Ness himself was the first to promote this wildly exaggerated and distorted version of his career to the public. Near the end of his life, when he was forgotten, broke, and drinking excessively, he sought to resurrect some of the glory of his youth and to extricate himself from debt by writing a book recounting his adventures in Prohibition-era Chicago. In the book, he portrayed himself as a real-life Sherlock Holmes stalking a real-life Moriarty in the person of Al Capone. Ness collected himself sufficiently to assemble a short memoir of his early career, which he then turned over to his collaborator, a journalist named Oscar Fraley. When it emerged from Fraley’s typewriter, Ness’s straightforward, accurate, if undramatic version had taken on the frenetic tone of a Mickey Spillane novel. The result, called The Untouchables, finally appeared in 1957, too late to help Ness, who had died two years earlier. It was overblown and often inaccurate both in regard to Ness’s original, unimproved version and the historical record, but for good or ill, the book’s version of events made a considerable impression, giving rise to the legend of Eliot Ness. To cite but one instance, his account shrewdly fed the mythical notion that one man—not a legal system, not tax laws, and certainly not a bunch of dry-as-dust IRS accountants—was responsible for bringing down Capone. Ness and Fraley had done their job all too well; as a result, the role of the IRS and its Intelligence Unit were forgotten, and the public embraced the legend of Eliot Ness. To read The Untouchables is to forget, briefly, that no matter how many stills Eliot Ness smashed or bootleggers he arrested, nothing he did contributed to the government’s case against Al Capone.
Yet the truth about Ness was equally fascinating, if less spectacular, for in many ways he did serve as a remarkable foil to Al Capone. The gangster controlled a national crime network generating $75 million a year; the honest young Prohibition agent’s annual salary came to just $2,500. Capone was often flamboyant and vicious; Ness was boyish, vague, hard to read. Capone was fat and dark; Ness stood six feet tall, and he was rather gangly, with sleepy blue eyes. Capone’s shiny custom-made suits shouted “gangster”; Ness dressed conservatively and parted his cornsilk hair in the middle. Capone’s gray eyes and dark hair, not to mention his double scar, gave him an aura of implacable menace; Ness, in contrast, was genuinely handsome, Gary Cooper handsome. Capone raged against his enemies and even took a baseball bat to three of his victims; Ness never lost his temper and always contained his emotions.
Although the real Ness was intelligent, well educated, and ambitious, he was also a publicity hound, impenetrably naïve, and insecure—a lonely, melancholy, haunted man who bore scant resemblance to the self-assured character played by Robert Stack in 114 episodes of The Untouchables on television. Ness’s worst enemy was not Al Capone, who was assuredly the best thing that ever happened to him, but Ness himself, who was plagued throughout his life by his problems with women and with alcohol. Indeed, his drinking problem was so serious that it eventually destroyed his marriages and his career.
The external circumstances of his early years give little hint of the turmoil that was to trouble his adult life. Ness was a son of Chicago; he was born there on April 19, 1903. He was the son of Norwegian immigrants, Peter and Emma (King), who named their son after George Eliot, the English novelist, without realizing they had bestowed the pen name of Mary Ann Evans on the child. Ness’s father operated a Scandinavian bakery in the Chicago suburb of Kensington, working long hours, never wealthy but never poor. The Chicago Scandinavian community was, like other ethnic enclaves, a cohesive group, and early in life Ness formed connections that would determine the shape of his career. The family of his future boss, George E. Q. Johnson, lived close to the Ness home, and it is possible, indeed likely, that the young Ness knew Johnson. So from the start Ness was connected to the men and the ethnic group who would become Capone’s primary antagonists, the men who believed in America because America believed in them. In addition, Ness’s sister, a decade older than he, was married to Alexander Jamie, an FBI agent. Jamie also taught Ness marksmanship, in the process becoming a glamorous, potent presence in the young man’s life and subsequent career.
