“Oh, no, you don’t,” the doorman roared, sweeping the assistant prosecutor aside with a burly forearm. McNamee crashed into the side of the building and fell to his knees.
The half-dozen men behind McNamee, many of them brandishing truncheons, pressed forward—but they couldn’t get past the guard. The doorman was a massive creature. He stood on the front step, punching and kicking like a hockey goalie in sudden-death overtime. The rumpus brought one of the club’s owners, James “Shimmy” Patton, to the door.
McNamee, a professional and proud of it, was back on his feet by now. Reflexively, he shot his cuffs, straightened his tie. “I’ve got a search and seizure warrant for this place,” he announced. He’d been joined on the doorstep by fellow assistant prosecutor Frank Celebrezze, who nodded tentatively.
Patton stared at the men. “The hell you do,” he snarled. The squat, pug-like gangster hadn’t been tipped off about a raid, so clearly McNamee and Celebrezze were here by mistake. “Where’s that goddam Cullitan?” he barked. He looked out into the beige winter evening, trying to locate Cuyahoga County prosecutor Frank T. Cullitan. He wanted to go straight to the top to register his complaint.
“He’s closing down the Thomas Club,” McNamee said.
Patton’s mind whirled. None of this made sense. The men McNamee and Celebrezze had brought with them clearly weren’t deputies. Cuyahoga County sheriff John Sulzmann worked closely with the suburban casinos. Sulzmann believed absolutely in what he called “home rule”—meaning the sheriff didn’t do anything about crime in a particular town unless the mayor specifically asked him to. Patton glared at the men stacked up in front of his doorman. He definitely didn’t see any badges.
The gangster snickered—it was a pathetic display of humanity arrayed before him—but he held himself in check. He understood the value of violence. He also understood that you didn’t start throwing haymakers at high-profile public officials unless you had to. “You fellows are prosecutors,” he told McNamee and Celebrezze. “You just step aside and let those other fellows you’ve got with you try to get in here. We’ll mow ’em down.”
By now the club’s security detail had arrived. Wielding Thompson submachine guns, they fanned out behind Patton like Ziegfeld girls.
“Anyone that goes in there gets their goddam head knocked off,” Patton declared, loud enough for everyone to hear.
The gangster’s “hard-boiled attitude” shocked McNamee and Celebrezze. They—and Cullitan—had figured even gangsters would stand aside when representatives of the county prosecutor, search warrant in hand, came calling. A wave of panic gripped the badgeless “special constables” behind the assistant prosecutors. They had been hired from the John J. McGrath Detective Agency for the night. They hadn’t expected this kind of trouble either. The private dicks yelled at Patton’s men to put down their weapons, to go back inside. The calls quickly grew high-pitched and shrill. Patton’s minions stood their ground.
The standoff continued for about half an hour, until a line of cars rolled up, blasting their horns. It was County Prosecutor Cullitan and more McGrath men, flush with victory. They’d met no resistance at the Thomas Club in Maple Heights. Cullitan climbed out of the lead car and buttoned up his coat. Looking around, he realized things hadn’t gone so smoothly here. After a brief consultation with McNamee, he approached Patton.
“Mr. Patton,” he said, “I’ve tried every decent way I could—”
The gangster stopped him with a raised hand. “No, you haven’t.” He meant Cullitan hadn’t tried pocketing bribes. He hadn’t tried looking the other way.
“This is my job to close this place,” the prosecutor said.
“Why don’t you quit your job?” Patton answered. He threw back his shoulders and smiled, pleased with himself.
At the gaming tables inside, gamblers slowly realized the standoff out front was serious. Some of them recognized the county prosecutor from his campaign signs. Shopkeepers and insurance agents and doctors started to stream out the back door. The notorious bank robber Alvin Karpis, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s foremost “public enemies,” coolly retrieved his coat from the money-counting room and sauntered into the night along with the panicked regulars. Employees began to load everything—the roulette wheels and slot machines and blackjack tables—into vans parked behind the building.
