Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Such full-scale crime labs were scattered throughout Europe, but nothing like them existed in the United States. Massee offered to fund a “Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory” in Chicago—not part of the police department, but rather a nonprofit corporation “outside the pale of politics and divorced from all petty and narrow influences.” The dean of the Northwestern University law school offered the facility a home on campus. Massee tapped Goddard to run it.

  “We had no precedent to go upon,” Goddard recalled. That summer, he visited thirteen European cities with crime labs “at least sixty years” ahead of the United States in every respect but one.

  “In general,” Goddard wrote, “European methods of bullet identification are hopelessly antiquated.”

  But the ballistics expert knew much was to be learned from his continental colleagues. He returned intent upon building a lab that would rival those in Europe.

  The Clark Street massacre was never far from Goddard’s mind. Every so often, Bundesen would send him another suspected Thompson to test, but none matched. Goddard remained confident he could identify the right guns . . . if police ever found them.

  While Northwestern staked its claim on the future of forensics, the University of Chicago announced its own program in police reform. Not content to give cops better tools, they intended to give the country better cops. The new department would offer advanced criminology courses, drawing upon research ranging from law and medicine to psychiatry and anthropology. Chicago would be their laboratory, a training ground for a new kind of policeman. Among the first to sign up was Eliot Ness.

  Eliot’s life had quieted down in the months since Chicago Heights. He had resumed seeing Edna Stahle, still Alexander Jamie’s secretary, their romance growing steadily while their work lives remained entwined. When they were together, her mask of shyness dropped to reveal a refined, sophisticated, and sparkling personality.

  One night that summer, Ness took Edna to a fancy restaurant and popped the question. They married on August 9, 1929, a month before Edna’s twenty-third birthday, in a civil ceremony as quiet and private as the bride and groom.

  Eliot and Edna moved into a residential hotel at 6811 Paxton Avenue, just south of Jackson Park, a respectable, upscale neighborhood a few blocks away from where Johnny Torrio had been shot four years earlier. Like the Torrios, the Nesses kept mostly to themselves. Their landlord remembered Eliot as a quiet tenant who “never discussed his affairs with anyone.”

  Neither did Edna. She hated the spotlight, staying in the background as her husband rose to prominence. Eliot, for his own reasons, would never talk much about their time together. Their mutual silence cloaks much of their relationship.

  But with married life came new priorities. A month after the wedding, Ness signed up for a correspondence course in law. Off duty, he’d come home to write papers on contracts, torts, and agency—all civil matters, not the criminal law he dealt with at work. Newly married, perhaps planning to start a family, Ness had every reason to consider a career that did not include getting shot at.

  Then came the University of Chicago’s program in police administration. Ness joined the first class with a handful of other Prohibition agents, among them his old partner, Don Kooken—Alexander Jamie no doubt sending his top men to see what they could pick up and bring back.

  Jamie’s son, Wallace, though still an undergrad, also took the course. A sensitive soul and lover of literature, Wallace longed to be a crimefighter like his uncle Eliot. More than ever, he and Ness looked like brothers, better suited to a classroom than a crime scene.

  Their professor was August Vollmer, fifty-three, police chief on leave from Berkeley, California. Tall, strong, with piercing gray eyes on a cinder block head, Vollmer hid gregarious charm behind his flinty facade. Ness surely knew of the world-famous law enforcement pioneer—at Berkeley, Vollmer had created the nation’s first truly modern police force.

  Twenty years before Massee and Goddard, Vollmer’s cops were solving crimes using bloodstains, soil, and fibers. His department’s firsts included putting officers on bicycles (and later in squad cars), forming a police training school, employing two-way radios, and making systematic use of crime statistics.

  The aggressive interrogation of suspects—the so-called third degree—was, Vollmer told his officers, “an admission of stupidity and ignorance and brutality.” He forbade them to “strike any person, particularly a prisoner, except in extreme self-defense.” At Berkeley, he encouraged two protégés, John Larson and Leonarde Keeler, to develop a more humane, “scientific” alternative to backroom interrogations—the lie detector.

