Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  So long as its most vulnerable residents are pushed to the margins, Chicago will remain “the murder capital,” as Kanye West called it, “where they murder for capital.”

  In 1989, Chicago’s second Mayor Daley—son Richard M.—traveled to London, England, to promote foreign trade. When the younger Daley appeared on a BBC talk show, the host began by bringing up Al Capone and Eliot Ness.

  “Are there still fellows around with mustaches, funny hats and tommy guns?” he asked. “I’m not foolish. I know the reason you’re here is to clean up Chicago’s image.”

  Daley patiently reminded British viewers that Capone had left Chicago more than fifty years earlier.

  “It’s a very warm, friendly city,” Daley said.

  Five years later, Daley continued his father’s crusade to rewrite Chicago’s reputation by hosting the World Cup tournament. At the same time, Capone’s familiar face could be seen around town on a brewing company’s billboards, part of a series showcasing famous figures from the city’s past. Protests came from Italian-American groups and the mayor’s office, the brewery soon replacing Capone with Enrico Fermi.

  Even so, Capone’s presence still hovered over the World Cup. International visitors would have their pick of Capone T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other souvenirs in the city’s many gift shops. Or they could visit “Capone’s Chicago,” a “Disney-like” museum on the North Side where guests saw an animatronic Capone—complete with cigar—sharing his life story. At Water Tower Place, an exhibit featured life-sized dummies of Capone, Ness, and the St. Valentine’s Day victims.

  “Capone’s Chicago” would eventually close, as would the Water Tower Place exhibit, but Capone remains an undeniable presence downtown. Walk into any souvenir shop and you’re likely to see his face on a T-shirt or hip flask. His stylized portrait hangs in Chicago’s upscale Blackstone Hotel, where the baseball bat banquet was reenacted for the 1987 Untouchables film.

  If Capone lost the battle for Chicago, his ghost won the war. That he remains the city’s inescapable face is more fitting than either Mayor Daley might ever admit. Foremost, Al Capone wanted to be loved; wealth was always secondary. Chicago, too, desires both your adoration . . . and business.

  “It cannot be denied,” one Italian journalist observed, “that Chicago wants to be, and is, a lovable city.”

  Perhaps that explains the loud, predictable protests raised against every visible reminder of Scarface Al. Chicago’s defenders still want to absolve their city of responsibility for Capone by branding him an outsider—an other, unreflective of their town.

  As Chicago’s director of tourism said, “Al Capone was a New Yorker. He only lived in Chicago for 12 years. This city has spent millions of dollars to change its image. We have more Nobel Prize winners than any other city. More medical centers, more beach than Rio de Janeiro, the greatest symphony in the world. What we don’t need is the memory of Al Capone.”

  When the question of making the Prairie Avenue home a landmark came before the city, prosecutor George E. Q. Johnson’s son wrote a letter to the Sun-Times, laying all the evils of Prohibition at Capone’s feet.

  “This fiend killed, robbed, stole, murdered, corrupted public officials in such a brazen manner as to ruin the reputation of our great city,” he wrote.

  Yet well before Capone arrived, Chicago was corrupt and violent, and it remained that way after he had gone. Pathologizing Capone—making of this opportunistic businessman a “fiend”—allows Chicago’s boosters to sidestep the central question: What kind of city—what kind of country—would allow such a man to exist, much less turn him into an icon?

  Henry Ford considered Prohibition both morally and “economically right,” because sober workers were better workers.

  “There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals,” Ford insisted. “In fact the one cannot exist without the other.”

  By that logic, virtually every murder Capone committed was justified. The liquor ban offered wealth to those who couldn’t get it any other way, but bootleggers who wanted to stay in business had to defend themselves and their territory any way they could. Violence was not only “good economics” but self-defense—a necessary evil along the fastest available road to the American ideal of affluence.

  “I can’t change conditions,” Capone said. “I just meet them without backing up.”

  The same forces that created the assembly line also birthed the Cicero brothel whose cold, industrial efficiency so sickened Robert St. John. The laws of commerce, its system of incentives and rewards, guarantee every Henry Ford will create at least one Al Capone.

