But that was then. Eliot would not be so easily scared off. As with the police-corruption investigation, he went after the victims. Over several months, the safety director and investigators Keith Wilson, Tom Clothey, and Dick Jones followed the trail around the country: to Toledo, Columbus, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Saint Louis. They garnered testimony from dozens of businessmen who had left Cleveland because of the constant shakedowns. They learned that the state-of-the-art, nine-thousand-seat arena that businessman A. C. Sutphin built for his American Hockey League team, the Cleveland Barons, had been held up for ransom. “These people had us just where they wanted us,” admitted Carl Lezeus, the arena’s general manager. When the arena’s grand opening was imminent, with only the painting and installation of seats left to do, the union workers suddenly went missing. They wouldn’t show up to finish the job until Campbell received a $1,000 bribe. “A postponement would have cost us a lot of money,” Lezeus told Eliot. “We did the only thing we could do—paid the $1,000.”
Eliot loved this part of the job. A critic once described Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, one of Eliot’s heroes since childhood, as “a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bull-dog.” That description fit Eliot, too. And as with the fictional Holmes, there could be no personal life, no interior life, so long as the game was afoot. Night after night Edna ate dinner alone as Eliot tracked down one more witness or followed the money through one more pair of hands. Eliot personally convinced Vernon Stouffer of the popular Stouffer’s restaurant to cooperate, even though the restaurateur, worried about the impact on his business, had refused to help Cullitan four years earlier. Campbell and McGee had made Stouffer cough up $1,200 before they would allow union glaziers and painters to finish work they’d begun at Stouffer’s restaurant. Campbell later came back for an extra ten bucks. Stouffer asked for a receipt for the sawbuck so he could put it on the company expense account. Campbell snarled, “Go to hell. I don’t give receipts.” Once Stouffer stepped forward, several other signature Cleveland retailers—the owners of the Samuel stores, Lerner stores, and the Avon Shop—followed his lead and sat down with the safety director. “When I approached them they could hardly believe that a cleanup was going on,” Eliot later said.
When Cullitan convened a grand jury to sift through Eliot’s evidence, the labor leaders realized they faced a serious threat this time. On December 1, 1937, McGee stood up at a packed Cleveland Federation of Labor meeting and declared that the union’s members had nothing to worry about. No one could convict him of anything, because he hadn’t done anything wrong, he insisted. “The grand jury has been there three weeks and nothing has come out,” he said. “And I don’t think anything is going to come out.”
Then McGee changed the subject, bringing up a recent steel strike in the city. Workers had violently struck Republic Steel Corporation over the summer, and Eliot, by following Mayor Burton’s policy of “strict neutrality,” became a union villain during the fight. It had been an ugly face-off during long, brutally hot days. Early on, Eliot had taken Burton with him to shut down an airfield the company was using to resupply “scab” workers. He expected to be hailed as a labor hero, but instead, strikers staking out the field set upon the safety director’s car, rocking it and banging on it so furiously that Eliot had to wave his service revolver to get the men to back off. The union could never trust a Republican administration. After Eliot sent in policemen to stop strikers from beating replacement workers on their way into the mills, hundreds of union men marched on city hall. Standing below Eliot’s office window, they chanted “Traitor! Traitor!” and unfurled a huge banner that read, “The Police and Militia Can’t Beat This Strike.” Eliot stepped out on his balcony to see what was going on and was met by a thunderclap of boos that grew and grew until he disappeared back into his office. Now, four months later, McGee understood that attacking the most popular man in Cleveland could work—at least with a union audience. He told of a recent meeting in which the sniveling, two-faced safety director tried to curry favor with McGee and turn him against Campbell. “McGee, I like you. I’ve always liked you,” Eliot supposedly said. At which point the heroic labor leader cut him off. “I don’t like you, and you don’t like me,” he sneered. “Let’s cut that stuff out.” Done with his reenactment, McGee threw back his head and held up a fist. He declared that Eliot Ness was trying to destroy the union for daring to have “aggressive leadership.” The hall roared to its feet.
