Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  Ness felt certain he had the job—he’d driven the Capone gang to the brink of bankruptcy, as just about anyone in the know would attest. With his record and connections, how could Hoover turn him down?

  On November 18, while speaking over the phone in the Chicago Prohibition office, Ness remarked he had it all sewn up. The Division would surely make him Chicago’s special agent in charge, and he wouldn’t accept anything less.

  “Boss is using his influence,” Ness said, apparently referring to George Johnson. But that indiscreet admission destroyed Ness’s chances of ever becoming one of Hoover’s G-men—word soon got back to the man whose job Ness expected to take: the current special agent in charge, Melvin Purvis.

  Within the year, Purvis would become the Division’s most celebrated agent, nationally known as the man who got John Dillinger. He and Eliot Ness would become the most famous real-life American detectives of the twentieth century.

  But in late 1933, Purvis’s leadership of the Chicago office was notable only for its incompetence, his men blundering from one fiasco into another—arresting the wrong men in two separate kidnappings, letting the notorious bandit “Machine Gun” Kelly slip through their fingers, and failing to turn up any leads on Dillinger.

  Hoover had long shown a special fondness for Purvis, using Melvin’s first name in official memoranda and kidding him about his good looks. But even the Director’s patience had reached its limit. In June, Hoover would bring in a more dependable man to take over the Dillinger case.

  Purvis was a poor fit for the Chicago office, dangerously ignorant of the complex currents of the city’s underworld. An aristocratic southerner, arrogant and entitled, he’d come to town with his own horse, chauffeured car, and black manservant.

  Ness had crossed Purvis’s path during one of the agent’s botched investigations. As a native Chicagoan, knowledgeable of local gangs, Ness had every reason to believe he could do a better job.

  But Purvis would not give up his post without a fight. On November 28, he sent a letter to Hoover saying Ness was pulling strings to become special agent in charge, attaching a file from Coyne on the Joe Kulak affair. Purvis claimed the file showed “a connection between Mr. Kemp and Mr. Ness in the obtaining of money for the purpose of allowing stills to operate without interference.”

  He also passed along second- and thirdhand gossip about Ness’s marital woes, even attacking Ness’s leadership of the Untouchables—Purvis said they had failed to make a case against Capone. At least three times, in letters and over the phone, Purvis reminded the Director that Ness was the brother-in-law of Alexander Jamie, a pariah due to his history with the Bureau and the newly collapsed Secret Six.

  Meanwhile, Ness—unaware Purvis was working against him—sat for a job interview with the Division. Before making his final report, the interviewer consulted with Purvis, who claimed Ness was using “political influence” to become special agent in charge “after the removal of the present Director and Mr. Purvis.”

  Nothing Ness had said suggested he wanted Hoover out of the way; on the contrary, he would often express his respect, even admiration, for the Director’s work.

  But just that hint of treachery was enough to make the Division close ranks. Somewhat incredibly, the report on Ness’s interview concluded the former leader of the Untouchables “does not appear to be resourceful nor to have executive ability; and is not likely to develop.”

  Ness was “primarily a politician”—something not even his worst enemies could claim with a straight face—and “temperamentally unfit for the position sought.”

  On December 4, Hoover scribbled a note at the bottom of one of Purvis’s poison-pen letters about Ness: “I do not think we want this applicant.”

  That effectively closed the matter, the case wrapping up officially a month later. The next day, December 5, Utah became the last state to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment, bringing Prohibition to an immediate end.

  On May 27, 1933, an orgasmic display of lights, music, and pyrotechnics marked the start of the Century of Progress Exhibition on Chicago’s southern shore. Unlike the classically designed “White City” of the 1893 fair, this sleekly modern “Rainbow City” looked ahead to a wondrous and optimistic future. Exhibits extolling the progress of science and the cultures of many nations filled 477 neon-lit acres, which visitors could view from the popular Sky Ride gliding hundreds of feet above.

