The ultimate survivor of this war was a third faction, the Mayfield Road Gang, led by Frank Milano. Soon this operation had absorbed much of the remaining Lonardo and Porello gangs, including young Angelo Lonardo. In 1928, the nineteen-year-old Angelo, known as “Baby Face,” made his bones by taking revenge on the Porello associate responsible for his father’s death. The “thick-necked, thick-fingered, and pasty-faced” young hood almost went away for the murder, but witnesses and evidence disappeared. This double whammy—the murder and the efficient avoidance of judicial consequences—led to Angelo being put up for membership, an arcane affair complete with burning candles and incantations. In the 1930s, initiations usually took place at the Statler Hotel in downtown Cleveland. The gangsters would roll through the lobby doors in tailored black suits, their pants bulging from guns and the excitement of it all. They’d swagger past the ballrooms where Cleveland’s frivolous swinging set spent their evenings drinking and dancing. The black-suited men would disappear into rooms specially set aside for them, their bulkiest guards at the door.
The men conducting the initiation—usually an underboss and a “captain”—always carefully explained the rules of membership to the initiates. You weren’t allowed to take drugs or run prostitutes. You couldn’t sleep with the wife of another “made” man. And “whatever illegal activity you engage in, you have to report to the boss and receive permission to engage in that activity.” These were the official rules, the rules you had to promise to live by or else, but of course it was understood that they could be bent or broken. The whole organization, after all, was built on contempt for rules and laws. You just had to be smart about the way you did it.
“Once you accept the rules of membership, they lift a cloth off a table; underneath is a gun and a dagger,” Lonardo explained. “You are told that you now live and die with the dagger and the gun. You die that way, and you live that way. You are then given a card with a picture of a saint on it. This card is placed in the palms of your hands and lit. You shake the burning card back and forth until it is burned down to ashes. They then pinch your finger to draw blood, and then everyone gives you a kiss on the cheek and says, ‘You are now a member.’”
There was a purpose to this ritual. Loyalty and discipline mattered. Angelo’s father and his successors were killers, but they weren’t mindless killers. They considered themselves businessmen—smart businessmen. By the early 1930s, in fact, the city’s Mob bosses had frozen membership because, in the wake of convictions in Chicago and New York fueled by gangsters ratting out other gangsters, they saw that bad things happened when you “were not making the ‘right’ kind of people.”
***
Eliot declared his intention to bust the Mob in a speech at the same downtown hotel where the gangsters liked to congregate. Success or failure, he told a businessmen’s group at the Statler, would turn on his ability to attack one key racket: that old bugaboo, gambling.
“It is debatable whether gambling is morally wrong,” he said. “But from the policing standpoint you have an entirely different picture. I am inclined to be liberal in my views of amusements and I do not want to intrude my opinions on others, but as a safety director I must recognize everything which contributes to a lawless situation. By that, I mean major crime. Gambling brings into financial power citizens recognized as law violators.”
Eliot would make this case time and again throughout 1937. As he prepared to directly tackle the Mob, he knew he would need the public’s support. That meant getting even people who liked to gamble to back a gambling crackdown.
“Two hundred thousand dollars a week is poured into the coffers of racket bosses in Cleveland as their ‘cut’ from gambling alone,” he told the Advertising Club in another speech on the subject. He informed the ad executives that the policy and clearing-house racket had “grown one hundred percent since relief payments began,” that gangsters sucked money out of the economy by taking “from the poor boys, from persons on relief,” and that the government saw none of that money in tax revenue. He made a point of differentiating between a card game among friends and Mob-controlled gambling. “The mild, unorganized and personal forms of gambling,” he said, were generally harmless, but “when organized crime outfits run gambling, it’s anything but harmless. Organized gambling activity is always controlled by racketeers and supplies them with heavy revenue with which to carry on their sinister, anti-social operations.”
The Mob used the cash it pulled down from gambling to muscle into legitimate enterprises, he pointed out. It laundered money by strong-arming businesses into putting hoodlums and prostitutes on the payroll. It took over unions, collecting dues from members and controlling prices for services and products. The corruption moved like a diseased fish from the gutting line to the finest restaurant, reaching all the way to the city’s highest public officials. Eliot had seen in Chicago what happened when the Mob took effective control of a city’s government and economy. Whatever your personal views of gambling, he told the city’s business leaders and opinion makers, you had to put them aside in the effort to stop the gangs.
***
Eliot planned to conduct a methodical investigation, as always, but not against one gangster at a time, as he had with corrupt police officers. He wanted to bring a massive single indictment against every leader in the sprawling organization, to sever the Mob’s head with one great swing of the ax. And he was determined to do this despite the inconvenient fact that Ohio did not have a conspiracy statute like the federal law the FBI used for such cases.
Eliot knew he would have to infiltrate the Mob to really get anywhere, but he also understood that insinuating one of his own men into the gang would be dangerous and time-consuming. So instead, he sought out double agents—gangsters he had something on and could manipulate. His decision to rely on these criminals led to spirited debate between his team and the county prosecutors. “He got information from informers,” one former assistant prosecutor said years later. “He was a great believer in them. But you can get a paid spy to tell you anything.” An investigator on Eliot’s team would insist: “Those informers were very important. They risked their lives to do the right thing.”
