“I told him he would be taking a great chance,” Ness wrote, “but if he were accepted by the mob, I would have some assignments for him.”
A few days later, the Kid returned, having made contact with the Outfit through a “mouthpiece” of Capone’s. The attorney had warned the Kid the gang knew about his meeting with Ness, and “that the Government would use him and throw him out like an old shoe when they were through.”
But Capone’s men wouldn’t pass up the chance to get a double agent on Ness’s squad—if the Kid signed on, the gang would happily pay him to report Ness’s movements.
Eliot remained suspicious. “I couldn’t understand why the young man wanted to play such a dangerous game,” he recalled. The Kid batted such doubts away by explaining he needed money, and an exciting job, to impress his wife, a striptease dancer. More likely, the Outfit had sent him in the first place, hoping to plant someone on Ness’s staff.
Either way, Ness saw the value in having a double agent of his own. He could use the Kid to feed misinformation to the mob, taking care they never learned anything that could hurt his own squad.
Ness also knew he was placing his informant in a risky position. Pass along too many bad tips, and the Kid wouldn’t outlive his nickname. Ness didn’t relish playing games with someone else’s life; he didn’t want another Frank Basile on his conscience. He told the Kid “the job would be extremely dangerous and of short duration.”
And the Kid would have to open a Postal Savings Bank account, from time to time showing Ness enough of a cash balance to support fleeing if need be. The Kid readily agreed, becoming Ness’s man inside the Outfit.
From the Kid’s reports, Ness learned of the gang’s growing determination to do something about his Capone squad. The Kid passed along a message: If Ness quit raiding breweries, he could expect to see two crisp, clean $1,000 bills resting on his desk each and every Monday morning.
“This was a pretty good sum of money,” Ness recalled, “considering that they would pay me weekly a large part of what the government was paying me per year.”
Ness had recently received a $900 raise, giving him an annual salary of $3,800. And he was lucky to have it, as the Depression rolled on with no end in sight. In Chicago the following spring, one social worker would report seeing “a crowd of some fifty men fighting over a barrel of garbage which had been set outside the back door of a restaurant. American citizens fighting for scraps of food like animals!”
In that desperate climate, the Capone mob was offering Eliot Ness the best kind of security—$104,000 a year just to look the other way, the modern equivalent of $1.5 million.
“The offer, of course, was not considered,” Ness wrote.
The gang zeroed in on his men. One frigid night, Seager cruised along Wabash with Lahart riding shotgun. They were tailing a truck from the “barrel wash” plant, plowing through a fierce wind in their aging Essex auto.
“We were about two blocks behind,” Lahart recalled, “trying to look like just another car on the street. But they had ‘trailers’ of their own. . . . One of them must have spotted us.”
A car zoomed up and a package came flying through the window, landing right in Lahart’s lap.
For a panic-stricken moment, Lahart thought he had a hand grenade between his legs. Instead, he found a packet full of cash. By then, the Capone car had sped on, but Seager hit the gas and caught up, throwing the bribe back in the driver’s face.
Capone’s men tried the same tactic on Paul Robsky, tossing an envelope of thousand-dollar bills into his car. Robsky couldn’t manage to hurl it back, so he turned it over to the district attorney’s office. On a separate occasion, Robsky said, “two of us were told we would be put on the payroll for $1,000 a week if we played ball.” The agents didn’t, much to the gangsters’ surprise.
“They told us that ‘everyone here in Chicago gets along good with each other,’ ” Robsky recalled. “ ‘Why not you?’ ”
For one thing, most of Ness’s men weren’t from Chicago, where getting a badge usually required political connections or a flat-out bribe. The city’s police force offered men from working-class, immigrant communities a chance at advancement—if they stayed in the good graces of their local ward boss. Otherwise, they’d never rise to the rank of captain or inspector, where a man could enrich himself through payoffs.
Ness’s men, even the local ones, hadn’t signed on for the graft.
“They’re working guys with families . . . ,” says Scott Sroka, grandson of Joe Leeson. “None of these guys were in it to get rich.”
Instead, they wanted an exciting career, and a shot at the American Dream. They were in for the long haul—grabbing a quick bribe simply wasn’t worth it.
Leeson, for example, didn’t have much education, but he’d worked his way up from an Indiana farm with skills and drive. He would be hard-pressed, in the midst of the Depression, to find another job offering him a better future.
Ness had chosen men who shared not only his midwestern faith in hard work and public service, but his ambition. Although they still dressed like workingmen, they were professionals, making a career out of law enforcement. Wads of cash offered by slick-suited gangsters, Sroka says, probably insulted them.
Even Lyle Chapman, who had a taste for fine clothes, refused to fill his pockets with payoffs. Many times when Chapman was on stakeout, a Capone thug would appear out of nowhere and offer him a bribe.
“Oh, we’d take the money,” Chapman said, “but turn it over as evidence and then smash another brewery.”
Having learned bribery got them nowhere, the gang turned to harassment, following the agents at all hours and loitering outside their homes, hoping to throw a scare into them and their families. Chapman, with Ness along, had to speed to his girlfriend’s apartment more than once after she called saying “hoods were outside and she was scared.”
