Eliot Ness (27 page)

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Authors: Douglas Perry

BOOK: Eliot Ness
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They certainly knew how to have fun. Eliot’s childlike giggle and Evaline’s cannonball guffaw cut through the boathouse every Monday night, when they had a standing party at Clifton Park Lagoon. Evaline wasn’t the only one busting a gut at every one of Eliot’s witticisms. “
He was a party man, a party man,” remembered Corinne Lawson, his longtime housekeeper. “And all the women were just crazy about him.”

***

Ultimately, the fun wasn’t enough. Cracks began to appear in the marriage. Evaline may have been impressed by Eliot’s low-key amiability, his desire to always remain in control and reasonable, but it also infuriated her. She needed the dramatic gesture: to be shaken or shouted down or boxed about the ears.
That
was passion.
That
was life. And so their marriage heaved and simmered. Sometimes, when Evaline was in one of her black moods, Eliot would simply stay away from her—for days. That was easy enough. He made more time for a personal life now than he had during his marriage to Edna, but he still worked very long hours. And Evaline also worked, churning out advertising drawings for various local stores. She did her best work after dark, which meant Eliot sometimes found himself on his own whether he liked it or not. This was just as well, for Evaline couldn’t manage even the most basic domestic tasks expected of a wife. One night, while trying to prepare dinner for a quiet evening with her husband, she knocked over a pot of boiling water while distracted.
She ended up with nasty burns on her feet that required a trip to the doctor and an extended convalescence.

The kitchen accident could be seen as an omen. “Normal life” was simply beyond this unusual couple. Eliot had enjoyed success after success as safety director, and he had an alluring, intelligent wife, but a few close friends began to realize that something was deeply wrong. Eliot no longer fought his fatigue and stress by zoning out at home.
He had reached the
final, inevitable stage of mental burnout: recklessness. He began to slip away from work for long lunches that sometimes left him late for appointments. Evaline, unable to reach him in the middle of the day, suspected the worst. Years later she would tell a family member that he “screwed everything in a skirt.” His wife’s suspicions led Eliot to try to be more conscious of time. One day he blasted through a red light in his sedan, causing a pedestrian stepping into the street to jump back and scream at him in fury. Eliot pulled to the curb, climbed out of his car, and marched back to the man—perhaps to apologize, perhaps to give him the high hat. Whatever Eliot’s aim, the man attacked him, sending the public safety director crashing to the pavement. This brought a policeman hustling to his aid, but Eliot refused to file a complaint or even give his name. He hurried away.

Even stranger than midday brawling, Eliot began playing unfunny practical jokes. He hired an actor to pretend to be a drug pusher at a restaurant where he was having a working lunch with Governor Martin Davey. He egged the actor on until the “drug pusher” got into a shoving match with a man at the bar, sending the governor fleeing out the back to avoid the press. “
Eliot had pulled that stunt on a couple of other people, but doing it to the governor was going a little overboard,” said Dan Moore, the state securities commissioner and Eliot’s friend. Another time, having belatedly learned that Michael Harwood had secretly recorded one of the witnesses in his trial, Eliot bugged the boathouse before a party, carefully hiding microphones in every room. He couldn’t help himself: technology fascinated him, and he probably wanted to know if Harwood’s plan could have worked. “
When the party was nearing the end, he told us what he had done, and he began to play back the recording,” recalled Marion Kelly, a journalist and friend. “On it we heard women talking with other women’s husbands. He managed to pick up quite a lot, and even though it stopped short of scandal, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. People were not amused.”

Drink had begun to muddy Eliot’s judgment, but the weird pranks he pulled weren’t enough to keep partiers from putting the Nesses on their invitation lists. Eliot and Evaline’s wit and bonhomie were too good.
And there was always the thrill that came with knowing anything might happen. Evaline even led a skinny-dipping expedition in the lake one night after Eliot was called away on business. Just tossed her dress over her head and bounded into the water, leaving all the guests slack-jawed and wondering what to do. (The drunkest ones followed, of course.) The impromptu swim no doubt was a fuck-you to Eliot. He would frequently leave midparty when
a call came in—the call was “inevitable,” remembered Viktor Schreckengost, who traveled the same party circuit. That meant if the Nesses were the hosts, Evaline would suddenly find herself running the show on her own. And if they were guests, she would have to bum a ride home from another partygoer.
Making it worse, Eliot often took a lucky reveler—anyone who happened to be standing there when Eliot received the call—for the high-speed, siren-screaming ride to the crime scene, an experience the chosen one would relive at parties for weeks to come. Schreckengost went along once. So did another artist, Bill McVey, who had befriended Eliot. And Jo Chamberlin, the brother of Eliot’s assistant. “If something was happening,” remembered Chamberlin, “he’d say, ‘We’d better go take a look,’ and the next thing you know he’d be across town, and whoever happened to be with him went sailing along, too.” Whoever happened to be with him except Evaline, that is. Eliot knew his wife liked excitement as much as anyone, and that she hated to be left out, but he never invited her along for the ride. It was still a man’s world.