Campbell, perhaps trying to reel in the expectations his partner was building up, followed with his own speech. He said there would be indictments, because “you can’t find a grand jury that would have guts enough to return a no-bill. We’ll be indicted on general principles, and the prosecutor won’t need any evidence in court. All he’ll have to do is bring in copies of the newspapers. If we go into that jug in Columbus [the state penitentiary], we’ll go in with a smile because we have put thousands to work.” The hall again erupted in cheers, and the celebration carried out into the street after the meeting broke up.
Eliot had spies in the hall taking notes on what was said. He realized that attacking Campbell and McGee personally would only build up their credibility among union men. When asked about the charge that he was against unions, he said, simply, “I am against racketeers in labor. I am against racketeers in the police department. I am against racketeers.”
***
Campbell was right: the grand jury didn’t have the guts to return a no-bill. He and McGee were indicted later in December. The grand jury charged them with “exacting tribute” from builders and business owners by threatening to withhold union labor. (McDonnell was also indicted but would be tried separately.)
Campbell and McGee came to trial in February 1938. The two men, staring straight ahead from the defendants’ table, seemed stunned by the amount of evidence rolled out against them. Eliot’s team had tracked down just about everyone the labor leaders had ever come into contact with. With Eliot sitting with the prosecutors, Cullitan and assistant prosecutor Charles McNamee showed that contractors and business owners often had to pay thousands of dollars beyond the honest cost of the work to get their projects done. As a result, the number of building permits in Cleveland had plummeted far below that of similar-size cities around the country. McNamee told the jury that before Campbell had schemed his way into a leadership position of the glaziers’ union, he’d been arrested repeatedly for picking pockets and stealing cars. McGee, for his part, had been arrested more than twenty times.
Vernon Stouffer dominated the trial’s second day. The respected restaurateur, with his low, resonant voice, told of the defendants shaking him down for hundreds of dollars and then coming back time and again for more. Jurors watched the witness with rapt attention as he laid out how Campbell and McGee held his business hostage. McGee’s attorney, William Corrigan, realized his client was in deep trouble. After Stouffer stepped down, Corrigan rose, straightened his suit jacket, and dramatically asked for a mistrial. Eliot Ness, he declared, was putting his client in a “precarious position.” Judge Alva R. Corlett sent the jury out of the room. The safety director’s celebrity, Corrigan continued, made his presence at the prosecutors’ table prejudicial. “This is not an ordinary trial,” Corrigan said. “This—”
Corlett cut him off. “These defendants are getting the same kind of trial, as far as this court is concerned, as any humble defendant,” he said. “It is just an ordinary trial to the court.”
“But for the city it is not,” Corrigan insisted. “Here’s the safety director sitting right here. Never in my thirty years’ experience have I ever seen—”
“He doesn’t impress the court,” the judge insisted.
“But how about the jury?” Corrigan asked.
Eliot unconsciously turned to look at the empty jury box, a small smile inching across his face. Judge Corlett followed the safety director’s gaze, but he quickly
snapped back to Corrigan and waved for him to sit down. He would allow Ness to remain in the courtroom and to sit wherever he wanted, he said. But in a sop to the defense, he told the jurors when they returned that he hoped they would be “no more impressed by Eliot Ness than by anyone else in this courtroom.” The directive caused a wave of laughter to roll through the room. No more impressed by Director Ness than anyone else? The idea was ridiculous. Flustered by the response, the judge banged his gavel. He had bailiffs remove those spectators he deemed to be laughing the hardest.
***
The court proceedings dragged on, but they didn’t get any better for the defendants. In March, after a twenty-four-day trial, the jury of six men and six women convicted Campbell and McGee of extortion. Cutting off requests for bail pending appeal, Corlett immediately sentenced the pair to serve one to five years. Officers hustled the union leaders, dazed by the verdict, out of the courtroom and into a car for the drive to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. Eliot saw the men to the waiting sedan, and gave the roof a satisfied tap as it pulled away from the curb. Three deputies accompanied Campbell and McGee on the ride down to the state pen. They refused the new convicts’ appeals to stop for something to eat or even to relieve themselves. Arriving at the prison at 7:30, the union bosses stepped out of the car amid a flurry of popping flashbulbs, their eyes betraying the unease of men coming to terms with a terrible new reality. They spent the night in a holding cell, awaiting their prison clothes and numbers. Neither managed to sleep.
