“In any city where corruption continues, it follows that some officials are playing with the underworld,” he said. “If town officials are committed to a program of protection, police work becomes exceedingly difficult, and the officer on the beat, being discouraged from his duty, decides it is best to see as little crime as possible.
“Now what about it?” he continued. “We hear the man on the street asking what harm there is in gambling. Now, I’m not a reformer, but let me tell you one or two things. Those gamblers said they had a gold mine out there. I am told that for $60,000 to $70,000 to change hands in one evening was not unusual. Is there any effect from that on legitimate business, do you think?”
After the reception he received at the Odovene Club, Eliot decided he wanted to keep the glowing headlines coming. He had planned on attacking the Cleveland Mob after reforming the police department; it was pointless to do so beforehand. But now he chose to go ahead and launch a hasty, very public assault on Mob-run gambling in the city. It would be an initial, probing thrust in anticipation of a much bigger push down the road; he was putting the gangs on notice. He told Lieutenant Michael Blackwell, a rising star in the department, to throw a scare into gamblers across the city, to get them twitching every time they heard the click of a shoe in the stairwell outside.
Blackwell could do that. The ambitious, honest young officer loved to kick in doors and yell, “This is the police!” In the weeks ahead, he and his men would charge into gambling rooms across the city, swinging sledgehammers and waving guns. They pounded furniture into kindling, ripped out telephone wires, blew open safes full of money. A later addition to the raiding team described how he became swept up by the fervor of the squad’s work:
The excitement generated in these raids was contagious, and I quickly found myself wading in alongside my fellow raiders, breaking a sturdy leg off of a heavy oak table or swinging a metal chair to demolish vulnerable gambling room equipment. The enormous exertion expended would leave me sweating and exhausted, but also exhilarated. I had struck a blow at the gambling gang owners whose activities and bribes were corrupting the police and other city officials.
Along with Blackwell’s actions, detectives began a sweep of the Third and Fourth Precincts to disrupt the Mob’s rotation of girls into its whorehouses, which often operated near gambling dens. The police moved out every girl in the district who couldn’t prove she had an established residence.
The push appeared to have an immediate effect. A local manufacturer of negligees and women’s silk underwear sent Eliot a letter declaring that, because of the crackdown, he had been “obliged to lay off almost half my factory help.” Eliot put the letter in a frame. The Plain Dealer exulted that “now the gamblers never know when the police will arrive or where and that uncertainty is no small factor in cutting down the evil here.” Letters to the editor poured into the newspapers in support of the safety director. “It is not only refreshing in thought but encouraging in civic spirit to find that we now have a director of public safety as independent in thought, fearless in action and supremely indifferent to the demands of the politicians as Eliot Ness has proved himself to be,” read a typical one.
Yet the gambling racket proved much more difficult to hurt than Eliot expected. Too often gambling operators did know when to expect a raid. Gambling was deeply entrenched in the community; police officers in every precinct protected it. Most of the places Blackwell and his men smashed to bits would reopen in another back room a few days later. The joints began to move around every day, making it impossible for the special unit to stay on top of them.
Even the Harvard Club was up and running again a couple of weeks after Eliot’s now-famous raid. Asked by a reporter about a rollicking new casino on Harvard Avenue, just down the street from the building Cullitan had shuttered, Newburgh Heights police marshal Frank Ptak offered a predictable response.
“I know nothing about it.”
CHAPTER 16
This Guy Ness Is Crazy
January was wreathed in darkness. A thick blanket of smoke had smothered the city for a month, squeezing out everything but a collective mood of gloom and anxiety. Cleveland “was well on its way toward winning the dubious honor of being known as ‘The Dark City,’” the Press wrote. The lack of sunshine wasn’t the only problem. A cold spell gripped the region, the worst in more than a year. In the early morning blackness of Sunday, January 26, the watchman at the Hart Manufacturing plant on East Twentieth Street periodically stopped during his foot patrols to stamp and shimmy in place. It didn’t help. The cold hit like a fast-acting poison. The watchman didn’t see anything suspicious during his shift. He didn’t see anything at all save for the dirty snow underfoot, the breath fogging the air in front of him.
It wasn’t until midmorning that anyone noticed the two baskets on the ground behind the factory. At about 11 a.m., a woman bent down and peeked under the burlap sacks that covered them. She continued on through an alley and around the corner to the White Front Meat Market on Central Avenue. She announced there was a basket of hams sitting against a wall behind the Hart building. The butcher, concerned that someone had broken into his shop overnight, went out to take a look. When he returned, shaken, he called the police.
Inside the baskets, detectives discovered two human thighs, an arm, a hand, and the lower part of a woman’s torso, all neatly wrapped in newspaper. The basket and its contents were coated in coal dust, suggesting an initial hiding place for the remains. Patrolmen began to scour the area. They found two pairs of white women’s underwear, also wrapped in newspaper.
Police identified the remains through fingerprints as those of a local barmaid, Florence Polillo, aka Florence Martin, Florence Sawdey, and Clara Dunn. The autopsy determined that “before her death, her entire reproductive system had been removed along with half her appendix.” The report indicated that “all the cut surfaces had clean edges,” meaning the dismemberment had been done with a surgeon’s skill.