The Outfit put Ness under constant surveillance. Death threats came in by mail and over the phone, warning Ness he would be castrated, shot, and left lying in a ditch. According to Lahart, Ness heard from “time to time” that hitmen were gunning for him, but while the danger seemed real, the bullets failed to fly.
When he left his Paxton Avenue apartment for a Sunday morning stroll, Ness noticed a suspicious character watching him, always staying a block behind but following at every turn. This was probably the private detective the Outfit had hired to shadow him and dig into his background, searching for anything the gang might use to scare him off the case.
And the investigator hit pay dirt. In looking over Ness’s civil service record, he noticed the birth date on the federal forms didn’t match Ness’s college records. Ness, the detective realized, had lied about his age to keep his job. And the Outfit could prove it.
The Kid brought this news to Ness as if it were a friendly warning.
“They have information that you got your job under false pretenses,” the Kid said. “Wouldn’t that go pretty hard against you on the witness stand?”
But if Ness was at all concerned, he didn’t show it. The gang proceeded to file a complaint with the Civil Service Commission, hoping to get Ness dismissed. No soap.
The squad kept up their own investigations. One agent devoted himself to tracking purchase records of all “suspicious looking automobiles and trucks” and made a list of vehicles linked to the Capone mob. If a squad member chanced to spot one, he’d follow it. Soon the team knew every Capone truck and driver by sight.
One such truck crossed the paths of two agents in the early morning hours of May 11. They spotted it at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, a block from the Lexington Hotel. Its side bore the name of the Acme Seamless Tube Company, a lame attempt at camouflage.
The bootleggers must have spotted their tail, because they took off, heading north. The agents gave chase. A convoy car carrying two gangsters fell in beside them and kept swerving into their path, trying to run them off the road, nearly succeeding.
&
nbsp; The truck plunged into the heart of the Loop, weaving up back alleys and down side streets in a vain attempt to shake the feds, finally pulling into an alley between Wells and La Salle. Two men jumped out, the driver leaping onto the running board of the convoy car, which sped away, out of the agents’ reach. But his passenger, Frank Uva, didn’t move fast enough. Ness’s men quickly collared him, confiscating the truck and its eleven barrels of beer.
The gang responded to the loss of one vehicle by stealing another—sometime in late May, Ness’s car vanished. A few days later, the vehicle was found on the street, stripped. Ness picked up the remains and somehow got it back in working order, but made the mistake of parking it outside his apartment. When he got up to go to work, he found the car missing its front wheels. He told the Herald and Examiner “thieves were stealing his automobile on the installment plan.”
And they wouldn’t stop trying—Ness’s car disappeared again some time later, as did Marty Lahart’s and that of another special agent working the Capone case.
Thieves also penetrated the agents’ offices, rifling their files and stealing evidence. A check on the Transportation Building’s phone lines revealed two wiretaps on Ness’s office. The agents used this as another opportunity to feed the gang misinformation.
As the case got closer to a grand jury, Ness decided to move their work where he felt it would be safe—the marble-and-granite edifice of the First National Bank at Dearborn and Madison. Ness rented “a large safety deposit box” on the ground floor and stashed everything they’d gathered inside. The vault became the unit’s second office; Chapman and the other agents went there to do all their paperwork.
Ness’s pencil detective had begun to link various parts of the beer business into one giant web, with a scar-faced spider at its center. From the Intelligence Unit, Chapman got records of money orders showing Capone had received large sums from George Howlett and Joe Fusco, two top men in the bootleg racket.
Chapman also traced the serial number of a truck seized at the South Cicero Avenue brewery and found Capone purchased it back in the early 1920s, under his favorite alias, “Al Brown.” A chain of circumstance connected this truck with another that Capone purchased at the same location, which was later seized hauling beer.
Now the squad could demonstrate Capone had taken a hand in transporting illicit alcohol, one of the three acts outlawed by the Eighteenth Amendment—a tenuous link, but proof connecting Capone to a crime. No other investigator could boast as much—not even the tax men, with their circumstantial case. Organizing and distilling all these documents would take time, however, and Chapman—never the speediest or most dedicated worker—had little to spare.
The Capone case turned Ness’s men into outsiders. By refusing to take the mob’s money, they opened themselves to constant harassment—threats and thefts, attempted bribes, and profane insults. They reminded Charles Schwarz, Ness’s friend on the Chicago Daily News, of India’s “untouchables,” the men, women, and children trapped at the bottom of the Hindu caste system.
India’s untouchables lived as outcasts, scorned by nearly everyone. Even their shadows were seen as unclean. Barred from normal society, unable to enter temples or schools, they retreated into the night and did the dirty work no one else would do—everything from killing animals to hauling human waste. They had recently made headlines in America because of Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to improve their lot in life.
Schwarz’s paper ran its first article about Ness’s men just a few columns away from a story about Gandhi. Perhaps that’s what gave him the idea. Impressed by the squad’s resistance to bribes, Schwarz began calling them Chicago’s “untouchables.”
The name appealed to Ness’s dry Nordic sense of humor. He had learned about India’s untouchables in a University of Chicago history course, and saw a certain parallel in how the underworld treated his men.