By this time, the private detectives in the front had put away their clubs and hunched in on themselves. They’d seen enough of those machine-gun barrels. They had wives and children they wanted to go home to. Arthur Hebebrand, Patton’s business partner, stepped outside to judge the situation. To make sure Cullitan understood their resolve, he told the prosecutor: “If an arrest is made, you won’t go out of here alive.” Cullitan believed him. He walked to a gas station, followed by a clutch of Patton and Hebebrand’s men. Finding a telephone box, he called the county sheriff’s office and pleaded for assistance. As expected, he was rebuffed. The message from Sulzmann: “Mr. Cullitan should call the mayor of Newburgh Heights and let him ask for assistance if he thinks he needs it. That is in accord with my home rule policy.” Cullitan slammed down the phone. He had already tried and failed to reach Newburgh Heights mayor Jerry Sticha.
He fished in his pocket for more change, picked up the receiver again.
***
Cleveland had plenty of gambling parlors. They were hidden behind storefronts and jammed into the back rooms of laundries. Anyone stepping into one of these rooms would not be impressed. They typically looked abandoned—except for the fact that they were filled with people. The Mob made millions of dollars every year on these ramshackle places.
In the suburbs, however, Cleveland’s gangs may have pocketed even more money from gambling than they did in the city, and they didn’t have to make much of an effort to disguise their operations. No one in the ’burbs seemed to know that gambling was illegal. That was because gangsters owned a handful of local governments in the towns surrounding Cleveland, especially to the southeast of the city. At the huge casinos in these burgs, you had to ring a buzzer at the front door, and you had to stare down a beady eye that peered at you through the sliding slot. But this was mostly just for show, for the fizz of illegitimacy that heightened the excitement of the experience.*
“Long before there was a Las Vegas, there was Cleveland, and its place on the gambling map was most prominent,” recalled reporter George Condon. The Thomas Club in Maple Heights and the Harvard Club in Newburgh Heights were the two best-known casinos in the region. The Harvard had grand pretensions. It was located in a former industrial building, but it had a fancy plantation-house facade stuck on the front. The club’s operators, Patton and Hebebrand, had recently taken over from the original owner, Billy Fergus. The police found Fergus buried in a limestone quarry, his head split open by three bullets. The Harvard’s staff wore crisp uniforms and showed off the latest games and equipment, most of which were fixed. The club had limousines on call to pick up gamblers in downtown Cleveland at any time of the day or night.
The Harvard Club boasted some eighteen hundred “members.” The Thomas had about two thousand. Forty years later, one member would recall the Thomas as “a clean-cut place. You never had any riff-raff out there. No stabbings, no crime and no bombings like you see all the time these days. They were very good to the people in the area. They employed people, helped the needy with coal in the winter and baskets of food, things like that. It was a really nice place to go to.”
Not everyone agreed with this assessment of the casino. The club had a “special window” for strapped gamblers to cash relief checks. One man tried to kill himself after a particularly disastrous night at the gaming tables. “Have my body cremated and give my ashes to the Thomas Club. They have everything else,” he wrote in a suicide note.
Decent people recognized that gambling was an evil, and they had facts on their side. No matter what the clubs’ members believed, the plain truth
was that the areas where gambling thrived had more robberies, assaults, and prostitutes than anywhere else. Cullitan certainly didn’t have to be convinced. He considered gambling a plague on civilized society. He believed he was doing God’s work when he set off for the suburbs that January afternoon, search warrant in his pocket.
***
The Cuyahoga County prosecutor tracked Eliot down at a city council meeting. An aide summoned the safety director to a nearby office to take the call.
“They’re threatening to open fire,” Cullitan heaved into the phone, his voice cracking with fear and stress. He told Eliot that the sheriff had refused to come to his assistance, that he was in a desperate situation. “We need help,” he said.
The first time Eliot had laid eyes on Frank T. Cullitan, a couple of weeks before, he couldn’t have been too impressed. The county prosecutor looked like a political hack at fifty paces. He had the fat red face and squinty pinprick eyes of the quintessential city hall hanger-on. He’d slap you on the back for no reason, his pendulous chin swinging, his laugh echoing down the long hall of the county courthouse, a laugh directed at nothing.