The next day in the Cleveland News, a reader cheekily wrote in a letter to the editor: “I was one of the spectators when McGee and Campbell made their famous auto parade through the downtown streets, and I recall that each one of them wore a brand-new plug hat. Can you tell me if either gentleman wore his plug hat on the recent trip through the streets of Columbus to the penitentiary?” The same edition of the paper brought news that the Miller United Shoe Company would remodel its fourteen Cleveland-area stores. The company, wary of having to deal with Campbell and McGee, had held off on doing the work for years.
Three days after the convictions, Mayor Burton wrote to Eliot. It was as effusive as the reserved, buttoned-up mayor got.
Dear Eliot:
Confirming and developing my oral statement immediately following my receipt of the news of the conviction of Campbell and McGee, this letter is to express to you my official and personal appreciation of the exceptional public service which you rendered in this case.
This case and the long investigation leading up to it has dealt with one of the worst conditions in Cleveland. From the first day that you joined us, you have in a quiet and modest way led the attack on this evil. The conviction of Campbell and McGee marks a major victory in the battle and I believe marks the turning point in our campaign to drive out the rackets. . . .
I hope that you enjoy your well earned vacation and will return to your duties here ready to continue the drive with your usual vigor and with increased assurance of success.
With personal regards to Mrs. Ness and yourself,
Yours sincerely,
Harold H. Burton
Mayor
Frank Cullitan, talking to Eliot after the verdict, had offered a more succinct response to the victory. “Campbell and McGee asked for it,” he said.
***
The convictions, coming on top of the police housecleaning and the gambling-racket assault, made Eliot a national figure once again, even more so than during the Untouchables’ heyday. This time not just newspapers but the glossy national magazines jumped on the Ness bandwagon.
Newsweek wrote that Eliot had “lifted fear from the hearts of honest men.” Cosmopolitan, then a literary and opinion magazine, wrote: “Next time anybody tells you that individual opportunity is as dead as the dodo in this corporate age, and the chance for adventure along with it, please introduce him to Eliot Ness, Director of Public Safety for Cleveland—the remarkable young man who found a dramatic challenge in an ordinary job and who represents a brand-new school of crime smashers.”
Reader’s Digest noted that Eliot earned $7,500 a year as Cleveland’s safety director and had been offered many times that by private companies to make the leap into the business world. “Someday I may take one of those jobs,” it quoted Eliot as saying. “Right now, however, I want to prove what an honest police force with intelligence and civic pride can do.”
CHAPTER 26
The Doctor
Cleveland’s serial killer kept interrupting Eliot’s good work.
Back in February 1937, the torso of a young woman had swirled out of Lake Erie and thumped ashore near the end of 156th Street. This latest corpse—officially victim number seven—reignited public fascination with the murders, even though the county’s new coroner, Samuel Gerber, couldn’t say for sure it was the work of the same “maniac butcher” who had been scattering body parts around the area for more than two years. Inevitably, the investigation became a political issue. Martin L. Sweeney was a Democratic congressman from Cleveland and a determined Burton antagonist, for the Republican mayor looked to be headed for higher office. That meant Eliot also was on the ambitious congressman’s hit list. (Sweeney called him Burton’s “alter ego.”) Even though the campaign season hadn’t begun yet, the congressman told Clevelanders that if they rid themselves of Burton, “we can send back to Washington the Prohibition agent who now is safety director.” That line of attack fell flat—no one minded that the city’s hard-charging safety director had once been a liquor cop—but Sweeney kept up his criticism. A couple of weeks after the discovery of victim number seven, the congressman, playing on Clevelanders’ fears, declared that Eliot was wasting precious time on police-corruption cases when he should be focused on catching the city’s serial killer. “There’s a killer out there,” he would declare time and again.
