Eliot Ness

by Douglas Perry

  McGill turned to Cullitan. The county prosecutor grinned in reply. Yes, you’re hearing what you think you’re hearing, the grin said.

  McGill had figured Eliot Ness would ratchet up his move against the gambling rackets, for that would allow him to lead late-night raids—and heroically kick down doors—with the press watching. Everyone understood that to effectively pursue organized crime in Cleveland, you had to address police corruption, but for years honest safety directors and police chiefs had ignored the rot in the police department while doing the best they could against the Mob. (The dishonest ones sat on their hands entirely, or worse.) If a safety director actually went after the real problem, he knew that one wrong step—firing a politically connected cop, for example—could end his tenure. But the new safety director wasn’t one of the boys and didn’t seem to care about his political future in the city.

  “It’s going to be hard getting evidence against the police,” Cullitan said. Police corruption hadn’t been tackled in Cleveland partly because previous city administrations had been partners in the dirty game. But another reason, the prosecutor pointed out, was that even the honest cops were loath to rat out their colleagues. That brought Eliot to his feet.

  They would have to depend on “unconventional witnesses,” the safety director said.

  “Any offender that will come forth and testify against the police will be granted immunity from prosecution, as well as protection against retaliation,” he continued. “We’re going to promise them both. We’re going to contact every known offender in this city, if we have to go all the way back to 1920. Any offender who will come forth and testify will get both immunity and protection. In fact, my men are already at work.”

  McGill told Eliot he was ready to get started. He actually had a lump in his throat. He would vividly remember this meeting for the rest of his life. It was risky to go after dirty cops in this city, and it was a risky strategy to use known criminals against them in court. They had never tried it in Cleveland—certainly not on the scale and with the seriousness Eliot was proposing.

  The young safety director broke out that disarming smile. He stood and shook McGill’s hand and then Cullitan’s, seemingly well pleased with himself. “Well,” he said, “I must be about my master’s work.” He promised to be in touch, turned, and strode from the room.

  Cullitan closed the door behind Eliot, swiveled to look at his chief assistant, and let out a long, jaunty whistle.

  ***

  Cullitan and McGill might have wondered what Eliot meant when he said his men were already at work. The safety director’s office didn’t come with much of a staff, and police departments didn’t yet have internal-affairs divisions. But with the success of the Harvard raid, the world had opened up for Eliot. Now that his director was being celebrated around the city, Mayor Burton had no trouble coming up with the funds to hire a handful of secret investigators, answerable only to Eliot (and the mayor). Burton’s chamber of commerce supporters had indeed had enough of the padded costs that came from the Mob’s protection rackets, which affected everything from truck deliveries to janitorial services. And now, quite suddenly, they believed something could be done about them. So the money came in, and Eliot quickly made the hires. Having built up a bulky dossier on the area’s bootleggers and their accomplices while at the Alcohol Tax Unit, Eliot had excellent leads to get them started. His key hires, in fact, came from the ATU along with his files—including Keith Wilson and Tom Clothey, who had helped raise Eliot’s profile when the new mayor was looking for a director.

  The team became known around the city’s newsrooms by a catchy nickname, the Unknowns, a sly nod toward Eliot’s famous Capone squad in Chicago. Which, of course, meant that this new team wasn’t exactly, well, unknown. Reporters who had sat through a boring budget meeting one night had learned that Flynn, Eliot’s executive assistant, officially would be in charge of a small group of “civilian investigators who will visit precinct stations and inspect the work of policemen on beats and in cruising squads.” Flynn, a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer and former Notre Dame football player, seemed ideally suited for such a role. He was six feet four inches tall, with broad shoulders, slicked-back hair, and the kind of abbreviated lip rug that Germany’s new fascist leader was making fashionable. He looked more like a gung-ho safety director than his boss. Flynn told the city’s financial officers that the new men under his charge would not be “spies.”

