Eliot Ness

by Douglas Perry

  Two and two make four, the earth circles about the sun, and a bootlegger will never talk, they said.

  Yesterday in a courtroom the prohibition era was referred to as some almost unbelievable period in history. In the same courtroom a bootlegger began to talk.

  Not just one—a dozen of them. John Brodzinski, known as Johnny Brodie, testified that Cadek had told him one rainy October day during Prohibition that he wished he had “a little car.” Brodie responded, “That ought to be easy enough, captain; I’ll see what can be done.” The next day, after passing the collection plate among his fellow bootleggers, Brodie delivered a brand-new Hudson. Other former bootleggers told of being raided out of business when they balked at the captain’s shakedowns. Former speakeasy proprietors testified that their customer base suddenly dried up when they refused to pay protection money. Cullitan presented evidence, carefully prepared by Eliot and Fritchey, that in the late 1920s Cadek had made large deposits at local banks for the wife of bootlegger Joseph Antoszewski, and that he had presented $5,000 worth of Pyramid Savings & Loan passbooks to the bootlegger’s daughter. The prosecutor even suggested that Cadek and Mrs. Antoszewski were having an affair while her husband was in prison.

  The trial ran on the front page of the city’s newspapers day after day. Readers couldn’t get enough. After all, this was unprecedented. Cadek, pointed out the Plain Dealer, was the first policeman “ever to face trial here for bribery.” Everyone knew that bootleggers had corrupted police officers by the trainload during Prohibition, but now, for the first time, Clevelanders were hearing the bootleggers themselves admit they had “made allies of those whose business it was to enforce the law.” Police reporters saw it as a turning point, a come-to-Jesus moment for a department that had been corrupted at every level.

  On May 26, a jury convicted the fifty-two-year-old police captain on four counts of accepting and soliciting bribes from bootleggers. The five men and seven women deliberated for just an hour before reaching a verdict. Cadek didn’t take the witness stand during the trial, but in the hallway afterward, waiting to be transported to the county jail, he spoke up. “A good guy always gets kicked around,” he told a deputy. The deputy agreed.

  Reporters caught up to Cadek when he was being booked. The police captain stared straight ahead at some distant nothingness as the hacks threw questions at him. When he was led from the room, he finally turned to the reporters and smiled. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  By the time he arrived at the jail half an hour later, his bravura had deflated. He felt sick to his stomach. Still wearing the white straw hat and light-colored suit he’d picked out for court, Cadek sat on his cot for hours, staring at the floor, barely moving. He refused dinner. At seven that evening, jailers removed him from his cell and took him to the hospital ward. He was having a panic attack.

  “Captain Louis J. Cadek, the man who commanded bootleggers to ‘pay up or go to jail,’ today himself awoke in County Jail to contemplate the price he will have to pay as a convicted bribetaker,” Fritchey triumphantly wrote for the front page of the Press, finally getting to tell the story he’d had in his hip pocket for more than a month.*

  The reporter didn’t know it yet, but he and Eliot were just getting started.

  CHAPTER 19

  Victim No. 4

  A little after midnight on Saturday, June 6, a wave of excitement snapped through the crowd. Finally, the line was moving forward again.

  The first group had walked through the morgue’s ornate, Egyptian Revival halls early in the evening. News of the horrors they’d seen spread quickly. Now the line swung around the outside of the massive concrete building on Ninth Street, made a sharp turn, and stretched past the Cuyahoga County Courthouse two long blocks away.

  They had all come out to see the latest victim. The head, which the coroner had determined had been neatly severed while the man was still alive, lay on a gray metal gurney outside the morgue’s freezer room, waiting patiently for a passerby to recognize it. The head had been swaddled in white towels in hopes of giving the impression of an intact corpse. Police officials, deeply divided over the macabre exhibit, feared women would scream or pass out when they realized just what they were looking at.

