The investigation quickly traveled far and wide. Hearing of seven similar murders over the past ten years in New Castle, Pennsylvania, an industrial outpost near Youngstown, Ohio, Eliot sent Flynn to the town to check out their evidence. Flynn didn’t find a lot of substantive similarities, but seeing as he was Eliot’s man, his opinion didn’t matter to the case’s lead detective. Merylo would write in an unpublished memoir that “Flynn returned to Cleveland a little dubious about the New Castle torsos. He wasn’t sure those murders had been committed by the man responsible for those here. I was sure.”
***
Eliot wished Merylo would go ahead and find the pervert already.
He didn’t want to spend any more of his time on this serial killer. The whole case made his skin crawl, everything about it. Disease was inherent in man; Eliot the rationalist understood this, but his childhood in Christian Science—the one true faith—rebelled at such conclusions. “All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science’s founder. Eliot took up a career that in many ways stood at odds with his—with his beloved mother’s—optimistic beliefs. Now, with the torso case, he found himself in a horrible house of mirrors, everything distorted and ugly. He much preferred ordinary human corruption, the kind that could be cured through a shifting in consciousness.
Eliot was not a religious man. He had struggled with Mrs. Eddy’s ideas throughout his adolescence, but still there was something about them he couldn’t deny. There was a force out there, a leveler of history and time and ego. All things were one thing.
He refused to dial back his police-corruption investigations to suit the mayor’s preoccupation with the torso murders. Putting the serial-killer case to the side, he pushed forward, day after day, until on October 5 he showed up in Cullitan’s office with hundreds of pages of testimony and “documentary evidence and exhibits,” all carefully organized and vetted. Eliot had targeted as witnesses not only men who’d been shaken down by cops, but also retired police officers and police widows. The report named nearly twenty current officers as being involved in bribery, bootlegging, and protection rackets.
The grand jury went into action three days later. Eliot paced in the county courthouse corridor each day until bribery charges came down against eight officers. He punched a fist into his hand and headed back to city hall.
Michael Harwood, as expected, topped the list of indicted men. The others were Deputy Inspector Edwin C. Burns, Lieutenant John H. Nebe, Lieutenant Thomas J. Brady, Sergeant James Price, Patrolman Clarence H. Alberts, Patrolman John W. Shoemaker, and Patrolman Gaylord Stotts. The indictments charged that during Prohibition and beyond the officers “put protection payments on a systematic monthly basis,” that they “knocked off bootleggers and then ‘cleaned up’ by agreeing to ‘fix’ the case,” and that “when bootleggers refused to pay protection, some officers framed them by planting liquor on their premises and raiding them.” The indictment also asserted that some of the officers went into the bootleg business themselves. The grand jury’s forewoman, Mrs. Lucia McBride, said the testimony of a large number of witnesses shocked the jury members to their cores. The evidence presented to them, she said, “displays a callous brutality and studied intimidation by police officers” in the city.
Reporters rushed to Harwood’s home, where they found his wife sobbing uncontrollably. “Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it terrible?” she wailed. “All our lives we’ve worked so hard, and all they do is torture you.” Later that day, a hack found Harwood and a business associate at the police captain’s new hobby: a nightclub called the Green Derby he had just opened at Euclid Avenue and East 172nd Street. The place had been the family’s restaurant, the Checkerboard, until just a few weeks before. “Can’t you see I’m talking business with this man?” Harwood snapped when the reporter approached.
The other policemen facing charges affected stunned disbelief. Burns, found at his home, told reporters: “To my knowledge I haven’t violated any of the rules of the department. I don’t know what this is all about.” Nebe, coming out of the Tenth Precinct station, said the same thing: “I haven’t the slightest idea what this is all about. I don’t know who would give me anything.” Offered Patrolman Stotts: “I never took a dime from anybody. When I was on the liquor squad we knocked off anybody and everybody. Of course, there’s a lot of them sore at us and glad to have a chance to sock us. Well, my word is as good as any of theirs.”
Eliot—and, more important, Cullitan—was willing to test Stotts’s theory.
***
Captain Harwood went on trial in December, the first of the eight indicted officers to have his day in court. Every day, men and women packed the gallery. Housewives plunked down on the benches in the second and third rows, tutting at the testimony and offering up their opinions, oblivious to Harwood’s family sitting near them. Men stood in the back, craning their necks for unobstructed views of the bootleggers on the witness stand, men they once bought pints from and shared jokes with. Harwood was the man on trial, but most of the attention focused on Eliot, who sat in the courtroom every day. Spectators wondered about the notes he constantly jotted down on large yellow pads. They thrilled when he whispered to his “undercover men,” who flagrantly carried their guns on their hips for everyone to see. Reporters began what would become a years-long habit of speculating about the safety director’s courtroom demeanor, how he seemed “neither at work nor at play, neither bored nor excited.”
