Dedication
In memory of
MICHAEL CORNELISON,
who brought Eliot Ness to life
Epigraph
There is something tragically wrong with a system of justice which can and does make criminals of honest men and can only convict gangsters and racketeers when they don’t pay their income taxes.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Untouchable Truth
Map: Organized Crime in 1920s Chicago
Rogues’ Gallery
Prologue: St. Valentine’s Day
Part One: Prairie Avenue Boys
One: 1895–1920
Two: 1850–1923
Three: 1920–1925
Four: 1925–1926
Five: 1925–1926
Six: 1926–1927
Seven: 1927
Eight: Spring–Summer 1928
Nine: Winter 1927–Summer 1928
Ten: August 1928–January 1929
Part Two: Citizen Capone
Eleven: January–March 1929
Twelve: February–October 1929
Thirteen: May–October 1929
Fourteen: December 1929–March 1930
Fifteen: December 1929–April 1930
Sixteen: March–June 1930
Seventeen: June–August 1930
Eighteen: June–October 1930
Nineteen: November–December 1930
Part Three: On the Spot
Twenty: December 1930–February 1931
Twenty-One: December 1930–February 1931
Twenty-Two: February–May 1931
Twenty-Three: Spring–Summer 1931
Twenty-Four: June–July 1931
Twenty-Five: Summer 1931
Twenty-Six: October 1931
Twenty-Seven: October 1931
Twenty-Eight: October 1931–January 1932
Twenty-Nine: February–May 1932
Thirty: 1932–1934
Epilogue: The Great American City
Acknowledgments: A Tip of the Fedora
Bibliography
Note on Sources
Source Notes
Abbreviations
Rogues’ Gallery Credits
Index
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Untouchable Truth
by Max Allan Collins
On Monday night, April 20, 1959, the first of a two-part TV presentation called “The Untouchables” appeared on Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. I was eleven years old, watching in Muscatine, Iowa, and I was dumbstruck. The next day, all the kids—well, the boys, anyway—were talking about this hardhitting crime show, the fact-based story of federal agent Eliot Ness and his band of incorruptible lawmen, taking on the Al Capone gang during Prohibition.
Me, I was bowled over by how much it tallied with my obsession (which had started at age six) with Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, particularly reprints of 1930s and ’40s comic strips. When the concluding “Untouchables” episode aired, finally presenting Al Capone on camera (after the prior week’s crafty cliffhanger), I was struck by how much Capone resembled the ’30s Tracy villain, Big Boy.
I could hardly have imagined that less than twenty years later, I’d be writing the legendary Dick Tracy strip and hearing Chester Gould confirm my suspicions that detective Tracy had been based on Ness and the Untouchables—a fact still little noted or known.
That was the beginning of my interest in true crime in general and Eliot Ness specifically. I immediately read Ness’s memoir, The Untouchables (1957), cowritten by sportswriter Oscar Fraley, as well as Fraley’s follow-up, 4 Against the Mob (1961), about Ness’s later law enforcement career in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Ness-Fraley book has largely been dismissed as a fabrication, but one of our many discoveries while researching this book has been to confirm how surprisingly accurate it was. Fraley built his narrative on a decidedly nonboastful, fairly short memoir by Ness, amplifying it with newspaper and magazine accounts. But the ghostwriter paid no heed to chronology, and events appeared in what struck Fraley as the most effective order. Ness protested to no avail, taken out by a heart attack at fifty-four, before publication of the work that would make him far more famous dead than he’d been alive.
Fraley’s readable if creatively rearranged account led to a backlash among Ness’s contemporaries in law enforcement as well as Chicago journalists, building him (inaccurately) into a glory hound. The enormously successful TV series spawned by the Desilu Playhouse two-parter did Ness’s real-life reputation no favors, either.
Ironically, the original two-part film (released theatrically as The Scarface Mob) was the most accurate presentation on film Eliot Ness and the Untouchables have ever received. Director Phil Karlson was a master at true-crime noir, with The Phenix City Story (1955) behind him and Walking Tall (1973) ahead of him (with its similar glorification of real-life lawman Buford Pusser).
Featuring Hollywood star Robert Stack as a grimly charismatic Ness, the “Untouchables” two-parter boasted a semidocumentary style, Roaring Twenties nostalgia, and fast, violent action, with ’30s media star Walter Winchell’s rat-a-tat-tat narration perhaps the masterstroke.
A much-fictionalized Chicago mob was amplified by similarly fanciful episodes with Ness taking on such real-life criminals as Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, Legs Diamond, and Lucky Luciano. J. Edgar Hoover, never a fan of the real Ness, objected so much to the Untouchable’s latter-day fame that he insisted the producers credit the FBI’s work at the end of the Ma Barker episode. Capone himself (with Neville Brand reappearing) was again featured only in the two-part episode, “The Big Train.”
The only other two-part The Untouchables episode, “The Unhired Assassin,” was loosely based on the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak. That event also became the subject of my detective novel True Detective (1983).
