Within weeks, Blackwell and his men did what Molnar never officially could: they found the clearing-house meeting spot. It was in Frank Hoge’s brother’s house in Lyndhurst. Soon it moved to a property in Warrenville Heights owned by businessman and “Mob goodwill ambassador” Abe Pickus. For a short time it landed at an industrial building in Independence Village. Like Myrtle Taylor, it now moved around a lot. One of Blackwell’s raids on the clearing house, recalled McGill, “netted about a dozen numbers operators, thousands of number slips ranging from pennies to greenbacks, and about $25,000 in cash, the take for one day.”
The police captain would have rather netted the books kept by Miss Taylor. That would make any trial a slam-dunk. But so far, Blackwell hadn’t had any luck tracking down her life’s work.
***
While the Mob sought a little peace and quiet out in the suburbs, Eliot made as much noise as he could at the county courthouse downtown. By early 1939, he had lined up the testimony of more than seventy policy operators for a grand jury Cullitan had empanelled. For two months he brought witnesses to a hotel suite to secretly meet with the county prosecutor. He made several copies of the notes and affidavits from these interviews, with each copy kept in a different place “to insure against theft.” No one was surprised that it had taken two years to convince witnesses, by persuasion and coercion, to talk. “That they ‘talked’ was almost incredible,” the Plain Dealer marveled when the depth of the witness list became clear.
The fact was, many of the witnesses talked because they wanted to. When the Mayfield Road Mob took over the gambling racket, the gang’s leaders had figured they were being smart by leaving veteran policy operators in place. Doing so eliminated the headaches and drudgery of running the games themselves. But now they realized that it also meant their business came into close contact with men who had no loyalty to the gang, men who were resentful and angry at their treatment. And unlike legitimate business owners paying protection, the policy operators often didn’t have the assets, families, and roots in the community that made speaking out so dangerous. When Director Ness offered to relocate them and to pay living expenses until a trial, some eagerly ratted out their overlords.
The grand jury wasn’t the only problem the Hill gang faced. The sustained crackdown—the raids, the arrests, the perpetual search for a safe haven for the clearing house—had made Cleveland’s gambling syndicate vulnerable to competition. Sensing the Cleveland gang’s weakness, the Pittsburgh Mob, longtime partners with the Mayfield Road outfit, decided to move into Cleveland themselves—before someone else did. The Pittsburgh gamblers arrived in town during the summer of 1938 and began offering significantly better odds than the Hill gang. They set up shop around Woodland Avenue and East Fifty-fifth Street, the heart of the black neighborhood where the games had first thrived. They specialized in the daily “bank clearing house” lottery, but there was no doubt about their plans to expand.
Cleveland’s gangsters reacted like scorned lovers. They busted up furniture at the new gambling shops and ended various long-established business arrangements with the Pittsburgh Mob. When that didn’t accomplish much, they fed threats to the newspapers in hopes of scaring the out-of-towners into seeing sense. “There’ll be killings, if those Pittsburgh punks don’t get out of town,” one hoodlum told a Cleveland News reporter. Another told a hack: “There’s going to be something done about those chiselers, and plenty soon. They’ll be told to get out or be wiped out. I’m surprised there hasn’t been any shooting yet, but perhaps there’s nothing being done right now because the men who run the racket work smooth, just like the federal government.”
***
In late April 1939, Eliot returned from an overnight trip to Florida and went straight from the airport to a downtown hotel, where Cullitan and others were poring over the policy-racket case files and plotting how best to proceed. Blackwell never had been able to get his hands on Miss Taylor’s books, but the amount of evidence investigators had accumulated was overwhelming anyway. They all realized how close they were to the finish line. (Incredibly, the secretly disgraced Lieutenant Molnar took part in the meeting.) Eliot, arriving at the summit late, weighed in. It was time for them to make their move, he said. The meeting broke up with handshakes and backslapping all around.