However, the most important figure in the life of the young Ness was neither his father nor Jamie. The most important figure was his mother, and to understand the special relationship between Emma King Ness and her youngest child is to come close to unraveling the mystery of Eliot Ness. Emma adored Eliot; in later years, when some measure of fame descended on him, she was fond of reminiscing about what a good boy he always was. It was not at all surprising to her that he became a federal agent because as a son, he was more than good; he was, she believed, incapable of doing wrong. Night after night, while Peter Ness was absent, tending his bakery, the young Ness was at home with his mother and occasionally his sister, and he remained attached to them both, so attached that he was still living at home when he was a twenty-six-year-old Treasury agent.
As a result of his overprotected youth and young adulthood, he became accustomed to women identifying completely with him, and he, in return, seemed to identify completely with women. “The ladies loved Eliot,” says Louise Jamie, who was related to him by marriage. “He was handsome and personable and understated. He never carried a gun. He was very private. He was typical of the English-Norwegian, the backbone of America. Even the gangsters knew it. There is honor among thieves, you see, if they respect you. Nobody ever shot Eliot for that reason.” Indeed, throughout his life, women found him inordinately attractive. Perhaps they were drawn to the inner sadness they thought they glimpsed lurking beneath his pleasant exterior. Or perhaps it was simply his good looks. Throughout his adult life, women lured him from one romantic interlude to the next, but none of the marriages and affairs and romantic entanglements and flirtations in which he became involved came out right in the end.
In an age when a college degree was a rare credential for a detective, Ness attended the University of Chicago, where at different times he majored in law, business, and political science. He cut a fashionable figure on campus, wearing snappy sport coats, playing tennis, double-dating, pledging the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Only his continuing fascination with jujitsu, which he studied diligently in preparation for future combat, was at odds with convention. Ness graduated in 1925, when he was twenty-two, in the top third of his class. In the normal course of events, a bright young man like Ness would have gone on to law school, but Ness, driven, perhaps, by a desire to emulate his brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie, was attracted to the aura of law enforcement.
To continue the story of his early career in his own words:
In about 1928, I was employed by the Retail Credit Company, . . . a national investigation company devoted entirely to investigations of persons applying for insurance. This was during the Prohibition heyday. My brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie, was at that time an F.B.I. agent, which, of course, was part of the U.S. Department of Justice. I believe the Prohibition Bureau was then transferred to the Department of Justice, and Alexander Jamie was drafted to become Chief Investigator with the Prohibition Bureau. It was his job to make conspiracy cases. I came in presently to work on personnel.
Corruption was apparently a continuous problem with the department trying to handle the enforcement of the Prohibition Law, and soon another division was organized to make conspiracy cases and also to investigate corruption with the Department itself. This agency was called the Special Agents of the U.S. Department of Justice, Prohibition Department . . ., and soon I was drafted into this unit. This is where my connection with the Mafia began.
Though it fielded a staff of 300 agents in Chicago alone, the Prohibition Bureau was overwhelmed by Capone’s army of over 1,000 soldiers and its network of 20,000 speakeasies, as well as a lack of popular sympathy. Even Ness acknowledged that he had waged a losing battle against the Capone organization and all the other bootleggers. “The trouble with the Prohibition Law,” he wrote, “was that such a large section of the public did not believe in it, they either were against it
in its entirety or figured it was for the other fellow.” Amid this dismal climate, the U.S. attorney in charge of the operation, George E. Q. Johnson, hired Ness on the recommendation of Alexander Jamie. Ness was a safe choice, because he was a neighbor of the former and related to the latter. At the same time, there were liabilities, for Ness was young, and more than that, he was callow. At the time he first challenged the most dangerous and powerful gangster of the era, Ness was all of twenty-six, four years out of college, still living with his parents.
Ness went to work for Johnson at the time that federal and local law enforcement agencies were coming together for the first time in their effort to dismantle the Capone organization, and he participated in their numerous early raids on Chicago Heights, but he was still an unknown quantity, his name mentioned in the newspapers in passing if at all, and usually misspelled (“Elliott Ness”). Ness was assigned to a partner, Dan Koken, whom he came to idolize, the first of several apparent infatuations Ness had with the men with whom he worked. The two occasionally teamed up with a fellow known as “Nine Toed” Nabors, who was, in Ness’s words, “the handsomest man I have ever seen. He was built like a Greek God, with natural, light wavy hair.”