But first impressions could fool you. Eliot had heard good things about Cullitan. He’d heard he was honest. He’d heard he wanted to do the right thing. Burton said he admired the man, even though Cullitan was a Democrat. Eliot decided to give the prosecutor the benefit of the doubt.
“Hold everything,” he said into the phone. “I’m on my way.”
The new public safety director’s priorities were clear. When a reporter had asked him whether Cleveland would follow New York’s lead in cracking down on women wearing shorts in public, he had snorted derisively. “They may wear all the shorts they want to on the street,” he said. Eliot was a leg man—Edna had a great pair of stems—but that wasn’t the reason for his attitude. He was sending a bigger message: he didn’t care about the penny-ante stuff. New York officials could waste their time on things like public dress codes for women. He was Captain Ahab hunting his big fish. Cleveland, like Chicago before it, was overrun with gangsters. And gangsters undermined society and degraded their fellow man. The Mob and public corruption would be his focus.
Eliot called the county jail. He couldn’t believe the sheriff had refused Cullitan’s appeal for help. There must have been some sort of misunderstanding. “The prosecutor informs me he is in danger of his life,” he said. “Will you send him assistance?” The man on the line said Sulzmann was home with the flu and couldn’t be reached. Eliot didn’t know what to make of that response. “Will you go out or won’t you?” he demanded. Finally, he received a definitive answer: no.
Furious, Eliot drove over to Cleveland’s Central Police Station, where he rounded up men coming off duty. He asked for volunteers. This would be unofficial duty, he said. There would be no extra pay, and there might be danger. To his surprise, the men liked the sound of that. Forty-two officers agreed to go. Eliot clapped his hands. They would head out to Newburgh Heights in a convoy, he said. The mayor had already given his safety director the go-ahead, but only as backup to Cullitan’s men. Eliot and his officers were not to serve warrants or make arrests. They were acting as private citizens.
***
Even after that panicked call from Cullitan, Eliot was surprised at what he found along Harvard Avenue: a tense, crowded standoff that stretched into the street, blocking traffic. Prostitutes wearing little more than negligees and high heels lingered around the property’s periphery, wary of going back inside the club, unwilling to go home without a payday. At a nearby gas station, the county prosecutor stood against a wall, helpless, surrounded by “many tough-looking ‘birds.’”
“While the prosecutor’s deputies were laying siege to the Harvard Club, the prosecutor himself was besieged,” Eliot recalled later. “I would be unable to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. Even my fullest powers of description could not give you the picture as it was. I told our driver to open up his siren and split a way through the crowd.”
Eliot stepped out of the lead car and shook hands with Cullitan. The safety director was wearing a tan fedora and a long, camel’s-hair topcoat. He’d put on a crisp new shirt before heading out. “We are here to protect you, and to do that we must go where you go,” Eliot told him. He nodded toward the Harvard Club.
The two men crossed the street, followed by Eliot’s off-duty police officers. Eliot, to his surprise, realized that all of Cullitan’s private eyes were clumped in front of the building. When he’d told the prosecutor to hold everything, he meant to keep people from leaving the building. He’d assumed Cullitan’s hired guns had surrounded the place.
It was 10:30 by now; the standoff had been going on for five hours. The county prosecutor’s detectives had clearly lost their taste for battle. Eliot noticed newspapermen standing around, notepads in hand. Despite Mayor Burton’s orders, he decided to take charge.
He addressed his men: “Let’s have a fight here. All right? Let’s go.”
Eliot strode up to the club’s front door. He was unarmed, but the forty-two cops—“private citizens”—behind him wielded shotguns, pistols, truncheons, and tear-gas guns. Eliot hammered on the door and called out for the occupants to open up. The slider in the door flew back. “It’s Ness. It’s that goddam Eliot Ness,” someone inside the club said. Everyone had heard about the new safety director’s raids on Capone back in the day. The lock turned and the door swung open. Eliot disappeared inside. A moment later, he reappeared.
“All right,” he said to Cullitan, “let your men go in there and serve their warrants. We’ll back them up.”