But George Johnson considered the name a badge of honor—a mark of incorruptibility. These men couldn’t be bought, influenced, or scared off.
No one could touch them.
Ness might have used the term as a joke, but Johnson picked it up and ran. Like the phrase Secret Six, this was newspaper bait—a dramatic, irresistible title turning this small squad into something big.
For all their successes, they still remained a motley, imperfect crew. But at least on paper, they could be a symbol of the honest, dedicated, and fearless law enforcement Chicago so sorely needed.
Before long, Johnson would make sure the entire country knew the Capone squad by its new name: the Untouchables.
Capone on Palm Island.
(Library of Congress)
With Sonny, in 1931, receiving a signed baseball from Gabby Hartnett of the Chicago Cubs.
(Library of Congress)
Twenty-Three
Spring–Summer 1931
Al Capone never commented publicly on the work of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables, but he certainly knew about their raids, and probably approved the attempted bribes and threats. That was how he liked to deal with reformers and principled lawmen.
“I got nothing against the honest cop on the beat,” Capone said. “Most of them you can’t buy. So you just have them transferred someplace where they can’t do you any harm. But don’t even talk to me about the honor of police captains or judges. If they couldn’t be bought, they wouldn’t have the jobs.”
Capone and Ness had in common a hatred of corrupt officials, if for different reasons.
“A crook is a crook,” Capone said, “and there’s something healthy about his frankness in the matter. But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”
When he should’ve been focused on the federal men working to put him in jail, Capone instead became obsessively annoyed with his treatment by the media. Over the past two years, Capone had been the subject of numerous books, including narrative histories of Chicago gangland, a rambling biography by a local journalist, and magazines depicting the Beer Wars carnage. Then came the emerging medium of sound motion pictures.
Gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who encountered Capone more than once, witnessed his transformation into celluloid myth.
“It has always stayed vividly in my mind that there was something almost sleepy in Al Capone’s voice,” she wrote, “a hushed undertone, such as a man uses in a library or a sickroom. . . . Later, on the screen, I am sure that all our top movie gangsters, Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, et al., copied this vocal characteristic of Capone’s.”
Capone had offers to join them in the movies, but he always refused. “It’s foolish to talk about it,” he said.
He already got movie-star-sized bags of fan mail—up to two thousand letters each week—many asking for handouts. A good share came from overseas, in languages he could not read.
Capone showed one to a journalist, who translated a Berlin woman’s sob story, pleading for money. An English woman sought only a small favor—to have some quarrelsome neighbors killed. She even offered to pay his passage to London.
“Even over there I’m known as a gorilla,” Capone griped.
Any other gangster facing federal indictment would have known not to talk to the press. But Capone couldn’t help venting to a reporter from Variety, trade journal of the film industry, about “the flock of books, stories, articles and interviews written by guys, all of whom claim to know me personally. You can put me on record as saying I don’t know any of ’em. Furthermore, I’ve never authorized any book or story about me.”
Still, Capone professed a love for the movies, saying he enjoyed private screenings. Gangster films made him laugh.
Another reporter asked Capone about a Real Detective magazine article saying he was an imposter, the real Al Capone having been murdered. The gangster had a good laugh about it.
“So now I’m a ‘p
honey,’ am I?” he said. “It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read. . . . Wait until my wife finds out that someone switched husbands on her.”
Despite Capone’s openness with the press, he didn’t let reporters get too close—as Chicago Daily News literary editor Howard Vincent O’Brien found out. Seeking intimate access to Capone, O’Brien arranged through a Secret Six detective to have lunch with Jack Guzik at a Madison Street speakeasy.
After ordering tomato juice, the genial Guzik railed on about his unfair income-tax conviction. He spoke bitterly of the hypocrisy of reformers and “certain judges and prosecutors,” but offered a surprising appraisal of prosecutor George E. Q. Johnson.
“That guy sent me up for five years,” Guzik said, his voice high-pitched and squeaky. “But he’s a good, honest, sincere guy . . . a square shooter.”
“ ‘Square shooting,’ ” O’Brien reflected, “plays a big part in gangster psychology.”
After numerous meetings with Guzik, O’Brien—having been thoroughly checked out and sized up—was ushered into the Lexington. He found it an unlikely “gangster hangout,” a hotel like countless others in many small cities. His eye immediately found the bulletin board, where a sign announced: KIWANIS CLUB MEETS EVERY THURSDAY, 2ND FLOOR.
But O’Brien couldn’t ignore the “swarthy men” lazing about the lobby, hoodlum types “in pearl-gray spats and fawn-colored fedoras and tight-fitting jackets, with salmon-pink neckties and eyes like oysters.” Reaching the fourth floor without incident, the journalist was given “one last bath of inquiry” by various watchdogs, but, surprisingly, no one searched him.
Capone’s office might have been a bank president’s—file cabinets, adding machines, thick carpeting, framed paintings. At the big desk in a bay window sat Joe Fusco, the youthful head of Capone’s beer racket, his tall frame clad in brown tweed. With the entrance of Guzik and his guest, Fusco vacated the throne.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 36