Bureau managers spent much of the summer fending off congressmen and their staff. In June, with the demise of Prohibition unmistakably on the horizon, a Chicago agent named Al Wolff exemplified politics’ power to trump reality. When Wolff was one of hundreds of men furloughed in anticipation of repeal, Illinois congressman Adolph J. Sabath fired off a threatening telegram to the dry force’s director. “It is most peculiar that of all the men selected to be released from the service one of them should be Albert H. Wolff Prohibition Inspector in Chicago who is a real active Democrat and in whom the National Committeeman of Illinois is greatly interested. Someone else should be let go in his place.” Wolff was rehired. Fifty years later Wolff would insist—like dozens of former federal agents before him, some of whom had never set foot in Chicago—that he had been a part of the famous “flying squad” that took down the most famous gangster in the world. He called himself “the last Untouchable.”
Wolff and the other remaining Prohibition agents did little work during the hot, draggy summer. What was the point? The sale of 3.2 percent beer had been legalized in March, making enforcement a real pain. A sip didn’t tell you much; you had to get the chemist involved. Raids slowed to a trickle as state conventions began to take up repeal resolutions. There was no suspense; everyone knew the Twenty-first Amendment would be adopted, freeing up the taps and dooming the Bureau of Prohibition. Agents sat around the office, fretting over their bank balances and searching the want ads; secretaries ratcheted up their eye-batting in hopes of landing a husband while there was still time.
Another cull came in the fall, and Eliot survived that one, too. Like Wolff, he would be there until the bitter end.
CHAPTER 12
It’s Just Tuesday Night
At 4:29 p.m., on December 5, 1933, the news reached Chicago that the federal ban on alcohol was history. The announcement proved anticlimactic. The wettest city of the dry years remained quiet.
“Crowds were gathered in a few of the loop bars, but what cheers were heard were sporadic, and there was no general hilarity, although the real celebration was expected to come later in the evening,” reported the Herald and Examiner. The paper added that “little groups of four and five girls, homeward bound from loop offices and shops, were frequently seen at the bar ordering ‘sidecars’ and ‘manhattans’ and other mixed drinks in a manner that indicated they were not novices.” No one could mistake the implication. The saloon would not become the husband’s refuge once again. Women were publicly in the sauce and were staying there, which bar owners thought was just fine. Downtown, the longest queue could be found not at a flashy drinking spot but at the Federal Building, where dealers—including many longtime bootleggers—rushed to pay newly adopted federal liquor license fees.
At about seven o’ clock, a reporter named Warren Brown walked over to a popular downtown hotel and asked the maître d’ what the younger generation was drinking on the first night in fourteen years that anyone could legally buy and consume liquor. “What else do they know, but gin and what they call ‘hootch’?” replied the maître d’. “Wine? They don’t know anything about wine. They don’t order wine with their dinners. They wouldn’t know how to drink wine with their dinners if they did.”
Later, his notebook full, Brown stepped into the hotel’s elevator. A fellow passenger was already in the box, rubbing his hands together, his cheeks flushed. “I suppose you’re getting ready for a big night?” the man asked the elevator operator.
“Me?” said the operator. He smirked, and turned back to the controls. “I have been getting it all the time, as much as I want, whenever I wanted it. It’s just Tuesday night to me.”
***
The best of the bunch from the Capone squad continued in liquor enforcement after the end of the Prohibition Bureau. Repeal, after all, did not put an end to bootlegging. The legalization of alcohol meant real revenue, desperately needed revenue, for the federal government. Men were needed to make sure everybody was paying up. Longstanding bootleg operations, the Chicago Tribune pointed out, “continue to operate wildcat and compete unfairly with the legitimate concerns by evading the $5 a barrel tax, and by using gang tactics to force saloonkeepers to buy their products.”
Joe Leeson moved over to the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU), the Prohibition Bureau’s bureaucratic successor. He was quickly identified as a rising star in the agency. Sam Seager became a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s Intelligence Unit, working under Elmer Irey. He became an expert at fingerprint and handwriting identification and was soon tapped to head up the Buffalo division. Marty Lahart stayed with the Chicago Prohibition office until the arrival of repeal, when he moved to the Alcohol Tax Unit and transferred to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Two months after the Prohibition Bureau discharged Paul Robsky, the government brought him back on a temporary basis. By the end of the year, the Justice Department had hired him full-time and sent him back to Greenville, South Carolina.
Cloonan remained in the Denver Prohibition office until July 1933, when, lacking strong references from Chicago, he was furloughed in anticipation of Prohibition’s repeal. But since no official investigation had been opened against him, the Alcohol Tax Unit rehired him in February 1934. Some weeks later, the agency assigned him to Chicago, and that’s when red flags popped up. This time the agency launched a thorough investigation. His faltering marriage was laid out in bureaucratic detail, including that he “had not provided food and clothes” for his estranged wife and their adopted son, and that “Cloonan had struck [his wife] with his fists and had otherwise abused her, on three separate occasions.” He also owed money to his mother and sister. In the end, though, the evidence wasn’t enough to fire him. His domestic troubles ultimately were his own business. And too much time had passed to reach a definitive conclusion about the bribery allegations, though the report determined there was “considerable evidence tending to show that in February, 1932, Cloonan was in collusion with certain violators, and was accepting money from them.” Cloonan was not disciplined and, again, was not informed that he’d been investigated. He would continue to work for the ATU, though with few opportunities for advancement.