On Wednesday, April 26, two years after Eliot had turned his attention from police corruption to the Mob, Cleveland’s newspapers crashed banner headlines across their front pages, heralding a staggering blow to the Mayfield Road Mob. Wrote Clayton Fritchey in the Press:
In the most sweeping assault on gangdom in Cleveland’s history, the County Grand Jury today returned extortion and blackmail indictments against 23 men named as key figures in the policy racket.
The action resulted from months of secret and dangerous work on the part of Safety Director Eliot Ness and trusted associates and followed a parade, during the last four weeks, of 60 unnamed and closely guarded witnesses.
The indictments struck at the heart of the legendary Mayfield road or “Hill” mob which for years, seemingly immune from detection or prosecution, has spread its web of blood, violence and terror through every phase of Cleveland’s crime and rackets.
The list of the indicted included every major policy racketeer connected with the Cleveland Mob, including Angelo Lonardo, Angelo Scerria, Frank Hoge, Shondor Birns, Joe Artwell, and Albert (Chuck) Polizzi. The ambition of the indictments shocked observers: Eliot Ness and Frank Cullitan clearly wanted to wipe out almost the entire leadership of the gang that had dominated Cleveland for more than a decade.
Eliot believed that taking down the Hill gang would be his greatest legacy in the city, and a far greater accomplishment than his role in the Capone case. The press, accustomed to mayors and safety directors under the thumb of the city’s mobsters, agreed. The Plain Dealer wrote that the “investigation . . . in years past could have existed only as a figment of the imagination.” Men and women stopped Eliot on the street to shake his hand, sometimes with tears in their eyes. Finally, an honest man, they said. Finally, someone with the courage to do something about the murderous thugs who ran Cleveland.
The newspapers covered every possible angle of the indictment. They revealed that Oscar Williams was the prosecution’s key witness, forcing Eliot to hustle the numbers runner out of town. As it would turn out, Williams might have been safer in Cleveland. The city all but emptied of gangsters as soon as the indictments were revealed. (Many of them had taken off days before, most likely tipped off by Molnar.)
The police arrested six of the twenty-three indicted men within a day of the indictments’ announcement. By the end of the week, they’d collared six more, including Hoge and Birns. But the arrests dried up after that. The biggest names—specifically, the two Angelos and Joe Artwell—remained at large as spring pushed into summer. Eliot, frustrated, asked for the FBI’s assistance in the manhunt.
The weeks ahead saw a series of raids on suspected hideouts around the Cleveland metropolitan area, none of which turned up Lonardo, Scerria, or any of the other missing men. Eliot took it personally that so many mobsters had successfully lammed it. He devoted most of his days to the hunt. On May 15, planning to stake out a house after receiving a tip on Lonardo, he replaced his well-known personalized license plates with a set of plates from a car being held at the police yard. He hadn’t gone far when Patrolman Joseph F. Prucha spotted him. Prucha was known around the department as “Camera Eye” because of his photographic memory, which he put to use memorizing the license plates of the department’s constantly changing list of stolen cars. He pulled Eliot over, and when the safety director jumped out of the driver’s seat and marched determinedly toward the patrolman, Prucha leveled a rifle.
Eliot, surprisingly calm with the barrel of an elephant gun pointed at him, identified himself. When the gun stayed where it was, he barked: “Officer, I am your boss.”
Prucha wasn’t buying it. This wouldn�
�t be the first time someone he had pulled over claimed to be the famous safety director. “If you’re Eliot Ness,” Prucha replied, “I’m President Roosevelt.”
Eliot carefully produced his ID and said that, with FDR’s approval, he would like to be on his way. Prucha watched the peeved safety director drive off, certain he would be suspended or fired the next day. Instead, later in the week, the patrolman received a letter of commendation from the director’s office.
***
Eliot wasn’t monomaniacal about the gangster hunt. He continued to take the long view with crime, which meant putting precious resources into preventing kids from growing up to be gangsters. After the Tremont youth-gang campaign back in the fall of 1936, Eliot established a crime-prevention bureau that would focus on juvenile delinquency.