  In 2007, as the Family Secrets trial coincided with a slew of local corruption scandals, the Sun-Times reflected on Chicago’s morbid fascination with its own crookedness.

  “It’s not so much that we like our mobbed-up reputation,” the editorial said, “although some of us treat it as entertainment and revel in our infamous history. . . . But until we are more outraged than entertained . . . Al Capone will remain our favored forefather and unofficial mascot.”

  Yet Chicago’s attitude toward Eliot Ness is strangely harsher than its love-hate relationship with Al Capone. The Transportation Building still stands, as does nearby Dearborn Station, where Ness and Capone had their one fleeting encounter; but no plaque or marker memorializes either structure. Back when Tim Samuelson was working to get Capone’s house designated a landmark, he considered registering Ness’s home at the same time, as a compromise to win the city over. But he dropped the plan after discovering Ness shared a two-flat with his parents.

  “The real Eliot Ness really wasn’t that impressive a guy,” Samuelson claimed decades later, in his role as Chicago’s official cultural historian. “He gets his job through his brother-in-law. You rarely see his name in the newspapers of doing anything. He was kind of an underling.”

  Ness’s true legacy and that of his Untouchables lives on in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the successor agency to the Prohibition Bureau. In 2014, Illinois’s senators—Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Mark Kirk—cosponsored legislation to name the ATF headquarters in Washington after Ness. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio introduced the bill, in recognition of Ness’s remarkable work in Cleveland.

  “Chicago gangster Al Capone believed that every man had his price,” Durbin said. “But for Eliot Ness and his legendary law enforcement team ‘The Untouchables,’ no amount of money could buy their loyalty or sway their dedication to . . . Chicago’s safety. That steadfast commitment to public service is why it is so fitting that we remember Eliot Ness with this honor.”

  Official Chicago quickly spoke up in protest—this time in the form of “the city’s most powerful alderman,” Edward M. Burke. A self-described “old-school” political boss, Burke became known as “the City Council’s resident historian” for his efforts to correct the record on Chicago’s past.

  In 2010, Burke—having already worked to exonerate Mrs. O’Leary’s cow for allegedly causing the 1871 fire—convinced the Chicago police to reopen their investigation into the seventy-year-old slaying of E. J. O’Hare. But the alderman seemed unconcerned with actually solving the crime, telling reporters his real goal was recognizing the long-dead mob lawyer as the true hero of the Capone investigation instead of Eliot Ness.

  “If nothing else,” Burke said, “O’Hare’s reputation ought to be rehabilitated and the truth ought to be known. . . . It was not ‘The Untouchables’ . . . that led to the conviction of Al Capone. . . . It’s a fiction of Hollywood.”

  Four years later, Burke had lost none of his desire to write Ness out of the Capone story. After learning of the Senate proposal, Burke and another alderman immediately introduced what the New York Times called a “purely symbolic resolution” declaring Ness unworthy of such an honor.

  “He’s a Hollywood myth,” Burke mistakenly claimed. “He probably never laid eyes on [Capone].”

  Senator Kirk did his cause no f
avors by citing the 1987 film The Untouchables as his reason for honoring Ness.

  “I think he did pretty well in that movie . . . ,” Kirk said of Ness. “I’m going with the Eliott [sic] Ness that was in the movie.”

  At a City Council hearing over Burke’s resolution, three federal tax investigators seized the opportunity to vent their agency’s frustration with how Ness’s posthumous fame had come to eclipse Frank Wilson’s. One retired IRS official spoke of his relationship with Mike Malone, the undercover agent whose brief stint at the Lexington was spun into legend by Wilson’s and Elmer Irey’s embellished memoirs.

  “Malone,” this former agent said, “told me Eliot Ness was afraid of guns and didn’t like leaving the office.”

  The Sun-Times, which had ridiculed Burke’s earlier move to find O’Hare’s killer as “a lousy stunt,” now agreed with the alderman—Ness’s name had no place in Washington.

