.” That word had stuck with Fraley, and it was how he now liked to describe Ness to anyone who asked. It was true enough—Eliot Ness had been dangerous in many ways—so Fraley usually left it at that. Even though he knew there was so much more to say about the man.