  It hardly mattered that the team’s cover had been blown. By the end of the Unknowns’ very first week, everyone in the Roaring Third and other corruption hot spots was aware that new cops were poking around, even if they didn’t know whom exactly the men worked for. Wilson and Clothey were the lead investigators on the “secret” squad, but, as he made clear when he was hired, Eliot wasn’t going to sit around and let others have all the fun. He gave Flynn authority to make bureaucratic decisions in his absence, and he began disappearing from the office for days at a time. “No fox hound ever hit the trail quicker than Ness hit the trail of the corrupt police,” said McGill.

  Eliot pushed himself hard, starting work early every morning and staying at it deep into the night. “Time meant nothing to him when he was on the job,” said Cleveland police deputy inspector Frank Story, who would sometimes cross paths with Eliot late at night. For days at a time, just like during the Untouchables’ period, Edna saw her husband only in passing. Flynn saw him little more than that. Eliot’s undercover investigators followed their boss’s example. Most of them were young and single, and so they didn’t have anyone at home to miss them.

  Eliot knew the police force was in bad shape, but what he found truly shocked him. Officers weren’t just taking bribes to look the other way. Well-organized cliques in almost every precinct operated as miniature crime families, with patrolmen kicking up to sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. Some officers acted as actual enforcers for racketeers; other cops ran their underworld bosses’ competition out of business through repeated raids that earned the officers promotions and public praise. Honest policemen were bullied into silence or slowly reeled into the malfeasance.

  The Unknowns began following leads to restaurants and bars, to fruit carts and newsstands and laundries, promising immunity for cooperation. They met wary shop owners who offered up stony silence; no one wanted to put their business and possibly their life at risk to testify against something that had long been normal operating procedure in the city. “Patrolman Who?” they’d say. “Pay tribute—what’s that?” You couldn’t blame them for the dumb act. New administrations always promised to act against corruption, but none ever did, not really. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince people that this time was different.

  Eliot made his objective clear to the public, stating baldly: “We have no place for traitors in the police department. We want to know on which team every man is playing, Cleveland’s or the underworld’s.” Then the safety director himself scored the investigation’s first significant witness when he convinced a fifty-six-year-old widow, the owner of an East Side social club, to end years of silence. The woman believed that harassment by police officers demanding bribes had helped lead her husband to an early grave, but she’d never dared say it out loud—until Eliot showed up on her door. Eliot excelled at getting people to disgorge information they had no intention of ever telling anyone. There was something about his boyish seriousness that could be hypnotizing. It was a hair’s breath from being ridiculous—it seemed so self-conscious, so careful, like little Oliver Twist asking for more. Sitting down with the widow, the safety director used his earnestness to devastating effect. He quietly cajoled her into admitting she’d been a party to public corruption—and then agreed with her that officers who’d sworn to uphold the law had taken advantage of her. Sure enough, the dam broke, and long-repressed emotions poured out. The woman swung from tears to anger as Eliot listened. “Line them up, director,” she finally told him. “Line up the police d
epartment and I’ll show you every crook.”

  Eliot was prepared to do exactly that. This woman told him that during the Prohibition years she and her husband had paid Cleveland police officers $10,000 in protection money, not including $150 she forked over at Central Station one night to have a liquor arrest “fixed.” Better yet, he didn’t just have to take her word for it. The couple had carefully put down every payoff in a ledger book.

  “My husband was forced to buy all kinds of tickets from the police,” she would tell a grand jury. “Generally, they cost $3 and $5 a piece and he always took at least two. Once when I asked Pa if he was going to a police clambake he had just bought a ticket for, he said: ‘No. That was held last week.’ My husband always paid. He never argued with them. I used to get mad when police would come in from other precincts, but my husband would say: ‘Keep quiet, now. This is all right.’”

