Such insouciance—with those sad blue eyes, and that sweet, boyish smile—won over the twenty-two-year-old “girl” reporter. She left him with an embarrassing flush painting her cheeks. Her article would describe him strictly in heroic terms. It closed with Eliot heading out for a “tennis engagement”: “This, he explained, was just a ‘workout’ necessary to prepare him for more hours and hours of intensive work to insure Alphonse Capone’s ultimate sojourn behind bars.”
***
Eliot didn’t mean to sound flip when talking about such serious matters. Part of it was bravado. Reporters allowed him to be someone else, someone more than he thought he was. His confidence had bloomed since becoming a special agent back in 1928, but his insecurities couldn’t be entirely banished. They were as much a part of him as his boyish face. He wanted to convince reporters—and himself—that he was up to any task.
However flippant he may have sounded, Americans loved it. Fan mail started to flow into the Prohibition Bureau offices in Chicago. A representative sampling captures a country that no longer had a taste for “anything goes,” a country that wanted its freedom, but safety and respect, too. Wrote Darwin H. Clark, an advertising man from Los Angeles:
Dear Mr. Ness:
Just a note to express my hearty congratulations to you and your associates for the good work you have done in landing Al Capone, and we hope others of his gang, behind bars.
I feel, like thousands of others in this territory, utmost respect for men of your caliber that cannot be touched by the lawless in a city such as Chicago. Your intelligence, courage and integrity deserve a great deal of commendation, and I hope you will keep up the good work.
Another man in California, a former Chicagoan, wrote:
Dear Mr. Ness,
God bless you and the others for the good work you have done. . . . Keep up the good work, as those rats surely will bob up again when they think no one is watching.
Even many repeal activists jumped on the Untouchables’ bandwagon. Halbert Louis Hoard, the editor of the Jefferson County Union in Wisconsin, understood that the gangsters hardly wanted to be rid of Volstead. He wrote to Eliot:
Dear Mr. Ness,
I am 100 percent wet, but I applaud you for your bravery. The sooner you put these bootlegger drys where they can’t vote for Prohibition, the quicker we can get a repeal of the 18th amendment. I’m for you.
Newspaper editorialists picked up on the enthusiasm. The Hollywood Daily Citizen wrote that “the country owes to this young man and the other unnamed workers who assisted him a great debt of gratitude.” The editorial continued:
There is an inspiration in that young fellow’s work not only for other young men but for the older people who have grown discouraged in the battle for good government. No soldier on the battle field ever performed more heroic work than has Eliot Ness performed. He should be honored as are the heroes of the battle field honored.
This country needs more of the heroism displayed by Eliot Ness—more of war heroism in peace time.
This being America, such amazing press meant there was money to be made. A publicity man, Raymond Schwartz, wrote to Eliot offering to put his story, in his own words, in magazines across the country. He proposed a series of five or ten articles, “short but very brisk,” about the special agent’s work chasing down Al Capone. He said “the proceeds should run well into the thousands,” with Eliot splitting it with the magazine wire service.
Eliot didn’t take Schwartz up on the offer; it’s possible his superiors at the bureau considered it unseemly. For now he would have to ride the publicity wave without remuneration. He continued to give interviews in his office and at raid sites. He tipped off the papers about arrests. Reporters inevitably found their way to the Ness family home, too. Emma, intimately familiar with the press her son had received, gushed that Eliot had been the best-behaved, most honest boy ever. Eliot’s father said nothing. Or at least nothing memorable—he was never quoted. Eliot noticed. In a moment of rare emotional candor, he admitted to a reporter that he wished he knew his father better.
***
A week after the Prohibition indictments, only sixteen of the sixty-eight men named with Capone had surrendered or been arrested. The Capone squad, along with a series of special police details, went in search of the rest, swooping down on the gang’s usual haunts. They stormed the Lexington and Metropole hotels on South Michigan Avenue, marched into the Montmartre in Cicero, muscled their way into Joe Fusco’s “cabaret and pay-off joint” near the University of Chicago. Empty. Deserts. They’d all gone “on the lam.”