In the late ’70s, while teaching mystery fiction at a community college, I happened to notice The Maltese Falcon’s 1929 copyright—the year of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. That meant Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries—instead of Philip Marlowe meeting an Al Capone type, Al Capone could meet a Philip Marlowe type.
In 1981, I set out to write a period private eye story around a real crime—the Cermak assassination. I sought the help of George Hagenauer, a Chicagoan whose knowledge of the city and its mob history was considerable. I said to George, “My private eye, offended by the rampant graft, will quit the Chicago PD.” When he stopped laughing, George said, “Max, don’t you know? You get on the PD for the rampant graft!” In that exchange, Nathan Heller was born.
Ever since, George has been my primary research associate on the Heller novels, as well as many other historical thrillers. With Heller, the approach is to research a famous unsolved (or controversially solved) crime, and when I’m ready to write the definitive work on the subject, I write a private eye novel instead.
Early on I had the idea of making Eliot Ness the honest law enforcement contact for my somewhat shady PI—every private eye has a cop pal, after all. But I’d read in Fraley that Ness and the Untouchables had disbanded after Capone went to prison, with Ness gone from Chicago by 1933. The mandate of my novel was authenticity, so I abandoned the notion of using him.
And then he turned up in the research! Ness was right there on the scene, after two corrupt cops attempted the assassination of Frank Nitti. And into True Detective he went. Ness appears in a number of subsequent Heller novels as well, in particular The Millio
n-Dollar Wound (1986), Stolen Away (1991), and Angel in Black (2001).
In 1986 I was asked by an editor to spin Ness off into his own novels—a good opportunity to explore his little-written-about years as public safety director in Cleveland. George and I made several trips to that city and explored the locations of potential Ness novels, from the castle-like boathouse on Clifton Lagoon, where Eliot lived, to the dreary Kingsbury Run gully, where the serial-killing Mad Butcher pursued his homeless prey.
Our research took us to the Cleveland Public Library, the City Hall Municipal Reference Library, and the Case Western Reserve Society, where the Ness papers reside. I expected to be disappointed. Noted mob expert Hank Messick’s The Silent Syndicate (1967) explored the Cleveland mob while disparaging Ness’s gangbusting role.
So when I found in the Case Western Reserve card catalog (remember those?) an entry saying, “Eliot Ness Scrapbook,” I held out little hope. We’d already been there all afternoon but asked to see the scrapbook anyway. A civil servant slogged off dutifully to answer our request.
Near closing, the civil servant returned, pushing a hand truck laden with perhaps half a dozen huge scrapbooks, each many inches thick and large enough for a newspaper front page of the era to be pasted in. George and I exchanged the same kind of dumbstruck look the original “Untouchables” broadcast had generated in me.
Actually exploring this treasure-trove find—apparently the last person to use the scrapbooks had been Oscar Fraley—meant returning the next day, and the next, and many more after that. Examining such items as Ness’s eyeglasses and a signed photo, I alerted the staff that this material should not be handed out to the general public, and soon Case Western had put the scrapbooks on microfilm.
Among that material were postcards sent from a mental institution to Eliot Ness by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Eerily, the front of one postcard depicted Neville Brand, insane and ranting, clutching prison bars, in a still from Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954)—years before Brand would be Al Capone on The Untouchables.
My four Ness-in-Cleveland novels—The Dark City (1987), Butcher’s Dozen (1988), Bullet Proof (1989), and Murder by the Numbers (1993)—were followed in 2004 by a play, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. A one-man show performed by my late friend Michael Cornelison, Untouchable Life became a film of the same name in 2005, airing on a number of PBS stations.
I had written the play, and then filmed it, in part because I wanted to go on record with my version of Ness’s life. The research George and I did, particularly on Butcher’s Dozen (the first book-length work on the Kingsbury Run slayer), had been plundered without credit by other novelists and graphic novelists, and by nonfiction writers, who apparently felt that not acknowledging my work was fine because it was “fiction.”
I also wanted to address aspects of director Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, The Untouchables. De Palma is a director I admire, and the film is well-made and entertaining. The screenplay is another matter. David Mamet certainly created a memorable speech for Sean Connery—“You wanna get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun,” and so on.
But the historical inanities—inaccuracies doesn’t cover it—are unforgivable. I have no trouble with liberties being taken with historical material for dramatic purposes. But having Mounties chase rumrunners in a country where rum is legal? Depicting a trial where a jury is changed midstream? Showing Eliot Ness tossing Frank Nitti off a building? The screenwriter displays a lack of respect not just for history but for his audience.
Untouchable Life attracted a high school student from Michigan to the Des Moines Playhouse to see Michael Cornelison perform as Eliot Ness. A. Brad Schwartz had been a Dick Tracy fan since around five years of age, having been exposed to the film of that name (on which I was a creative consultant and wrote the movie tie-in novel).
Just past age eleven—and this may sound very familiar—Brad saw a movie called The Untouchables, recommended by his mother as being “like Dick Tracy but real-life.” He became enamored with that film, which led him to my work, including Road to Perdition, a graphic novel in which Eliot Ness appears. Brad was fifteen the summer he came to Des Moines for the play Untouchable Life, going to the premiere of the film in Rock Island, Illinois, in February 2005.
