Eliot Ness

by Douglas Perry

  But he wasn’t in the room when the raid started. He had walked in fifteen minutes later, so now he was in trouble. Harwood asked to make a phone call. A few minutes later, another man arrived in the back room. The man said his name was Joe McCarthy and that he was the proprietor. He admitted it was a gambling joint and said “Eddie” knew nothing about it.

  “Didn’t Harwood telephone you to come down here or he would have to take the rap?” Eliot asked.

  “I’m the guy,” McCarthy said.

  “You’re quite sure you want to take the rap on this?”

  McCarthy was sure—but Eliot wasn’t going to let him. The safety director found keys on Harwood that worked the locks in the gambling room. The keys found on McCarthy did not.

  Now it was Eliot’s turn to make a phone call. He reached Chief Matowitz at Central Police Station and told him to immediately relieve Edward Harwood’s father of his command of the Fourteenth Precinct. The younger Harwood barked at Eliot that he couldn’t do that. Eliot asked Matowitz to hold the line, turned to Harwood and told him to pipe down.

  Outside, a clutch of reporters had gathered. Vehovec was giving an interview when Eliot stepped into the street. The hacks nearly knocked the councilman over to get to the safety director. “The matter has now gone far beyond the operation of a single bookmaking establishment,” Eliot told them. “It is a question of police efficiency, discipline and honesty in the Fourteenth Precinct, and every officer in it is going to be called on for a recital of everything that is known.”

  Later that night, Captain Harwood met with his son at the family’s restaurant on Euclid Avenue and “bawled Eddie out.”

  “You were a damn fool to go back in and let them get just the man they wanted,” the police captain hissed. He told his son he had “a good mind to take a belt to you now.”

  ***

  Early in July, Tom Clothey and Keith Wilson began waiting around outside the police academy. They picked off their targets one by one over a couple of days, tapping them on the shoulder on the busy sidewalk or introducing themselves on the streetcar. Eliot had identified five men as the best recruits in the department. Now he needed them for temporary undercover duty. He simply could not trust anyone who already wore a badge.

  The assignment: to take down a large bookie joint in the Eighth Precinct. Police officers protected the place, acted as its bagmen and muscle. The Unknowns had watched it for a couple of weeks, but they kept their distance. By now, the city’s gangsters could recognize many of the safety director’s investigators on sight. So on Friday, July 17, Eliot began sending his new conscripts up to the third floor of the building at 2077 West Twenty-fifth Street. The public safety department had issued each of the men a small amount of cash for placing bets and buying drinks. Over the weekend the fledgling officers lost all of it. The gambling equipment, they believed, was rigged.

  On Monday evening, while some of the undercover men lounged in the bustling gambling room, a secretary in the safety director’s office called the Eighth Precinct. Her voice cracking, she told the patrolman at the desk that her husband had lost all of his money in the place on Twenty-fifth. The patrolman said, “Oh, you mean that bookie joint down the street.” Yes, she said, that bookie joint down the street.

  Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the place; it was run by Tommy McGinty, a high-profile hood and boxing promoter. The secretary said she wanted the gambling den shut down. The patrolman was sympathetic to the woman’s plight, but he also was suspicious. After hanging up, he called the safety director’s office and asked if they knew anything about the call. The secretary claimed ignorance, and the cop didn’t realize he was talking to the same woman who’d just called. Ringing off, he then phoned the Ninth Precinct and asked if they could pop their heads in at 2077, because the Eighth didn’t have men available. The Ninth sent two patrolmen to the address, but before they arrived, the lights in the gambling den flashed off and on, which sent everyone into frenzied action. When the patrolmen stepped into the room, there was nothing to see. The officers tipped their hats, left the building, and reported to the Eighth that they found no evidence of gambling. Twenty minutes later, the place was packed with gamblers again.

  The next day, Matowitz ordered the Eighth Precinct’s commander, Adolph Lenahan, to report to Central Police Station. When Lenahan arrived at the chief’s office, Matowitz handed him a resignation letter and told him to sign it. Lenahan, stunned, refused. The chief suspended him on the spot—for being drunk on the job. Lenahan demanded that he be taken to the hospital for a professional medical opinion on his condition, but Matowitz waved him off. Instead, he brought in two officers and told them to take Lenahan home.