It was frustrating for the squad, but it also meant the world had fundamentally changed. Gangsters were no longer strutting around like they owned the town. Some of Capone’s most trusted lieutenants, stuck in hiding, couldn’t conduct business. (Eliot would spot dashing Mob associate George Howlett, indicted along with Capone, at the Northwestern-Indiana football game. Howlett rushed out of the stadium, hopped into a new sports car, and roared off. Eliot zoomed out of the parking lot right behind him. By the end of the third quarter, Howlett was in the county jail, one more coconspirator scratched from the list of the missing.)
The wiretaps continued to bring in information. They showed that Capone’s captains had already begun talking about who should succeed the Big Fella. Wrote the Tribune, in a scoop straight from Johnson and Prohibition administrator E. C. Yellowley: “In disputing among themselves, federal dry agents say, the gang captains have eliminated as possible successors to Capone all those who have been hit by federal convictions or charges. This means, say the special agents, that names little known are due to loom up as the result of the gang’s reorganization. Four gangsters were mentioned by the federal men as heirs presumptive. They are Llewellyn Humphries, Rocco De Grasse, Frank Rio and Teddy Newberry.”
In other words, nobodies. Second-raters. Johnson was declaring victory. The Chicago Mob would go on—everyone knew there was no way to eliminate organized crime entirely—but it would be with a haggard expression and a noticeable limp. The U.S. district attorney pressed Eliot to keep up the pressure. Already, the Mob was in lockdown mode; men were jumpy and exhausted. They increasingly avoided their regular places of business. No one was willing to take a risk. That meant customers went thirsty and market share began to shrink. This new reality for the gang was unmistakable in many of Eliot’s handwritten wiretap transcripts (“In” represents the speaker on the phone being tapped):
Out: Is Johnny there?
In: No, he isn’t.
Out: Well, listen, I got a truck down here at the [undecipherable] and I haven’t any more.
In: How much do you need?
Out: Around ten dollars.
In: I can let you have it if you come after it.
Out: I am not coming up there.
Another call complained about a delivery not arriving.
In: You know we had a big place knocked off last night.
Out: No, I didn’t know it.
In: Yes, a big place at 51st and Halsted.
Out: That is too bad.
In: I am going down there now. You better meet me there and we will have a drink.
Out: No, I can’t. There is nobody else here now.
To be sure, the Outfit wasn’t about to just roll over. Gangsters had mortgages to pay; they had children and gambling habits to feed. And they still had some tricks. On a steamy day in July, after staking out the building for days, the Capone squad and some borrowed Prohibition agents hit a garage in the 3400 block of North Clark Street, rushing in from both sides with spirited whoops and hollers. When the men met up in the middle of the darkened interior, the only sound was their breathing and the odd cricket clicking away in the rafters. The place was empty except for them.
“Well, boys, it looks like we’re dished again,” Eliot said, no doubt wondering if someone from his own team had tipped off the gang. One of t
he men pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his dripping brow—the squat building really packed in the heat—and out popped a fifty-cent piece. The coin bounced on the cement floor, spun, and rolled. And kept on rolling—until it dropped through a sewer grate. Everyone froze. No one wanted to lose even a dime these days, but that wasn’t it. The coin had made an odd little thunk when it landed inside the grate. The men gathered around the opening in the floor. Eliot kneeled down, wrenched open the grating, and peered in. He saw the edge of a crate. They had discovered a twelve-foot-square underground chamber. Over the next hour, they hauled out a hundred and nine crates, each one packed with the “finest imported liquors.” Eliot would estimate the value of the cache at $15,000. Plus fifty cents. They never found the dropped coin.
