Eliot Ness

by Douglas Perry

  At the end of October 1930, Alexander Jamie requested an indefinite unpaid leave from the Bureau of Prohibition so he could take over the Citizens’ Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime, popularly known as the Secret Six, a private, extralegal group dedicated to bringing crime under control in Chicago. The prominent local businessmen who bankrolled the committee had deemed it necessary because the police and the local Prohibition office were so corrupt and chronically underfunded. Jamie was taking Don Kooken with him as his deputy director. In a letter he included with his leave-request form, he made a bold recommendation. “As Mr. Kooken and myself are leaving the office, the question naturally arises as to someone to take the position of Special Agent in Charge,” he wrote. “Insofar as I may be permitted to suggest, I would like to recommend to you for this position, Special Agent Eliot Ness who is the oldest Special Agent in this office in point of service and for approximately a year and a half has been considered my second assistant. Mr. Ness is known to you personally, as is also his reputation for honesty and ability to hold such a position.”

  The twenty-eight-year-old assistant to Jamie’s assistant did not get the job. The older and far more experienced W. E. Bennett was named the special agent in charge in Chicago. But Jamie did not abandon his lobbying campaign on behalf of his brother-in-law. A short time later, on the recommendation of the new chief of the Secret Six, George Johnson opened up Eliot’s federal personnel file. He noted that the agent had been commended for his “coolness, aggressiveness and fearlessness in raids.” This was gravy: Johnson greatly respected Jamie’s opinion and trusted that he would recommend the right man for the job. The Swedish American federal prosecutor took a good look at the photo clipped to the inside cover, at Eliot’s stoic Scandinavian expression and perfectly coiffed blond hair. The young agent in the picture looked trustworthy and decent, just as Jamie had said. Johnson believed that honesty, loyalty, and reliability, not experience, would count above all else for the leader of his new operation. He sent for Eliot Ness.

  Johnson’s interview was perfunctory. After just a few minutes, he stood up and shook Eliot’s hand. Everybody in the Chicago Prohibition office knew the U.S. attorney was putting together a special “Capone squad,” and Eliot had hoped he would be chosen for the effort. When Johnson told him he not only was on the team but would be its operational leader—Froelich would serve as the unit’s administrative supervisor—Eliot couldn’t believe it. He would later recall that he “felt like leaping out of my chair and doing a jig right there in the office of the United States District Attorney.”

  ***

  Legend has it that Eliot personally selected the men who would become known collectively as the Untouchables. “The success of the entire venture,” he wrote in his memoir, “was predicated on there being no ‘bad apples.’” To that end, he wrote, he went through mounds of personnel files delivered from Washington, picked out the agents with the best records, and put them “under the ‘microscope.’” He weeded out any agent who had the slightest hitch in his background until he was left with only the most accomplished and upstanding men in the entire bureau.

  In reality, Eliot, Johnson, and Froelich took pretty much anyone they could get. Good men were hard to come by in the Bureau of Prohibition, and so regional administrators resisted giving up their best agents, insisting the requested men were in the middle of cases or had subpoenas pending or specific skills the office could not do without.

  In November and December 1930, after much bureaucratic wrangling, a handful of agents from around the country received orders to report to U.S. District Attorney Johnson for “temporary detail on special work.” (Eliot himself wouldn’t be officially put under Johnson’s direction until December 8, which suggests he may not have had anything to do with selecting the team’s original members.)* With a few exceptions, the agents assembled for the team were not the bureau’s standouts. Some would qualify as misfits, a couple bordered on incompetent. Eliot, via his cowriter Oscar Fraley in The Untouchables, would write that he had specific, definitive qualities in mind for the team members: “single, no older than thirty, both the mental and physical stamina to work long hours and the courage and ability to use fist or gun. Nor would mere ‘muscle men’ do because each had to have special investigative techniques at his command.” This checklist was straight out of George Golding’s playbook; Golding liked to take young college men, blank slates he could mold into his own image. Eliot liked the idea of that, and it would become a famous part of Untouchables lore, but it’s not what he ended up with. All of the agents in the squad were older than him, some by more than a decade. Most were married and had children. Thanks to Eliot’s memoir, ten men—plus Eliot, their boss—have been credited as the team’s members, but in fact there never was a set lineup. Agents moved in and out of the unit during its brief existence for various official and nonofficial reasons; some worked on the operation for just a week or two before returning to their regular assignments. Only a few men stayed the course with Eliot from beginning to end.