CHAPTER 29

Clearing House

C
aptain Michael Blackwell picked up the scent each day outside Russo’s Drug Store, or Bontempo’s Confectionery, or sometimes Vince Dylinski’s Trocadero Club. These were policy chieftain Frank Hoge’s favorite hangouts.

Hoge and his bodyguard would alight sometime in the afternoon and clamber into one of his big touring sedans. Whether or not he had spotted Blackwell, Hoge acted as if he had a police tail. The sedan frequently and unexpectedly veered across lanes and jerked into turns. It would head west for miles before turning around and crossing the city again. The destination was always the same: the home of Miss Myrtle Taylor, the Hill gang’s bookkeeper. They made sure that staking out Taylor wasn’t easy. She kept moving to new digs.

Hoge, of course, always knew where she was. The car would pull up, the small, slim black woman would duck into the backseat, and the evasive maneuvers would begin again. At a prearranged spot, never the same as the day or the week before, they’d even switch to another car (or maybe not) and the two identical sedans would head in different directions.

If they knew Blackwell was behind them and they couldn’t shake him, they’d drive in circles, maybe pick up some lunch, and then deposit Taylor back at home. If they thought they were in the clear, they’d blast past the city limits to meet up for the “clearing house”—the daily money count—with other members of the gambling racket. The gangsters always counted the “take” together and checked the books together, so everyone could keep an eye on one another.

The meeting always took place in the suburbs. They used to do it in the city, where the bulk of the business was, but Eliot’s detectives—and especially Captain Blackwell—had made convenience impossible. The “home rule” policy that allowed casinos to thrive in the ’burbs also made it much safer for the stacks of cash the gang’s gambling racket generated throughout the city.

The Mob had to be especially careful these days, ever since Lieutenant Ernest Molnar had been found out. For more than a year, Molnar had been in charge of finding the clearing-house meeting. He never managed to do so, even though he usually knew where it was. Eliot finally figured out what was going on. He had his investigators track Molnar, and they discovered the lieutenant was taking money from the two Angelos and running interference for them. It was a painful revelation for Eliot. Molnar had been his poster boy for the new Cleveland police; Eliot had promoted him and talked him up in the press for years. But nothing surprised the safety director anymore. He knew almost anyone could be corrupted. He called Molnar into his office and confronted him. The always ebullient lieutenant lost his smile. After some hemming and hawing, he admitted it. Eliot made him disgorge every penny that he knew the policeman had taken. Eliot turned over the $770 to Frank Cullitan, but he did not arrest Molnar. Cullitan didn’t think they had the evidence. So like Barney Cloonan when the Prohibition Bureau had discovered his treachery, the lieutenant stayed on the payroll after being found out. He even prospered. Molnar’s perfidy stayed between him, Eliot, the Unknowns, and Cullitan, and so an unsuspecting Chief Matowitz tapped him to head the vice bureau. Blackwell, another Ness protégé and an officer known for his honesty, took over the gambling investigation.

Within weeks, Blackwell and his men did what Molnar never officially could: they found the clearing-house meeting spot. It was in Frank Hoge’s brother’s house in Lyndhurst. Soon it moved to a property in Warrenville Heights owned by businessman and “Mob goodwill ambassador” Abe Pickus. For a short time it landed at an industrial building in Independence Village. Like Myrtle Taylor, it now moved around a lot.
One of Blackwell’s raids on the clearing house, recalled McGill, “netted about a dozen numbers operators, thousands of number slips ranging from pennies to greenbacks, and about $25,000 in cash, the take for one day.”

The police captain would have rather netted the books kept by Miss Taylor. That would make any trial a slam-dunk. But so far, Blackwell hadn’t had any luck tracking down her life’s work.