  Or they might take in the fair’s more titillating attractions, like exotic dancer Sally Rand, or Calvin Goddard’s Crime House. The host of the latter—his job at the Northwestern Crime Lab terminated—showcased the latest in forensic science, but also depictions of torture, an electric chair, and “Chicago’s most beautiful murderess.” Goddard would soon find himself written out of the history of American forensics by the FBI, which welcomed his methods but not the man who pioneered their use.

  The fair was held over another summer, hosting more than 48 million visitors, the local economy reaping the benefits. But the city fathers’ goal—to “adorn Chicago’s reputation with something more decorative than grafting politicians and murdering racketeers,” as one observer put it—proved elusive. The organizers had hoped to showcase their city’s cultural attainments, but Chicago’s underworld heart kept beating just within earshot.

  Once again, the job of defending Chicago’s honor fell to Robert Isham Randolph, who served as the exposition’s “director of public protection.” On June 7, 1934, Randolph arranged for the arrests of Joe Fusco and Capone’s younger brother Matthew, who made the mistake of dropping by the fairgrounds for a beer and a sandwich. Randolph couldn’t tolerate the presence of a former public enemy and the brother of Public Enemy Number One, not at the Century of Progress.

  Like so many arrests over the years, this was merely Chicago-style theater. The Outfit had been at the fair from the very beginning, skimming money from construction through local trade unions, controlling everything from alcohol to hot dogs, parking lots to hat checks.

  “If a wheel turns on the fairgrounds, we get a cut of the grease on the axle,” one Outfit member boasted. “We got the whole place sewed up.”

  Instead of reclaiming Chicago from the gangsters, the fair helped keep the mob afloat as its bootleg operations dried up. Many tourists ventured from the fair into the Outfit’s saloons, casinos, and brothels, which ran around the clock both summers, filling the coffers that once belonged to Capone.

  With another burst of fireworks, the Century of Progress came to a close on October 31, 1934, ten days shy of ten years after Dean O’Banion’s murder touched off the Beer Wars. By then, most of the key combatants were either dead or in exile. Names that had made so many headlines over the past decade—O’Banion, Weiss, Drucci, Genna, Lingle—now adorned tombstones and mausoleums at Mount Carmel Cemetery on Chicago’s far West Side. Others—McGurn, Nitto, Capone—would soon join them, lying alongside the men they’d put in the ground. Chicago would never see their kind again—gangsters so much larger than life they became icons in death—because their conflict created a different world, one in which they had no place.

  The bloody battle for Chicago’s soul had never been about the rule of law, or preservation of morality, or even good versus evil; but about commerce. As gangsters fought for control of illicit markets, the federal government stepped in to protect the men whose businesses remained, if sometimes only barely, within the bounds of the law. Shooting and killing were bad for everybody’s bottom line, from Samuel Insull’s to Al Capone’s. Both sides needed a city that was a little less Wild West, a little more Midwest. For the White House and the Secret Six, saving Chicago meant stopping the violence—not, as Eliot Ness might have had it, destroying the Outfit.

  “There’s plenty for everyone,” Johnny Torrio always said.

  And once the guns stopped echoing and the legal beer began flowing, the businessmen of the upper and underworlds had little reason to battle on. The city fathers got their World’s Fair, all right, but Frank Nitto co
ntrolled the concessions—and the Outfit. So long as he stayed in the shadows and kept the killing to a minimum, no one seemed too concerned.

  The bantam Enforcer, hidden from history behind Capone’s outsized personality, won the war for precisely the same reason Ness’s efforts to smash the gang came up short. Chicago only wanted the appearance of having been cleaned up. Ness and the Untouchables served that purpose until Capone’s conviction, their story legitimizing the federal drive to put Scarface away. But once Capone left the scene, Ness found himself all but alone, still fighting the mob while his onetime allies packed up and moved on.

  Capone had paved the way for his own downfall. He knew the dangers of too much bloodshed.

  “I told them we were making a shooting gallery of a great business,” he said after the Hotel Sherman peace conference, “and that nobody profited by it.”

