by Owen J. Hurd
A lifelong hood, White had pulled jobs in the past with two of Moran’s cronies, the Gusenberg brothers, so he had the connections required to orchestrate the meeting at the S.M.C. Cartage Company garage. Eig pieces the motive and the means together with a heretofore ignored piece of eyewitness testimony provided by a passerby:
“Just about the time I arrived in front of the place, an automobile I thought was a police squad car stopped in front of the garage. There were five men in it. The fellow who stayed at the wheel had a finger missing.” Sometimes referred to as William “Three-Fingered Jack” White, the crook had two fingers missing on his right hand.
So what would prevent Hoover from acting on this information? For one thing, White was already dead. It turns out that White had been acting as a federal informant, feeding the FBI useful information about other Chicago gangsters. But White’s cover was blown in 1934, and the mobsters he betrayed had him rubbed out. If Hoover knew about White’s involvement in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, he decided that it wasn’t worth losing White as an informant. After he died, there was no point in pursuing the matter.
LOOSE ENDS
During his post-prison convalescence Al Capone was reunited with a long lost brother, James Vincenzo Capone, who had run away from home as a young man. Out west he adopted a new name and identity. He came to be known as Richard “Two Gun” Hart, a Prohibition agent who ironically specialized in bootlegging raids, not unlike the ones Eliot Ness performed on Al Capone’s operations.
Having inherited his father’s genes—not to mention a case of syphilis—Al Capone’s only child, Albert “Sonny” Capone, would seem to stand little chance of leading a law-abiding and productive life. He was a sickly youth who underwent treatments and operations for various ailments, but he pretty much recovered by the time he reached adolescence and actually lived a fairly honest and humble life. His only encounter with the law occurred in 1965 when he was arrested for shoplifting $3.50 worth of merchandise at a neighborhood grocery store. The previous year Sonny had made headlines for suing his old high school classmate Desi Arnaz. Desilu Studios was one of the producers of The Untouchables, the highly fictionalized television program that glorified Eliot Ness and, the Capone family said, violated the privacy of the Capone family. The Capones lost their case in federal court.
The Untouchables Disband
Anybody who knows the name Eliot Ness most likely associates him with the Untouchables, his team of loyal bribery-proof Prohibition agents operating in Chicago during the 1920s. But it turns out that Eliot Ness wasn’t as instrumental in taking down Al Capone as once believed. Most of the credit belongs instead to the pencil pushing deskbound agents in the Internal Revenue Service. The Untouchables certainly did their part, raiding illegal breweries and distilleries, always making sure that reporters were close by to snap photos of agents smashing casks of beer and dumping thousands of gallons of spirits down the drain. But because the Untouchables never figured out a way to pin the bootlegging crimes on the mob bosses, their headline-grabbing efforts amounted to little more than a persistent but ultimately harmless nuisance.
So where did the legend of the Untouchables come from? Mostly from the imagination of a skilled coauthor, Oscar Fraley, who recorded and embellished the boozy memories of an aging and dispirited agent, rehashed a quarter century after they had occurred. The resulting book, also titled The Untouchables, bore this misleading tagline: “The thrilling story of the handful of incorruptible men who smashed the bootleg empire of ‘Scarface’ Al Capone as told by their leader.”
But Ness’s reputation as a Chicago crime fighter overshadows some of his biggest public service successes, as well as his biggest failure—all of which took place in a city that he is rarely associated with, Cleveland, Ohio.
With Al Capone in jail and Prohibition repealed, Eliot Ness moved from the spotlight in Chicago to the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, where he continued his mission against illegal intoxicants in relative obscurity, this time targeting small-time moonshiners. But he quickly grew weary of performing on such a small and remote stage. His next opportunity to regain the spotlight came in 1935 when he was recruited to take over as Cleveland’s director of public safety. At the time, Cleveland’s police squad was rife with corruption. Precinct captains were on the take, permitting crime bosses to run their gambling, prostitution, and drug-running operations with little interference.