By now, with the press watching and Johnson preparing to bring Capone to trial, the Capone squad had become increasingly adventurous, its actions taking on a Three Musketeers quality. The battering ram wasn’t enough anymore. It was old hat, boring. On the night of September 21, 1931, Eliot and three of his men crouched in the dark near the entrance to an industrial building at 222 East Twenty-fifth Street. When a truck pulled up to the entrance and tapped its horn for admittance, the agents slipped out of their hiding places and grabbed on to the back. They rode into the building, past the series of barricades, jumped off the truck’s bumper, and locked the doors. The warehouse’s four workers stood there gaping at them. None of them attempted to run. The agents looked around; the floor was covered with ice, forcing everyone to step gingerly or take a pratfall. The building was in the process of being turned into a full-scale brewery; the ice served as makeshift refrigeration. The agents kept everyone quiet until a second truck drove up to the entrance and the driver knocked. The agents opened the doors, guns drawn, hard smiles punched into their faces like puzzle pieces. The driver gave up without protest. His partner bounded out of the passenger seat and sprinted down the street. An agent took off after him. After a block, he rode the man to the ground.
Eliot found a phone and called the newspapers. Once the hacks showed up, the four Untouchables lapped the building with axes swinging. They dumped three hundred gallons of beer and took into custody fifty-six cases of hard liquor. The reporters went home with their coat pockets clinking.
***
The Outfit, its strong-arm tactics and bribes largely ineffective, realized it had to do something different. So it began to adopt the Capone squad’s own methods. No agent noticed when men in coveralls scaled telephone poles along Dearborn Street outside the Transportation Building. In the weeks that followed, the phone company received dozens of complaints from downtown customers about disconnections and strange clicks. When it investigated, the utility discovered that several lines into the Prohibition Bureau’s offices had been tapped. An anonymous agent told a reporter that the Mob had been listening to Eliot’s calls for three months, but the young leader of the Capone squad denied it. Eliot would be embarrassed about it even years later; he would claim in The Untouchables that he discovered the tap himself.
The tapped phones surely helped the Outfit sidestep a fair number of raids, and it probably also allowed some indicted mobsters on the lam to stay on the lam. But it wasn’t enough to hold back the tide. The following March, with the squad locking down evidence for a possible Capone trial on Prohibition violations, Eliot turned in a report detailing the team’s major work. He wrote:
From the inception of the organization of the special group . . . six breweries with total equipment valued at $140,000 were seized. Observation of the workings of these breweries indicated that the total income based upon the wholesale [price] of beer manufactured would have totaled $9,154,200 annually. Five large beer distributing plants were seized in addition to the breweries. The total amount of beer seized in the breweries and plants was approximately 200,000 gallons having a wholesale value to the Capone organization of $343,750. Twenty-five trucks and two cars were seized, the value of which totaled approximately $30,950. Many of these trucks were large trucks exceeding ten tons and some of them were specifically constructed. Four stills were seized with an approximate value of $12,000. 403,500 gallons of alcohol mash were seized in connection with these stills, value of said mash approximating $4,000.
As Eliot’s memo makes clear, the Untouchables did not shut down the Capone booze operation. Far from it. Soon after a brewery or cleaning plant or distribution facility would get knocked out, another would pop up somewhere else. Few saloons ever saw a break in their deliveries. That said, the raiders were undeniably having an impact. Costs were up, consistent revenue harder to come by. There was also the psychological effect, the siege mentality that now infected the syndicate. The Chicago Daily News wrote that Eliot Ness was “the especial thorn in the side of the Capone mob,” estimating that the young agents’ team had stopped output that would have totaled $2 million. “In addition to their steady drain on Capone’s war chest,” the newspaper continued, “the special agents have kept the Capone legal staff busy defending thirty-one men arrested in these raids. Capone’s high-priced lawyers have had to prepare for the defense of Capone and sixty-eight others indicted for conspiracy.”
What made all of this particularly bad news for the Outfit: it couldn’t raise prices. For the first time since Prohibition began, the cost of a glass of “real beer” in Chicago had dropped, from 25 cents to 15 cents. The Outfit was getting hit with a double whammy: the Untouchables and the Depression. So far, the syndicate had refused to lower prices, keeping them at $55 per barrel, but saloonkeepers cut their prices anyway. They didn’t have a choice. Customers increasingly went elsewhere and paid less for near beer. Some club owners took their lives in their hands by driving to Joliet or farther downstate to buy beer outside of Capone’s purview for $35 a barrel. Their saloons often received warnings: rocks tossed through windows, customers harassed on the way into the bars. The warnings sometimes worked, sometimes not. The fact was, the gang’s makeshift leadership didn’t inspire the same fear as Capone, who was preoccupied with his coming tax trial. On a Sunday in July, truck drivers even dared to go on strike after the syndicate announced pay cuts, forcing Joe Fusco and Bert Delaney to make deliveries themselves.