  The paper opined, “Much as we love the legend of Eliot Ness . . . we can’t imagine why anybody would want to name a building for the real Eliot Ness, who just annoyed Capone.”

  Even though the Sun-Times wildly understated the Untouchables’ effect on the Outfit, their editorial reflected a deeper truth about Chicago’s relationship with Ness. Today’s tourist will not find Ness’s face alongside Capone’s in the souvenir shops. If his memory survives in Chicago at all, thank Robert Stack’s late fifties incarnation and Kevin Costner’s portrayal in the Untouchables movie. While the 1959 two-part pilot film is, perhaps surprisingly, among the more accurate screen depictions, Brian De Palma’s brash, swaggering retelling of the Capone investigation bears scant resemblance to actual history.

  Costner’s Ness defeats Capone only by adopting gangster methods, what Sean Connery’s character calls “the Chicago way.” Like Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders,” the phrase came to symbolize Chicago’s self-image—proud, tough, and defiant—even as it misrepresents Eliot Ness.

  The real man, the antithesis of the Chicago way, still seems like a foreigner in his own hometown, dismissed by Burke and others as a Hollywood invention.

  The American public will always prefer the fictitious, gun-toting Nesses to their mild-mannered inspiration. Writer Rick Polito’s sardonic summary of The Untouchables—“A federal agent in Chicago hampers the work of an enterprising American job creator”—suggests why.

  Yet when the laws of commerce create a monster like Capone, Americans expect their government to ride to the rescue with a hero like Ness. They cheer the Dick Tracy–esque G-men who slay the most visible villains. But they don’t want the feds to stick around too long. A crusader like the real Eliot Ness, with ideas of fighting crime by rewriting the social fabric, will inevitably wear out his welcome.

  Burke’s effort to kill the Senate proposal succeeded. Durbin, Kirk, and Brown abandoned it without further comment.

  Though ATF headquarters remains nameless, the building displays a memorial to the Untouchables. Its central atrium, now named for Eliot Ness, greets visitors with his portrait. On an opposite wall are pictures of several real Untouchables, and an exhibit explains their importance to the history of federal law enforcement.

  The symbolic battle for Chicago lives on in De Palma’s Untouchables, which rewrites the city’s geography right along with its history. Although many of the story’s real-life locations remained standing when the movie was made, the filmmakers invariably chose to exchange those buildings for more elegant and elaborate landmarks.

  Thus Roosevelt University stands in for the Lexington Hotel; the Rookery replaces the Transportation Building. Ness and the Untouchables appear on the streets outside the Board of Trade, as defenders of “all the concentrated wealth of Chicago,” as one film critic put it.

  The movie, while unmistakably set in Chicago, creates a fantasy landscape indulging in the myth that the Untouchables truly cleaned up the town. And as the physical reminders of Capone and Ness fade away, their very real conflict seems just another Hollywood myth.

  The 1987 film inspired a television remake that ran for two seasons in the early 1990s. Christopher Crowe’s script for the pilot episode imagines a scene of Capone and Torrio, in 1919, walking along a bridge over the Chicago River—probably the Michigan Avenue Bridge, whose dedicatory plaque still bears Big Bill Thompson’s name.

  Capone points out a skyscraper: the Wrigley Building, built by a man who made so much money selling chewing gum, he could afford to memorialize himself in steel.

  “Johnny,” Capone says, “people want booze more than they want gum. If we make the right moves—now—there can be a building over there with our name on it someday.”

  These lines didn’t make it into the finished episode, just as Capone’s fictitious dream failed to become a reality. If you stand on the Michigan Avenue Bridge today, the only name you’re likely to see (apart from Mayor Thompson’s) is trump, looming on the side of the blue-glass tower standing next to the Wrigley Building.

