Eliot Ness (22 page)

The Virtues of Courage

O
n a piercing June day in 1937 Evaline McAndrew boarded a train at Chicago’s Illinois Central Depot. She walked with her usual dreamy sway. The floor hummed under her feet, a marvelous feeling, like she was inside something living, something that owned her. Evaline loved trains. They were portals to her fantasies. When life wasn’t going well—and it was never really going all that well—she could hop aboard a train, any train, and start all over again.

Right now, Evaline especially liked the idea of starting over. She wanted to be a commercial artist, but so far the dark-haired twenty-five-year-old had mostly paid the bills in Chicago by posing for department-store ads. She had kind of a funny face for a model—heavy cheekbones topped by a wide prairie nose and a gummy smile—but that hardly mattered. “
She wasn’t beautiful, but she was wonderful-looking,” recalled Ann Durell, a longtime friend and colleague. Durell got it exactly right. Tall and fluid, Evaline exuded an idealized Great Depression sexiness: elegant, self-reliant, satisfyingly cool to the touch.

Eliot noticed her right off. On his way to Minneapolis to lure that city’s assistant traffic engineer to Cleveland, he was sitting in the club car when her long legs scissored past. The legs folded into a nearby seat, dropping her torso—and her arresting profile—into view. He liked what he saw. Everything about Evaline—her makeup, her clothes, the expression on her face—was exactly how it should be. Eliot appreciated the effort she put in. He introduced himself. She reciprocated, polite but unwelcoming, as was to be expected. Eliot did not give up.

The timing was perfect.
Evaline had bought a train ticket because she needed something more from her life. It wasn’t just her career prospects that frustrated her. She needed a spark. A thrill. A shock. She didn’t know what. She hadn’t been able to find it in big, bustling Chicago, to her surprise. She didn’t think she’d find it in Canada, her destination, but a visit to another country sounded like a good substitute until something better came along.

As the train got under way, Eliot and Evaline started talking. He wasn’t very good at intimacy in marriage, but with perfect strangers he excelled at it. He loved to drink in the contours of an interesting new face—and Evaline’s offered an intriguing mix of abrupt angles and soft curves. He loved discovering an active mind—and Evaline’s was so active she seemed on the verge of levitating. At the same time, this brash young woman found Eliot funny and suave, with crinkly, forlorn eyes that were somehow comforting rather than mournful. Mile after clacking mile the two good-looking infatuates leaned into each other, shoulder to shoulder, whispering and smiling. Evaline, smothered for months by an indefinable unhappiness, felt the angst lift and float away.

“Eliot and I talked a lot . . . looked at each other at the same time a lot . . . laughed a lot and kissed a lot when I got off the train,” she remembered.

That last part—the kissing—was cause for shame. Eliot Ness was married. And so was Evaline Michelow McAndrew.

***

Edna wouldn’t have been surprised to learn about her husband’s tête-à-tête on the train.
She had long suspected he was fooling around. Beginning more than a year before with Eliot’s famous one hundred straight nights tracking down leads for the police-corruption investigation, the marriage had all but ceased to exist. He loved his work, and only his work. That was clear to Edna now.
The job communicated something to Eliot that his wife simply couldn’t. Something about beauty in the world, how we created it but most often ignored it or turned it inside out. It was his responsibility to keep the world from getting too ugly. How could marriage—how could one woman—compete with that?
Eliot’s dedication to his work was so complete that, early in his tenure as safety director, the
Cleveland Press
assumed he was single, mistakenly calling him the most eligible bachelor in the city. The newspaper’s error was at worst a technicality. Eliot worked long, hard hours every day, but he always had time for a smile and a compliment for the prettiest secretaries at city hall. By the time he returned home each night after another sixteen hours of intense work and flirting, he had wound down like a pull toy.
On good nights, he would stretch out on the floor and read Arthur Conan Doyle or Shakespeare while listening to opera. More often, he poured himself a drink, or many drinks, settled into a chair, and zoned out. He always looked so lonesome sitting there, with his hair slightly mussed and his tie undone, but no matter how much Edna cajoled, she couldn’t get him to open up to her. She was heartbroken by her
inability to connect with him anymore, her inability to be a true partner. She’d been heartbroken for years.

On top of the daily frustrations and disappointments of her married life, there was still personal danger for Edna to deal with, too, all these years after Capone. The investigations into police corruption had kicked up threats against the troublesome safety director. Someone even took a shot at Eliot with a rifle as he drove home one night. Just as he did in Chicago, Eliot refused to admit that the threats and close calls bothered him, but Edna could no longer match his stoicism. She worried for her husband’s safety, and for her own as well, stuck all alone every day in their little rented apartment.
When Matowitz assigned Eliot a bodyguard for a time, Edna told a friend she didn’t know if she could take it much longer.