  Vollmer sought to redefine what it meant to be a cop. Police work in those days was a low-skill, low-wage occupation. Men got on the force through political pull, promoted by shaking the right hands and busting the right heads. Berkeley offered an entirely different system: well-trained, scientifically literate “college cops,” hired and promoted on merit. Though, like Capone, Vollmer’s schooling ended at the sixth grade, he dreamed of a day when every police officer would have a college degree. He believed his system could work anywhere, and made his case in the press, feeding reporters exciting stories in exchange for coverage.

  Vollmer didn’t mince words about his colleagues, referring to the San Francisco Police Department as a “bunch of morons.” Half of Chicago’s cops, he told the Tribune, were “stupid” with “no business being policemen.” He abhorred racism, campaigned against the death penalty, and opposed police crackdowns on political radicals.

  “If the communists have arguments that are sufficiently convincing,” he wrote, “why shouldn’t we listen to them?” Beating and locking them up would only “make martyrs out of a lot of dumbbells.”

  Vollmer saw the dry law as a destructive distraction crafted by zealots with little understanding of the real world. He made open visits to speakeasies, and was critical of bans on gambling, drugs, or prostitution, which he saw as public health problems, not police matters.

  “The eradication of drug addiction by short jail sentences,” he wrote in 1936, “has proved a futile effort.”

  In class, Vollmer was passionate and entertaining, bringing in professional criminals for guest lectures, somehow charming them into speaking before a room full of cops. He had a rare gift for inspiring students, building relationships lasting for years. Ness became one of his most ardent disciples.

  The young agent also picked up his mentor’s fascination with the scientists who, as Vollmer put it, were “out-Sherlocking the old Sherlock Holmes of fiction.” Ness began hanging around the Northwestern crime lab, eager to learn. One chemist recalled him dropping by at all hours and staying late into the night—“always smiling, but very earnest about his work.”

  Ness got to know Calvin Goddard, who gladly taught him the basics of ballistics; he also took an interest in the lie detector and befriended its inventors, John Larson and Leonarde Keeler. Keeler was a college dropout about Ness’s age, recently hired by the crime lab to perfect his polygraph. A whiz kid and a promoter, Keeler hoped the device might one day make juries obsolete.

  But Larson, famed as America’s only Ph.D. policeman, had less faith in his invention’s unerring accuracy. While the Prohibition Bureau might find the device useful for getting leads out of suspects, Larson told Ness, lawyers would tear apart prosecutors trying to use it in court. Nevertheless, Ness soon began bringing in gangsters he arrested for a spin on the new machine.

  Well-read college boy Ness had always been an odd man out in the Prohibition Bureau. Jamie had protected him so far, but Ness would never be the glad-hander his brother-in-law was. Vollmer gave Eliot a new aspiration—being a cop in the way that other men were doctors or lawyers . . . a true professional.

  “Merely arresting the offender and sending him to jail,” Vollmer said, “is like pouring water into a sieve.”

  Instead, the teacher saw a role for policemen as social engineers, addressing crime’s root causes.

>   “Common sense teaches us that the time to begin crime prevention is in the formative part of the child’s life,” Vollmer argued.

  These ideas transformed Ness’s thinking about policing, giving him an alternative to the more cynical brand of law enforcement practiced by his brother-in-law. In Vollmer, Ness had found another surrogate father he seemed eager to please. Jamie had set him on his path, but Vollmer became his role model.

  Not given to writing letters or openly expressing affection, Ness did both for his most important teacher.

  “I feel, and for many years have felt,” Ness wrote to Vollmer in 1935, “that my connection with you at the University of Chicago was one of the most beneficial things in my life.”

  In mid-September, Alexander Jamie sneaked out of the city after receiving an urgent phone call from Washington, D.C. The press soon got wind Jamie was in the capital for a secret meeting with George E. Q. Johnson and top Prohibition Bureau officials. Those in the know speculated he would soon replace E. C. Yellowley as Chicago’s Prohibition administrator.