Who better to reform the system than the “incorruptible” Ness? The former Prohibition agent applied the same zeal and skill that he used in Chicago to root out corruption in the police squad. Several high-ranking officers were indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms. Others were fired or reassigned, breaking up the cycle of apathy and criminality. Having cleaned up the police force, Ness focused his energies on the rackets, securing indictments for a number of the city’s top mob figures. Ness didn’t wipe out organized crime altogether, but he did turn the city around, making it a less amenable place for the mobsters to operate their illegal enterprises.
Early on in Ness’s administration, an event occurred that jarred the nerves of Cleveland residents and initiated a bizarre series of events that would represent the biggest failure of Eliot Ness’s crime-fighting career. Two youths were playing along a deserted stretch of railroad tracks. Overgrown with weeds and littered with trash, the area known as Kingsbury Run was home to transients and other down-on-their-luck types. One of the boys came across something strange. Taking a closer look, he realized it was the decapitated and castrated remains of a murder victim.
It was the first of at least twelve similar victims, all beheaded and others more thoroughly dismembered. The majority of the victims were reduced to armless, legless, headless torsos. The killer seemed to prey on people residing on the lower rungs of society, derelicts, prostitutes, and misfits. For the next three years, the so-called Torso Murderer of Cleveland scattered his victims throughout the city, often varying his patterns to send cryptic messages or perhaps simply to keep the authorities off balance. As the number of victims piled up, Ness and the rest of the police were completely confounded. By the time the tenth victim was discovered, Ness was no closer to cracking the case.
“About all we have to go on,” he confessed, “is that one of the victims we have been able to identify was a pervert and another was a prostitute.”
Responding to criticism in the press about a lack of progress in the Torso investigation, Ness fell back on a tried-and-true tactic. He conducted a high-profile, large-scale police raid on the shantytown region where most of the victims were found, rounding up hundreds of hobos and burning down their makeshift homes. When all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything starts to look like a nail. The operation didn’t bring Ness any closer to finding a killer. It merely traumatized members of the class that had been victimized by the Torso killer and now by the police authorities. The absurdly misguided act of aggression proved to be a public relations disaster for Ness. Changes in his personal life would soon add to his public problems.
Throughout the early years of his public safety directorship, Ness had lived a relatively sedate existence. When he punched the clock at the end of the day he retreated to the quiet suburban home shared with his wife, Edna. When the couple split up in 1938, Ness’s social life changed drastically. Instead of home-cooked meals and beach walks, Ness now spent most of his evenings on the town, boozing and carousing into the wee hours. Some worried that his new social life might be problematic for such a high-profile goody-two-shoes like Ness. They would eventually be proven right.
Still smarting from the fallout caused by the shantytown raids, Ness reasserted himself to rooting out organized crime. He conducted a series of raids on gambling dens, which eventually led to nearly two dozen arrests of Cleveland’s top mob figures. Ness also found time to overhaul the juvenile offenders system and enacted an extremely successful campaign for automobile safety.
In addition, Ness found a new wife. Ten years his j
unior, Evaline Ness was an independent career woman working in the fashion industry—not a homemaker, waiting for her husband to come home after work. After a long workday, the newlyweds liked to meet downtown for dinner and drinks and then go dancing at swanky social clubs. It was a very different marriage than Ness’s first, as he now had an accomplice who abetted rather than discouraged boozy late nights on the town.
On their way home after one particularly late night of partying, Ness’s car spun out of control on some icy roads, crashing into another vehicle. Ness left the scene of the accident before police arrived. A passerby took down his license plate number. It didn’t look good that the city’s foremost proponent of auto safety was involved in a hit-and-run accident, and it didn’t help that the man who made his reputation as a Prohibition agent was driving under the influence of alcohol. No charges were ever filed, but Ness was pressured into resigning. He moved to Washington, DC, and worked for a time at the Federal Social Protection Program, a governmental initiative to limit sexually transmitted diseases in the U.S. military. Two years later Evaline left him and moved to New York, where she hoped to further her career as a fashion illustrator and designer.