***

While the Mob sought a little peace and quiet out in the suburbs, Eliot made as much noise as he could at the county courthouse downtown. By early 1939, he had lined up the testimony of more than seventy policy operators for a grand jury Cullitan had empanelled. For two months he
brought witnesses to a hotel suite to secretly meet with the county prosecutor.
He made several copies of the notes and affidavits from these interviews, with each copy kept in a different place “to insure against theft.” No one was surprised that it had taken two years to convince witnesses, by persuasion and coercion, to talk. “That they ‘talked’ was almost incredible,” the
Plain Dealer
marveled when the depth of the witness list became clear.

The fact was, many of the witnesses talked because they wanted to. When the Mayfield Road Mob took over the gambling racket, the gang’s leaders had figured they were being smart by leaving veteran policy operators in place. Doing so eliminated the headaches and drudgery of running the games themselves. But now they realized that it also meant their business came into close contact with men who had no loyalty to the gang, men who were resentful and angry at their treatment. And unlike legitimate business owners paying protection, the policy operators often didn’t have the assets, families, and roots in the community that made speaking out so dangerous. When Director Ness offered to relocate them and to pay living expenses until a trial, some eagerly ratted out their overlords.

The grand jury wasn’t the only problem the Hill gang faced. The sustained crackdown—the raids, the arrests, the perpetual search for a safe haven for the clearing house—had made Cleveland’s gambling syndicate vulnerable to competition. Sensing the Cleveland gang’s weakness, the Pittsburgh Mob, longtime partners with the Mayfield Road outfit, decided to move into Cleveland themselves—before someone else did. The Pittsburgh gamblers arrived in town during the summer of 1938 and began offering significantly better odds than the Hill gang. They set up shop around Woodland Avenue and East Fifty-fifth Street, the heart of the black neighborhood where the games had first thrived. They specialized in the daily “bank clearing house” lottery, but there was no doubt about their plans to expand.

Cleveland’s gangsters reacted like scorned lovers. They busted up furniture at the new gambling shops and ended various long-established business arrangements with the Pittsburgh Mob. When that didn’t accomplish much, they fed threats to the newspapers in hopes of scaring the out-of-towners into seeing sense. “
There’ll be killings, if those Pittsburgh punks don’t get out of town,” one hoodlum told a
Cleveland News
reporter. Another told a hack: “There’s going to be something done about those chiselers, and plenty soon. They’ll be told to get out or be wiped out. I’m surprised there hasn’t been any shooting yet, but perhaps there’s nothing being done
right now because the men who run the racket work smooth, just like the federal government.”

***

In late April 1939, Eliot returned from an overnight trip to Florida and went straight from the airport to a downtown hotel, where Cullitan and others were poring over the policy-racket case files and plotting how best to proceed. Blackwell never had been able to get his hands on Miss Taylor’s books, but the amount of evidence investigators had accumulated was overwhelming anyway. They all realized how close they were to the finish line. (Incredibly, the secretly disgraced Lieutenant Molnar took part in the meeting.) Eliot, arriving at the summit late, weighed in. It was time for them to make their move, he said. The meeting broke up with handshakes and backslapping all around.

On Wednesday, April 26, two years after Eliot had turned his attention from police corruption to the Mob, Cleveland’s newspapers crashed banner headlines across their front pages, heralding a staggering blow to the Mayfield Road Mob. Wrote Clayton Fritchey in the
Press
:

In the most sweeping assault on gangdom in Cleveland’s history, the County Grand Jury today returned extortion and blackmail indictments against 23 men named as key figures in the policy racket.

The action resulted from months of secret and dangerous work on the part of Safety Director Eliot Ness and trusted associates and followed a parade, during the last four weeks, of 60 unnamed and closely guarded witnesses.

The indictments struck at the heart of the legendary Mayfield road or “Hill” mob which for years, seemingly immune from detection or prosecution, has spread its web of blood, violence and terror through every phase of Cleveland’s crime and rackets.

The list of the indicted included every major policy racketeer connected with the Cleveland Mob, including Angelo Lonardo, Angelo Scerria, Frank Hoge, Shondor Birns, Joe Artwell, and Albert (Chuck) Polizzi. The ambition of the indictments shocked observers: Eliot Ness and Frank Cullitan clearly wanted to wipe out almost the entire leadership of the gang that had dominated Cleveland for more than a decade.

Eliot believed that taking down the Hill gang would be his greatest legacy in the city, and a far greater accomplishment than his role in the Capone case. The press, accustomed to mayors and safety directors under the
thumb of the city’s mobsters, agreed. The
Plain Dealer
wrote that the “investigation . . . in years past could have existed only as a figment of the imagination.” Men and women stopped Eliot on the street to shake his hand, sometimes with tears in their eyes. Finally, an honest man, they said. Finally, someone with the courage to do something about the murderous thugs who ran Cleveland.