Somewhere along the way we got to know each other, and—while his college thesis evolved into the Orson Welles book, Broadcast Hysteria (2015)—he suggested we collaborate on a biography of Eliot Ness. I’d had several editors suggest the same, but I felt Untouchable Life was my last word on the subject.
Apparently I was wrong.
The project morphed into a dual biography of Capone and Ness. For a good long while, we hoped to follow Ness through to the end of his days, but eventually Chicago became the focus. For now.
We hope to set the record straight on any number of things. The inaccurate and unfair portrayal of Ness is one; the glorification of Al Capone is another. Jonathan Eig, in his Get Capone (2010), is guilty of both, particularly in trying to clear the mobster of the infamous baseball bat murders and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
For the former, Eig claims the baseball bat story dates only to 1975 when we have the basics in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times within two days of the murders, and Capone wielding the bat himself in print within a year of the event. For the latter, Eig ignores ballistics evidence, eyewitness testimony, and a credible confession in favor of a convoluted theory based on a single error-ridden letter to the FBI.
Deirdre Bair, in her book Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend (2016), collaborates with Capone family members to present a portrait of a loving husband and father. Typically, Bair disparages Ness, claiming he made “sure the press was there to take his photograph as he struck heroic poses over gallons of illegal booze being smashed to pieces and going down the drains and into the sewers.”
No such pictures exist.
A handful of diligent researchers—among them Rebecca McFarland, Paul Heimel, and Scott Leeson Sroka—have endeavored to shed light on the real Ness and his accomplishments. But even self-proclaimed Ness defender Douglas Perry—in Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero (2014)—lingers on sordid details of Ness’s supposed womanizing and drinking, with little in the historical record to back him up.
Filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick use Eig as a source for their documentary Prohibition (2011), Novick insisting, “Eliot Ness had nothing to do with catching Al Capone. . . . he wrote a book in which he just made stuff up.”
By dismissing Ness’s work, Eig and others seek to shift the spotlight to the Treasury agents who compiled the tax evasion case against Capone—in particular lead investigator Frank J. Wilson and his boss, Elmer L. Irey. The public has all but forgotten these men, a fact their admirers seem to blame on Ness.
For example, Gary Alford of the IRS—singing the praises of tax investigators—told the New York Times, “They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the [Capone] tax case.”
Only they did—The Undercover Man (1949), directed by B-movie master Joseph H. Lewis of Gun Crazy fame. Starring Glenn Ford as “Frank Warren,” the film—which plays like a dry run for the Untouchables TV series—was based on Frank Wilson’s self-aggrandizing article in Collier’s magazine in 1947 (a hardcover book followed in 1965). Wilson made a boatload of money off the film—he literally bought a boat.
Elmer Irey wrote (or a ghostwriter did, as had been the case with Wilson) his own puffed-up work, The Tax Dodgers (1948), taking credit for busting up the Capone mob. Irey also filmed a crime-does-not-pay opening scene for T-Men (1947); one wonders if he realized that Chicago gangster Johnny Rosselli was an uncredited producer on the picture, with a 10 percent piece of the action.
Neither Frank J. Wilson nor Elmer Irey even mention Eliot Ness in their respective memoirs. Read this book and see if you think that was fair. Add to that the treatment Al Capone got from the federal government, as well as the questionable conduct of the much-lauded Ju
dge James Herbert Wilkerson.
In trying to set the record straight, we have used decades of Collins-Hagenauer research, including published sources—newspapers, books, and long-forgotten true-crime magazines—as well as newly uncovered archival documents and federal files obtained through numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. Trips have been made to libraries, archives, and personal collections in a dozen states as well as the District of Columbia, including the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner.
Coauthor Schwartz has combed through the personnel files of the Untouchables in the historic archives at the ATF’s D.C. headquarters. Brad also made a trip to the small Pennsylvania town where Eliot Ness died, speaking with the last people with living memories of the man. He also spoke with the son of one Untouchable and the grandson of another, and spent an afternoon exploring Ness’s old South Side neighborhood, later visiting Capone’s Miami mansion.
A few notes about the pages ahead. Al Capone’s famous successor is known in the popular media and most books as Frank Nitti, but the name he used was Frank Nitto. We have honored that, though when the Nitti usage turns up in a quote, we spare you the “sic.” We also use “Jack Guzik,” as Nitto’s fellow gangster was known to his associates and family, although some media quotes will retain the more commonly seen “Jake.” Similarly I have taken the liberty of correcting minor spelling, grammar, and usage errors in quotes from newspapers and magazines of the day.
We do not use the Ness-Fraley book, The Untouchables, except where verified by multiple sources, with the occasional exception of drawing upon Ness’s state of mind in relation to certain incidents.
Neither of our subjects has really gotten a fair shake from history. Our hope is to balance the scales of justice on their behalf. Telling the story of Capone and Ness accurately is our goal—not only is truth stranger than fiction, in this case it’s even more compelling than the many lies and exaggerations visited on both.
Map: Organized Crime in 1920s Chicago
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 1