Eliot’s obsessive commitment to work—and his increasing interest in seducing other women—was broken in November when his brother Charles called from Chicago. Their mother had died of a heart attack. She was seventy-three. The next morning, Eliot and Edna packed up the car and set out for Illinois. It would be the first time in a long time that the couple had spent a significant amount of time together.

The trip would remind Edna how much she missed Chicago and her own family. The long drive back to Cleveland after the funeral must have been torture for her, and not just because she was leaving her native city again after little more than a day. It was because Emma Ness was a saint. Everyone had said so at the funeral, over and over. Now Eliot wouldn’t be able to think of his mother any other way. This was not a new problem. Emma had always had high expectations for her youngest son. In her eyes Eliot could do no wrong. He was the golden child. Edna, plain and socially awkward and far from golden, never could measure up. When Edna and Eliot arrived back in Cleveland, they learned that the city council had issued an official resolution of condolence for its public safety director. “
WHEREAS, it is at a mother’s knee that the virtues of courage, honesty and straightforwardness are inculcated,” it began. The platitudes rolled on, paragraph after paragraph. Eliot was deeply moved. He pasted a copy of the resolution into his scrapbook, along with condolence letters from friends and relatives, pages of them. The letters and cards were sober proof that the woman who gave him more than anyone else, who gave him life and life lessons—the very moral code he lived by—truly was gone. The scrapbook, which he’d started keeping in college, offered no mention of his father’s death five years before.

Gun, Blackjack, and Brass Knuckles

P
hilip Porter could feel it coming, like an ache in the bones before a nor’easter. Big news was about to pop. In his column in the
Plain Dealer
, he noted that no one had seen Eliot around city hall for a while.

In the old days, it was nothing particularly unexpected for a director at City Hall to be absent from his office most of a day, or most of several days. Former Mayor Davis was absent most of the time after the first few months.

When Eliot Ness is absent, however, it means something entirely different. He has been absent from City Hall (but not from town) for most of the last week. You can look for something almost any minute now.

Porter was right. Eliot had been safety director for more than a year, and his police-corruption trials were wrapping up. In recent weeks,
he had turned his staff’s attention to the citywide tire-theft ring and to the marijuana trade. He had zeroed in on the illegal distribution of “filthy” magazines. He personally took up a kidnapping case. But it was finally time to go after a much bigger goal. Eliot was ready to launch an all-out war on the underworld.

The Mayfield Road Mob, also known as the Hill gang, was Ohio’s leading crime outfit. They did business however they pleased, without fear of police interference. Cleveland mobsters didn’t shoot police officers, but unlike the Capone gang back in Prohibition days, it wasn’t because the boss forbade the practice. It was simply so much easier to pay them off. Some of the cops, the dumbest saps, would look the other way for a dollar a week. But now the gangsters were increasingly coming into contact with young, idealistic police officers who had bought into the Cult of Ness. You couldn’t grease these guys. You couldn’t bully them. And now even the old-guard officers were willing to make arrests, if only to keep up appearances.

The city’s mobsters couldn’t decide on the best course of action, which
led to an unusual temporary paralysis. Herman Pirchner, who would go on to become one of Cleveland’s best-known restaurateurs, had just opened a place in the city center. A couple of years before, he’d walked away from his first eatery when the Mob demanded a stake in the business. “
We had never heard of the Mafia before then, but we did not want to get involved with guns, so we gave it up,” he would say some forty years later. But with the promised protection of Eliot Ness—“the legendary safety director,” the restaurateur liked to call him—he decided he would fight for his new establishment. When the gang’s muscle came calling, he told them he wasn’t paying, and he dropped Eliot’s name. He refused to back down even when the toughs warned him of the possible consequences. He braced himself in the days ahead for a bombing or a fire or a rap on the head as he closed up at night, but nothing happened. This time, it was the gangsters who walked away. “The Mafia decided to leave us alone,” Pirchner said. “From that time until now, they never bothered me again.”

What was a self-respecting gang to do?
George Mulvanity, still over at the ATU and working undercover, warned Eliot that discussions about knocking him off were flitting around the gang’s outer edges. The mobsters had watched closely as the safety director brought down senior police officers, men they relied on. They knew they had to act, to assert themselves.