Cullitan’s temporary constables, followed by newspapermen, marched into the room. The “Harvard men,” as Eliot would call them, fell back, but not very far. They wouldn’t let the McGrath detectives make their way beyond the front room. Eliot worried about keeping everyone cool. Looking outside, he saw that his officers were “just aching for something to happen.”
By this time the gangsters had locked themselves into the main gambling room. “I looked through a hole [in the door] and saw one big fellow with a revolver,” Eliot recalled. “I told Cullitan I thought gas was what we ought to use.” He must have said it rather loudly, because the Harvard men began heading for an exit at the back of the gambling room. Eliot kicked in the door, but by then the long, wide room was empty.
Back in the entryway, Cullitan’s men pulled a ladder down from a trapdoor in the ceiling. They climbed up, muscled aside a bulletproof glass shield, and found themselves in a low-ceilinged room with sniper slits cut into the floor. The openings allowed for machine guns to be trained on the gambling room and the money room.
Cullitan and his men pushed into the money room next. They had found $52,000 at the Thomas Club earlier in the evening. “And that was after [only] morning business,” a reporter noted. “Imagine the money that must have passed from the public to this one gambling house in a full day.” At the Harvard, they came away with nothing. Not a dime. They didn’t even have the proprietors. Hebebrand and Patton had stepped into the money room a few minutes earlier—ostensibly to retrieve their hats and coats for the ride downtown—but they didn’t come back out. They climbed through a hidden window near the ceiling and dropped ten feet to the ground behind the building. The McGrath detectives did a double take when they went in after them. The good guys just couldn’t do anything right tonight.
Cullitan no doubt was embarrassed that the hours-long standoff at the Harvard Club resulted in no arrests. He had what little was left in the building hauled away—chairs, tables, phones, adding machines. The next day he had phone service to the club shut down.
“We have achieved our purpose—to put the Harvard and Thomas clubs out of business,” he declared to reporters.
***
The next morning, Eliot woke up a hero.
“Eliot Ness last night showed the county of Cuyahoga in general and Sheriff John
M. Sulzmann in particular that his reputation as a zealous, courageous law enforcement officer is no publicity build-up,” wrote one reporter.
Eliot, faced with a scrum of reporters when he arrived at the office, praised the officers who had joined him on the raid—and puffed himself up as well. “It was a highly credible thing they did. . . . I went over to the station and found the boys just coming off duty and preparing to take off their uniforms and go home,” he said. “I told them the circumstances and informed them I was going out there if I had to go alone. I explained that I’d like to have some of them go along, but they didn’t have to volunteer. I told them I wouldn’t hold it against them if they didn’t go. Without an exception, they all agreed to go.” He then provided the newspapers with the names of the forty-two men.
Of course, he couldn’t leave it at that. The papers declared that he had proved something at the Harvard Club. That he had proved he had the right stuff for this job, that the Cleveland Mob was going to have a serious fight on its hands. Eliot liked the feel of all that praise. Speaking before a fawning audience at the Odovene Club a few days later, the safety director bragged shamelessly. “About the time we got there, a newspaper man came bounding out and told us the tough babies were ready for trouble,” he said. “That was a welcome sound, because we were afraid we were missing something.”
He insisted he never before “saw such a situation, not even when, in the government service, I lived with the Mafia or raided repeatedly the Capone outfit. Those fellows at the Harvard Club are called gamblers, but they certainly have learned the technique of gangsters. I am confident that if Cullitan had gone in there he would be dead today. They were not bluffing, but meant business.”
The subject of Sheriff Sulzmann inevitably came up, and Eliot gripped the podium. He now knew that Cuyahoga County’s sheriff was a crook, and he didn’t mind saying so, especially to make a broader point. Before he and his officers had headed for the Harvard that night, he’d sent his executive assistant, John Flynn, to the county jail to check on the situation there. Flynn “found six deputies just sitting—perhaps waiting for the millennium,” Eliot told his audience at the Odovene Club. He said the sheriff’s actions added up to dereliction of duty—and worse.
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