Late in 1928, Ness and Koken, posing as corrupt Prohibition agents, began frequenting a Chicago Heights saloon called the Cozy Corners, where, Ness recalled, “rum-runners from Iowa, southern Illinois, St. Louis, and as far away as Kansas City would come. They would leave their cars with the bartenders, and the cars would be driven away by members of the Chicago Heights alcohol mob. The drivers from out of town would stay at the bar, drinking, or avail themselves of what the brothel located on the second and third floors had to offer”—their reward for delivering booze. Ness enjoyed hanging out with the small-time bootleggers; it was glamorous, fun, exciting. Ness played the role of bootlegger to the hilt, and another agent, Burt Napoli, who spoke Italian, pretended to be his chauffeur. In short order the little band became well known to the racketeers of Chicago Heights, who paid Ness $250 a week in bribes—all of it duly reported to his superiors.
Emboldened, Ness and other special agents began shaking down the bootleggers of Chicago Heights still more aggressively. “One time two truck loads of merchandise were coming in,” recalls Sam Pontarelli, a longtime resident of the Heights and confidant of Al Capone. “Ness and his men stopped the trucks, grabbed the drivers, squeezed their balls, and beat the shit out of them. Hit them with clubs. It looked as though the shipment would not be delivered, but then money changed hands, and the trucks got through.” This behavior convinced the racketeers that Ness “wanted to be a fifty percent partner in the stills and the whorehouses” maintained by the organization. “He was on the take,” Pontarelli insists.
On his next visit to the Cozy Corners, Ness insisted on meeting the boss of the alcohol racket in the Heights. This was Joe Martino, the last surviving member of the old Phil Piazza gang, the Sicilian bootleggers and blackmailers who had once terrorized Chicago Heights. Two years before, in 1926, the Capone forces under the direction of Dominic Roberto and Jimmy Emery had killed off or driven out the Sicilians, and only one still walked the streets of Chicago Heights: Joseph Martino. The Capone organization allowed him to live because he was the president of the local branch of the Unione Sicilione, and Capone was reluctant to stir up that hornet’s nest. However, the arrival of the reckless young Eliot Ness upset this delicate balance of power. Ness was dangerously ignorant of the recent history of the Chicago Heights rackets; he lumped the Capone organization together with the Sicilians, assuming they were allies when in fact they were often mortal enemies. He also assumed, mistakenly, that Martino occupied a powerful position in the Capone organization when in fact the organization was using Martino to gather intelligence on Ness, much as Ness wanted to use Martino to gather intelligence on Chicago Heights bootleggers.
In his original manuscript, Ness offered a vivid, if awkward, account of his initial encounter with Martino:
Martino was smooth faced, round and short, with very dark hair and complexion. He spoke English well grammatically, with a very heavy accent. It was explained that Joe was the head of the “organization,” which turned out to be the Chicago Heights chapter of the “Unione Siciliano”. I asked where all the still owners were, and Joe explained that they had already had a meeting, and that the still owners had commissioned himself . . . to pay us to refrain from raiding the stills. We had quite an argument about the amount to be paid. I was the main objector and the hungry one; of course it made no difference what they paid, as the money was marked and turned over to the District Attorney. . . . We brought up questions about how much they paid other law enforcement officials, and who, but they were careful not to bite too hard on these leads. . . .
At this meeting, in the same room, but sitting apart from the group, we noticed a swarthy, silk-shirted Italian, who apparently did not understand a word of English nor did he speak any English. We agreed on a weekly sum, which I think was in the neighborhood of $500.00. As the meeting broke up, Burt Napoli [an agent posing as Ness’s chauffeur] turned white, and pulling me aside, said, “The silk-shirted Italian has just asked whether or not he should let you have the knife in the back!” . . . We later learned that this man was one of the killers, imported to do the bidding of the leaders of the gang after the finger had been pointed.