Eliot was fully aware of the kind of fight he was wading into.
The gangster Angelo Lonardo, looking back on more than five decades in crime, would tell a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1988 that when he was coming up, “you would have to have killed someone and stood up to the pressure of police scrutiny” to become a member of Cleveland’s La Cosa Nostra. Even Chicago’s Outfit didn’t have such stringent membership requirements. And while the membership rolls remained secret, the members’ viciousness didn’t, which meant Cleveland’s gangsters could impose themselves on almost any business in the area.

For starters, everyone was paying protection money—or “union dues,” as it was often called. The Mob set the retail price of whatever the product was, with their cut factored in, and if anyone—even one little cigarette hawker—tried to sell at a discount, he’d be fined a hefty amount. If that didn’t bring the renegade into line, Mr. Muscles would show up. The Mob—and the dirty cops who made the racket possible—extorted money from bars, restaurants, butchers, dry cleaners, massage girls, window washers, fruit sellers, deliverymen, even real estate agents. The protection racket, inevitably, led to other crimes, including robbery (often of the businesses the
robbers were “protecting”) and murder (hey, things happen). And the cops who had been bought off for one crime now found themselves being forced to help out with other, more serious ones.

The protection game provided steady, reliable income to the Cleveland Mob, and they were loath to let even a single business owner—like Pirchner—get out from under it. That stuff traveled. But it was a secondary stream of income for the gang, a baseline. By the mid-1930s, with Prohibition gone, the most profitable racket of them all—the one to protect above all others—was a highly efficient gambling operation called “policy and clearing house.”
The most basic policy game involved individuals placing bets on numbered balls in a bag. You could bet a penny or your entire paycheck, with odds up to 400 to 1 on nailing all three numbers, in order, being pulled from the bag. With clearing house, players bet on published figures, such as the last three digits of the clearing-house balance released by the Cleveland banks or the last three digits of the day’s total closing number for the New York Stock Exchange. Runners would dash around the city to bars and shops and diners, informing players when and where the results would be announced.

Policy and clearing house had started out as a small-time diversion in the city’s black neighborhoods. By the 1920s, however, it had become a big business, if largely under the radar. The major operators—Rufus “The Emperor” Jones, J. B. “Hot Stuff” Johnson, and Willie Richardson—brought some flash to a rather straightforward racket, sporting tilted derbies and fat cigars and tooling around town in brightly colored sedans. Stolid, butcher-shop owner Frank Hoge was the only white member of what became known as the “Big Four,” and he kept a low profile. These policy and clearing-house kings operated a respected racket, known for paying out promptly and without retribution on the rare occasion of a big score. During Prohibition, policy and clearing house mostly wasn’t worth the Mob’s time—nothing could compare to the profits bootlegging brought in. But once the repeal movement began to pick up momentum, lottery games suddenly looked like a very appealing business.

On March 4, 1933, four men paid a visit to Clarence Murphy, who operated a game in the heart of the black section of town. They informed the policy operator that they expected him to start kicking up 50 percent of his take to them. Murphy refused. Two days later, as Murphy was leaving his home in the morning, three men with shotguns appeared. They started firing before Murphy could say anything. He fell backward, cracking his head
on the pavement. The men kept firing until the body began to break apart and smoke had wafted halfway down the block.

The rout was on.

Soon, Rufus Jones was packed away to prison for income-tax evasion, where he promptly died, with conspiracy theories abounding. J. B. Johnson took a bullet, and after recovering he signed on with the Mob. Longtime operator Benny Mason tried to retire from the business, but the gang wouldn’t let him—he was too popular with his game’s players. Willie Richardson and Frank Hoge also stayed on after the muscle men moved in, with Hoge becoming one of the gang’s key men in the racket. None of this was a secret. The Mayfield Road Gang “conquered with gun, blackjack and brass knuckles and today are blackmailing a 40 percent cut from a racket that yields riches of $5,000,000 to $10,000, 000 a year,” the
Press
reported.

The Mob didn’t just take over the big games.
Jacob Collins, a thirty-one-year-old East Side man who ran an independent policy game that barely paid the rent, was yanked into an alley one day and told to report to “Little Angelo” Scerria at Hoge’s butcher shop on Central Avenue. This was not a directive anyone wanted to receive. “Big Angelo” Lonardo and “Little Angelo” Scerria ran the gang’s policy and clearing-house operations.
The
Press
labeled them the “co-king of the ‘numbers’ racket.” The one-eyed Scerria, who’d beaten two murder raps, served as the enforcer. He had “the dread reputation of always carrying out a threat.”

When Collins arrived at the butcher shop, he found Scerria waiting for him. Little Angelo didn’t like to be kept waiting. He flapped his one good eye at the small-time policyman.

“Who gave you permission to book?” he said. “Don’t you know you have to get a commission?”