  Of course, most of the people in the queue wanted the grotesque shock. They knew they weren’t going to be able to identify the man or provide the police with a valuable clue. They just wanted to see the poor soul for themselves. Inside the morgue’s front doors, the sharp odor of preservatives and bleach swept over visitors, sticking to the nasal cavities like peanut butter, making sensitive stomachs twist and loop. The women in particular must have felt regret at the sight of the head, which had been found the previous morning in Kingsbury Run. Like Edward Andrassy, he was young and good-looking, with straight black hair swept back from his forehead. It was the face of a rogue, an adventurer—the kind of face no young woman could possibly resist. So far, more than a thousand men, women, and children had filed past the dead man’s head. Many more would follow over the next few hours, before morgue workers shooed away the remaining lookie-loos and slipped the head into a freezer.

  He would become known as Victim No. 4. (The Lady of the Lake would not officially be put on the bloody ledger.) The police were desperate for an identification—the faster the better. By now, they felt sure that the four macabre killings were not coincidences. Cleveland had a serial killer.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Original Mystery Man

  The constant stream of news about Eliot’s police-corruption investigation—and even the more recent blaring headlines about a “maniac killer” on the loose—couldn’t bring Clevelanders down. Big things were afoot, exciting things. In the first sign that the economy finally might be improving, the city had lined up more than a hundred and fifty conventions and trade shows for 1936, ranging from the Loyal Ladies of the Royal Arcanum Supreme Council to the biggest catch out there, the Republican National Convention, which promised drama and excitement as the highly motivated opposition sought a candidate to defeat President Roosevelt.

  But best of all would be something even grander than the Grand Old Party: the homegrown Great Lakes Exposition. Boosters had come up with the idea of a huge, summer-long bash. They billed it as a celebration of the city’s centennial, but its real purpose was to lift Cleveland’s reputation around the country and thus help pull it out of the Depression. The organizers sought to make it bigger and better than Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933. They were determined to outshine even the Nazi Olympics, scheduled to kick off in Berlin a month after the Cleveland Expo’s launch. Headed by philanthropist and former city welfare director Dudley S. Blossom, the civic committee had quickly drummed up $1.5 million, including sizable donations from Standard Oil of Ohio, Republic Steel, Bell Telephone, Sherwin-Williams, The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, and U.S. Steel.

  Early in the year, police cleared out Tin Can Plaza for the exposition grounds. The campus would stretch from West Third Street to about East Twentieth Street, including the lakefront, the downtown Mall, the Public Hall auditorium, and Municipal Stadium, where Major League Baseball’s Indians played. All told, the exposition would take up 125 acres, a fair amount of it reclaimed from decrepitude. After years with virtually no new construction, a series of impressive new buildings suddenly rose into the sky downtown, along with a huge bandshell and a temporary “International Village.” To connect downtown with the lakefront, the Expo built a 350-foot bridge over the railroad tracks. The city laid down fifteen miles of new asphalt roads and installed new water and sewer lines. Expo construction put nearly three thousand men to work.

  The plumped-up work rolls were great, but no one forgot that the point was to bring out-of-towners—and their money—to Cleveland. This exposition would not be highbrow. Scheduled to open on June 27 for a hundred-day run, there would be bathing-beauty contests, fan dancers, and three dozen showgirls “5 feet 6 in
ches and upward.” There would be boxers, prestidigitators, comedians, midgets, circus animals, dueling orchestras, and a rotation of celebrities such as Xavier Cugat and Ted Weems. Let Adolf Hitler top that.

  Officially, the Expo was a family-friendly extravaganza, but city officials decided to be liberal in their definition. Sex, after all, was what the public wanted. “They have forced it on us,” insisted Almon Shaffer, who was in charge of concessions. “The pressure has been so great no man could stand against it. . . . You have no notion how popular sex is with a lot of people.” The triumphant French Casino nightclub exhibit, one of the biggest buildings in the International Village, promised “Callipygian Beauties Treading Pavanes and Rigadoons in Diaphanous Garments that Will Be the Talk of All America!” Mayor Burton ordered bras painted on the nude posters outside the nightclub, but he offered no comment on the braless ladies inside. He didn’t need to. The women spoke up for themselves. “I feel wicked as hell—I’ve never appeared this nude before, and my family don’t know what to think,” admitted Trudye Mae Davidson, who, as Toto Leverne, was the French Casino’s headliner. A nearby stall called the Little French Nudist Colony went further still. For twenty-five cents, customers received a four-minute peep through special windows at live naked girls lounging around a bath. What saved the show from the censors: “trick lighting and reflecting processes” that reduced the girls to four inches in size and gave thousands of squinting men headaches.*