As for Eliot, in September 1933 he joined the Justice Department’s Alcohol Beverage Unit, a transition agency for Prohibition Bureau agents during the march to repeal. (It would later evolve into the Treasury’s Alcohol Tax Unit.) He’d gained some nice publicity as the public face of the “Untouchables,” but ultimately it didn’t mean much. Al Capone’s fame would continue to grow after he disappeared into the federal prison system. His gangster credentials transcended Prohibition. He hadn’t just trafficked in illegal liquor; he was the highest-profile, most successful, and most vicious gangster in American history. Eliot’s celebrity, however, would fade away almost as quickly as it had arrived, like a fever breaking. His fame was inextricably linked to the dry years, an era everyone wanted to forget even before it was officially over. But at least the government was happy with him. The unit’s Midwest administrator gave Eliot an impressive raise, to $3,800 a year, and assigned him to Cincinnati.* The raise took some of the sting out of having to move away from his hometown, but only some of it. When he arrived at his new posting he found he was completely unknown in the office; no one had heard of the Untouchables. He felt like he was starting over.
Eliot had a secure career as a liquor cop, which was no small thing during the Great Depression. But what he really wanted was to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then called the Division of Investigation. He wanted a broader purview than alcohol. He submitted an application, and on October 30, George E. Q. Johnson wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of the division, a young administrator named J. Edgar Hoover.
Dear Mr. Hoover:
Mr. Elliot [sic] Ness, who is at the present time an assistant investigator in charge in the office at Cincinnati, Ohio, (prohibition department) informed me today that he has pending an application fo
r appointment with the Bureau as a regular agent.
I saw a great deal of Mr. Ness while I was United States Attorney. He is a graduate of University of Chicago, is intelligent and has a fine experience.
During the Government’s investigation of the Capone gang and their ramifications he had a special division working which reported to the United States Attorney; under his direction these men did a splendid piece of work. His integrity was never questioned and I recommend him to you without reservations.
Yours very truly,
GEORGE E. Q. JOHNSON
Eliot thanked Johnson in a letter from Cincinnati, dated November 6, 1933. “Throughout my connection with the Government,” he wrote, “I have been constantly benefited by action taken in my behalf by you, and I know that this again will prove very beneficial.” He was wrong about that last part. His record with the Prohibition Bureau, backed up by Johnson’s recommendation, should have made him an excellent candidate for the Division of Investigation, but that turned out to be the problem. Unlike the liquor agents in Cincinnati, Hoover had read the accounts of the Untouchables that had gone out on the national wires. And he would not allow anybody into his agency who might possibly upstage him. He squelched the application. Unsatisfied with that, he began a low-level interagency smear campaign against him. Even ten years later, with Eliot out of federal service, Hoover would still warn his agents to “beware of Ness.”
PART II
Center of the Universe
The Cleveland Police Department’s first batch of sharpshooters receives a congratulatory audience at city hall with Ness and Mayor Harold Burton (to Ness’s left).
CHAPTER 13
Chasing Moonshine
In late August 1934, on the hottest day since a record-breaking string of hundred-degree scorchers the month before, a fourteen-year-old girl was paddling around in Lake Erie when she noticed someone below the surface waving at her. She pushed her head under for a better look. No, it wasn’t someone. Not quite. The girl screamed and rushed out of the water, heaving and spitting.
She’d seen a hand. A ragged stump of a hand.
Other disturbing reports followed. A fisherman snagged a clump of blond hair on his line. A ferryboat worker swore he glimpsed a human head rolling around in his boat’s wake. Two men swimming in the lake saw strange blobs bobbing in the water. One of the swimmers jabbed at it with a stick. “It was flesh of some kind. It wasn’t a fish,” he insisted.
Finally, proof: On the morning of September 5, Frank LaGassie, a thirty-four-year-old Photostat operator, was walking along the shore on Cleveland’s East Side when he came upon what appeared to be a waterlogged chunk of tree trunk. It was actually the lower torso of a woman, the legs amputated at the knees.
Police arrived to stare at the gruesome find along with LaGassie. After searching unsuccessfully for the rest of the woman, they delivered the torso to the morgue. The next day, the Cuyahoga County coroner, Arthur J. Pearce, determined that the woman had been dead for about six months and had been in the water for at least half that time. He calculated that she had been about five and a half feet tall, one hundred fifteen pounds, and somewhere in her thirties. He noted that the skin was rough and reddened from the use of some kind of preservative, which explained why the torso remained largely intact after so much time in the water.
No one knew what to make of it. The coroner couldn’t even say for sure that the woman had been murdered. The police called the victim the Lady of the Lake.
