“Did this Robin Hood buy $8,000 worth of belt buckles for the unemployed?” he drawled. “Was his $6,000 meat bill in a few weeks for the hungry? Did he buy $27 shirts for the shivering men who sleep under Wacker Drive?”
The Tribune marveled at the performance: “Mr. Johnson was earnest, so much so that he was almost evangelical at times, clenching his fist, shaking his gray head, clamping his lean jaws together as he bit into evidence and tore into the defense theories.”
It worked—all of it. The trial lasted all of two weeks, and on October 17, after eight hours and ten minutes of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. Al Capone was guilty on five counts. Women in the courtroom gasped. Reporters dashed into the hallway. The defendant sat stone-faced, his heavy shoulders rolled forward. By now, he had expected the guilty verdict.
The following week, Capone returned to court. Before another packed room, Judge Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years in the clink, plus $50,000 in fines. Once again, gasps popped around the room. Court officers hustled Capone into the hall and toward the elevator for transporting prisoners.
“What do you say, Al?” a reporter yelled out.
The greatest and most-feared gang boss in American history stopped and turned. “It was a blow to the belt, but what can you expect when the whole community is prejudiced against you?” he whined. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting more than five years for income-tax evasion.”
***
In May 1932, federal agents put Alphonse Capone on a train to Atlanta, where a prison cell waited. Chicago was done with him. The Mob boss, who was beginning to shows signs of mental degradation from untreated syphilis, would never return to the Second City. But the Prohibition Bureau’s war against Capone’s organization didn’t end with its leader heading off to the pen. Now there would be a succession battle. In June, a machine-gun volley eviscerated one of the chief candidates for the big chair, George “Red” Barker. Six months later, another potential boss, Ted Newberry, would be murdered. Police considered Joe Fusco and one of Capone’s brothers the chief suspects.
Despite the continuation of Mob violence, Eliot experienced a letdown. The cause of prohibition had never appealed to him. He wanted to do a good job for its own sake, for the principle of law and order, and because he saw how organized crime destroyed civic life. But with Capone gone, he now struggled with motivation. He always had difficulty finding emotional highs; only the lows came naturally to him. Shortly after Capone’s conviction, he said to Robsky: “Did you ever think you wanted something more than anything else in the world and then, after you got it, it wasn’t half as good as you expected? Has that ever happened to you?” For Eliot, this feeling of emptiness would recur time and again throughout his life. Periods of intense productivity would be followed by melancholy and feelings of inadequacy.
After the trial, the Capone squad as a separate unit was officially disbanded. Eliot tried to keep as many of his agents—his band of brothers—as he could. Seager, Chapman, Cloonan, Leeson, and Robsky all would stay on in Chicago and continue to work under Eliot in the special agency unit, where he was now the assistant special agent in charge. In January 1932, Eliot derailed an attempt to reassign Robsky to another city. M. L. Harney, Chicago’s new Prohibition administrator, wrote to Washington that Robsky “has acquired a wide knowledge of the activities and personnel of Chicago beer and alcohol gangs, which would make him particularly valuable to Mr. Ness in his new assignment.” Harney added: “I do not need to elaborate on the situation which confronts me in Chicago. I have an ambition to make a real and lasting impression on the hoodlums who have monopolized the illicit liquor industry in this vicinity, and I need the assistance of every capable Investigator that I can acquire.”
Looking to reignite his own spark, Eliot didn’t let his Untouchables bask in their accomplishments: he put them right back to work. On January 21, with Capone still sitting in the Cook County Jail, Eliot and a dozen agents raided a brewery at 2024 South State Street. They arrested five men and confiscated $75,000 worth of booze and brewing equipment. In May, Eliot launched a series of coordinated raids that shut down thirty-three saloons. His team also raided farms up in Lake County, where the Bugs Moran and Roger Touhy gangs ran stills. The press speculated that a new push was on to dry up the city before the summer political conventions. Both the Republicans and the Democrats were coming to the Second City to nominate their presidential candidates.