  George Golding’s special agency unit had been the inspiration for the Capone squad, the operational and philosophical starting point. But though Eliot continued to admire the former special agent in charge, he would not run things like Golding had. Hardboiled Golding, for all his hail-fellow bonhomie, didn’t like people. He didn’t trust them, didn’t think about their families or off-duty lives. He put their names in books, kept score, waited for them to turn on him or show they were fuck-ups. They usually proved him right, one way or another, and look where that had gotten him: bureaucratic oblivion in Washington. Eliot had learned a few things from Golding, tricks he would use for years to come, but he never took up his suspicious nature. He believed the best of people—until proven wrong. That would be his approach to the Capone squad, to the men who would help define his reputation.

  From the start, three men were obvious picks for the team. Joe Leeson, a celebrated agent in Detroit, was Don Kooken’s brother-in-law and thus could be counted on to be a reliable man. Johnson had worked with Marty Lahart, the Golding veteran, and been duly impressed by the “tall, happy Irishman.” Another former Golding man, Samuel Seager, was one of Jamie’s favorites.*

  Seager was just shy of forty when he joined the Capone squad. A former upholsterer and chiropractic student, his only law-enforcement experience before signing up for the Prohibition Bureau was as a prison guard in upstate New York. Despite this, he had proved himself an exceptionally capable agent, a natural-born cop. Jamie thought so highly of Seager that a couple of years earlier he had blocked the agent’s request to transfer to another city. Seager had been shocked by the gung-ho amateurishness of the Golding operation and had wanted out. Jamie instead sent him on temporary assignment to southern Illinois, where, according to reports signed by Jamie, he single-handedly broke up a major bootlegging operation in East Saint Louis. Seager, known to friends as “Maurice,” was one of the first men to report for duty with the Capone squad. Eliot, though not yet formally assigned to the operation, brought Seager up to speed on the plans for the team. Maurice would immediately see something special in Eliot: intelligence, determination, the capacity for loyalty. He would become Eliot’s closest, most trusted colleague in the unit.

  Joe Leeson’s family connection to Kooken, now with the Secret Six, wasn’t his only calling card for the special squad. He was known in the bureau as “the best ‘tail car’ man in the country,” which Eliot figured would be a valuable skill in tracking Capone’s men and shipments. And having worked for two years in the Detroit division, he knew the ins and outs of that city’s Purple Gang, which supplied Canadian booze to Chicago’s bootleggers. Leeson’s boss in Detroit, Ernest Rowe, fought hard to keep him in Michigan’s biggest city. After receiving Johnson’s request for Leeson’s services, Rowe sent a beseeching telex to Washington, listing a series of reasons why he couldn’t spare the man. When he was instructed to send him anyway, Rowe wrote t
hat Leeson would report to Chicago on December 22, and added that he “keenly feels the loss of this man. He is one of our best agents.”*