  Beauty came in many forms at this exposition—including huge. The heroic figure Beauty—along with its male counterpart, Protection—rose above the campus like the Second Coming, nude save for a slash of plaster cloth across her privates. Eliot surely noticed the mammoth sculpture when he walked through the exposition grounds during a safety inspection at the beginning of June. He also must have noticed the artwork’s creator. Everyone else did. The contrast between artist and art was extreme, so much so that a reporter couldn’t help but comment on it in print. “The enormous statues that will greet visitors to the Great Lakes Exposition this summer measure 12 feet from toe to top, but the sculptress responsible for them is not much more than 5 feet tall . . . in high heeled shoes,” the reporter wrote.

  Elisabeth Andersen Seaver, with her bulbous cheekbones and petite figure, could fire a man’s imagination more than any statue ever could. No one was ever surprised to learn she was taken. The beautiful thirty-year-old sculptress was the wife of architect and watercolorist Hugh Seaver. Hugh had a solid reputation in the city, but Elisabeth was making a name for herself entirely separate from her husband. Her talent had brought her into the spotlight against her better nature. Throughout her life, teachers, clerks, and friends would misspell her name—with a “z” instead of an “s” for the first name, and an “o” instead of an “e” for her maiden name. The placidly acquiescent Elisabeth—Betty to her friends—sometimes spelled it wrong, too, rather than correct someone else’s mistake. When she came out of the Cleveland School of Art in 1927, adjunct instructor Guy Cowan tapped her to work at his influential pottery, an impressive first job for any new art-school graduate. The Cowan Pottery produced arguably the finest, most distinctive commercial pottery in the country, helping define the city’s art movement. Her signature work for Cowan was Spanish Dancers, a seductive, nine-inch-tall decorative piece that one critic called “spirited . . . very modern in treatment, simple and stylized without being in the least extreme.” Following a brief tenure at the pottery, she won repeated first-place honors at the May Show, the city’s popular annual art competition. Her success became a source of discord in her marriage, for Hugh could be petulant and insecure. Elisabeth nevertheless graduated to more ambitious work, including stone-relief panels at the city hall of her hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a public fountain in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Now, back in Cleveland, she was embracing epic statuary. Hugh didn’t like it, which made Elisabeth feel guilty, but she kept working. She wanted to have her own life.

  Elisabeth spent long days on the exposition grounds, high up on scaffolding, the fragile rack of her shoulders tilted into the lake’s snapping wind. The commission from Sherwin-Williams had come in at the last possible moment—less than a month before the statues needed to be finished and in place on the Mall, where they would bookend the performance space occupied nightly by the Great Lakes Symphony Orchestra. She had cast the pieces with two tons of clay and was now lacquering them to survive a hundred days in the sun. “It’s a twelve-hour-a-day job,” she said a week before the Expo’s official launch. “I start in at 7:30 a.m. and am lucky to leave by 7:30 in the evening.”

  Elisabeth’s dedication to her work was impressive, but it was not monomaniacal. From her perch near the top of ten-foot-high scaffolding, she noticed Cleveland’s director of public safety moving about the grounds on his inspection tour, his hat pulled low on his head, topcoat flapping behind him. That’s a very attractive man, she thought when she caught her first live glimpse of Eliot Ness. Below her, the city’s celebrated safety director had to stop every few strides to shake hands with Expo workers who stepped into his path. Elisabeth didn’t climb down to join the crowd on the director’s trail. She didn’t like to be pushy. But she made a mental note to secure an introduction.