The agents’ success was readily apparent. The syndicate no longer made deliveries in mammoth trucks that even civilians could tell were filled with beer. Now runners used ordinary automobiles that were tricked out to conceal their loads. After nabbing two men as they unloaded beer from a car outside a State Street nightclub, Eliot crowed to reporters:
The automobile was a Ford coach. It was fixed up for the specific purpose of delivering barrels of beer. All seats were taken out except the driver’s. When the door on the side is opened, skids are automatically lowered to the ground. Then the barrels are rolled out on these skids. This is a radical departure from the old Capone method of making deliveries in huge and expensive trucks. We have seized so many of their trucks that the syndicate is running short on finances. Also, they probably thought they could fool the agents with these small automobiles.
By now, he had become blasé—even mindless—about the danger inherent in his work. The sharp hunger he had felt during the Capone squad days had dissipated, leading to a casual recklessness as he adjusted to what he viewed as a less important assignment. One night he was headed home to change for a black-tie event downtown—his appearance in newspaper columns led to occasional invitations to society parties—when he somehow ended up finding and smashing up a still in an empty private residence. The home invasion, undertaken single-handedly, made him late for the ball. So he called Armand Bollaert, his old fraternity pal, and asked him to swing by his apartment for his tuxedo and bring it over. Bollaert pulled up to the house and handed over the tux, but reinforcements hadn’t shown up yet to cart away the brewing equipment. Eliot asked Bollaert to guard the home until his agents arrived while he went to a nearby police station to shower and change. His friend agreed, but, once Eliot roared off in his car, Bollaert became terrified. He realized gangsters could show up at any moment to discover their still smashed, with him waiting out front like an idiot. “I sat there what seemed like five hours,” he remembered. “I wasn’t very happy. I could envision all sorts of things.”
Eliot could take some comfort from the fact that Al Capone wasn’t completely gone from his life. In the spring, while the raids continued on Capone’s successors, Eliot and his men increasingly spent their time organizing and cross-referencing evidence for a “new booze conspiracy indictment” against the convicted Mob boss. The previous fall, Eliot had sent Chapman on a tour of Midwest Prohibition offices to gather up evidence related to the Capone syndicate. The assignment took Eliot’s “pencil detective” to Detroit; Springfield, Ohio; and a trio of small towns in Indiana—Michigan City, South Bend, and Hammond. Evidence gained through Chapman’s travels—as well as through recent raids in the Chicago area—would be tallied up and put to use against the sixty-eight other men who’d been indicted along with Capone the previous June. Johnson told the press that the Volstead case against Capone was “airtight,” but he added that he did not have any plans to take it to trial. The objective was to keep the indictment current, and so make Capone ineligible for parole. Even more important, it would be kept ready in case Capone managed to win an appeal on his income-tax conviction.
Back in Chicago, Chapman shut himself in a small office in the Transportation Building and buckled down to work, transcribing testimony, linking it up with specific seizures, and figuring out how the money went up the chain to Capone. On September 7, 1932, he reported to Harney that “I think I am going ahead in good shape. I have completed all evidence in the case for the years 1930, 1929, and 1928. This includes the Cotton Club
and the Montmartre cases, which were both large and held me back quite a bit, because they were new to me, and I had to familiarize myself with these two angles before I could analyze the evidence. I have found a big wooden box full of the evidence in these cases and have gone over it thoroughly. However, before I am satisfied with my write-up of the evidence in these cases, I would like to have Goddard, Lahart, or one of the agents participating go over it and see if I have missed any vital points. There is an awful mass of evidence in all these various events in Case 122-B, and while it is slow work, I think that, with the ideas in mind that you gave me, I am on the right track, and will bring out a thorough and fine report.”