Just as with the Cadek trial, the bootleggers, saloon owners and bartenders who took the witness stand told of Harwood and his men brutalizing them during Prohibition, usually with the harassment ending with Harwood telling them they should pay up “in order not to be bothered.” One former bootlegger said that when he refused to pay, Harwood insisted he “would be sorry.” In the weeks that followed, he said, a series of raids forced him to get out of the business. Still another man, who ran a saloon without a liquor license after repeal, maintained that Harwood encouraged bootlegging right up into this very year.
James C. Connell, attorney for the defense, refused to concede the high ground. A bulky, energetic man with an actorly flourish in court, he contended that Harwood was the victim of a revenge plot by bootleggers, instigated by Councilman Anton Vehovec. The thirty-eight-year-old lawyer blasted the safety director for bringing forward tainted evidence. Unlike Cadek, Harwood took the stand to profess his innocence. He testified that as captain of the Fourteenth Precinct, he did not undertake any gambling raids “because there were written orders that Captain [Emmett] Potts would take care of all gambling and slot machine complaints.” Potts was well known to have been the corrupt Mayor Davis’s street enforcer. The testimony didn’t help: Connell didn’t have those orders to present to the court, nor did he have any witnesses to back up the claim. Cullitan then subjected the captain to eight hours of cross-examination, tripping him up on numerous points, including his son’s business activities.
Worse yet for the defense, the reporters covering the trial reacted to Harwood’s testimony with unconcealed disgust. The Plain Dealer’s Philip Porter, who had followed Harwood’s career for more than a decade, found the defense outrageous. “Harwood’s ludicrous story of being a kindly law enforcer, victim of a foul plot by bootleggers and reporters, was a good laugh to those who knew him,” he wrote. “He has never been anything but a tough, ruthless conniver, using his blue suit to cover his phenagling [sic].” Newspapermen knew all about the police force’s worst offenders and always had, but they’d mostly kept quiet over the years for fear of being shut out of police stations and even courtrooms. Eliot now gave them license to let loose.
Cullitan rode the public outrage. “The defense largely has been muddying the waters, claiming that we are trying to destroy Harwood,” he said in his closing argument. “He is the one who dirtied himself, by lining his dirty purse with bootleggers’ money.” The prosecutor, well awa
re of the attention being paid to Eliot throughout the trial, also vigorously defended the safety director.
“Mr. Ness is of a different political faith than I am,” the Democratic prosecutor said. “I do not know him socially or move in the same circles. But I do want to say to you that I have nothing but admiration for the determination he has shown in his efforts to rid the city of gangsters, mobsters, racketeers, and to clean the police department of crooks. I want you to remember that he is doing this work for every decent citizen—for you, for me and for us all.”*
On the evening of December 16, the seven women and five men on the jury announced they had reached a verdict. Harwood entered the room with a small smile on his face. Word had come down the previous night that one jury member—an elderly woman—was holding out for acquittal. It sometimes took just one person with passionate conviction to turn the tide. With Harwood standing stiffly next to his lawyer, the bailiff opened the verdict and read it out in a clear, deep voice. A collective gasp rolled through the courtroom, and Harwood put his face in his hands. Behind him, his wife fell off her chair, passed out cold. He had been convicted on six of seven bribery counts. One of the police captain’s two daughters, Helen, began to sob uncontrollably. Harwood himself struggled to control his emotions. “Harwood’s face was ashen,” Fritchey wrote. “Then, as the blood returned to it, he became livid. He parted his lips as if to speak—and words would not come.” Judge Frank Day asked Harwood to comment on the verdict, but the defendant didn’t seem to hear. Tears came to his eyes. He walked out of the courtroom without saying a word. Harwood’s wife and daughters, all weeping, followed him out. His other daughter, Mrs. Marie Kohl, turned to Eliot. “Thank you for this, Mr. Ness,” she said. As she passed by, she spat on him. Eliot said nothing. He waited until she had disappeared out the doors before wiping the spittle from his face.
Many of the attorneys for the other seven indicted officers sat in the back of the room. The looks on their faces—disbelief, discouragement, maybe fear—would be duplicated across the city’s police precincts when newspapers arrived in the morning. The Cadek conviction hadn’t been an aberration, a one-off thanks to a weird subplot involving cemetery plots and hoodwinked immigrants. No, the world had changed. The impossible was now possible. Director Ness actually was cleaning up the police force, one crooked cop at a time.
***
Once he’d pulled himself together, Harwood turned his attention to winning on appeal. Just days after the conviction, he hired private investigators and technical experts. He wanted to show that Cleveland’s safety director had framed him and the other seven officers.