  Johnson had lost his patience with Yellowley, whose office all but ignored the prosecutor’s urging to go after the city’s gangsters. Instead, Yellowley and his agents doggedly pursued innumerable small fry, only making Johnson’s life worse. Already the prosecutor faced a backlog of hundreds of criminal cases, many pending for a year or more, lacking enough judges to hear them all. Yellowley’s only success had been Chicago Heights, which Jamie and his special agents had cleaned up on their own, with Ness in the lead.

  Now the press speculated that Johnson wanted Jamie to head a similar cleanup in Chicago. Instead, the Prohibition Bureau held on to Yellowley and kept Jamie in his current job, proudly announcing an “intensive” new campaign against Chicago’s bootleg barons, which Jamie and Yellowley would carry out together. Unwilling to “warn the enemy in advance,” they refused to say more. Asked for comment, prosecutor Johnson spoke vaguely of the “harmonious” arrangement the Bureau had worked out.

  “A greater effort will be made to reach the sources of the bootleggers’ supply,” he said, “and get at the revenue which finances the organized gangs.”

  He had told the truth, but not the whole truth.

  Cutting off Capone’s cash flow was a lofty goal, but Yellowley’s Prohibition agents remained much too dysfunctional to ever make that happen. Federal officials would pursue another line of attack that, for the moment, remained top secret.

  Members of the Treasury and Justice Departments had met to discuss plans for income tax prosecutions against various Chicago gangsters. With the bank records seized after the Heights raids, they now had solid leads on three of the Outfit’s four senior partners—Ralph “Bottles” Capone, Frank Nitto, and Jack Guzik. The fourth, Al Capone, remained the ultimate prize, but they still had nothing on him.

  They decided to work their way up the chain. Ralph would be first to go. The taxmen had the most evidence against him, and he’d unwittingly set himself up by lying about his income and falsely pleading poverty. That meant the feds could charge him not just with tax evasion but fraud.

  The government needed an airtight case. Although the Supreme Court had ruled illegal income taxable, no one had ever tried to convict a gangster—a suspected murderer, pimp, and who knew what else—for not paying taxes. If the feds couldn’t lock Bottles up on tax charges, they’d have no hope of convicting his brother Al.

  They arrested Ralph in the most public way possible. On October 8, he arrived at Chicago Stadium with tickets to a prizefight, dressed to the nines. On the way to his front-row seat, he was stopped by two rumpled, portly men—a United States marshal and a special agent with the Intelligence Unit, carrying an arrest warrant. Bottles made a fuss, but they hauled him off anyway and brought him to the Federal Building, where George Johnson was waiting.

  Johnson and his assistants questioned Ralph into the night. The gangster took on a haughty, indifferent attitude—these civil servants were stupid! After asking permission to smoke, Ralph lit up a cigar and laid a few others on the table. He invited the federal men to help themselves. No one did.

  Bottles clearly had no understanding of the charges. Without his lawyer present, he assumed the feds wanted him on liquor violations, and when they asked about his numerous bank accounts, under various assumed names, he freely admitted they were his. That was all gambling money, he claimed, not booze money. Definitely not booze money.

  But to the taxmen, the source didn’t matter. Income was income. Clarence Converse, the arresting Intelligence Unit agent, took careful notes, keeping his busy hands under the table.

  Ralph answered all their questions, then found it was too late to raise his $50,000 bail. Couldn’t he stay the night in a hotel and post bond in the morning? The federal men refused. But Al Capone’s brother hadn’t lost his confidence.

  “Well,” Ralph crowed, “you don’t have anything on me.”

  “Only enough to send you to the penitentiary,” Johnson said.

  Capone’s baseball bat attack on Joe Giunta, Albert Anselmi, and John Scalise (left to right), as illustrated by the December 1932 issue of Startling Detective Adventures.

  (Authors’ Collection.)

  Capone (center) with Enoch “Nucky” Johnson (second from right) on the Atlantic City boardwalk, May 1929.

  (Brinks38200 via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.)