  To survive, Capone had to civilize the underworld—forging peace agreements and absorbing rival gangs, turning hardboiled hoods into disciplined workingmen, and replacing open gunfights with targeted assassinations. In short, he professionalized crime, placing himself at the head of a new kind of big business.

  But Capone remained too big, too famous, and too associated with the old violent ways to stay on top. He had to be sacrificed so his organization could survive.

  As the mob modernized, law enforcement had to do the same. Ness and his Untouchables were lawmen in transition, a bridge between the old-school cops and the new kind of federal agents. Rough-hewn, unpolished, and imperfect, they looked ahead to a professionalized future, the best of them transforming themselves into the forerunners of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men.

  But they had no place among these new crime-fighters—Ness would not be the only Untouchable denied a career as an FBI agent. J. Edgar wanted fresh faces, men he could mold into American heroes. And he carefully kept them away from the corrupting influence of organized crime, preferring to fight battles he could win.

  This meant targeting a different kind of “public enemy”—the bank-robbing bandits crisscrossing the country on the wings of powerful V8 engines. The FBI’s battles with the likes of John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and “Baby Face” Nelson were Dick Tracy adventures writ large in the real world, with attractive heroes, grotesque villains, and all the violent spectacle the Capone case had lacked. Yet they remained a kind of sideshow, a diversion from more substantive forms of criminality.

  “The war on crime is no more furthered by the killing of a Dillinger than by the jailing of a Capone for income-tax evasion,” wrote one observer in 1935. “There are a thousand Dillingers . . . and a thousand Capones who know better than to write checks. The Bureau of Investigation is designed to prune the criminal tree; the tree goes on flowering.”

  Too pure for Chicago, too tainted for the FBI, Ness found himself banished from the city of his birth, as much a victim of the federal government as his scar-faced nemesis.

  Yet while Capone had lost his town—and would soon lose his mind—Ness’s greatest triumphs, and tragedies, lay ahead.

  Untouchable Tours guide Craig “Southside” Alton outside the Lexington Hotel before its demolition in 1995.

  (Wikimedia Commons)

  Epilogue:

  The Great American City

  The summer of 1934 found Eliot Ness busting hillbilly stills in the “Moonshine Mountains” of Kentucky and Tennessee. Bootlegging remained chiefly a big-city business, however, and Uncle Sam still needed someone with Ness’s unique talent for battling the illicit alcohol trade.

  In August, Ness was transferred to Cleveland to head the local office of the newly renamed Alcohol Tax Unit. His exile at an end, Ness threw himself into another flurry of raids—busting, the Plain Dealer reported, “an average of one still a day.”

  His work caught the city’s attention, and in December 1935 he became Cleveland’s new director of public safety. Over the next six years, Ness would reform a corrupt, inefficient police department and lower Cleveland’s horrific traffic death rate until the city was among the safest in America. Thanks to Ness, the Cleveland Police became a model for the nation. Along the way, the Untouchable battled gangsters and labor racketeers, and personally led raids against the gambling operations of Moe Dalitz’s nationwide Cleveland Syndicate.

  Drawing upon ideas he’d learned from August Vollmer, Ness made Cleveland’s Safety Department among the most progressive in the country—modernizing the police, outfitting squad cars with the latest in radio and teletype technology, and urging cops to fix the deeper social problems that created crime. He made fighting juvenile delinquency a chief priority, establishing “Boystown” clubs and a “Dick Tracy Detective Squad”—never realizing he had been the template for Chester Gould’s comic strip detective.

  “Millions have been spent in efforts to cope with the problem of adult crime,” Ness declared in 1939. “I think the time is at hand when police officials, teachers, and educators should join to prevent problem children from becoming criminals.”

  As Ness reached new heights, his nemesis fell farther than anyone could have predicted. On November 16, 1939, Al Capone emerged from federal prison after serving seven years, six months, and twelve days of his eleven-year sentence. Capone had spent more than half of that time at “the Rock,” a new maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island.