Without informing his lawyer, the newly convicted former policeman offered two women $100 each to lure the prosecution’s most damning witnesses into a trap. The women, Mrs. Marie Murray and Mrs. May Green, agreed to the plan—and decided not to tell their husbands, who worked for Harwood at the Green Derby. Murray and Green were young and sexy, with pointy breasts and fat, bloodred lips, but they were new to femme fatale duty. Only one of the witnesses, Casper Korce, took the bait. The former bootlegger, who had testified against Harwood at trial and against others during grand-jury proceedings, followed the ladies to a swank West Side apartment that had been wired for sound. Murray and Green got Korce liquored up and unbuttoned, and began to press him about how much he “got out of the cases.” Korce thought he was getting the celebrity treatment, seeing as his name had been in all the papers, but the good times abruptly ended when his dirty talk proved a turnoff. “I was offered $2,500 to testify for Harwood instead of against him,” Korce said. The mood ruined, the women handed him his hat and sent him on his way.
Harwood tried again, paying the women another $100 each to invite Korce around a second time and press him harder to “open up” about the safety director. Korce again gave in to the women’s winks and smiles; once in the apartment, he yammered on about his bootlegging days and how Ness and Fritchey had interviewed him for hours about his relationships with police officers. But the women couldn’t get him to cough up anything incriminating on Eliot or the reporter. Korce, no doubt turning blue from frustration, found himself pushed out the door again. Harwood was even more frustrated. He told Murray she would have to testify that she’d heard Korce say that Ness had paid him $3,200. The woman, though afraid Harwood would tell her husband about her participation in the seduction plot, refused. She would rather have her husband mad at her than Eliot Ness.
After Harwood’s conviction, it was Deputy Inspector Burns’s turn in March. The trial was a carbon copy of Harwood’s, including a handful of repeat witnesses. The bootleggers assigned the same litany of abuses to Burns that they had to Harwood; some of Burns’s colleagues on the police force, meanwhile, took the stand to insist the defendant was a stand-up guy, as honest as they come. As the jury filed out of the room to begin deliberations, the fifty-five-year-old Burns, a “tall, husky, handsome man” and a popular officer in the department, approached Eliot and stuck out his hand. “I just want you to know that, no matter what happens, there are no hard feelings,” he said. “I know there was nothing personal in your activities.”
Eliot was surprised—and visibly moved—by the gesture. He was sensitive about how the rank and file in the department viewed him. The emotional outburst that Harwood’s daughter directed at him at the end of her father’s trial had hit him hard. He shook Burns’s hand. “Nothing personal at all,” he said.
Five hours later, the jury returned and pronounced Burns guilty on all five counts. The deputy inspector smiled for press photographers and did not look at Eliot as court officers led him from the room.
***
The police-graft investigation did not always offer up clear-cut cases. Neil McGill prided himself on being a hard man, but he admitted he felt sorry for John Nebe, who came to trial three weeks after Burns. During Prohibition, the young patrolman had pocketed five bucks here and five bucks there, mostly to be somewhere else when men unloaded trucks full of liquor. “This was chicken feed compared to most of the bribes given (to the other indicted officers),” McGill noted. He pointed out that Nebe’s lawyers would focus on how poorly Cleveland police officers were paid. And that they could argue that Nebe wasn’t trying to get rich; he was just trying to keep a roof over his children’s heads and bread on the table. The policeman had a big, attractive family that surely would be sitting in the front row every day of the trial. That kind of thing could sway a jury.
“Eliot, we may have trouble in getting the jury to convict Nebe,” McGill told the safety director during a planning meeting. “You know that the difference between a bribe and a tip is that a bribe is given before the service is rendered, and a tip is given after a service is rendered. These amounts of five dollars and ten dollars are not in the bribe class.”
Eliot nodded. “That’s true, but you and I know, and Lieutenant Nebe knew, that a bribe, even disguised as a tip, is given to influence the conduct of a public officer or public official. We will let the jury have the facts.”
The jury hung on Nebe, just as McGill had feared, but Eliot would not let it go. Right was right, wrong was wrong. He convinced Cullitan to try the officer again. The second time around, Eliot brought in three “surprise witnesses.” The trial judge agreed to put them on the stand even though the witnesses hadn’t mentioned Nebe in their grand-jury testimony.
Former bootlegger Louis Gregorcic, who had testified against Harwood and Burns in their trials, now said that he paid Nebe $50 a month for eight months during the later years of Prohibition. John Mozina, a butcher, told of being arrested by Nebe for having two gallons of sour wine in his home. Mozina said he paid Nebe $50 and that the case was subsequently dismissed. “He did not ask me for it; I just gave it to him,” he said. And finally, Mrs. Mary Anslovar insisted Nebe once forced his way into her home and took away a small amount of illegal booze she had. She said she paid him “$200 or $300” to stay out of the dock. All of these new brib
ery allegations involved much larger sums than what the witnesses in the first trial had claimed they’d paid the policeman. Eliot did not like to lose.
Nebe was convicted.
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