“Why cut us?” one driver reportedly told Fusco. “You still charge $55 a barrel for the beer. We take all the chances and do all the work in this hot weather.”
“All the saloonkeepers owe us money,” Fusco told the men. “They’re hard up and we can’t make them pay. You’ve got to take a wage cut.”
The drivers didn’t buy that argument. On Monday, they again stayed home. Barrels of beer piled up at warehouses. The next day, Fusco brought out his enforcers, and after a few beatings and threats, everyone went back to work.
CHAPTER 11
A Real and Lasting Impression
On October 5, 1931, Al Capone went on trial for tax evasion. He tried to maintain his dignity, his above-it-all swagger, during this unsettling new phase of his bossdom, but it wasn’t easy. Stepping out of his bulletproof sedan on the trial’s first day and looking around—at the photographers standing atop their cars along Clark Street, the gawkers shoving and pushing to get close to the courthouse entrance—he understood that Chicago no longer viewed him as Good-Hearted Al. This mob of reporters and store clerks and housewives wanted to see him humiliated.
Eliot was already sitting in Judge James Wilkerson’s sixth-floor courtroom when Capone came through the heavy, magnificently arched doors. The special agent craned his neck like everyone else. At last, the man he had been harassing for months became real to him. Not a bogeyman, just a man. A balding, fat, moon-faced young man in a shiny blue suit. An expensively dressed schlub. Eliot stared at the mobster with unrelieved fascination, his jaw clenched. “That’s the first [time] that Eliot Ness ever saw Al Capone,” insisted Berardi, whose colleagues furiously blasted away with their cameras as Capone strode into the courtroom, their flashbulbs disgorging thick puffs of smoke in th
e Mob boss’s face. Berardi, with a miniature camera hidden in his hat, had found a seat in the front row, where he patiently waited for his opportunity to snap a page-one photo.
Despite the turnabout in Capone’s popularity, no one could confidently predict the trial’s outcome. George Johnson had been nervous enough about the case’s strength that he negotiated a plea deal with Capone’s lawyers back in July that would have put the gangster in prison for two and a half years. The attorney general signed off on it, but then the newspapers weighed in. Two and a half years for Capone? That was some sweet deal, they said. Papers across the country expressed their outrage at the leniency. A few editorials actually suggested that Judge Wilkerson had been bought off. That changed everything. At the eleventh hour the judge unexpectedly declared that he alone would decide the punishment, regardless of the plea deal, forcing Capone’s attorneys to call the whole thing off.
Johnson, it turned out, had dodged a bullet. He had a winning hand—and the right judge to carry it through. On the first day of the trial, having received information that Capone’s men had a list of the prospective jurors, Wilkerson switched jury pools with another judge. For the first time the Big Fella began to sweat the outcome. Sitting at the defendant’s table throughout the first week, he stewed as men he employed—and in some cases had made wealthy—stepped up to the witness stand for the prosecution: mousy little Leslie Shumway, who kept the books at various Capone gambling joints; suave Edward “Easy Eddie” O’Hare, a lawyer and racetrack owner; oily Parker Henderson Jr., Capone’s lackey in Miami; Fred Ries, a Capone gambling-house flunky. Capone’s lawyer, Michael Ahern, preened and bellowed, accusing the prosecutors of this and that, and that and this, but it didn’t help. Frank Wilson had broken the code for Capone’s confiscated ledgers, allowing the prosecution to unravel the Mob boss’s business finances and pinpoint his “salary.” Johnson, taking over for assistant prosecutor Dwight Green for the closing arguments, easily swatted away Ahern’s depiction of Capone as a latter-day Robin Hood.
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