Ness then had a string of jobs in the private sector, distinguishing himself at none of them. Five years after he left Cleveland in disgrace, he returned to run for mayor. It didn’t go well. Ness suffered the worst electoral defeat in the city’s history.
Finally, he ended up in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, a small town in the north-central portion of the state, where he eked out a modest living, along with his third wife and their adopted son. Ness spent much of his evening hours in one of several Coudersport taverns, spinning tales of his G-man days to skeptical patrons and bartenders. Virtually unknown outside Chicago and Cleveland, Ness was anything but a national celebrity.
Around this time, he had a chance meeting with a man who would change all that. A business associate introduced Ness to Oscar Fraley, a sports reporter for United Press International. Instead of shrugging off Ness’s stories as dubious bluster, Fraley suspected that he had discovered a potential gold mine. Fueled by scotch whiskey, the former agent told Fraley colorful stories of stakeouts, raids, and busts. Fraley lent his writing expertise, punching up the stories with dramatic details. The resulting book, The Untouchables, would eventually sell more than a million copies and make Eliot Ness a household name across the country. But Ness would not live to see the day. A couple months before the publication date, he died of a massive heart attack.
Of course, it was the subsequent TV series based on the book, with Robert Stack in the title role, that really made Ness’s name. The story lines for that show were entirely fictional, as was most of the plot in the 1987 motion picture starring Kevin Costner as Ness.
LOOSE ENDS
Evaline Ness remarried in New York and eventually became an award-winning illustrator and writer of children’s books.
In 1998, the last surviving member of the Untouchables, Albert “Wallpaper” Wolff, died. He had continued his work as an undercover cop in New York, busting narcotics rings and even an illegal racehorse drugging operation. He was tapped to provide technical expertise for the 1987 movie, The Untouchables, showing Kevin Costner how to handle a gun and talk like an agent.
Punishing John Dillinger’s Killer
On July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was shot down in an alley after watching a movie at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Double-crossed by a madam friend who accompanied him to the movies that evening—she wore a bright orange dress so that federal agents could easily identify her fugitive companion—Dillinger met his end after a yearlong manhunt.
In the months after John Dillinger’s death at the hands of the FBI, the notorious bank robber’s main pursuer, special agent in charge of the Chicago office, Melvin Purvis, became one of the most famous men in the country and even the world. In 1934, along with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Purvis was voted one of the most influential people in the United States by Literary Digest. The debonair agent’s exploits were noticed by prominent Europeans, including the likes of Adolph Hitler and Herman Göring. In prewar days, Göring hosted the “beeg G-man” at his country estate, where the two unlikely companions hunted for wild boar.
Purvis certainly capitalized on his fame. He became a popular pitchman for Gillette safety razors, Dodge automobiles, and even Post Toasties cereal. Hollywood courted him as a consultant for gangster films. There was talk of a movie being made about his exploits, starring Cary Grant in the Melvin Purvis role. Purvis was even offered a role in one movie. He dated movie stars.
So what happened? How did his fame recede so thoroughly, to the point where he was virtually unknown to all but hard-core gangster fans, up until the recent motion picture Public Enemies reintroduced him to the general public? The answer stems from his complicated relationship with his FBI boss and mentor, J. Edgar Hoover. Up until Dillinger’s death the two G-men enjoyed a warm friendship, and in the immediate aftermath of the successful manhunt, Hoover was congratulatory and warmly appreciative, writing Purvis, “I am particularly pleased, because it again confirms the faith and confidence which I have always had in you…. My appreciation of the success with which your efforts have met in this case is lasting and makes me most proud of you.” Hoover’s letter also included the following comments, especially significant, considering his subsequent attitude toward Purvis and the role he played in Dillinger’s death:
The shooting and killing of John Dillinger, by Agents of your office under your admirable direction and planning are but another example of your ability and capacity as a leader and an executive…. This would not have been accomplished had it not been for your unlimited and never-ending persistence, effective planning and intelligence, and I did want you to know how much I appreciate it.