The newspapers jumped on the gruesome discovery. They competed for the biggest, most startling headline—“Woman Slain, Head Sought in Coal Bins”—and offered up every lurid detail about the find. They catalogued the body parts, piece by piece, as if this could help readers solve the case. Only rarely—and incidentally—did they provide a glimpse of the victim as a real person. “She usually ironed on Saturday, and when I found she wasn’t there, I was worried,” her landlady told the Press. “She never gave us any trouble, and the only bad habit I noticed was that she would go out occasionally and get a quart of liquor—bad liquor, too—and drink it all by her lonesome in her room.” The city’s smallest paper, the Cleveland News, made a connection between the “hams” left behind the Hart building and the dismembered Lady of the Lake from more than a year before. The paper pointed out that police still didn’t have an ID for the victim of that now-forgotten 1934 case.
The Lady of the Lake wasn’t the only connection to be made. Four months before, in September 1935, a grisly double murder had baffled police. Two boys found a headless, emasculated man along a slope of Jackass Hill in Kingsbury Run, an industrial ghetto on the east side of the city. The corpse lolled on its side, as if the man had just drifted into a midday nap when something horrific happened. Drained of blood, he was naked except for cotton socks. Later in the day, another headless, emasculated corpse, older and stockier, was found nearby. A reddish-black discoloration to the bodies, like with the Lady of the Lake, led investigators to believe the killer had tried to burn the corpses. Sweeping the area, patrolmen stumbled over the heads and genitals in the underbrush.
The younger headless man was identified through fingerprints as Edward Andrassy, a twenty-nine-year-old knockabout and former psych-ward orderly. (The police weren’t able to identify the older man.) Investigators learned that Andrassy was an occasional marijuana dealer, and that a few weeks before his murder he had gotten into a bar fight with someone associated with the Mayfield Road Mob
, the city’s most powerful gang. His father said that “Edward lived in continual fear of his life.” The idea that his murder was a gang hit made some sense. This recent spate of bizarre killings might all be about the Mob sending some kind of message. Florence Polillo was a part-time prostitute, another racket run by the underworld. Middle-aged, chubby, and depressive, she wasn’t their kind of prostitute, but still, the Mob didn’t like freelancers. It was a long shot, but it was as good a guess as any.
Police worked the gangster angle of the Andrassy case hard. Tips poured into Central Station, overwhelming the secretarial staff, but not all the calls came from cranks. Dudley McDowell, a security officer for the New York Central Railroad, had spotted a swank green coupe in Kingsbury Run on numerous occasions before the double murder. Clean, expensive cars were a rarity in the Run. The coupe’s driver always scanned the area with binoculars from the top of Jackass Hill before climbing into the car and blasting away. McDowell, a professional, had taken down the car’s license-plate number as a matter of routine.
Through the plate number, police identified the car’s owner as Philip Russo. Detectives went to the man’s house on East 140th Street, but the place had been abandoned. Russo had disappeared.
***
Eliot took little interest in the gruesome case of the prostitute in the picnic baskets. It was one isolated murder, he figured. No doubt the work of a lunatic, someone who’d inevitably be caught soon. Besides, he was too wrapped up in the mundane details of his new job, the kind of details no reporter or headline writer could possibly find interesting. He was fascinated by the science of traffic safety, for example. Cleveland was one of the most dangerous cities in the country for motorists, and Eliot decided he would change that. He declared that the traffic division no longer would be “the Siberia of the police department.” Also the city’s police stations and firehouses were in terrible condition—vermin-ridden, moldering, filled with useless, antiquated equipment. He wanted to fix that, too.
The fire department was not one of Eliot’s top priorities during his first months in office, but that didn’t mean he neglected it. Though he had no experience with firefighting, he immediately reimagined the typical fire official’s typical day. He believed firemen should feel the same sense of urgency in their work, day in and day out, as police officers. He declared that when they weren’t fighting fires or taking care of their equipment, firemen should be focused on fire prevention, “instead of just hanging around in their fire stations waiting to respond to fire alarms.” He sent out orders that officials in each battalion would conduct daily—not weekly or monthly but daily—inspections of commercial and industrial buildings within their area. Faced with concerns about men being taken out of their firehouses, he announced that he would equip battalion cars with two-way radios, allowing inspectors to react just as quickly to a call as if they were in the station. Eliot ignored complaints from the department brass that he didn’t know what he was talking about. “People resent change,” he said with a shrug. “There are folks who start out: ‘This guy Ness is crazy.’ That’s part of the job.”
The city’s lawmakers, so far, were not among the resentful. With cheers for the Harvard Club takedown still rolling through the newspapers, Eliot convinced the council to pony up precious funding for the city’s first-ever police training school. He considered this a game-changing victory. Some big-city police departments offered formalized training to recruits—this was mostly started during Prohibition in response to the rapid rise in organized crime—but these continued to be the exceptions. Many departments, including Cleveland’s, simply handed new officers a badge and a gun on their first day and sent them out on the streets. They were expected to learn the job entirely by doing it, at best with tips and mentoring from veteran policemen.