  A few hours later, Eliot and a raiding party rolled into the Eighth Precinct and turned onto West Twenty-fifth Street. Again the lights blinked at the gambling den and the joint’s employees launched into action. Except this time the five undercover men also came to life. They grabbed the operators. One tackled a cashier who was trying to dump receipts and recording books out a window. Gamblers headed for the exit, but Eliot, his assistant John Flynn, and a clutch of officers met them on the stairs. A paddy wagon arrived to take away suspects. For the next hour, the officers carried gambling equipment piece by piece down the narrow staircase to a police truck waiting at the curb. Men and women on the street, who had been living with raucous gambling parlors in their neighborhood for years, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. By the time the place had been emptied out, several hundred people ringed the building, agape at the sight.

  “The suspension by the chief brought the matter of the bookie joint to issue at once,” Eliot told reporters. “I have had it watched for a week, and Captain Lenahan will now be asked to answer why this establishment was allowed to run as openly as it was running.”

  The next day, Eliot grilled the precinct’s deputy inspector, Timothy J. Costello, who admitted that his three sons worked for McGinty at a dog-racing track. Costello would survive the investigation, but the upward trajectory of his career abruptly ended. He soon would be reassigned to the police radio room. Lenahan, the precinct’s commander, told reporters he planned to fight the intoxication charge against him, but after a few days of thrashing, he quieted down. At the end of the month, he resigned from the force.

  The safety director kept the pressure on. In the days that followed the raid, police barged into a dozen more gambling rooms around the city. A reporter caught up to Eliot one evening as the safety director was leaving city hall. He asked what was going on. “I am interested in whether the precincts are meeting their responsibility,” Eliot said. “A certain philosophy has grown up in the police department in the last ten years, and it takes some time to overcome it. I don’t want periodic activity. I want continued activity.”

  ***

  Late in the summer, Eliot disappeared from public view. Reporters learned that he had given Flynn and Chief Matowitz the authority to handle “routine matters” while he was gone. They quizzed safety department staff and Mayor Burton’s assistants about his whereabouts but got nowhere. “He is the original mystery man, and none of his associates is ever completely in his confidence,” one reporter wrote about the safety director. “His speech sounds candid, but it rarely is.” When another hack happened to come upon the safety director on the street one day, Eliot refused to say what he was doing. “Mr. Cullitan will know how to get in touch with me,” he said, mysteriously.

  The reporter didn’t know how lucky he was to score a Ness sighting. In August and September, Eliot quietly left the state time and again to track down witnesses and take statements. On one weekend he made a “sudden dash” to New York to interview a former bootlegger. Later in the year, federal agents would help him find two fugitives in northern Michigan who had been seen marching off into the woods. They came upon the potential witnesses near an icy lake, huddled under a tent, wearing business suits and polished shoes, trying to clap
circulation into their extremities. Eliot and the agents probably saved the men from freezing to death. On the drive back to Cleveland, one of the men admitted he had been a “payoff collector” for Harwood. The other stayed silent, save for his chattering teeth.

  The old guard, scared by the headlines and the incessant speculation about the safety director’s activities, began to play furious defense. When Eliot heard that patrolmen from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Precincts put the word out that no one who talked to the director or his investigators would be safe, he acted immediately. Like Judge Wilkerson swapping out the entire jury for the Capone case, Eliot ordered the Fifteenth Precinct to be completely turned over. Matowitz transferred twenty-two officers out of the precinct in a single day. He admitted to reporters that the safety director had handpicked their replacements. The move was so unusual that Eliot issued a written statement about it:

  My investigation shows that there has been police collusion in the Fifteenth Precinct over a number of years and that condition has resulted in residents losing all confidence in police generally. My order should not be construed as a reflection on the men transferred today. I have not gone into their individual integrity. I have faith in most of them, but, as matters stand now, they are working in a shadow of suspicion that is detrimental to both themselves and the community in question.

  Fenton E. Barrett, the captain of the Fifteenth Precinct until being transferred, insisted he would fight the stain on his reputation. A month later, like Lenahan before him, he resigned.

