Eliot Ness

by Douglas Perry

  Eliot’s partisans didn’t just raise his profile; they played hardball. Rumors suddenly spread that U.S. Secret Service agent William Harper had been seen around town with various underworld figures. Harper was Eliot’s chief competition for the job.

  ***

  The mayor took the search for a safety director far more seriously than anyone had expected. He knew something had to be done about the city’s institutionalized crime, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy. Early in his administration, he frequently wore a police inspector’s badge to reinforce his commitment. Some said he also carried a police revolver tucked into his pocket.

  By the middle of December, after a week of excited newspaper coverage, Eliot’s candidacy had become a symbol—and a test—of the mayor’s reform credentials. Sure, Burton could talk a good game, and yes, he’d taken some encouraging first steps. But would he have the courage to put someone like Eliot Ness into high city office? In a column published just hours before the mayor made his decision, the Plain Dealer’s Philip Porter dared to believe:

  Harold Burton’s brief administration has been full of surprises, but none was more pleasant to the insiders who admire ability than his sudden serious consideration of Eliot Ness for safety director. If Burton actually makes the appointment, the strictly political boys will be gibbering incoherently.

  Porter marveled at how Ness, this man “without the slightest trace of political connection,” could be a serious candidate for safety director of the city of Cleveland. It was almost inconceivable. The columnist threw aside any pretense of journalistic objectivity, admitting that reporters who had covered Ness “admire his courage and his skill, and they like him personally. Few government officials have won them in such a short time as he has. . . . It’s a pretty safe rule that when reporters respect and admire an official, he’s the goods. They see so many phonies that they can smell them out like bird dogs.”

  By now Eliot had won over Burton, too. Shortly before noon on Wednesday, December 11, the mayor called the ATU’s offices at the Standard Building downtown. He offered Eliot the job, and Eliot immediately accepted. Burton told him to come right over to city hall to take the oath of office.

  Eliot, nattily dressed in a double-breasted, gray-striped suit and red tie, walked over to city hall, skipped up the wide concrete front steps and ambled down to the mayor’s office. As always in the first months of a new administration, the place was mobbed by men hoping for a nod. Eliot slipped into the back of the reception area. “For some time,” wrote a reporter who didn’t recognize him at first, Eliot “stood patiently with a horde of job-seekers in the mayor’s outer office.” Finally, someone recognized him and insisted he come through. Safely ensconced in the inner sanctum, he vigorously shook the mayor’s hand and sat, keeping his overcoat on.

  Joseph Crowley, the city’s assistant law director, arrived to give the oath of office. The picture of the oath-taking that ran in the afternoon papers shows a grim-faced Eliot with his hand held high above his head, like a boy who’s concerned the teacher will overlook him during attendance. When the new public safety director shook Crowley’s hand at the end of the ceremony, his annual salary had just doubled, to $7,500. (This would be a nice surprise for Eliot; he hadn’t even asked about the pay during the interview process.) At thirty-three, he was by far the youngest safety directory in the city’s history. Within an hour, Crowley put out a statement declaring that Eliot would have “complete freedom in developing the law-enforcement policies of the city.”

  ***

  Eliot’s arrival at the mayor’s office, and the reason for it, quickly washed through city hall. When he, Burton, and Crowley came out of the office, they found city employees jamming the corridor, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the new safety director. They noted the “heavy layer of pomade” in his hair, the well-tailored suit, the shy smile. “He did not present the formidable, bellicose appearance that Americans expect in their law enforcement officers,” wrote George Condon, a longtime Cleveland reporter. Not that it mattered; his youth and his reputation as the man who busted Capone were enough to impress people. As Eliot came through the gauntlet, men shook his hand, slapped his back, and offered congratulations. A few whistled and whooped. The mayor told him he shouldn’t expect this kind of welcome every day.

  Eliot recognized a few reporters in the crowd, and he stopped to give the obligatory statement.

  “Of course, I am greatly honored by the appointment,” he said. “I have a keen sense of feeling of the responsibility that the office entails. I will bend every effort to fill the duties of the office creditably.”

  Reporters weren’t willing to leave it at that. They trailed Eliot back to the Standard Building, throwing questions at him with every step. Eliot kept his head down as he walked, but he also answered the questions. He understood the importance of a strong first impression.

  Asked about corruption on the police force and poor morale in the fire department, the new safety director said he hoped “to devise some method of properly rewarding policemen and firemen for efficient and honest work.” He admitted he had a lot of “homework” to do.

  Eliot’s Untouchables experience inevitably came up during that walk back to the ATU offices, and reporters filled up their notebooks. In the next day’s papers, the story of Eliot and Albert Nabers’s Chicago Heights arrest of Mike Picchi would be retold, this time with Eliot creeping alone down a dark alley, noticing “the flash of light on metal” and throwing himself at his startled would-be assassin. The gun Eliot wrestled from him, the Press wrote, “now is one of Mr. Ness’ prized possessions.” (Eliot did not have Picchi’s gun.)