Ness left the meeting convinced he had just spoken with the bootlegging kingpin of the Heights, and on that basis he obtained search warrants for eighteen stills. He subsequently participated in the raids on them, capturing “prisoners, machinery and alcohol,” but as he celebrated his first triumph, he learned to his horror that Burt Napoli, the agent who had posed as his chauffeur, had been murdered. Seeking revenge, Ness’s unit arrested a suspect, but before they could interrogate him, “he hanged himself by his necktie in his cell. The evidence on him was positive enough to make us feel that the person who had gotten Burt had been brought to justice.”
Now that his cover had been blown, Ness’s brief career as an undercover agent came to an end, but he was more eager than ever to smash all the stills in the Heights. Henceforth, “we always travelled with sawed-off shot guns in our pockets, and when we went into a restaurant, we always took a corner table as the danger of our undertaking was becoming more imminent.” He joined forces with another agent, Marty Lahart, a “tall, happy Irishman,” who led a memorable assault on the Cozy Corners. “As he entered the saloon, he yelled, ‘Everybody keep their places, this is a federal raid.’ As he uttered these words, four revolvers and one shot gun hit the floor,” Ness wrote. “After taking control of the first floor, he went to the second floor which was the brothel. He again made the announcement that the federal raid was on. One of the girls quickly looked up, eyed Marty, and shouted, ‘Look who’s here, Tom Mix.’ ”
Despite the success of the Cozy Corners raid, Ness sensed he was, in Chicago parlance, “on the spot.” One day he picked up the phone, and a rough voice warned: “I got a message for you. You’ve had your last chance to be smart. Just keep in mind that sometime soon you’re going to be found lying in a ditch with a hole in your head and your wang slashed off. We’ll keep reminding you so you won’t forget to remember.” This threat seemed appallingly likely to be carried out the night Ness noticed a suspicious car following him. He forced the car off the road and frisked the driver, who was carrying a gun with the serial numbers filed off and a supply of dumdum bullets. Shortly afterward, Ness spoke with an informant who reported that he had recently overheard men in Chicago Heights plotting to kill the young agent; their plans included using dumdum bullets “so that they would make a large hole in the body they entered.” Since Ness still lived with his parents, police placed the Ness family home under twenty-four-hour guard, and Eliot later moved into a nearby apartment with two other agents. The threat was in its own way gratifying because it made him feel different, special—he was so important that men actually wanted to kill him—and as long as he felt that way, he c
ould continue to function in his job, which translated into more professionally sanctioned thrill seeking. He did not have to wait long for more excitement.
“By this time we had successfully gathered enough evidence to make an iron-clad conspiracy case,” wrote Ness, “and early one Sunday morning the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, plus ourselves aided by about 100 Chicago detectives, went to Chicago Heights, and raided haunts of every known gangster in that area.” Ness reserved for himself the honor of arresting the presumed kingpin, Joe Martino. “We read the warrant to him and he went to the closet to pick up a top coat, and at the same time he threw a weapon on the floor. He became deathly sick and we had trouble getting him to the station.” He spent the night in jail and, free on bail, returned to Chicago Heights the following afternoon. It was then that the Capone forces struck. Late on the afternoon of November 29, as Martino loitered in front of his saloon on East Sixteenth Street, a passing car fired over a dozen bullets at him. Martino fell to the pavement dead. “He apparently had not been in the Heights for more than two minutes when he was mowed down by machine gunners,” Ness wrote. “That was the end for Joe Martino.”
The neighborhood immediately reverberated with news of the latest gangland slaying. “His hands are still clasped in the pockets of his working trousers,” wrote a Chicago Heights Star correspondent who dashed to the scene of the crime. “Reports were that the slaying had been accomplished in the usual gangland manner. A large motor car containing four or five men shrouded behind the curtains drew up at top speed, paused for a minute to deliver a death-dealing volley, and passed out of sight.” Martino, forty-five, fell less than a hundred feet from the Milano, where his former boss, Phil Piazza, had met his bloody end. In fact, the block was so dense with scenes of gangland slayings in recent years—half a dozen by one count—that it had acquired the nickname of “Death Corner.” Overall, Chicago Heights had been the scene of more than twenty shotgun deaths, and when the Star launched an inquiry into the town’s rackets, the newspaper’s offices were bombed by person or persons unknown, and the investigation came to an abrupt end.
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