  With the press cheering him on—“the community waited long for a safety director like Eliot Ness,” wrote the Plain Dealer—the housecleaning took on an irresistible momentum. Tipsters called the safety department with the addresses of police-protected gambling joints. Surveillance on one suspected officer would lead to others coming under scrutiny. The Ness mystique continued to grow and deepen. At city hall functions, suburban house parties, and inner-city bars, people talked about how the safety director had “spent one hundred consecutive summer nights following the trail of police crookedness through some of the city’s worst dives and some of the metropolitan area’s nicest suburbs.” He would be just as busy through the fall and winter.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Sadistic Type

  Kingsbury Run stretched out in a large parabola along the East Side. With its natural watershed, this once had been an idyllic spot, before heavy industry and then the Depression moved in. Now it was Cleveland’s colostomy bag. The city’s detritus emptied day after day into the sprawling urban ravine. A constant haze of industrial smoke provided natural cover for the toxic runoff that oozed in from the Flats district along the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Homeless men set up camp along the high ground. The city’s railroad system—with crisscrossing tracks carrying freight to Chicago and commuters to the suburbs—seemed to be the only thing keeping the area from collapsing in on itself like a dying star.

  On the morning of September 10, 1936, a twenty-five-year-old hobo looking to jump a freight train for the East Coast noticed a headless and limbless human torso drifting in an expanse of dirty water along a bend near East Thirty-seventh Street. By early afternoon, word had spread. Hundreds of men and women in the Run walked over to the area to watch policemen drag what quickly would become known as “the torso pool.” They whispered nervously to one another as they watched the operation.

  The bodies were adding up fast: six total over the past year, four in Kingsbury Run. There were the two men on Jackass Hill, their heads and genitals expertly removed. Then the prostitute, cut into pieces, the thigh, pelvis, and right arm placed in the picnic basket and left near the meat shop. Next came the victim whose head officials had displayed at the morgue. Two boys had discovered it; the dead man’s body was ultimately unearthed two hundred feet away. Another headless, naked body was found July 22 just outside the city limits, in Brooklyn Township, the head not far away, wrapped in the victim’s clothing. And now this latest victim, the torso halved and plopped into the Run’s rancid waters like hot dogs. The pace of killings was quickening—everyone knew that much.

  When the coroner, Arthur Pearce, emerged from the morgue that evening, he found himself in demand. Reporters surrounded him and fired questions, but he didn’t know what he should say. The six murders, with their true, forceful amputations of heads and limbs, unnerved him, just like everyone else. He believed it was likely the work of a surgeon, someone with talent. “The killer is apparently a sex maniac of the sadistic type,” he said. “This is indicated by the condition of his victims. He is probably a muscular man. The slayer definitely has expert knowledge of human anatomy. The incisions of his knife are clean and were made in each case without guesswork. He may have gathered his knowledge of anatomy as a medical student. Or it is possible that he is a butcher.” This kind of statement did not help the situation. Headlines in seventy-two-point type featuring the words “sex maniac,” “sadist,” and “butcher” reached newsstands within hours. Those were followed, at long last, by public panic.

  Eliot had mostly steered clear of the investigations into the bizarre murders. Only in the last couple of months had police decided they were all connected and thus deserved special attention. But that wasn’t why the safety director had stayed away: after all, a couple of months was not an insignificant amount of time when there’s a serial killer on the loose. The better reason for his reluctance to get involved was that he recognized the killings as the work of a psychopath. Such crimes defied logic. They required luck to solve, and Eliot didn’t like to rely on luck. He also didn’t like to delve into the dark recesses of men’s motivations. He didn’t have that kind of curiosity—not even about his own motivations. He wanted only to act, to strike out against the enemy.

  Now, however, the degree of his involvement was taken out of his hands. The torso pool—coming on the heels of the death mask at the Expo—finally would make the case priority number one for Mayor Burton and his administration. The so-called torso murderer had become big news in the city, relentless news. The Plain Dealer called the killer a “New Insane Type.” The News wrote, “Of all horrible nightmares come to life, the most shuddering is the fiend who decapitates his victims in the dark, dank recesses of Kingsbury Run.” Offered the Press: “He kills for the thrill of killing. He kills to satisfy a bestial, sadistic lust for blood. He kills to prove himself strong. He kills to feed his sex-perverted brain the sight of a beheaded human. He must kill.” The editorials and headlines became a drumbeat, pounding down Cleveland’s reputation just as the Great Lakes Exposition came to a close. The news had gone out on the national wires and even spread overseas. Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper in the Soviet Union, cited the murders as evidence of America’s moral degradation. Cleveland’s business leaders had begun screaming for the case to be solved. Everyone in the city was screaming. Chief Matowitz had just assigned the case—all of the murders—to the police department’s best detective, Peter Merylo. But that meant little to Burton. The mayor didn’t know Merylo. He knew Eliot. Burton called Eliot into his office and told him to take charge of the investigation.