  The pack of reporters followed Eliot up to his office in the Alcohol Tax Unit’s suite and continued to fire questions at him as he cleaned out his desk. “I am going to be a working safety director,” he said. “I will do undercover work to obtain my own evidence and acquaint myself personally with conditions.”

  That engendered some double takes. He was going to do his own undercover work? No one knew what to make of such a statement. The directorship was a management job. A payroll-padding, speech-giving, hit-the-links-at-two job. Yet this new kid wasn’t even going to take the day to celebrate—he was getting right to work. When Eliot showed up at police headquarters for a look around, officers blanched. “I’ve served under five safety directors and this is the first time I ever saw the face of one of them,” said one sergeant. City hall hangers-on received a similar shock when they heard about the mayor’s choice.

  “What did that guy ever do to help elect Burton?” one befuddled Republican lifer bleated. A Press columnist gleefully responded in print.

  Well, nothing is the answer. Mr. Ness didn’t even know Rees Davis, the Republican chairman who managed the political aspects of the Burton campaign, until Thursday, when the mayor introduced them.

  Some political hacks and fixers refused to believe the newspaper reports. They’d seen goo-goos (good-government men) before, and most of them only gooed when a reporter was around. The next day, party men began showing up in the safety director’s office. One by one they sat before Eliot, hats on knees, overcoats slung over the back of a chair. They explained how things worked in the city, offered advice, and coolly asked for the expected consideration. Eliot listened, expressionless, head down. He drew “doodlegrams” on a pad of paper until each caller finally was talked out, put his hat back on his head, and angrily walked out of the office.

  ***

  Despite the quiet confidence he showed to the press and his new colleagues, Eliot knew he was taking a significant risk by accepting the safety director job. He’d never worked for or supervised a municipal police or fire department. He’d never overseen any big organization. And there would be no ordinary learning curve here. Now that Capone was gone from Chicago, Cleveland was arguably the most mobbed-up large city in the country, with the most corrupt police department. Recognizing the challenge, he turne
d for help to his former teacher, August Vollmer. Eliot had become a passionate acolyte of Vollmer’s after taking the former chief’s police-administration course at the University of Chicago. He’d made a point of staying in touch with “the old man” ever since.

  Eliot chose his mentor well. Vollmer was widely viewed as the “father of modern law enforcement.” In 1909, Vollmer became the police chief in Berkeley, California, where he remade the small department through an intractable belief in the moral power of professionalism. He eliminated the political patronage system through which policemen had always been hired and promoted in the town, put cops on wheels—first bicycle, later motorcycle and automobile—and instituted formal training for new recruits, a rarity at the time. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, he sought recruits with college degrees, even advanced degrees. His police department may have been the first in the country to use blood, fiber, and soil analysis in criminal investigations, the first to use intelligence tests in hiring, the first to equip squad cars with two-way radios. The definitive proof that he was an iconoclast: he believed in crime-prevention measures. Indeed, he considered them more valuable than crime-solving skills. In the same vein, he aggressively argued against vice laws, insisting that sexual deviancy and drug and alcohol addiction were “first and last a medical problem,” not a police problem. Vollmer’s views were downright radical. Critics dubbed him soft on crime.

  Vollmer went on to become police chief of booming Los Angeles in 1923, declaring that he would clean up the department through scientific management. “I am going to strip all the mystery and hokum from police work and place it on the basis of efficiency,” he said. Despite some notable successes—he created a police academy and reorganized the two-thousand-man department into discrete disciplines—his tenure ended abruptly after just a year. The city’s power players turned against him after they realized he really meant to run crooked cops out of the department and shut down the city’s gambling dens. When his opponents ginned up a sex scandal—a doe-eyed divorcée brought a breach-of-promise suit against him, insisting that he made love to her like a “cave man”—he decided he’d had enough of the big city. He would spend most of the rest of his life in academia, teaching his “Berkeley system” to criminology students across the country.

  Eliot, unaware of the vehemence of the opposition his mentor’s methods had kicked up in LA, planned to be the first man to fully install Vollmer’s system in a major American city. The goal thrilled him. He would come up with few truly original ideas during his police career, but he would prove to be the foremost pioneer in adapting Vollmer’s ideas to a large department. Sitting down to his typewriter a day after taking the oath of office as safety director, Eliot informed the fifty-nine-year-old éminence grise of American police work that he had a new job and “am facing problems which, because of your many years of experience, would seem minor.” He then asked for advice on how best to revamp the way Cleveland’s police department handled promotions. He said he planned to remake the city’s force based on Vollmer’s tenets of professionalization. He closed the letter: “I feel, and for many years have felt, that my connection with you at the University of Chicago was one of the most beneficial things in my life.”

  During that first full day on the job, Eliot, Police Chief Matowitz, and Fire Chief Joseph Granger had posed for newspaper photographers at city hall. When one of the photogs requested a shot of just Eliot and the police chief, Matowitz lost his temper. A reporter had asked the chief earlier in the day if he feared he might be fired. The challenging query, along with an initial meeting with Eliot, had gotten to the chief. Matowitz believed the photographer wanted the picture for a story about him getting the ax. He refused to pose alone with Eliot, berated the photographer “in sulfurous language,” and stormed off. Mayor Burton, witnessing the hissy fit, stewed at Matowitz’s “ripe and incoherent remarks.”