Chapman was now the star, the man who could make connections in a chaotic mess of material. But a month after that upbeat memo to his bosses, things took a bad turn for him, though he didn’t know it. The agent had been spotted at Vanity Fair on the North Side, a nightclub that Prohibition Bureau managers considered “a questionable place for Government officers to be.” The bureau secretly opened an investigation and discovered that he was “frequenting places where liquor is sold and . . . consuming liquor not in the line of duty.” In the early years of Prohibition, the bureau didn’t pay much mind to what agents did during their off hours. They didn’t have to, seeing as many agents were temperance veterans or had come highly recommended by prohibition activists. They figured agents would be self-policing. But with the professionalization of the bureau in the middle 1920s, and with repeal forces gaining strength, administrators now made an effort to see that agents met the standards they enforced. At least they did so until it potentially got in the way of high-profile work. Everett H. Kubler, the chief of the bureau’s Special Inspection Division, recommended that the investigation of Chapman be held in abeyance. “Chapman is now, and has for some time, been engaged in writing the report of the Capone investigation, and [the Chicago office] believes it would be to the best interests of the Government if this investigation was not begun until that report is practically completed.”
So the bureau let Chapman finish his work unmolested. The agent spent the entire autumn and early winter organizing and cross-referencing “all the testimony of witnesses in a certain event or seizure, then drawing off, from that testimony, the particular points which incriminate the defendants.” The final case file was the size of the phone book, and his superiors judged the work excellent. But once that work had been tidily done up with a new bow, undercover agents spread out around Chicago searching for a different kind of testimony: evidence that Chapman wasn’t fit to remain in the dry agency. The investigation, taken up in earnest in April 1933, ultimately would charge that Chapman and his wife frequented notorious speakeasies. Worse, the Chapmans often brought along a teenage girl, Viola Bourke, who investigators suspected had been “sexually corrupted” by the couple. Chapman’s seduction method, Miss Bourke said in an interview with agents, included his taking her to the Transportation Building after hours, where he showed her evidence from the Capone case file, including “some photostatic copies of checks which he said had been signed by Al Capone himself, under another name.”
The final investigation report described how the Chapmans encouraged the girl to knock back highballs until stinking drunk, and how they sometimes kept her out until dawn. The investigators also learned that the agent was deep in debt, including owing $300 to Alexander Jamie. Agents in the Capone squad had each been receiving $150 a month in hazardous-duty pay, and Chapman needed every cent of it. When the extra pay ended in June 1931, the month Capone was indicted, Chapman’s spending did not see a similar drop-off. The investigation report alleged that “Mr. Eliot Ness knew of his financial struggle and stated that Mr. Jamie had some money at that time, which belonged to the Secret Six organization, but which was in a fund that was quite flexible, and that Mr. Ness arranged with Mr. Jamie for him [Chapman] to borrow the $300.00 for which he signed a note.” Chapman’s debts, the investigators noted, could make him susceptible to bribe offers, although in Jamie’s case the loan appeared to be more of a gift. The Secret Six head never asked for repayment or any interest payments (and never received either). Chapman, confronted by agents wielding this damning report, launched a desperate defense of his behavior, insisting that his nighttime escapades were an effort to satisfy his wife’s love of dancing and that he never took note of whether the “various clubs, hotels and ballrooms” they frequented served liquor. He declared that he was “opposed to the use of intoxicants and denies having consumed liquor on any of the occasions referred to . . .” He also insisted he had made good-faith payments on some of his bills and planned to pay off all of his debts.
It wasn’t much of a defense, but it was enough. Sort of. No charges would be brought against him. He didn’t even receive a letter of admonition. But in July he was furloughed, ending his government career.
***
The investigation into Chapman’s conduct surely embarrassed Eliot. It reflected poorly on him as a supervisor, bringing his judgment into question. But it was only the latest embarrassment. Eliot had already dealt with a far worse problem on his team. In February 1932, according to a personnel memo,
Special Agents E. A. Doyle and Elliot [sic] Ness supervised telephones at the New Wabash Hotel, and at the Coliseum Garage in Chicago, Illinois, for the purpose of obtaining evidence against violators in that city. (Case Jacket 122-B) Among the conversations intercepted and recorded by Special Agents Doyle and Ness were four that seemed to indicate that Special Agent Bernard V. (Barney) Cloonan was in collusion with certain violators in Chicago.