  On September 12, Eliot began interviewing the various officers who had investigated one or more of the murders. He sent a wave of patrolmen into Kingsbury Run to roust and question every hobo who might have seen or heard something. He ordered police cruisers to make regular circuits of the Run, twenty-four hours a day, and to stop any car driving near the area in the wee hours. All of that done, he called up Merylo’s captain and told him to send the case’s new detective over.

  The forty-one-year-old Merylo, an army veteran born in the Ukraine, was a tough bird. He didn’t play politics. He’d earned his detective’s badge in the most unusual of ways: through long hours and hard work. Matowitz knew what he was doing in putting him on the case. The detective arrived at Eliot’s office within an hour of the summons. Though Merylo had been on the case for just twenty-four hours and was still reading through
the police reports on the six murders, Eliot pressed him for details. The safety director was known for his soft touch, but Merylo, a prickly man, took offense at the questioning. The stocky, balding detective offered up half answers, clearly impatient. He had never met the safety director before but he knew he didn’t like him. He’d seen the headlines, read the articles. Eliot was slick; Merylo hated slick.

  Merylo told the director he thought the killer was a “sex pervert” but couldn’t yet offer much more than that. Eliot nodded. He asked a few more perfunctory questions, then told the detective to pursue the investigation as he saw fit and to keep him informed. Merylo rose and marched out of the office, fuming. He felt he was being called to account, that he was being criticized. He never got over it. “You can’t bring up Eliot Ness to Peter,” Merylo’s wife, Sophie, would say years later, after Merylo had retired. “He starts to get nasty. He did not like the man.”

  Merylo’s belief that the killer was a pervert would underpin his every move as he and his partner, Martin Zalewski, set off into the Run. Indeed, that belief would only deepen and harden in the months that followed. In one report, he wrote: “I am of the opinion that the murderer is a Sex Degenerate, suffering from necrophilia, aphrodisia or erotomania. . . . This may be a case of infatuation for statues, the kind with head and limbs broken off, such as the torso of Hercules or of Satyr.” Merylo’s theories about the killer—along with the coroner’s insistence that “if he is ever caught, it will most certainly be by accident”—unnerved the police brass. Chief Matowitz freed Merylo and Zalewski of all other obligations. The torso-killer investigation would be their only case.

  The detectives committed themselves to the hunt completely. They scoured Kingsbury Run’s shantytowns and the broken-down neighborhoods of the Roaring Third. Merylo dressed as a hobo and slept overnight in the Run. He hopped on and off train boxcars. On a few occasions he even dressed in what he considered homosexual garb and paraded ostentatiously around the Flats late at night. Merylo would write that “we received thousands of tips and examined as many suspects. We were compelled to work many hours over time, checking on every tip regardless of any significance. We spent from one hour to five or six weeks to check on a single suspect before we were able to check him out to our satisfaction that this individual could not have had any connection with these crimes.” They followed hundreds of doctors, butchers, and “known perverts,” searched through their mail and garbage. He and Zalewski got charged up over rumors about well-to-do men who trawled the Roaring Third for homosexual sex. A bartender at a grimy dive told of a tall, elegantly dressed regular who claimed to be a doctor. The man “seemed to be very accommodating and if anyone wanted to go anywhere he would take them in his car.” But Merylo wasn’t convinced the killer was a doctor. Perhaps it was someone who reached “sexual gratification while watching the blood flow after cutting the jugular vein of his victim,” he wrote. For a while, he zeroed in on a “chicken freak” who every week brought a live chicken to a whorehouse and paid a prostitute to cut its head off while he masturbated to climax. Puzzling over the few disparate facts at hand, he constructed a profile of the killer. He thought the man may have “only finished grammer [sic] school. He reads newspapers and detective story magazines, especially murder mysteries.” One thing Merylo was absolutely sure about: “This man would not stop killing as long as he is at large and alive.”