  Model prisoner Capone posed little threat of escape, and tax evaders rarely merited such heightened security. Once again, the federal government had happily bent its own rules to make an example of Public Enemy Number One.

  After years of harsh discipline, enforced silence, and attacks from other inmates, Capone’s mind finally cracked. The syphilis lying latent within him caused a psychotic break that no doctor could repair. Although he left prison a free man, Capone would always be a mental prisoner—trapped in a childlike state, subject to mood swings and delusions, terrified of strangers, and lost in premature senility.

  “He is nutty as a cuckoo,” Jack Guzik said in 1946.

  Capone’s family brought him back to the Palm Island estate, where walls and guards hid his condition from outsiders. Sometimes he would dream of returning to Chicago and his old haunts in Cicero. Ralph, still engaged in shady business but pushed to the Outfit’s margins, encouraged these fantasies, to the dismay of other family members, who preferred Al in his calmer moments, content to enjoy retirement as a quiet family man and forty-something geriatric.

  Apart from a brief stopover at Prairie Avenue on his way to Wisconsin, Capone would return to Chicago only in his fractured mind. When his family took him to restaurants in Miami, he’d imagine himself back in a speakeasy. At Palm Island, he’d sit by the pool and carry on conversations with deceased gangsters whose passing he had bidden.

  “He talked to dead people,” his relatives recalled, “and told them why they had to die. Sometimes he gave away Outfit business. We couldn’t take a chance that any of this would get out.”

  The men who’d replaced Capone in Chicago would never have to worry about him reclaiming his throne. They subsidized him in his final years, giving the family a $600 weekly pension, enough to live on—just.

  When Capone’s body came back to Chicago for burial in 1947, his Outfit successors all trooped dutifully to the cemetery to pay their respects.

  Like Capone, Eliot Ness spent his final days reliving the battle for Chicago.

  In the 1940s, Ness left law enforcement—his one true calling—first for business and then for politics, a washout in both. Broke by the 1950s, his taste for alcohol deepening, Ness found himself working for a failing paper company in the small Pennsylvania town of Coudersport, desperate to make a living for his third wife and their adopted son.

  In 1956, the sportswriter friend of a business partner offered to collaborate with Ness on a book about the Capone squad. Ness reluctantly agreed, and shared with his coauthor what memories he could muster. Now dying from his childhood heart condition, Ness hoped the book might provide financial security for his family a
fter he’d gone. But his inherent modesty made him uncomfortable with the manuscript.

  “It makes me out to be too much of a hero,” Ness said. “It was the whole team that did the work, not just me.”

  Ness also had doubts about The Untouchables as a title, fearing readers would mistake it for a book about India. He wouldn’t live to see its publication, nor the television series and films it would inspire.

  The gangster era had just begun to fade from America’s cultural memory when The Untouchables debuted on TV in 1959. Thirty years after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Chicago seemed poised to shake the stigma of Capone. But the series, produced by Desilu, revived the struggle for the city’s reputation, its backlot Beer Wars forever making gangsters synonymous with Chicago.

  As the writer Thomas Dyja put it, “Whatever else the city was responsible for would be lost in a hail of bullets from Robert Stack’s tommy gun.”

  In December 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues set off a nuclear chain reaction, the first ever created by human beings, in their laboratory beneath the bleachers of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field—where Eliot Ness had once watched football. Their discovery ushered in the Atomic Age, announcing Chicago’s emergence as America’s cultural and commercial heart.

  After World War II, the city projected its brand of friendly, matter-of-fact capitalism onto the country as a whole. Immigrant Ludwig Mies van der Rohe envisioned a new kind of skyscraper—sleek, modern, and spare—which soon dominated Chicago’s skyline and others coast-to-coast.

  Up in the northern suburb of Des Plaines, Chicago salesman Ray Kroc built his first McDonald’s, ushering in uniform cuisine, created quickly and consumed the same way. On the North Side, around the block from Dean O’Banion’s old flower shop, the headquarters of Hugh Hefner’s upstart magazine, Playboy, mass-produced sex like Kroc’s hamburgers.