  What particularly infuriated her was that the police didn’t play by the rules they had made up. They’d arrest the couple whenever they needed a bust or just to show them who was boss. “About seven years ago Sergeant ______ came in with two cops,” she said. (The officers’ names were redacted from grand jury documents.) “They arrested me, put me in the squad car and took me to central station. There I waited in the courtroom for a long time while the police went into the judge’s office. Finally I told them I had to go home, that my husband was sick and the children would be home for lunch. They went into the judge’s office again and came out and said I had been discharged. They put me in the squad car and on the way they told me the ‘fix’ would cost $150. When I got home I got the money from my husband and handed it over to the Sergeant.”

  The woman insisted that for seven years three patrolmen came into the club twice every week and she gave them $10 each. “I bought off everyone except the feds. . . . I had to pay police protection before I could pay my rent.” She said she also had to give officers free liquor, chickens, and other food. She ultimately identified thirty-seven police officers who’d “badgered” her for money.

  Not to be outdone by their boss, the Unknowns soon collected reams of testimony from dozens of their own witnesses. The investigators mostly focused on the Prohibition years, 1920 to 1933, for bar owners and former bootleggers no longer had to worry about prosecution for Volstead violations. Said one saloonkeeper: “I didn’t mind paying the $25 a month or more, but after work the police would come to my bar and drink free and eat all my free lunch. Sometimes there wasn’t room at the bar for paying customers.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Right to the Heart of Things

  When Clayton Fritchey arrived at his desk in the Cleveland Press’s newsroom one early January morning in 1936, he found an imposing man in work clothes waiting for him. Gus Korach had come to see Fritchey because the Slovenian immigrant was worried he’d made a big mistake. He was right—and it was a mistake that would have profound repercussions for the Cleveland Police Department.

  Korach had put $2,000—his entire savings—into cemetery lots. The salesman, who’d shown up at Korach’s door unannounced, had convinced him it was an easy, no-risk investment. The man didn’t mention it was illegal in Ohio to resell cemetery lots for a profit. Korach knew that many of his neighbors had already invested in lots. He’d heard some of them crowing about all the money they were going to make. So he bought eighty of them. But the more the laborer thought about it, the more he wondered if he’d gotten himself into something shady. And now he couldn’t find the salesman.

  Korach came to Fritchey because the reporter, with his plainspoken prose and working-class sympathies, wrote for men like Korach. This was not a writerly pose. There was nothing slick about Fritchey. He had heavy brown hair that rolled back across his scalp in placid waves. His thick forehead, backlit by small, lively blue eyes, suggested a gritty kind of worldliness. He’d grown up in Baltimore, where his father worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. At fourteen, Fritchey dropped out of school. He worked as a seaman, on the railroads, and at various menial jobs before ending up, at nineteen, as a rookie reporter for the Baltimore American. In 1934, at thirty, he moved to Cleveland, where he quickly made a name for himself as a hard-hitting city reporter for the Press.

  Fritchey told Korach he would look into the situation, and later that day he began interviewing other Clevelanders who had received visits from cemetery-lot salesmen. Within days he would report on the Press’s front page that a group of charlatans was preying on recent immigrants. The outfit had sold more cemetery lots than Cleveland would need for five hundred years. Once Fritchey’s story hit print, and prosecutors jumped in, the racket unraveled quickly, leading the cemetery salesmen to scatter and their boss to commit suicide.

  That appeared to be the end of it—except for one loose end that bothered the reporter. The name John L. Dacek, one of the scam’s operators, had come up repeatedly in Fritchey’s investigation, but neither Fritchey nor prosecutors had been able to track the man down. The name sounded familiar to Fritchey, but he couldn’t place it—and he couldn’t leave it alone. Finally, after he’d spent hours one night staring at evidence he’d collected, the letters of Dacek’s name reordered themselves into one he knew well: Cadek.