Throughout the winter and spring, Eliot would oversee every aspect of the training school’s establishment and launch. He found classroom space, designed the curriculum, and selected the instructors. The instructors included local jiujitsu expert Dewey Mitchell, the police laboratory’s majordomo David Cowles, and various senior officers in the department. He selected trainees, too, personally recruiting student leaders at local colleges. (He also quietly recruited African Americans, believing they would do a better job policing their own neighborhoods than white officers.)
Eliot made it clear to the academy’s first class that they would be a new breed of police officer in Cleveland. “If people have been accustomed to giving you things for nothing prior to your becoming a policeman, I suppose it’s all right for you to continue to accept those things,” he told the group of cadets. “However, if people who never gave you anything for free before now want to give you something without charge, you can conclude they are buying your badge and uniform.”
Along with giving advice, Eliot served as an instructor, too. He especially enjoyed helping out with the self-defense courses. The Press ran a series of photos of the young, good-looking safety director showing off holds and escape moves. “Suppose you were a bandit and told Safety Director Eliot Ness to ‘stick ’em up,’” the paper offered. “He might surprise you in any one of 30 different ways. And the next thing you’d know, you’d be on the ground. You might have a broken leg, a broken arm or ‘just be stunned.’”
“He has become as quick as a cat,” Dewey Mitchell said proudly.
By now, a legend had been born. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be Eliot Ness. Mayor Burton’s son, a college student, asked his father if he could spend the summer working for the safety director. By the end of Billy Burton’s first week, Eliot had him staking out a bookie joint. Before school let out, Eliot spoke to hundreds of elementary-school boys who sported their official Dick Tracy badges. “You have a badge just like mine,” Eliot said, prompting a wave of cheers and whistles. At about the same time, an unshaven man in a dirty overcoat walked into the mayor’s office and told the secretary he was there for his meeting with the mayor. When asked for his name, he said “Eliot Ness.” He disappeared before security arrived. A few days later, the same man walked into the safety director’s office, sat down at Eliot’s desk and got to work. This time, one of Eliot’s men grabbed him. He was turned over to police for a psychiatric evaluation.
CHAPTER 17
The Boy Wonder
Frank Cullitan turned in his chair and looked up. The county prosecutor’s face—“as Irish as the keeper of the Blarney Stone,” in one colleague’s phrase—broke into a warm smile. Despite Cullitan’s welcoming countenance, Neil McGill hesitated at the door. The fifty-two-year-old chief assistant prosecutor had been a farm kid; you could still see it in the sidelong way he entered a room, in the wary squint of his eyes when he met someone new. He always looked ready to take a heavy blow.
“Want you to meet Eliot Ness, our new safety director,” Cullitan said, waving McGill in.
Eliot, sitting across from Cullitan, leapt to his feet. “Glad to know you, McGill,” he said, grasping the lawyer’s hand.
McGill, a formal man of the old school, “felt a slight twinge of resentment at this free-and-easy use of my surname on first meeting.” He was Mister McGill even to longtime associates. He indicated his displeasure by offering a testy greeting in return, calling Eliot simply “Ness”—that would show him.
McGill wasn’t sure what to make of the man standing before him. The safety director had managed to get himself in the papers quite a lot during his first two months on the job, and he’d come off looking a whole lot better than McGill’s boss, Cullitan, with the raid on the Harvard Club. Looking him over, the assistant chief prosecutor could reach only one conclusion: he sure was young. McGill examined Eliot’s “boyish face and disconcerting and disarming boyish smile.” He decided he “just did not appear mature enough to cope with the Mayfield Mob, the policy and other rackets, the payoffs to the corrupt police and the racketeering in labor circles.”
Eliot would get a lot of that in the weeks and months ahea
d.
The three men sat down in the large, cluttered office. The flagpoles outside thrummed in the wind. The lake, visible in the distance, shifted like a sour stomach. “Your move, Mr. Ness,” Cullitan said.
Eliot got right to it. He was going to move aggressively, he told the two men. He wanted full cooperation in his investigations. And he wanted that cooperation no matter how much political pressure came with it—and there would be political pressure. It was an impressive, forceful call to arms, offered up in plain language. This young man who seemed so insubstantial at first glance now showed McGill that “behind that boyish smile was grim determination and the will to do a thorough job.”
Cullitan answered Eliot, but he addressed himself to McGill. “Needless to say, Mr. Ness will get the full cooperation of this office. You, as chief assistant county prosecutor, will be playing an important role, along with Mr. Ness, in cleaning up the city.”
McGill nodded, his enthusiasm for the conversation building. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “Where do we start?”
“At the logical place. We start at the source,” Eliot said. “This thing called ‘vice and corruption’ is a many-headed serpent. We’re going to start by lopping off those heads, one at a time, and let the chips fall where they may. Both of you know, as well as I do, that crime cannot flourish in any city without protection, police protection, and I have reason to believe that the crooks and gangsters are getting plenty of it in Cleveland. So we start with the police.”
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