***
Stories about the Lady of the Lake appeared on the front pages of Cleveland’s newspapers for more than a week. Eliot read all three of the city’s dailies, but he probably didn’t pay much attention to the grisly mystery. Murder and missing persons weren’t part of his domain. It was still just alcohol. He and Edna had moved to Cleveland in August so Eliot could become the chief investigator for the Alcohol Tax Unit’s Northern District of Ohio. After just a year in Cincinnati, where he’d been assistant investigator in charge, it was a nice promotion for him. His salary remained at $3,800, but he felt he was back in the big time.
Cleveland, after all, was a great city—or at least it had been very close to greatness. This gray, densely packed burg of nine hundred thousand had boomed throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century on the strength of its heavy manufacturing. Sixty-five percent of the population was “foreign-blooded”—Italians and Russians, Poles and Slovaks and Mexicans—and there were jobs for every one of them. The city’s central location on the banks of Lake Erie made it ideally suited for a leadership position in railroads and shipping, steel and automobiles. It was first in the nation in producing iron castings, plumbing fixtures, paints, and printing presses.
The city had also become the center of modern art—truly modern art: mechanistic, mass-produced, forward-looking. Clevelanders were reinventing industrial design. Outfits like the art-deco furniture maker Rorimer and Brooks and ceramics pioneer Cowan Pottery introduced the burgeoning Cleveland School to the rest of the world. More traditional artistic endeavors came running along behind. The Cleveland Museum of Art, housed in a $1.25 million neoclassical pile on the East Side, opened in 1916. Three years later, the museum debuted the Annual Exhibition of Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen, which soon would become the foremost art competition in the Great Lakes region. Locals called it the May Show. The Cleveland Orchestra launched two years after the art museum and quickly challenged it for local acclaim. Artur Rodzin´ski became music director in 1933 and, with a single-minded dedication to structure and a clean sound, pushed the orchestra toward international prestige.
Of course, none of this high-art pretentiousness made the slightest bit of difference now. In 1929, a hefty 41 percent of Cleveland’s workers had been employed in manufacturing-related jobs, helping to build America into the greatest economic force in the world. The city, the sixth largest in the country, had almost no unemployment. But following the stock market crash that began in October, businesses suddenly began to shut down. Fear spread quickly. In February 1930, some two thousand men tried to storm a city council meeting, sparking a small riot. One man ended up with a broken back, another a fractured skull. The violent protest didn’t help the situation. The council could do nothing to stop the economic slide. By the end of the year, a hundred thousand of the metropolitan area’s manufacturing jobs were gone.
It only got worse. The Standard Bank collapsed in 1931, setting off a panic. The same year, the president of Cleveland Trust Company, one of the Midwest’s biggest banks, had to carry bags of cash into the lobby to calm hundreds of depositors and stop a run. By 1933, a third of Cuyahoga County’s work force had no work. Cleveland drastically cut its budget to address falling revenue and dialed back basic services to help fund relief efforts.
The city was falling apart. Streets and sidewalks pitted by freezing weather remained unfixed. Blocks of apartments, vacant save for squatters, devolved into kindling. The downtown lakefront, which should have been the city’s pride, became “Tin Can Plaza.” Broke, out-of-work Clevelanders—“the lowest and loneliest of the down-and-out”—set up a “Hoover City” there just weeks after the stock market shocks. Hoover City residents lived in huts made from wooden crates and soiled sheets. Well-to-do businessmen occasionally walked over from downtown towers and paid residents a few pennies for permission to crawl inside the hovels for a look around. Some of these mindless thrill seekers would be building their own ramshackle huts in Tin Can Plaza soon enough.
***
One industry, inevitably, remained immune to the Great Depression.
“Cleveland’s bootleg output today—despite state monopoly—is greater than the city’s consumption of legal liquor,” wrote the Cleveland News in January 1935, citing Alcohol Tax Unit studies. The reason: the tax on alcohol was significant. That meant anyone who could put out spirits without the federal and state taxes would find a large, willing customer base—an
d stood to make a huge profit. Counterfeiting brand labels and bottles became a big business itself. The ATU believed there were “eight or nine big illicit liquor syndicates operating in Cleveland,” pulling down profits that rivaled what the bootleggers of the Prohibition years had made. Pretty much every tavern in the city sold bootleg booze, some without even realizing it.
W. K. Bruner, the head of Cleveland’s Alcohol Tax Unit office and a tough ex-marine, brought in the former Untouchables chief in hopes of improving morale and sparking a new urgency in the ranks. Eliot, at thirty-two, still looked like a college senior, but unlike in Cincinnati, he wouldn’t have to face skepticism from his troops. Bruner knew all about the Capone squad, and he made sure his forty-five men did, too. He even called local reporters and told them he had the famous Chicago gangbuster on his team. The new chief investigator helped his cause by getting right to work, taking charge of a raid during his first day on the job. Eliot would set a scorching raid-a-day pace for more than a month. Having become adept at interrogation while in Chicago, he time and again forced low-level still operators to give up work routines and the names of superiors. Arrests for liquor violations immediately jumped. He had hit his stride as a federal agent. He was confident and eager to show off his chops.
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