Collins, his hands shaking, apologized profusely and backed out of the butcher shop. “I then got out of the racket,” he later testified.

Other operators fell into line or, like Collins, abandoned the business. The gang “set up a franchise system,” collecting varying percentages off the top each week—usually in the 40 percent to 60 percent range—regardless of the operator’s profit or loss. As Clayton Fritchey put it: “There were no Sherman or Clayton anti-trust laws for these mobsters to worry about.”

With the Mayfield Road Gang now firmly in charge, the games lost some of their ring-a-ding-ding fun, but profits soared. The reason: cheating. For years, policy and clearing house were believed to be reasonably fair games of chance, though an individual gambler’s odds were never good. But now,
the games were fixed. This could be done in various ways. For the policy game, they would heat the balls bearing the numbers most heavily played, so that the guy rifling through the bag would grab and draw out only balls cool to the touch. The
Plain Dealer
, tipped off by Eliot, pointed out a less subtle tactic for clearing-house games: “When the house is hit hard, a police raid before the bets are paid also comes in handy.”

***

Angelo Lonardo’s father, Joe Lonardo, had been Cleveland’s dominant crime boss in the 1920s. Unlike Capone in Chicago, he kept a low profile, fostering a mystique in the city’s underworld as all-knowing and all-powerful. But during the later years of Prohibition, an offshoot led by Joe and Vincenzo Porello made a bold play for regional control of the production of corn syrup, often a key ingredient in moonshine. “
Killings were followed by retaliatory killings, gangsters were gunned down by machinegun fire from fast-moving limousines, or shot to death in barber shops and restaurants,” remembered Neil McGill. Joe Lonardo was murdered in 1927. The Porello brothers fell three years later.

The ultimate survivor of this war was a third faction, the Mayfield Road Gang, led by Frank Milano. Soon this operation had absorbed much of the remaining Lonardo and Porello gangs, including young Angelo Lonardo. In 1928, the nineteen-year-old Angelo, known as “Baby Face,” made his bones by taking revenge on the Porello associate responsible for his father’s death.
The “thick-necked, thick-fingered, and pasty-faced” young hood almost went away for the murder, but witnesses and evidence disappeared. This double whammy—the murder and the efficient avoidance of judicial consequences—led to Angelo being put up for membership, an arcane affair complete with burning candles and incantations. In the 1930s, initiations usually took place at the Statler Hotel in downtown Cleveland. The gangsters would roll through the lobby doors in tailored black suits, their pants bulging from guns and the excitement of it all. They’d swagger past the ballrooms where Cleveland’s frivolous swinging set spent their evenings drinking and dancing. The black-suited men would disappear into rooms specially set aside for them, their bulkiest guards at the door.

The men conducting the initiation—usually an underboss and a “captain”—always carefully explained the rules of membership to the initiates. You weren’t allowed to take drugs or run prostitutes. You couldn’t sleep with the wife of another “made” man. And “whatever illegal activity you engage in, you have to report to the boss and receive permission to
engage in that activity.” These were the official rules, the rules you had to promise to live by or else, but of course it was understood that they could be bent or broken. The whole organization, after all, was built on contempt for rules and laws. You just had to be smart about the way you did it.

“Once you accept the rules of membership, they lift a cloth off a table; underneath is a gun and a dagger,” Lonardo explained. “You are told that you now live and die with the dagger and the gun. You die that way, and you live that way. You are then given a card with a picture of a saint on it. This card is placed in the palms of your hands and lit. You shake the burning card back and forth until it is burned down to ashes. They then pinch your finger to draw blood, and then everyone gives you a kiss on the cheek and says, ‘You are now a member.’”

There was a purpose to this ritual. Loyalty and discipline mattered. Angelo’s father and his successors were killers, but they weren’t mindless killers. They considered themselves businessmen—smart businessmen.
By the early 1930s, in fact, the city’s Mob bosses had frozen membership because, in the wake of convictions in Chicago and New York fueled by gangsters ratting out other gangsters, they saw that bad things happened when you “were not making the ‘right’ kind of people.”

***

Eliot declared his intention to bust the Mob in a speech at the same downtown hotel where the gangsters liked to congregate. Success or failure, he told a businessmen’s group at the Statler, would turn on his ability to attack one key racket: that old bugaboo, gambling.

“
It is debatable whether gambling is morally wrong,” he said. “But from the policing standpoint you have an entirely different picture. I am inclined to be liberal in my views of amusements and I do not want to intrude my opinions on others, but as a safety director I must recognize everything which contributes to a lawless situation. By that, I mean major crime. Gambling brings into financial power citizens recognized as law violators.”