The newspapers covered every possible angle of the indictment. They revealed that Oscar Williams was the prosecution’s key witness, forcing Eliot to hustle the numbers runner out of town. As it would turn out, Williams might have been safer in Cleveland. The city all but emptied of gangsters as soon as the indictments were revealed. (Many of them had taken off days before, most likely tipped off by Molnar.)

The police arrested six of the twenty-three indicted men within a day of the indictments’ announcement. By the end of the week, they’d collared six more, including Hoge and Birns. But the arrests dried up after that. The biggest names—specifically, the two Angelos and Joe Artwell—remained at large as spring pushed into summer. Eliot, frustrated, asked for the FBI’s assistance in the manhunt.

The weeks ahead saw a series of raids on suspected hideouts around the Cleveland metropolitan area, none of which turned up Lonardo, Scerria, or any of the other missing men. Eliot took it personally that so many mobsters had successfully lammed it. He devoted most of his days to the hunt. On May 15, planning to stake out a house after receiving a tip on Lonardo, he replaced his well-known personalized license plates with a set of plates from a car being held at the police yard.
He hadn’t gone far when Patrolman Joseph F. Prucha spotted him. Prucha was known around the department as “Camera Eye” because of his photographic memory, which he put to use memorizing the license plates of the department’s constantly changing list of stolen cars. He pulled Eliot over, and when the safety director jumped out of the driver’s seat and marched determinedly toward the patrolman, Prucha leveled a rifle.

Eliot, surprisingly calm with the barrel of an elephant gun pointed at him, identified himself. When the gun stayed where it was, he barked: “Officer, I am your boss.”

Prucha wasn’t buying it. This wouldn’t be the first time someone he had pulled over claimed to be the famous safety director. “If you’re Eliot Ness,” Prucha replied, “I’m President Roosevelt.”

Eliot carefully produced his ID and said that, with FDR’s approval, he
would like to be on his way. Prucha watched the peeved safety director drive off, certain he would be suspended or fired the next day. Instead, later in the week, the patrolman received a letter of commendation from the director’s office.

***

Eliot wasn’t monomaniacal about the gangster hunt. He continued to take the long view with crime, which meant putting precious resources into preventing kids from growing up to be gangsters. After the Tremont youth-gang campaign back in the fall of 1936, Eliot established a crime-prevention bureau that would focus on juvenile delinquency.

The new bureau, headed by Captain Arthur Roth, was unlike anything the Cleveland Police Department had ever tried before. Officers in the bureau undertook work typically associated with social workers. They conducted detailed surveys of neighborhood “assets”: churches, clubs, playgrounds, swimming pools, and other facilities. They talked with parents, teachers, and community leaders, and became a familiar presence in schools. Eliot made it clear that, for smaller offenses, officers should keep kids out of the system. “
No member of the Bureau is permitted to appear in uniform,” he wrote. “Every effort is made to have the juvenile delinquent regard the members of the Bureau as sympathetic friends who are there to help them, rather than as cops. Juveniles are not brought into police stations or transported in official police vehicles. Their names are not entered upon the police records. This prevents delinquents from building up police records about which they may boast.”

Eliot and a professor at Cuyahoga Community College developed techniques for interviewing juveniles. One recommendation indicated just how new this approach was for the police. Eliot felt he had to instruct officers to “be friendly.” He added: “Many juveniles feel that the world is against them. Do not let your conduct further the development of an anti-social attitude in the child. Many juveniles are discouraged. They believe they are failures though they have not had time enough to develop. You wouldn’t expect a half-completed airplane to fly. You can’t expect an undeveloped child to function as an adult.”

Being friendly, of course, was just a start. “Keep them off the street and keep them busy” became Eliot’s mantra. He lobbied the mayor and the city council for help in making that happen. To many people, in and out of the police department, the crime-prevention effort smacked of coddling—maybe even communism. The police were supposed to respond when
crimes happened and arrest the offenders. End of story. They shouldn’t try to act like parents or priests. But Eliot remained undeterred. He believed, as Vollmer did, that the best way to make a community safer wasn’t to fill up the jails but to provide positive, meaningful opportunities for those most likely to commit crimes. In short, to make better citizens. “Millions have been spent in efforts to cope with the problem of adult crime,” he said in a speech. “I think the time is at hand when police officials, teachers and educators should join to prevent problem children from becoming criminals.”

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