But in the coming months, the warm and fuzzy relationship quickly soured. In its eagerness to sell papers the local and national press heaped praise on Melvin Purvis as the singular hero who took down public enemy number one. Bristling with envy at the press attention garnered by his subordinate, Hoover forbade Purvis from discussing the case with the media. Hoover tried to counter the generally accepted script with his own version of events—a version that didn’t just diminish Purvis’s role but completely eliminated it. In his book Vendetta, an undeniably biased but interesting account of the Purvis–Hoover conflict, Melvin’s son Alston argues that “Hoover insisted the focus be on the Bureau’s cutting-edge scientific methods and streamlined organizational system—structures that he had introduced,” rather than on the “integrity and bravery” and the “good old-fashioned police work” of “individual agents” like Purvis.
Of course, one could make the argument that Hoover was right—that there were legitimate reasons to discourage hero worship of individual agents; it could compromise the anonymity of agents, making it more difficult for them to operate in stealth, or it might be detrimental to bureau morale, in that praise focused on one person diminished the important contributions by other members of the team. Hoover, in fact, did make these arguments in letters and memos. However, his actions proved that it wasn’t so much that he wanted to tamp down praise for any single agent, but for Agent Purvis in particular. Hoover didn’t mind it when he was the subject of media attention. He also tried to undercut Purvis’s reputation by feeding the media information that made it seem like another agent was the real hero.
Sam Cowley was, after all, the agent Hoover had nominally put in charge of the Dillinger case. In reality, Cowley and Purvis worked in tandem without jealousy or competition. But the fact remains that it was Purvis who arrested Dillinger’s girlfriend, Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, it was Purvis who developed contacts with informants that led to his meeting with Anna Sage, the so-called Woman in Red who betrayed Dillinger at the Biograph Theater, and it was Purvis on the scene, giving the signal for his agents to close in on Dillinger, while Cowley manned the phones at local FBI headquarters.
Less than a week after Dillin
ger’s death, Hoover brokered an interview of Sam Cowley in American Detective Magazine, in which Cowley was quoted as saying, “One man alone is responsible for the end of John Dillinger, and that man is J. Edgar Hoover.” Hoover had read the article before it was published and gave it his blessing, proving again that he didn’t mind individual praise for agents, as long as it was directed at him or those he anointed to receive it. And especially as long as that agent was not named Melvin Purvis.
Though confused and perhaps somewhat disillusioned, Purvis had more important things to worry about. With Dillinger on ice, he turned his attention to the manhunt for Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the new public enemy number one. Once again, even though Purvis did not personally shoot Floyd, it was his detective work and his coordination of the team that led to Floyd’s demise. This latest accomplishment brought more plaudits from the media, ratcheting up Hoover’s distaste for his protégé.
Hoover was determined to run Purvis out of the bureau and to tarnish his reputation. He forbade Purvis to interact with the media and also sent agents out to perform a top-to-bottom inspection of the Chicago office, with the clear expectation that he would receive a negative report. The inspector obliged, but it was obvious that he had to strain to find anything wrong. His report was filled with trivial violations, for example, that Purvis checked into the office late one morning, that “dirty dishes were found behind a radiator in the store-room,” and that the cell rooms were littered with “dirty underwear and shirts.” It’s hard to believe that the agent responsible for bringing down the top two public enemies in three months should be excoriated for lax housekeeping. As unbelievable as it might sound, the inspector concluded that Purvis “has not been exercising proper supervision over his office.” Hitting on themes scripted by Hoover himself, the inspector attributed it to an excess of ego, suggesting that Purvis “had been giving more time to his own personal interests and to his social activities than he had been giving to the office which he represents.”