  Eliot was unfazed by the outburst. He had no intention of firing the fifty-three-year-old police chief. And he figured it worked to his advantage to have Matowitz feeling insecure in his position. He expected the chief to do his bidding, and sure enough, the chief would do it.

  The next night, determined to prove himself to the rank and file as well as to the brass, Eliot tagged along with two patrolmen on their rounds in the “Roaring Third,” the city’s notorious vice district. A sergeant loaned him a gun, a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber service revolver with a five-inch barrel. He would keep it throughout his tenure as safety director.* The two patrolmen took Eliot on a tour of the neighborhood, from East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue to East Fifty-fifth Street and Woodland Avenue. They pointed out gambling parlors that superiors had ordered patrolmen to leave alone and the hangouts of gangsters who were also beyond the law. At 2 a.m., they came upon a brothel on Orange Avenue where nearly naked girls wiggled suggestively in the windows, inviting men to come inside for a better look. Eliot decided it was time for action. Using a corner call box, Eliot called the nearest precinct station and told them to send over a paddy wagon and a patrol car.

  A few minutes later, the patrolmen stepped up to the brothel’s front door while Eliot covered the back. When he came around the side of the house, Eliot saw the back door wide open. Inside, the dank rooms were empty, except for the two patrolmen who’d just banged through the front entrance. “That was a quick getaway,” Eliot said, laughing. He knew what had happened: the place had been tipped off.

  ***

  By early January Eliot had begun to settle in. He rented an apartment at 10017 Lake Avenue on the West Side, just over the Cuyahoga River from downtown, to comply with the requirement that city employees live within the city limits. (Edna, at least for now, mostly remained at the cottage in suburban Bay Village that they’d been renting since moving to the area.) Eliot wrote again to Vollmer, who had sent him some sample training materials. The letter started out with gossipy news about other Vollmer acolytes, including Alexander Jamie’s son, a childhood friend who the year before had offered Eliot a job in Minnesota. “I guess you knew that Wallace Jamie was Assistant Safety Director at St. Paul and conducted a very thorough investigation of the police force and racketeers in that city,” Eliot wrote. “He is now working on a special job at considerable remuneration in Boston and has resigned from his post at St. Paul.”

  The pleasantries done, Eliot turned to the task he had before him. He insisted he was “appointed here absolutely non-political,” and that he had the support and trust of the mayor. He laid out his objectives: First, clean out corruption in the police department, and then modernize it. Next, attack the Mob. He admitted that reforming the police force would be no small task. “The department here is exactly as it was about forty years ago as far as selection, promotion, training, etc., is concerned,” he wrote. He added that civil service was a problem, because “absolutely no recognition is given for anything except the ability to pass a written examination, which you can appreciate is extremely detrimental to the morale of the department as a whole.” He said he already was working with the civil-service examiner on a new examination for chief of detectives.

  Eliot had a plan for ridding the police department of crooks, he told Vollmer. “The situation here is in a sense similar to that of Chicago in the early thirties when the business men organized the Secret Six for the purpose of coping with the situation,” he wrote. “I am going to receive some help along a similar line here but am proceeding cautiously on it in order that I do not become associated with any movement which may prove embarrassing or binding upon the work I hope to do as a whole.”

  Eliot was being modest—or careful, in case the plan didn’t go well. Bringing the Secret Six model to Cleveland had been his idea. In fact, he had insisted on it. During his job interview with Burton, he said he would take the position only if he could hire secret investigators who reported solely to him. He saw this as the only effective way to ferret out policemen on the Mob’s payroll. He told the mayor that he, Burton, would ha
ve to find a way to pay for them “out of unofficial funds.” The demand stunned the mayor. Such a thing had never crossed his mind. To Burton, it smacked of vigilantism—or even fascism. But Eliot, undaunted, told the mayor about the precedent in Chicago, and suggested he hit up friends in the business community who’d had enough of Mob rule in the city. Burton called around to acquaintances in Chicago to find out what this Secret Six thing was all about. He liked what he heard. A few days later, when he offered Eliot the job, the mayor said he would do his best to get him his unofficial investigators. That brought Eliot into his new position on a wave of confidence. He expected to have the police force cleaned up enough to begin an all-out attack on the Mob by the end of his first year in office. He couldn’t wait. He wrote to Vollmer:

  Racketeering here is rampant and the racketeers have virtual control of business and industry, much more so than is apparent on the surface. Almost every business association in the city is paying some sort of tribute to a well-organized Sicilian gang here. This angle, of course, is old stuff to me and will probably be one of the simplest.

  That was the kind of bluster that had made Eliot’s name in Chicago. But he’d discover that attacking Cleveland’s gangs wouldn’t be quite as simple as he thought.

  CHAPTER 15

  Tough Babies

  On January 10, Charles McNamee walked up to the Harvard Club’s front door at about 5 p.m. Pulling out a search warrant, he informed the doorman that he had come to raid the club.