Eliot never highlighted the torso investigation when talking with reporters, but he spent large parts of every week on the case, monitoring Merylo and Zalewski’s progress and at the same running his own counterinvestigation that he kept from them. He decided to let the cocky Merylo be the public face of the case. The detective liked to talk and beat his chest. Eliot figured that he and his Unknowns could pursue their own leads unnoticed behind Merylo’s gruff razzle-dazzle. Separate from Merylo and Zalewski’s work, the Unknowns broke down each murder fact by fact and reinvestigated it. Slowly, they tied up loose ends, though this never seemed to lead anywhere useful. One example: in September 1935, after the discovery of Andrassy and the still unidentified second man on Jackass Hill, detectives had tried to find a Philip Russo. His car had been seen numerous times at the top of the hill, with a man—presumably Russo—surveying the area with binoculars. Police considered it a promising lead, even more so when they couldn’t find him. Now, almost two years later, investigators tracked Russo down, only to quickly strike him from the list of suspects. It turned out that a woman who lived in an apartment facing Jackass Hill had carefully planned out her marital indiscretions. She would sometimes tell Russo, her inamorata at the time, to wait at the top of the hill with binoculars. When her husband left the apartment, she would flap a tablecloth out the window, the sign for her lover to hop in his car and zip over to the building.
When the weather turned nice that summer of 1937, the killer picked up his pace again. On June 6, the neatly severed head of an African American woman was found underneath the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. Her torso had been stuffed into a burlap sack and left nearby. Gerber would be able to identify this latest victim—her name was Rose Wallace—based on distinctive dental work. Like Flo Polillo, she had been a part-time prostitute. A month after the discovery of Wallace’s remains, the torso of a white man—along with other pieces of him—turned up in the Cuyahoga River, victim number nine. That was three new bodies in less than six months.
Eliot and his team finally got a break in the case eight long months later. On a warm, breezy day in March
1938, with the Campbell-McGee trial heading toward a verdict, a dog bounded out of the woods near the town of Sandusky with a human leg in its mouth. The dog’s owner, horrified, called the county sheriff’s office. The local coroner, E. J. Meckstroth, would determine that the appendage belonged to a young woman. “The leg shows as neat a job of amputation as I ever saw,” he remarked. This raised a red flag sixty miles away in Cleveland. David Cowles, the police department’s superintendent of criminal identification, drove out to Sandusky to inspect the mystery leg.
Cowles’s work in the lab had earned Eliot’s respect over the past two years. The feeling wasn’t mutual. Like Merylo, the short, round Cowles resisted Eliot’s natural friendliness. After all, Eliot was everything—good-looking, charming, intrepid—that Cowles wanted to be but never could manage. But if Eliot recognized the antipathy, he ignored it. Cowles, a self-taught chemist, was a strong advocate for ballistics and lie-detector technology, two much-derided scientific innovations that also fascinated Eliot. Their agreement on the value of scientific policing led Eliot to begin giving Cowles fieldwork. Most notably, he had put him in charge of running informants for the safety department’s under-the-radar torso investigation.
Cowles believed this severed limb found far from the city represented a major breakthrough. He had cultivated a source at the Osborn State Prison Honor Farm who was providing him with tantalizing information about a disgraced forty-four-year-old doctor, Francis Sweeney, who periodically checked himself into the veterans’ hospital at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. The six-hundred-bed hospital stood near the prison work farm in Sandusky. Now, on Cowles’s recommendation, Eliot and his Unknowns turned their attention to Sweeney.
Dr. Sweeney was a big man, certainly strong enough to subdue and hack up prostitutes and even young, fit men. The investigators dug into his background. They learned he had been gassed during the World War and never really recovered. He spiraled into mental illness in the years that followed—“going down and down and down with the booze,” in Cowles’s description. Sweeney’s wife, a nurse, sued for divorce and full custody of their two children in 1934, after twice trying to have him committed to an institution. Sweeney’s medical career had collapsed by then, and with his wife gone, he fell off the map, slipping into the netherworld where no one keeps records or asks for your name. The only official sign of him came from his stays at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home, where, as a voluntary patient, he could come and go as he pleased. The investigators obtained an old psychiatric evaluation that stated Sweeney had a “frustrated desire to operate.” Excitement swept the group. This looked like their man. They also discovered something else, something that could complicate their pursuit of the suspect. Francis Sweeney was a cousin of Martin Sweeney, the congressman who frequently criticized Eliot’s handling of the torso investigation.
Eliot Ness Page 26