One of those paid spies was a former numbers runner named Oscar Williams. To get Williams to talk, Eliot promised to hide him out of town for as long as necessary, and to pay him $35 a week for living expenses. Justice didn’t come cheap in Cleveland. In one interview session, Williams told Eliot about a time three thugs—Lonardo, Alex “Shondor” Birns, and Joe Artwell—kicked their way into a backroom game, wielding revolvers and sawed-off shotguns. They thumped Williams’s partner in the face and, as he lay bleeding on the floor, threatened to kill him on the spot. “I ought to smash your head,” Birns snarled when Williams tried to talk his way out of the situation. The smiling, slightly delirious look on Birns’s face would stick with Williams for the rest of his life.
Shondor Birns, Eliot was discovering, was unique in Cleveland. Like the most popular kid in school, Birns seemed to have immunity from the group loyalty expected of everyone else. He somehow managed to successfully cross between various rival factions in the city’s underworld. Everyone wanted the guy around.
He was even popular with the average Clevelander. Birns cultivated a pleasant, roguish public image and often gave interviews to reporters. The press labeled him “Cleveland’s Public Nuisance No. 1” and “Cleveland’s number one racketeer,” but most people tossed around the appellations with a smile. Birns’s own smile frequently lit up his bland, Slavic face. He was a “dapper extrovert” known for wearing a beautiful woman on each arm and firing off a hyena-like cackle at popular nightclubs. Though only in his midthirties, he was hailed as the most arrested man in Cleveland. Over the years he’d been pinched for robbery, assault, bribery, and attempted murder, among other crimes, but there hadn’t been a conviction since he was a teenager. One anti-Burton politician cracked that he was “untouchable.”
/> Eliot decided to harass Birns at every opportunity. When he found out that Cleveland’s most arrested man spent winters in Florida, he contrived to get him booted from the Sunshine State for failing to register as a felon. As soon as Birns arrived back in Cleveland, police came calling. “Boy, I hardly had a chance to take my clothes out of the car before they picked me up,” he said at Central Police Station. Reporters, notified by the safety director, were waiting for him as he came out of the building.
“Where’s the sun tan,” one hack asked him.
“Sun tan?” Birns said. “You can’t get any sun tan when you have to run around behind palm trees all day to keep the police away from you.”
“Say, we’ll quote you like that,” another reporter said. “That’s the nuts.”
“Yeah, the coconuts,” Birns joked.
The gangster knew the Cleveland authorities had tipped off police in Miami, and he wasn’t happy about it.
“Why can’t they leave a guy alone?” he said. “I can’t go anywhere without being picked up. They don’t give you any break. Oh, well, it was getting cold in Florida, anyway.”
Eliot surely enjoyed seeing Birns’s whiny complaints in the papers the next day. It wasn’t as good as a conviction, but it would do for now.
***
In the second half of 1937, Eliot began to increase the frequency of police raids on gambling halls and bookie joints. Poker, off-track betting, bingo, policy, slot machines: raiders found every variety of gambling in back rooms and basements across Cleveland. Gambling appeared to be the city’s favorite pastime.
The new year brought a breakthrough. On January 6, 1938, police took over the central office of five big policy and clearing-house games in a building on Euclid Avenue. The hero of the day was Lieutenant Ernest Molnar, one of the department’s rising stars. He stormed the room with two young officers, but he didn’t just arrest the men inside and confiscate the “top sheets” and accounting books. He sat down at the phone bank and, for more than an hour, answered calls, leaving the Cleveland Mob in the dark about its own rackets.
It was a smart move, costing gangsters many thousands of dollars more than if Molnar had simply shut the room down. Information, after all, was power. Even with telephones and telegrams, the straight dope remained hard to come by; communication could be slow and unreliable, and facts difficult to verify. This made the criminal network that linked outfits in various cities extremely valuable. The interval between, say, the end of a horse race in New York and the public dissemination of results in Cleveland offered myriad possibilities for making money. One key call that Molnar took came in from Pittsburgh, with the caller asking for Frank Hoge.
“I told the man in Pittsburgh that I would take the number, and he said, ‘The stock number today is 098 and the exchange number is 152,’” Molnar told reporters. Today, the lieutenant boasted, gangsters who took advantage of information would lose big.
The everyday gambler, of course, also lost. Those who had already put down bets weren’t getting their money back just because the results went missing. Eliot could make something of this, too, in the public-relations war against the gambling syndicate. Few of the city’s thousands of gamblers had much cash to spare for bets. Jobs remained difficult to find, and government relief had dried up. The state of Ohio, like the city of Cleveland, was effectively broke. The legislature in Columbus bickered over what to do about it, while in Cleveland some sixty-five thousand families on relief listened to their stomachs gurgle and grind. On the same day that Lieutenant Molnar made his big bust, Bishop Joseph Schrembs of the Cleveland Catholic diocese sent thumping telegrams to Governor Martin L. Davey and the state Senate committee on taxes and relief. “Cleveland situation very critical,” it read. “Rural districts may smugly smile but day of retribution sure to come. French royalists at Versailles said to have laughed at the Paris population, saying, ‘Feed them cake.’ Paid with their heads for their ribaldry. Remember, empty stomachs and frozen bodies and evicted families do not reason. I beg of you stop bandying words and vote sufficient relief.”