  ***

  Focused as always on work, Eliot decided there should be a police exhibit at the Expo featuring a fingerprint service. He believed this simple booth would help solve crimes in the region for years to come by bulking up the department’s noncriminal fingerprint files. Officers manning the stall would take one hundred thousand prints during the Expo’s one hundred days. Eliot also prominently displayed Victim No. 4’s plaster death mask in hopes of identifying the man. Just as it had at the morgue, the man’s striking face was an irresistible draw, with many Expo-goers lingering in front of the display for long minutes. Alas, no one came forward with the man’s name.

  Preparations for the Expo were a distraction from the police-corruption investigation, but by the time the extravaganza opened to the public, the safety director had identified his next target: Captain Michael J. Harwood of the Fourteenth Precinct. For months, a city councilman named Anton Vehovec had been insisting that Harwood and his men looked the other way on organized vice in his district. Harwood dismissed the councilman’s claims. “Vehovec has made a mountain out of a molehill,” he said. “This vice stuff is greatly exaggerated.” The councilman, the police captain suggested, was a buffoon who just wanted attention.

  Incensed by Harwood’s insult, Vehovec asked Eliot to take a walk with him through the district. He said he would show him a booking joint run by Harwood’s son. Eliot didn’t know what to think of the accusation—Harwood was right that Vehovec was a blowhard—but he took the councilman up on the offer. Late on the morning of June 6, at about the same time that Victim No. 4 was being put on public display at the city morgue, Eliot, Vehovec, Detective Walter Walker, and a couple of reporters came up to 1775 Ivanhoe Road NE. The front of the building housed a restaurant, but it was obvious something else was going on. There were men in the corner booths on each side who clearly weren’t patrons; Eliot and Walker pegged them as lookouts. The men in the booths froze when they realized it was the city’s safety director staring them down. Over just a few minutes, more than two dozen men entered the restaurant—and went straight through to the back. Eliot and Walker followed them and discovered a buzzer for entering a room behind the kitchen. Even though he didn’t have a search warrant, the safety director decided it was “imperative to enter.”

  Eliot tried the buzzer, but he couldn’t gain access. So Detective Walker began pounding on the door with a brick. When they finally made it into the room, they found the back door wide open. There were twelve men remaining in the room, the floor littered with gambling receipts. Eliot and the detective grilled the men, most of whom were drunk. Three admitted they had been playing blackjack. Some of the others said they were listening to race results when people began piling out the bac
k.

  As Eliot and Walker were gathering up signed statements, a young, heavyset man walked through the door. He stopped abruptly, surprised at what he was seeing. Eliot asked him who he was. Harwood, the man said, in a tone that suggested he believed he should be asking the questions. Edward Harwood, Captain Harwood’s son. He said he owned the building.

  “What are you doing here?” Eliot asked.

  Harwood chewed his cud for a moment, his eyes darting around the room. The ball finally dropped: these were cops. Harwood said he had been at his family’s restaurant, a few blocks down the street, when he heard “something funny was going on down here.”

  Eliot sat him down and began peppering him with questions. Harwood said he rented the back room to someone named Joe. He said he didn’t know the man’s last name. He admitted he had been in the room many times in recent weeks but insisted he had no idea that Joe was running a gambling parlor. In a report, Eliot would call Harwood’s claim of ignorance a “thin denial which warrants careful investigation.” He added: “His whole story is contradictory, is hesitantly told and leaves many things to be explained, particularly how such an establishment could run in a precinct commanded by his father.” Indeed, Eliot would later learn that Harwood had been in the betting room all morning, but, luckily for the raiders, he had made a trip to the drugstore just moments before Eliot and his group arrived. The younger Harwood was an expert at turning a room quickly. He could empty it of all evidence of betting and have gamblers playing Ping-Pong and pool within three minutes. He’d later tell an associate that if he had been in the room when the safety director and his men started banging on the door, they “wouldn’t have gotten anything at all.”