  But walk along Wacker and over to State, up the stairs and onto the L. You may see a sign directing you to the airport, still bearing the surname of the lawyer who secretly worked to get rid of Capone, but don’t follow it. Take the Green Line instead, past the former site of a stop—Randolph/Wabash—that shared half its name with the head of the Secret Six. The train will carry you through the thicket of Chicago’s proud skyscrapers, leaving the Loop to head straight south. Get off at Cermak-McCormick Place, the stop named for the mayor who tried to have Frank Nitto assassinated and the publisher whose newspaper employed Jake Lingle and introduced the world to Dick Tracy.

  Walk east along what was once Twenty-Second Street, but now bears the name of the martyred Mayor Cermak. You’ll cross Wabash Avenue half a block from the site of Eliot Ness’s first Capone raid, now an event space for weddings and other celebrations. Next door a gangster-themed dinner theater, Tommy Gun’s Garage, offers the experience of a Roaring Twenties speakeasy, complete with police raid. The menu includes a lasagna named after Big Jim Colosimo, whose famed café once occupied the parking lot.

  Go one more block and stop at the corner of Cermak Road and Michigan Avenue, former site of the Lexington Hotel. As recently as 2010, an official historical marker from the Chicago Department of Transportation identified this spot as the previous residence of “one of Chicago’s most notorious citizens, Al Capone.”

  Even that may have been too much for Chicago. The only historical marker in sight now prefers to mention a nearby hospital and church and all the development brought to the area by the 1893 World’s Fair, without referencing Capone.

  “South Michigan Avenue,” it awkwardly reads, “has also been home to the Metropole and Lexington hotels, Chess Records, Chicago Defender and to many major car manufacturer [sic] in the world. . . . People who want to be close to the downtown area have moved into lofted apartments and condominiums, reinventing the area as a neighborhood that is just as vibrant.”

  Where the Lexington once stood is a gleaming modernist skyscraper, all glass and sharp angles, the tallest south of the Loop. Built in 2010, this pet-friendly property offers more than three hundred spacious apartments, perfect for young professionals seeking their fortunes in Chicago.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows provide the kind of sweeping, unobstructed views that Capone once enjoyed. If your window faces north, you may catch a glimpse of the Transportation Building, long since converted into condominiums, tucked away amid the jumble of the Loop. Only the top few floors are visible, including the one where Eliot Ness used to work.

  Once or twice a day—and four times on Saturdays—a black bus full of tourists rumbles past. Photos of Capone, Torrio, O’Banion, and Moran look out from the windows as if taking a trip down memory lane, over huge white text: UNTOUCHABLE TOURS.

  But when the bus is out of sight, you might look at the apartment building and never guess who lived there, more than eighty-five years ago. Not unless you notice, just above the door, the six letters making up the building’s name.
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br />   THE LEX.

  Acknowledgments:

  A Tip of the Fedora

  by A. Brad Schwartz

  This project began with the goal of chronicling Capone and Ness from birth to death, with research retracing their paths through their lives—from the neighborhoods where they grew up to the homes where they died. Innumerable people and institutions gave of their time and expertise, sharing memories, documents, and other artifacts, helping us walk in the footsteps of legends. Every scrap of information, no matter how small, added brushstrokes to the portraits of these men, and our thanks go out to everyone who provided paint. Any errors, of course, are our own.

  Very late in the process, we realized we had gathered more narrative than could comfortably fit between two covers. The “battle for Chicago” asserted itself, telling such a compelling and complete story that we decided to focus on it, limiting our acknowledgments to the research reflected here.

  For their help in reconstructing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, we are indebted to Lt. Mike Kline and departmental historian Chriss Lyon of the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department in St. Joseph, Michigan; and James P. Sledge and Mary Marik of the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Chicago, Illinois. The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, opened to us their collection of massacre-related documents and artifacts, and Jonathan Ullman, Carolyn Fisher, and Geoff Schumacher arranged a smooth and productive visit. A fedora tip goes to Lora Kalkman, special assistant to Mayor Carolyn Goodman, for paving the way.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Norfolk, Virginia, offered a tommy gun firing demonstration at the Chesapeake Police Department shooting range. William Gannaway of the Ballistics Research Facility at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, corrected several of our misconceptions about these iconic weapons.