  Not everyone joining the team was accustomed to such high praise. On December 15, William Jennings Gardner reported to Johnson for assignment to the Capone squad. Eliot was thrilled. The forty-six-year-old Gardner also had been on Golding’s team, before being transferred to Syracuse, New York. Better yet, he had been a college football hero. Eliot admired athletic prowess more than almost anything else; he believed that success on the field of play corresponded with strong moral fiber and was specifically predictive of success in law enforcement. His fandom, in fact, blinded him: Gardner’s Prohibition Bureau personnel file couldn’t have been put “under the microscope” without bursting into flames. In the fall of 1927, the rangy North Dakotan, then working in the New Jersey office, had been fired from the bureau for laziness and repeated insubordination. He was saved only through the sustained application of political pressure. “I am exceedingly interested in the case of W. J. Gardiner [sic], recently dismissed from the service in New Jersey,” U.S. senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota wrote to Seymour Lowman, U.S. assistant secretary of the Treasury for Prohibition. The senator, keen to exploit his prerogatives, even for the benefit of a dodgy Prohibition agent, continued awkwardly: “Since he is a North Dakota man, I have been more especially interested in his case and being quite well acquainted with him was rather dumbfounded when the word of his dismissal came through. . . . Is it possible that he was let out of the service through petty jealousies and the fact that he was a man of extraordinary ability who might be overshadowing some of the other officials just above him?”

  Lowman did not flinch at the implied threat. The former lieutenant governor of New York was a dedicated and honest dry who fiercely opposed his state’s wet governor, Al Smith. A week before receiving Nye’s letter, Lowman told a reporter, “There are many incompetent and crooked men in the service. Bribery is rampant. There are many wolves in sheep’s clothing. We are after them. . . . Some days my arm gets tired signing orders of dismissal.” He did not rescind Gardner’s firing.

  But Gardner, who was half Chippewa and played politics with swinging elbows, did not leave it there. He turned to another powerful patron, U.S. senator Charles Curtis, one of the first men of known Native American descent to reach high public office. Curtis liked to proudly declaim that he was “one-eighth Kaw Indian and one hundred percent Republican.” In just a few months, the Kansan would become Herbert Hoover’s vice presidential running mate, but first he went to battle for one of his own. Curtis, it turned out, had more oomph than his colleague from North Dakota. Prohibition Bureau commissioner J. M. Doran wrote to Curtis in March 1928:

  The Administrator under whom Mr. Gardner was formerly employed reported that he was lazy and inefficient. In view of your interest in the matter, however, we will give him another opportunity to demonstrate his fitness for the service by appointing him as a Special Employee for a period of sixty days. At the end of that time, if his services are satisfactory to the Special Agent in Charge at Chicago, under whom he will be assigned to duty, steps will be taken to bring about his continuance in the service.

  So Gardner was assigned to Chicago—the beating heart of Prohibition resistance—and to the squad specifically charged with cleaning up the Chicago office. For everyone else, assignment to Golding’s prestigious team was a reward for exceptional work, or at the very least a sign of professional promise (e.g., young Harvard men willing to bypass banking careers in favor of busting heads for a mere $2,600 a year). For this politically connected troublemaker, by far the oldest man in the unit, it was a punishment, most likely with the expectation that he would wash out under the glare of publicity that followed Hardboiled Golding’s operations. That didn’t happen, but not because Gardner had reformed himself. He just happened to not be around when the special squad imploded. Indeed, it appears that he viewed the assignment as a no-show job, or perhaps that was how Golding, who had always picked his own men, had defined it for him. Gardner’s personnel file offers not one word about his work during the five months he was a special agent in Chicago; it simply notes his report date and then his reassignment to upstate New York.