In the days that followed, the legislature managed to pass a makeshift relief bill that put the burden on local governments and a hoped-for sale of bonds, and the Cleveland City Council pledged the city’s payroll as security for food orders. When Clevelanders received their belated relief checks, however, not everyone rushed to the grocer. Queues also formed for neighborhood policy and clearing-house games. Gamblers refused to be shamed into giving up their hobby. They needed the distraction from their lives. A few even went public with their dismay at the safety director’s crackdown, including one anonymous reader of the Cleveland Press.
To the Editor of the Press:
I play the horses. Sucker? You play the stock market. Sucker? Well, maybe and maybe not.
The stock market is in the same category with horse racing investments. They’re both gambling to some people. I envy the market investor. He doesn’t have to mingle with a bunch of rats and slink around like a rat himself. I’m tired of it. And so are the other two out of every five adults in this city. We are all tired of the stigma under which we must play the ponies.
And I don’t have to tell you that Mr. Ness is badly mistaken if he thinks for one minute that he or anyone else can stop booking in this or any other city. Where one is stopped two start.
The state and city governments are passing up a sweet revenue. I don’t think I’ll ever see the day when they license bookmakers, but if they do then, and then only, will bookmaking racketeers be wiped out. Why? Because now if you make a sizable bet you’re never sure the bookmaker will be around when time comes to collect. Licensed bookies couldn’t do that because of the large bond they would be required to post. The horse players assured of honest dealing would go to the licensed bookie (of which there would be a limited number) and illegal booking will die of its own accord. The state and city would have another source of revenue and everybody will be happy. So help me.
Pony Boy
Eliot liked this letter. He had long believed that gambling should be legalized—as long as it was tightly regulated, like the stock market now was. He snipped Pony Boy’s letter out of the paper and saved it.
CHAPTER 25
Against Racketeers
At the same time that Eliot’s drive against the Mob was picking up steam, he also took on another challenge: union racketeering. He decided to target two of the most powerful men in the city: Donald A. Campbell, president of the Painters District Council, and Campbell’s partner John E. McGee, president of the Laborers District Council.
His interest in labor corruption wasn’t new. Back in September 1936, Eliot submitted an eighty-one-page report to the county prosecutor on a “shakedown racket” at the Northern Ohio Food Terminal, where “a gang in the guise of a labor union” extracted bribes to unload trucks. Those who refused to pay—or dared to unload their own trucks—faced severe beatings. Eliot soon learned that the labor shenanigans went far beyond the Food Terminal. Many of the city’s labor leaders, including Campbell and McGee, had gained their positions “through sluggings, shootings and intimidation,” and they ran rackets that rivaled any that the Mayfield Road Mob controlled.
Eliot had met Campbell shortly after becoming safety director, running into him by chance on a downtown street. At the time, he was investigating the attempted murder of the labor leader Frank Converse. New in the job and fishing around for potential allies, he asked Campbell if he knew who did it. The thirty-eight-year-old painters’ union boss reacted as if he’d been slapped. He told Eliot that he should know the answer to his own question and walked away from him. Eliot, his antenna raised, returned to the office and opened a file on Campbell.
“Being union officials gives Campbell and McDonnell a nice ‘in,’” Eliot told Neil McGill after beginning an investigation of Campbell and painters-union business agent James McDonnell. “They can put ‘stop work’ orders o
n the builders, or make things otherwise pretty damn nasty for them. Their approach is always the same—pay . . . or else!” He believed Campbell, McDonnell, and McGee had extorted millions of dollars from businessmen and kept hundreds of their union members from working during the very worst of the economic depression.
McGill didn’t need to be told about Campbell and McGee. Cleveland was a union town. That meant nothing got built, torn down, repaired, moved, installed, painted, or unloaded without organized labor having its say about it. The county prosecutor’s office had targeted Campbell and McGee back in 1933 and ’34, when Campbell was head of the glaziers’ union and the city was enduring an endless wave of window smashings. Cullitan talked Chief Matowitz into putting six officers, working in two-man shifts twenty-four hours a day, on the union leaders. Campbell and McGee mocked the move. One morning, the swaggering labor bosses hired a five-piece orchestra and put them in an open touring sedan. Like the musicians, the union men dressed in formal wear, including top hats and silk gloves. They climbed into a second open sedan. Off the two cars went, with the sure knowledge that the policemen on their tail would follow dutifully along. The orchestra played “Me and My Shadow,” over and over, as the three cars—Campbell and McGee’s, the musicians’, and the policemen’s—slowly lapped downtown Cleveland, with a guffawing Campbell and McGee waving and tossing candy to people who stopped to watch. The police soon ended the round-the-clock surveillance. Cullitan never brought charges.
Eliot Ness Page 25