The new bureau, headed by Captain Arthur Roth, was unlike anything the Cleveland Police Department had ever tried before. Officers in the bureau undertook work typically associated with social workers. They conducted detailed surveys of neighborhood “assets”: churches, clubs, playgrounds, swimming pools, and other facilities. They talked with parents, teachers, and community leaders, and became a familiar presence in schools. Eliot made it clear that, for smaller offenses, officers should keep kids out of the system. “No member of the Bureau is permitted to appear in uniform,” he wrote. “Every effort is made to have the juvenile delinquent regard the members of the Bureau as sympathetic friends who are there to help them, rather than as cops. Juveniles are not brought into police stations or transported in official police vehicles. Their names are not entered upon the police records. This prevents delinquents from building up police records about which they may boast.”
Eliot and a professor at Cuyahoga Community College developed techniques for interviewing juveniles. One recommendation indicated just how new this approach was for the police. Eliot felt he had to instruct officers to “be friendly.” He added: “Many juveniles feel that the world is against them. Do not let your conduct further the development of an anti-social attitude in the child. Many juveniles are discouraged. They believe they are failures though they have not had time enough to develop. You wouldn’t expect a half-completed airplane to fly. You can’t expect an undeveloped child to function as an adult.”
Being friendly, of course, was just a start. “Keep them off the street and keep them busy” became Eliot’s mantra. He lobbied the mayor and the city council for help in making that happen. To many people, in and out of the police department, the crime-prevention effort smacked of coddling—maybe even communism. The police were supposed to respond when crimes happened and arrest the offenders. End of story. They shouldn’t try to act like parents or priests. But Eliot remained undeterred. He believed, as Vollmer did, that the best way to make a community safer wasn’t to fill up the jails but to provide positive, meaningful opportunities for those most likely to commit crimes. In short, to make better citizens. “Millions have been spent in efforts to cope with the problem of adult crime,” he said in a speech. “I think the time is at hand when police officials, teachers and educators should join to prevent problem children from becoming criminals.”
Slowly, he won over many of his critics. Despite facing severe budget problems, the city council found money to build baseball diamonds and basketball courts in the most depressed neighborhoods in the city. When Eliot’s revamp of the police force left the department with a handful of abandoned precinct houses, the safety director convinced the city to turn them over to the privately funded Boys Town. Kids from the neighborhood ran the former police stations as clubs and activity centers, using a system of self-government provided by the safety department. The department paid for the utilities and provided a security guard at each building.
More significant still, the crime-prevention bureau followed through on Eliot’s promise to the Tremont gangs by launching its own youth-employment agency. Establishing programs with some of the city’s largest companies, the bureau placed more than five hundred boys in three years. It also worked with the federal Works Progress Administration to create and fund a vocational training curriculum, with some of the classes held at the former precinct houses. Next Eliot helped start up Boy Scout troops in the worst neighborhoods, with police officers and former gang leaders as Scout masters. Eliot became a troop leader himself. Having cops and former gang leaders as Scout masters, he said, “overcame any feeling that scouting was ‘baby’ stuff and gave the activity an additional attraction.” The Scouts had given up on Cleveland’s inner-city neighborhoods years before, after youth gangs beat up many of their boys, often tearing the uniforms off their backs. Now there were waiting lists for troops.
The success was undeniable. In three years, juvenile crime in the city dropped by more than 60 percent. Mayor Burton became a true believer in what he called “the experimental field of crime prevention.” He praised Eliot as the effort’s “originator” and leading light in Cleveland. He even began to parrot his safety director’s scientific-policing language. “For centuries, we have fought crime primarily by seeking to catch the criminal after the crime has been committed and then through his punishment to lead or drive him and others to good citizenship,” the mayor said in his keynote address to the 1938 Rotary International Convention in San Francisco. “Today, the greater range of operation and greater number of criminals argue that we must deal with the floodwaters of crime as we now deal with the destructive flood of our great rivers. We must prevent the flood by study, control and diversion of the floodwaters at their respective sources. To do this we must direct the streams of growing boys in each community away from fields of crime to those of good citizenship.”