This discovery must have rocked Eliot. Until this time, he had given Cloonan glowing efficiency reports. He had come to rely on him as a dedicated agent, fearless and ready for any challenge. From the squad’s beginnings, Cloonan had been knee-deep in every raid and regularly served time on the wiretapped phones.
The phone conversations that cast suspicion on Cloonan were recorded over the course of two weeks. In a phone conversation on February 4, a known bootlegger—identified as “Hymie”—told Cloonan he’d left something for him at the usual place. The agents listening in were certain Hymie and Cloonan were talking about money. Three days later, Eliot and Doyle recorded Hymie and another bootlegger talking about an unnamed agent “who had helped us before.” One of the men said the agent had new information to pass along, presumably about impending raids. A week after that, on February 15, Hymie confirmed with an associate that “Barney” had been paid $100. After an investigation, the bureau determined that the conversations and other circumstantial evidence, when added up, “constituted collusion of a very reprehensible nature.” An internal report stated,
The “Barney” referred to in [the February 15] conversation was identified as being “the guy who used to be downstairs and is upstairs now.” This remark seems to constitute rather conclusive evidence that the man under discussion by these two violators, was Investigator Cloonan. There are two reasons for this assumption: The first is that Investigator Cloonan is generally known and referred to, even by members of his own family, as “Barney.” The second is that just a short time prior to the date of this conversation, Cloonan had been promoted from Agent to Special Agent; and had moved from the quarters of the Administrator, on the 4th floor of the Transportation Building, to the office of the Special Agent in Charge, which was located on the 12th floor of the same building. It is submitted that this seems conclusive evidence that the person referred to was Investigator Bernard V. (Barney) Cloonan.
And that wasn’t all. Eliot, surely hopeful that he might discover exculpatory evidence, dug deeper. He found only more bad news. A Chicago police officer told him that Cloonan and a police officer named Tom Coen “shook down” speakeasies in 1931, when the Capone squad was tailing beer trucks every day and compiling a list of clubs that bought booze from the Outfit. Eliot slipped the charge into Cloonan’s file without comment.
Yet after an initial inquiry, the Prohibition Bure
au did not undertake an official investigation. A personnel memo from two years later noted, simply: “These allegations were not gone into, for the reason that it was deemed inadvisable to do so at this time.” Why? We can only speculate. Maybe bureau overseers thought the evidence was too opaque, too open to interpretation. Maybe the U.S. district attorney’s office, worried about Capone’s pending appeal and its renewed Volstead case against the Mob boss, wanted to avoid any public revelations that might undercut evidence gathered by the “untouchables” squad. Cloonan was not questioned about any of the allegations; he never knew that his direct supervisor and bureau managers believed him to be crooked.
Eliot seemed happy to drop the matter. He blamed himself for Cloonan’s apparent perfidy, or at least he blamed himself for not recognizing that his agent was susceptible to corruption. He also blamed larger forces at work. The rules of society had changed over the course of Prohibition. Eliot could never take a bribe—never—but he understood how another man, even a good man, could. He didn’t hold it against Cloonan. In the end, he didn’t seem to care that the higher-ups had squelched the investigation.
Within a couple of weeks, the bureau transferred Cloonan to the special agency unit in Denver. The Capone squad now truly was a thing of the past. A month later, Eliot was promoted to chief investigator of the Chicago regional office.
***
The promotion did not mean a great deal to Eliot. Repeal was marching toward its own special spot in the Constitution, and everyone in the bureau recognized what that meant. Pink slips started wafting through Prohibition offices in the spring of 1933. William Gardner, well known in the bureau for being a drunk and a troublemaker, joined Chapman on the chopping block. No political pressure could help him this time. A few months later, the bureau also booted Paul Robsky to the curb. The Chicago office saw its numbers drop by almost half, reducing what once had been the largest regional dry office to fewer than two hundred souls. The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, issued an executive order on consolidating government agencies. He needed money for the ambitious relief programs he had in mind, and so every department in the federal government would have to tighten its belt. Soon rumors began to swirl that the Chicago Prohibition office would take another 50 percent hit. Every dry agent in the city, the Tribune reported, was “on the anxious seat.”
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