  Thirteen

  May–October 1929

  Just before dawn on May 8, 1929, two patrol cops came upon a Cadillac parked with its lights off on the outskirts of Hammond, Indiana. This bleak stretch of prairie near the Pennsylvania railroad and the Illinois border might have been the perfect getaway for a pair of backseat lovers, but when the cops got close enough to look under the blanket in back of the car, their flashlight revealed two dead men, bathed in blood.

  The unloved couple was Capone triggerman John Scalise and new Unione Siciliana president Joseph “Hop Toad” Giunta. After alerting local officials, the cops combed the area and found Albert Anselmi’s equally bullet-ridden, battered body flung farther out on the road.

  The Murder Twins had lived up to their nickname, but not in the way Scalise and Anselmi might have liked.

  At the Hammond morgue, Chicago police captain John Stege and Cook County coroner Herman Bundesen were on hand to witness the autopsy. Each victim was shot numerous times, both .45- and .38-caliber slugs present. Judging by the trajectory, the three had all been seated when slain. The bullets were gathered for Calvin Goddard’s ballistics lab.

  Scalise and Anselmi would be shipped to Sicily for burial, but Giunta wound up in Mount Carmel Cemetery, in a tuxedo and dancing pumps.

  Not long after the grisly discovery, the authorities heard a story on the gangland grapevine fleshing out reports “from Sicilian sources” in both the Tribune and the New York Times.

  Seemed the Murder Twins had been planning an Outfit takeover, in concert with Joe Aiello, so that Giunta could rule the Unione Siciliana without Capone as puppet master. A crony of the recently killed Yale, Giunta was popular with Sicilians, a twenty-two-year-old sharpie and jazz-mad dancer who mixed well, both socially and in business. With Aiello’s backing and the Twins’ firepower, Giunta was going places.

  Scalise had gotten similarly full of himself. A trusted Capone bodyguard now, he was sending big money home to Sicily, dressing loudly, and swaggering around, basking in his killer reputation. Sure of his hold on Giunta, he boasted, “I am the most powerful man in Chicago.”

  The Murder Twins had been seen meeting regularly with Aiello in a Division Street joint. Wary now of the strutting pair, Frankie Rio, Capone’s top bodyguard, faked an argument with the boss in their presence. Convinced he’d turned on Capone, the Twins brought Rio in on the plot to take over the Outfit.

  Shortly thereafter, a banquet was announced to take place outside Hammond at the Plantation, a Torrio joint. All the Outfit insiders would be on hand to applaud the rise of Giunta to the presidency of
the Unione—Capone himself had invited the three guests of honor.

  The vice resort-cabaret was closed that night for the private party, exterior lighting dimmed to discourage locals looking for a good time. Armed guards made sure the guests weren’t disturbed. When the Twins and Hop Toad arrived, they were escorted to a banquet room in back where twenty or more Outfit guys were already seated, though Capone was not yet present. Scalise, Anselmi, and Giunta received warm, back-slapping greetings in both Italian and English, then were given center-table seats of honor. Corks were popped, toasts made. Platters of spaghetti and chicken came, the guests eating with gluttonous glee, sharing wisecracks and wine with good friends.

  Finally, Capone arrived and, as if a judge had entered a courtroom, everyone rose. He sat and ate heartily, his honored guests on either side. He conversed with the three men of the hour, smiling, friendly, if overanimated. Behind him a clutch of bodyguards stood—perhaps they would dine later.

  When the table had been cleared of dishes, a bodyguard strode to the doors, locking them with a sound not unlike a gun cocking. The ganglord rose. He bowed to his guests of honor, who smiled up at him.

  Then Capone said, “This is the way we deal with traitors.”

  A bodyguard handed Capone a baseball bat, which he gripped in hands as powerful as Babe Ruth’s. While the stunned conspirators, still seated, were held at gunpoint, the boss began with Scalise, crushing his skull. Red streamed down the man’s face like a cracked egg. The screams of the two brave gunmen awaiting their turns were cut off, one at a time, by similar blows, first Anselmi, then Giunta.

  Capone worked them over for a while, then—none of the men dead, each clinging to consciousness—they were turned over to the waiting clutch of bodyguards, who blasted away.