  Louis Cadek was a well-known police captain, and police reporters had long suspected he was as dirty as an oil slick. The lumbering cop, weighing in at three hundred pounds, had been booted from the department in 1933 for dereliction of duty, but he managed to gain reinstatement shortly after Harry Davis’s election the following year, Davis’s second term in the mayor’s office after an absence of fifteen years. When Davis became mayor the first time, in 1915, Cadek’s rank suddenly jumped to sergeant, then lieutenant, and then captain in rapid succession. And he began to move around; ultimately he would be transferred twenty-eight times in thirty years. But this constant movement from one assignment to the next wasn’t because no one wanted him around. He was on a Cleveland cop’s version of the grand tour. He followed the money: from the Eleventh Precinct, home turf of the Mayfield Road Gang, to the Fourth, ground zero of the prostitution trade, to the Third, where illicit gambling and drinking clubs thrived. The big man was one of the most powerful cops on the street. Fritchey thrilled at the possibility of bringing him down.

  It didn’t take long to find the stink. Fritchey learned that Cadek owned two “de luxe automobiles” that typically would be beyond a police officer’s price range. The reporter dug deeper—and discovered that Cadek had $139,000 stashed away in accounts in a handful of out-of-the-way banks, most of them under false names.* Canvassing Cadek’s recent precincts, he made a list of storeowners, bootleggers, bookies, and small-time crooks who paid the captain for protection. Then he did something strange. Instead of going to his editor with his discoveries, he went to the safety director’s office.

  ***

  Eliot’s wariness quickly fell away as Fritchey described what he’d found out about Captain Louis Cadek. The reporter explained to Eliot that he considered journalism a public service. That meant he was willing to work with law enforcement when he deemed it appropriate—as long as he got first crack at putting the story into print. Eliot took him up on the offer. After a two-hour private meeting about Cadek, he pulled Fritchey into his police-corruption investigation, essentially making him one of the Unknowns. The next day, the Press reporter opened up his notebook for the team. He quickly bonded with the investigators in the office, as well as with the safety director himself. Wilson and Clothey admired Fritchey’s smarts and drive. The three of them began to go out in the field together to conduct interviews. “Clayton was the best investigative reporter in Cleveland. He was able to get information of great value to Eliot,” said Arnold Sagalyn, who was one of Eliot’s Unknowns and would become a friend of Fritchey’s. “He knew how to get right to the heart of things.”

  Fritchey’s reporting was so solid that little more than a month after the newspaperman came on board, Eliot was ready to move on Cadek.
The safety director wanted the captain to be the test case that would show him—and Cullitan and Burton—whether Cleveland was ready to get serious about ending police corruption. In April, Eliot suspended Cadek from duty and ordered him to appear in his office for questioning on “a departmental matter.” Cadek refused the order. His attorney, Gerard J. Pilliod, showed up in his stead and handed the safety director a statement that denied wrongdoing and accused “political enemies” of plotting his downfall. Eliot accepted the statement with a smile; he now could add insubordination to his list of charges against the captain. The next day, with the Unknowns pushing forward in their broad-ranging investigation of the police department, Cullitan began presenting evidence to a grand jury, pointing out that Captain Cadek had somehow accumulated more than one hundred thousand dollars in savings even though his total salary over thirty years as a policeman came to only $67,966. Cullitan’s case would have nothing to do with the cemetery scam that had first brought Cadek to Fritchey’s attention. Eliot was determined to convict Cadek for being a corrupt cop, not for being a run-of-the-mill shyster. Nine former bootleggers appeared before the grand jury to admit they had given the police captain bribes for years. Some said they had paid him every month thinking he was collecting for his whole precinct. On the last day of testimony, a dim-bulb mobster wannabe came to the courthouse looking for his brother, one of the witnesses on call. “Where’s my brother?” he asked a reporter in the hallway. “The gang told me to tell him to keep his mouth shut. He might be put on the spot for what he told.” The hack shared the exchange with Eliot, who dragooned the reporter onto the witness list.

  The case moved with lightning speed. Cadek was indicted on five counts of bribery, and in May he went on trial. On the first day, dozens of men and women crowded the courtroom, keen to get a look at the big cop they’d been reading about in the papers. Wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer the next morning: