Eliot Ness

by Douglas Perry

  As the second Cadillac got in on the action—with a third ready to go, if needed—Eliot and Robsky hoofed it over to the backside of the alley. The agents, both wearing workmen’s coveralls, peered in. It was a long, narrow passageway. A tailor’s shop had been stuffed into one of the corners like a finger in a dike. The alley’s walls rose higher, indicating the back of the speakeasy. Eliot stepped past the tailor’s hovel while Robsky, squatting in the shadows, put on his tool belt and spiked climbing shoes. Eliot spotted two gangsters midway down the alley: they were smoking cigarettes, the outlines of fat guns bunching up their coats. Finally, after yet another pass by the second Caddy, the back door to the speakeasy swung open, and the goons began nodding and yessing at someone. The door banged shut as the alley dwellers stubbed out their cigarettes, climbed into a sedan, and started it up. When the car turned out of the alley to join the convoy, Robsky hustled over to the telephone pole, with Eliot right behind him. Robsky looked up at the terminal box etched against a blinding blue infinity. “It seemed to be miles away,” the squad’s newest agent remembered thinking. “But, clamping my lips together and throwing one quick look at the unguarded back door of the Montmartre, I jammed my spikes into the pole and started my ascent. The higher I reached the more naked I felt, even though the figure of Ness standing tensely below me with drawn gun offered a certain amount of solace.”

  A certain amount, but not enough. Robsky moved rapidly at first, with the crablike shuffle of telephone men everywhere: hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. He’d made it about halfway up the pole before he got a funny feeling.

  He looked down. He was certain he’d heard something. He found Eliot directly below him, heater at the ready. Robsky’s eyes flicked over to the back of the club. He saw nothing. But someone could come banging through that door at any moment. Someone was sure to. He felt a prickle along his temples, another at the base of his spine. He’d begun to sweat. Panicked sweat. He closed his eyes, willed it away. He forced himself to look up. The terminal box stretched into the heavens. A pinprick at the top of the world. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Hand, hand, foot, foot—

  Robsky froze. Someone had come through that door. Shit.

  He didn’t look down. He listened, hugging the pole like it was a Teddy bear. It was nothing, he told himself. A passing car braking at a stop sign. A street vendor slamming open his drawer for a customer. It wasn’t the back door of the Montmartre Café. No way. He’d have heard gunshots by now.

  He crab-walked higher. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Now he could see the terminal box. It was a real thing, with real dimensions. It existed.

  When he finally made it to the top, Robsky threw open the box and stared inside. There were at least a hundred and fifty terminals. He developed a headache. He glanced down—Eliot was still there, unmolested—and he turned back to the box. He quickly raked the lines. A secretary at the bureau was supposed to call the Montmartre at exactly four and flirt with the bartender so Robsky would recognize her voice. It was now about ten past.* Chapman had been assigned to the phone in the Cermak Road apartment, where he would be talking with Lahart at the office, two more recognizable voices in the babble. Robsky flipped down one row and across another. Nothing. He looked down at Eliot until he got his attention and shook his head. Eliot waved at him to keep trying. Robsky began flipping through the terminals again, his fingers cramping from the stress. His breathing became ragged. Hanging up there in plain sight, he felt like “a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.” At last he hit one—Chapman, his distinctive booming laugh—and a minute later he got the secretary. Bingo. He gave Eliot the OK sign, slammed the door to the box, and began to work his way down the pole. He hit the ground with a spine-jarring thud, huffing, his face red from exertion and excitement. He beamed at Eliot, and his boss returned a dreamy smile. They ran out of the alley, pausing at the side of the building to pull themselves together. Robsky shrugged off his equipment. “Phew,” he said. “I still can’t get over thinking what would have happened if those monkeys had come back while I was up there at the top of the pole.”

  Eliot eased the brim of his hat back with the barrel of his gun. He offered up a Sam Spade smile. “Why, Paul, I had this little old .38 all ready.”

  Robsky couldn’t help laughing. Remembering the moment many years later, he wondered if Eliot somehow believed that he, and not Robsky, had done the hard part. Not that it really mattered. Robsky’s boss got the tough-guy talk out of his system there on the sidewalk, because he couldn’t do it anywhere else. This wasn’t something he could tell the press about. The two men hustled to their car. They began celebrating—banging the dashboard and whooping—as soon as they closed the doors behind them. They knew they’d just made a big score. Eliot wrote later: “This tap was kept alive for many, many months, and we learned a great deal about the operations and personnel of the gang through it.”

  ***

  With wiretaps in place at almost all known Capone offices, the late winter and spring of 1931 became a swirl of activity for the squad. They hit a brewery at 2271-2273 Lumber Street on the South Side, crashing through four steel doors at the rear of what appeared to be a garage. “The federal men found 140 barrels of beer, nineteen tanks of beer and wort and other equipment,” wrote the Chicago Daily News. The brewery, with a capacity of a hundred barrels a day, had been up and running for only a month. At a warehouse on Calumet Avenue, the special agents seized twelve thousand gallons of “iced beer ready for delivery for the weekend trade” and arrested James Calloway, Delaney’s chief assistant. (Calloway was already under indictment for conspiracy for his role in trying to retake the equipment from the raided brewery on South Wabash Avenue.) The agents ran a car off the road on the West Side and came away with $25,000 worth of wine. On his own Eliot chased a truck through busy downtown Chicago until the fleeing vehicle crashed into a post on Clark Street. There were only eleven barrels of beer onboard, but the driver was a wanted man. A few weeks later, the team took down a large still in suburban McHenry, north of Chicago.

  During this raiding frenzy, Eliot became a regular at the Northwestern University forensic crime lab bankrolled by the Secret Six and run by Colonel Calvin Goddard. The lab was a one-of-a-kind experiment, predating even the FBI laboratory. Here Eliot met Leonarde Keeler, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy who was trying to gin up interest in his “Respondograph”—a lie-detector machine. Keeler was a disciple of police innovator August Vollmer, whose graduate-level police-administration course Eliot had recently taken at the University of Chicago. Eliot also became friendly with Clarence Muehlberger, the toxicologist for the Cook County coroner’s office. Eliot would grill Muehlberger about his expertise and its application to crime solving, watching him closely as he went about his business. Chemist John R. Matchett remembered seeing Eliot time and again hanging around the offices late at night, a “rather handsome man about five feet ten inches”—people always seemed to think him shorter than he was—“always smiling, but very earnest about his work.” Goddard and his pioneering research into ballistics especially fascinated Eliot. The special agent turned over to Goddard every gun his squad confiscated, with the hope of being able to tie a murder around the neck of Al Capone or one of his top men.

  Eliot typically went to the laboratory alone. He worried about being seen as different, as the weird guy at the bureau, and he knew his interest in the crime lab wouldn’t help his image. Most cops and dry agents viewed the new field of police science with deep skepticism. A few years later, with Capone behind bars and headlines hard to come by, Northwestern sold the crime lab to the Chicago Police Department. The transition did not go smoothly. The criminologist Fred E. Inbau, who worked at the lab, invited command officers to come in so he could walk them through this new resource they had. “I have never met such a hostile group in my life,” he would recall. “I just about got on my knees and said, ‘Gentlemen, this is your laboratory. We didn’t ask you to come
in here to instruct you. We just want to show you what you now have that you didn’t before.’” Inbau made it through his presentation, showing off the ballistics-matching equipment, the microscopes for examining soil specimens, and Keeler’s lie-detecting machine, but tension hung over the room. “The ones who had some feeling of understanding or sympathy about it were afraid to even ask questions,” Inbau said. “They didn’t know what image this would create among their colleagues who professed that they could do the job without all of this jazz.”

  The promise of modern science thrilled Eliot, but for the most part he filed away his burgeoning knowledge for later use. It was the future of law enforcement, a future he was determined to bring about, but it could not be the present. He recognized that success against the Outfit would depend on old-fashioned police methods. Throughout the team’s first months, he and his agents spent almost every night sitting in cars in the bruising late winter cold, their muscles twitching, their hands and feet so icy they felt scalded. They would take turns, one trying to sleep as the others kept watch. Eliot took pages of notes every night, describing everything he saw. He seemed to love every minute of it. Growing up in a house filled with memories of older siblings who were grown and long gone, he had in some ways always felt separate, alone in the universe. Now he felt that he was a part of something. Something substantive, something he could lose himself in.

  It was a family, of sorts. Leeson, a former navy man, the quietest of the group, became the unit’s unofficial cook. Years later, in another life, he would always prepare the meal for dinner parties, then hand his wife the apron before the guests arrived and insist she take credit for it. He was less embarrassed about his culinary skill when around his fellow squad members. He would cook up simple, meat-heavy dishes and take them out to the men on stakeout duty. His wife, Dorothy, was a worrier. Almost as soon as he left the house, a pot of stew under his arm, she’d start calling around—to the office and the other agents’ homes—looking for him. All of the agents and their wives got to know her well.

  The Capone squad lived in a hermetic, hothouse world of its own, like scientists racing against the clock to find a cure for a pandemic. To others working in the Prohibition Bureau offices, the team seemed to go everywhere together, always whispering to one another, communicating with nods and smiles. By now Eliot had earned respect around the office. His kindly manner and easy smile made people comfortable. As he walked through the halls in the morning he would light up when someone—anyone—said hello, as if he wanted to see no one else in the world. Agents and support staff noticed how, despite the stress he was under, he “never raised his voice or dressed down his men in front of others.” This didn’t necessarily mean he handled stress better than anyone else. Like Dorothy Leeson, he was a congenital worrier. Stanley Slesick, one of the Prohibition agents Eliot would tap to provide backup for large operations, always knew when a raid was coming. Eliot, he said, was a “nervous” man, and it showed in his eyes, his pallor. “He’d always bite his fingernails,” Slesick said.

  ***

  Eliot had good reason to be nervous. He wanted to believe in every member of his team, but the fact was he couldn’t be sure whom he could trust. Even reporters had begun to speculate among themselves about the squad’s agents. “He and the six or seven other people that were called the Untouchables, I don’t know whether they were untouchable,” former Chicago American photographer Tony Berardi would recall. Berardi had made his reputation by snapping pictures of gangsters; he came to know many of them—and their business—well. He understood how things worked. “I think they were touchable,” he said of the Capone squad.

  So did Eliot. He realized everyone potentially was. After the Cicero raid in March, an envoy from the Outfit told Eliot they’d match his annual salary every month if he played along. Eliot threw the messenger out of his office and immediately informed Johnson and Froelich about the bribe attempt. The next day, an informant who worked both sides told Eliot that the gang had dug up incriminating evidence on him. “They have information that you got your job under false pretenses,” the informant said. “Wouldn’t that go pretty hard against you on the witness stand?” Eliot told the man he wouldn’t need his services anymore.

  These ham-handed bribe attempts forced Eliot to reevaluate his trusting nature once and for all. He knew the Mob must be approaching his men, too—and what did it mean if the guys didn’t tell him about the enticements? In the squad’s first couple of months, he and Seager periodically spied on their own agents, using Chicago police officers they believed they could trust. They told themselves it was just a fail-safe, to put their minds at ease, but sure enough, the information that came in occasionally proved disheartening. Leeson would later tell his second wife that “there were certain Untouchables in the beginning that were let go because they took bribes.”

  Eliot and Seager had no choice but to stay vigilant, even after the squad had been pared down to a core group. The Outfit believed in the power of payoffs like it was a religion; they would never give up trying to force cash on agents. “Capone’s men would pop up from nowhere on a street and offer us money to lay off,” Chapman recalled years later. The offers weren’t just enticing. They were astounding. The amounts kept getting bigger and bigger. So whenever one of the squad’s raids turned up an empty warehouse, or a gangster disappeared right after a search warrant had been issued, Eliot would start to worry. And he and Seager would initiate a secret search for a new potential turncoat. By late spring, they had a couple of suspects—the usual suspects.

  CHAPTER 9

  How Close It Had Been

  William Gardner looked like a G-man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a cocky, loose-limbed walk and an emotionless stare. No one ever expressed surprise when he said he was a federal agent.

  He never really felt like one. Gardner had been born on Indian land in North Dakota, his mother a teenage Chippewa girl, his father a white soldier he never knew. Gardner would be successfully assimilated into the wider society—he wore sharp Brooks Brothers suits and spoke the King’s English—but, half Indian and half white, he was never comfortable in it. The only place he ever believed he belonged was the playing field. He played college football for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a Native American boarding school/indoctrination camp whose stated purpose was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The institution almost always failed on both counts.

  Gardner’s Carlisle team had been the best in the country, a sensation. (It was so good that the legendary Jim Thorpe was a second-stringer on the squad.) Gardner wasn’t the most talented guy out there, but he was the most reliable. He thrived on pressure. When the Indians found themselves up against it during their glorious 1907 season, they didn’t pull out the tricks—even though their coach, Pop Warner, was a proud innovator. They put the ball in Gardner’s hands. Who was going to stop this tall, fluid end who moved like a freight train? No one. When Carlisle played Harvard, disbelief among the Ivy League’s best soon turned to anger as Gardner ground out the yards play after play. The flower of America’s youth couldn’t accept being beaten by a bunch of Indians. Finally, Harvard defensive tackle Waldo Pierce snapped. Getting up after a tackle, he sucker-punched Gardner with a left hook to the jaw. They had to carry the Carlisle star off the field. But he would be back—and mighty Harvard would fall. To close out the season, the Indians crushed the University of Chicago, the Big Ten champion, a victory Coach Warner would later say gave him “greater satisfaction” than any other in his long career. Much of the credit for the win, he said, belonged to Gardner, who “had his leg wrenched and his jaw broken . . . and played on to the finish without telling me a word about it, afraid I would send in a substitute.”

  This courage was one of the things Eliot liked about William Gardner. He was well aware of Gardner’s football career and often brought it up in conversation. Eliot respected physical strength and quiet authority. He would later describe Gardner adm
iringly as “a full-blooded Indian who was a very handsome boy, and a fashion plate. Bill must have weighed about 240 pounds and he was all muscle.”

  That was certainly the man Eliot wanted to see, but it wasn’t the one he actually knew. Gardner’s upstanding courage and all-muscle physique were long gone by the time he joined the Capone squad. He was now middle-aged and alcoholic and angry at the world. Eliot was under no illusions about this. Along with his having been fired for laziness, Gardner’s record with the Prohibition Bureau was dotted with disappearances that his supervisors officially chalked up to family problems but were almost certainly alcoholic benders. And there was still another explanation for the disappearances, one even less palatable. Not long after Gardner returned to work in 1928, thanks to Senator Curtis’s intervention, an anonymous letter arrived at the New Jersey bureau office. It was from a man claiming to be a permit holder—someone, such as a pharmacist, who had a legal reason for obtaining alcohol. It was addressed to an agent who’d recently had a high-profile case.

  You appear in the newspapers in the role of sleuth. You are to be commended for this work but you ought to start in your own office. You had a man named Gardner who loved to handle matters concerning alcohol and inspections. We understood that he was dismissed but one of my permit friends just told me today that he had word from that man who told him that he was on his way back and would report for work again soon. He said he had too many strong political friends to be sidetracked by you are [sic] that fellow Hanlon.