  No one in Chicago sought out Gardner for the Capone squad, either. Instead, the agent had asked earlier in the year to be transferred back to the city and the special agency unit, now run by Jamie. He listed “twofold reason . . . one is to better my status, and the other is to be nearer to my family.” (He had relatives in Michigan.) His supervisor in New York approved the transfer request without expressing regret. Jamie, who would soon move over to the Secret Six, was loath to turn down the transfer, under the theory that, in the aftermath of the Golding disaster, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  Gardner wouldn’t be the only misfit on the Capone squad. Johnson and Froelich realized the squad needed a “pencil detective”—that is, an agent with the kind of methodical, detail-oriented mind to take bits and pieces of seemingly disparate evidence and string them together to create a clear picture of organized intent. Forty-year-old Lyle Chapman, a Colgate University graduate and a Prohibition agent in Indianapolis, had that kind of mind; the problem was getting him to use it. “I remember my knees shook like jelly when I got the orders telling me what was up,” he would later say of his assignment to the Capone squad. “Frankly, I pondered how to get out of it.” This was the kind of reaction his superiors had grown to expect from him. Six months before Johnson requested Chapman for the team, agent B. F. Hargrove Jr. wrote to his supervisor that Chapman “just simply does not want to work or do things that we request him to do and on such occasion he puts up some excuse as to why he doesn’t want to. . . . It has got to a point where none of the agents wants to work with him.” Chapman had received hardly any satisfactory efficiency reports during his four years in the bureau, and none in the previous two years. That summer, the head of the Indianapolis division, Dwight Avis, reprimanded him in writing, closing: “I suggest that it would be very advisable for you to show a little more initiative in your work.” It was the last entry in Chapman’s file before his transfer to the Capone squad.

  A friend of Chapman’s, thirty-four-year-old Bernard Cloonan, also joined the operation. He was a former marine and a member of the prominent veterans organization the Forty and Eight. Eliot would describe him as “a barrel-chested giant who fitted the popular conception of the typical Irishman with his black hair, ruddy complexion and ready smile.” Cloonan and Eliot had joined the Chicago office at the same time, and Eliot had been awed by his sheer physical presence. Cloonan, he figured, would provide the muscle as needed.

  Rounding out what would become the core group were the “drawling” Virginia native Mike King, hard-boiled former private investigator Jim Seeley, and bashful former Pennsylvania state trooper Tom Friel, who was so shy he could barely speak in mixed company. The Capone squad was an eclectic group, there was no doubt about that. Eliot, the youngest member of the team and the boss, would struggle to figure out the best way to motivate them. But that difficulty had little to do with his youth and inexperience. In 1930, nowhere in America did one size fit all. Three decades later, pharmacist and World War I–era baseball player Davy Jones would point out just how diverse the country had been: “You know, we didn’t have the mass communication and mass transportation that exist nowadays. We didn’t have as much schooling, either. As a result, people were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other. Now people are all more or less alike, company men, security-minded, conformity—that sort of stuff.” Sure enough, there wasn’t a company man to be found on the Capone squad—except perhaps for its young leader.

  Eliot brought his team together for the first time in late December 1930. They all seemed to recognize just how big their new job was. The world outside the Transportation Building had turned especially cruel in the past year. Gang violence had spiked again, with Capone declaring t
hat when it came to gang war, “the law of self-defense, the way God looks at it, is a little broader than the law books have it.” When a football fan set off fireworks at Union Station while changing trains on his way east for the St. Mary’s–Fordham game, a panic ensued. Homicide detectives and a morgue truck screamed to the station, expecting to find wounded thugs and civilians scattered about. Worse than the rise in gang violence was the reason behind it: the 1920s’ economic boom had proved to be little more than drunken wishful thinking. The stock market had crashed late in 1929, throwing the country into depression. The federal government’s response—most notably the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act—only intensified the downward spiral. By now, a year after Wall Street’s collapse, the depression had become the Depression. The unemployment rate approached a third of the available nonfarm work force and was still rising. On his way into the office every morning, Eliot picked his way around homeless men sleeping on the sidewalk and stutter-stepped around queues at soup kitchens. A friend remembered him frequently handing over loans of $5 and $10. He wasn’t earning much as a special agent but he knew he was lucky to be earning anything at all. Now and again the unemployed would be marching down State Street when Eliot emerged from the Transportation Building. These parades included banging drums and chanting calls for government action. For months, the men worked themselves into a frenzied state over and over. But after a year of unrelieved misery, hope was slipping away. Eliot, hitting the street for lunch one day, found himself watching a straggly mockery of a march. The men passing by, operating on muscle memory, shuffled down the street like survivors after the end of the world. They made no noise at all. They had no demands left.