***
Eliot couldn’t have been surprised when, six months after privately calling out Lieutenant Molnar on his collusion with the Mob, new allegations about the officer arose. A bar owner, Anthony Zappone, told the state liquor control board that Molnar had targeted him for harassment. The board wasn’t investigating Molnar; it was determining whether to renew Zappone’s liquor license after a pinball machine had been found in his bar. Pinball machines, along with all other forms of gambling, were illegal in Cleveland. Zappone brought up his dealings with Molnar as an indictment of the entire regulatory system in the city.
“For three and a half years I have been persecuted by Molnar because I refused to put him on my payroll,” he testified before the liquor board. “He is supposed to be a great raider, but I can show you a hundred and five bookie joints that are operating and twenty-six ‘vest pocket’ slot machines in places where liquor is sold.” He added: “There have been twenty-five or thirty convictions in Municipal Court for having pinball machines in cafes. Why is it that I am the only one of the proprietors who is called before the board because of a conviction? Molnar saw to it that I was called here. For years he has been trying to get me. His men come into my place and chase customers out. They come in after closing hours and try to get my bartenders to sell them liquor so they can get a charge that will put me out of business.”
On June 6, with Zappone’s charges appearing in all of the papers, Eliot ordered a departmental inquiry into Molnar. But the bar owner had used up all of his courage before the liquor control board. When police interviewed Zappone about the allegations, with Molnar present, he recanted his earlier testimony. He said he’d been misunderstood. The police department cleared Molnar of any wrongdoing.
Distracted, Eliot let it go. Less than a week after he ordered the official investigation into Molnar’s conduct, police found Angelo Lonardo, arresting him at an apartment in suburban Shaker Heights. When detectives brought Lonardo into the county jail, Eliot was waiting for him. The safety director personally interrogated the numbers king, but nothing would come of it. Lonardo, lounging in an expensive green suit and two-toned shoes, insisted he didn’t know the whereabouts of the remaining fugitives. Nine major players remained at large, including Little Angelo Scerria.
In July, wit
h his key witnesses in hiding on the safety department dole but any potential trials on hold, Eliot opened another front in the policy war. He worked with police from the town of Bedford Township to arrest Myrtle Taylor, Frank Hoge (Frank was out on bail on the April charges), and Frank’s brother, among others, on entirely new gambling charges. Fritchey, meanwhile, was still doing his part for both Eliot and the Cleveland Press, hectoring known gambling associates about the whereabouts of Scerria and the others. “Why doesn’t the Press go after the legalized racketeers in Washington?” Abe Pickus asked him before slamming a door in his face.
***
Late in 1940, Michael Harwood walked out of the London Prison Farm near Columbus after serving two years and seven months. The other convicted former police officers would soon join him back in the free world. For Eliot, it must have been like seeing the ghost of Christmas past—the successes of his early years come back to taunt him. Such high-profile victories were increasingly difficult to come by.
After four years of thrills, Eliot had settled into a routine. Waiting for his policy fugitives to surface, he did his best to fill time with small-scale investigations. He arrested Howell Wright, a member of the Cleveland Library board, for extracting bribes from binderies that hoped to secure or hold onto the library’s business. Wright was convicted and sentenced to two to twenty years. Eliot also went after the city’s marijuana dealers, recruiting a young female high school teacher to work undercover for him. “She’s real sharp, knows her way around,” he enthused to McGill. He would net convictions of two large-scale pushers and guilty pleas from three other dealers who turned state’s witness. The teacher wanted to keep working for Eliot, but Evaline, jealous of the woman, put the kibosh on that.
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