Early in 1940, Francis Sweeney had popped up again. He checked out of the Sandusky Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home to visit an ailing niece in a Cleveland hospital. Cowles sent Merylo and Zalewski to interview him, to make sure Sweeney realized that the police knew his every move. This appears to be the first time the torso case’s lead detectives had heard the name Francis Sweeney; Eliot had never shared the safety department’s files on the doctor. “During our questioning, Dr. Sweeney was pacing the floor forward and back, as though he were dictating a business letter,” Merylo wrote in his report. He added that he did not consider Sweeney a suspect in the torso murders; he believed the doctor was just one more kook. Eliot took the report as a sign of success. Merylo described Sweeney as “fat and soft,” “delicate,” and not “the type of person” who could overpower, kill, and dismember a man. To Eliot, the report proved that Sweeney had lost his murderous edge in the two years since the safety department had targeted him. The Mad Butcher hadn’t struck since 1938, and Clevelanders were beginning to forget about him. Eliot made sure Sweeney returned to the veterans’ home in Sandusky and then put the case out of his mind, too. Soon, Chief Matowitz would take Merylo and Zalewski off the torso case and put them back in the regular homicide rotation. The torso murders were officially over.
Despite these successes, Eliot’s inability to track down the remaining Mob fugitives weighed on him—and his reputation. The city council and the Civil Service Commission had become increasingly hostile to the safety department’s budget, with its padded “common labor” expenditures for witness protection and the Unknowns. Eliot told his investigators they might have to find other jobs in the coming year. Considering this possibility, his assistant Bob Chamberlin began encouraging Eliot to go after a new job himself. The previous fall Mayor Burton had run for the U.S. Senate and, with Eliot’s support in Cleveland, won a thumping victory. Before leaving office, he appointed the city’s little-known law director, Edward Blythin, to finish out his term as mayor. Chamberlin told Eliot that the appointment was Burton’s way of encouraging Eliot to run for the office in 1941. The Welsh-born Blythin’s slurry accent and bookish personality made him ill-suited to being anything but a placeholder mayor. Chamberlin believed that if Eliot declared himself a candidate early, the Republican machine would back him and the Democrats would essentially concede the race, offering up little more than token opposition. Another friend, municipal court judge and Democrat Frank Lausche, also urged him to run, insisting he would win in a walk. But Eliot waved away the suggestion. Evaline recalled it becoming a kind of game Eliot and Lausche played when they got together for drinks or dinner. “Eliot would tell Frank that he ought to run for mayor and Frank would insist that Eliot run. I never thought that Eliot was seriously interested in politics. He was not a political person.” Jack Kennon, a longtime Cleveland reporter, believed politics bored the safety director. He considered Eliot a detective in temperament as well as training. “The constant excitement of his job is what keeps him there and is one chief reason the mayoralty post has no appeal for Ness,” he wrote.
Unlike Eliot, Lausche was a political person. He’d become publicly known in the city by vocally supporting Eliot’s gambling crackdown, signing off on warrants for many of the city’s highest profile policy operators. When Eliot declined to run for mayor, Lausche jumped into the race, and he breezed to the Democratic nomination. Eliot was close with Lausche personally, but in the general election he felt duty-bound to support the Republican Blythin, who was his boss and represented the continuation of the Burton administration. When Lausche won and decided to keep Eliot in the safety director’s job, it caused a major break between the new mayor and the head of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.
Eliot tried to stay out of it, and to lower his profile. He turned his attention to the fire department, asking for new firefighting equipment and funding for a training school. The proposal didn’t go anywhere, because a month after the election, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, slinging the United States into the Second World War. Within weeks, Chamberlin, Wilson, and Clothey—Eliot’s closest friends in the safety department—headed for Washington, DC, or boot camp. Mayor Lausche was a friend, too, but Eliot recognized that the new mayor couldn’t support him like Burton had. The city council finally brought the ax down on his budget, ending the era of the Unknowns. It was official: the fun was gone.
CHAPTER 30
L’Affaire Ness
At 4:45 on an icy March morning in 1942, Eliot and Evaline hurtled down Bulkley Boulevard, heading home after a long night of drinking at the Hotel Hollenden. The couple was laughing, with Evaline telling her husband about how she had “told off” a rude reporter, when the car began to slide. Eliot didn’t realize what was happening at first. He pumped the brake, but it didn’t do any good. The car crossed into the oncoming lane. Eliot shut his eyes against a sudden glare of light.
The impact slammed Evaline against the passenger-side door. Eliot cracked his face against the steering wheel, loosening his front teeth. He then spun into the door, his elbow cracking against the handle. When the car came to a rest, Eliot turned to find his wife slumped down in her seat, unconscious. He frantically shook her until she opened her eyes. She groggily insisted she was all right, that she just had the wind knocked out of her.
Eliot climbed out of the car to check on the other driver. Robert Sims, a twenty-one-year-old machinist at the Addressograph-Multigraph plant, appeared to be OK. His knee hurt, he said, that was all. He’d find out later the kneecap was broken.
Eliot told Sims to stay in the vehicle; he was going to move his own car off the road and then return. He eased the sedan down Bulkley a few hundred feet to an open area. He walked back to the crash site, where he found Sims’s car on the side of the road, empty, the door hanging open. Another car appeared out of the early-morning gloom, inching along. The driver told him that a motorist had taken Sims to the Fairview Park Hospital. Eliot, wiping blood from his mouth, thanked the man and walked back to his auto. Evaline was still groggy—from drink or the accident, or both. She insisted on being taken home, not to the hospital. She then passed out again.
At the boathouse, after putting his wife to bed and cleaning himself up, Eliot called the hospital. A nurse told him Sims couldn’t come to the phone—he was giving an accident report to the police. She handed the phone to Patrolman Joseph Koneval. The officer asked for the caller’s name, but Eliot, not expecting to be talking to a policeman, panicked and refused to give it. Later in the day, Eliot called his traffic commissioner, Martin Blecke, and gave an accident report over the phone.
The official report wouldn’t be filed for more than two days, and when it finally was, it was incomplete. The statements of the drivers—and the name of one of them, Eliot—were missing from the record. The only tip-off that the accident involved an important person was the inclusion of Eliot’s personalized license plate, EN-1. That was all a reporter from the Press needed. He caught up with Blecke and asked about the missing information. “If the report wasn’t filled out correctly, I will call in the patrolman who made it,” Blecke said. He disappeared into his office and closed the door.
The reporter could smell a big story. He kept digging, and the Press soon published a damning little expose on the “Ness Cover-Up.” The story suggested that the accident report got “lost” on Blecke’s desk, perhaps at Eliot’s direction. The traffic commissioner admitted he’d had the report in his office for a day after talking to the director, “but I wasn’t covering anyone then and I am not covering anyone now,” he said. Eliot didn’t do himself any good by keeping his head down and trying to brazen it out. “As for Director Ness’ explanation of the unusual handling of the accident report,” the paper wrote, “Ness said there was ‘no mystery’ about the report because it was ‘always available.’”
Once the Press published its broadside, the story took on an unstoppable momentum. Radio stations and the city’s other pap
ers weighed in with righteous clucking about the behavior of the man who had done more than his share of righteous clucking over the past six years. Sims’s father called reporters, declaring himself “dumbfounded” that on the day of the accident the police couldn’t tell him who the other driver was. “I had to get in touch with the Cleveland Automobile Club to find who it was listed to,” Ralph Sims said. The press’s accusations about a cover up led to conspiracy theories, with some city hall insiders speculating that a very drunk Evaline, not Eliot, was driving the car.
Stung by the press reports and by everyone’s apparent willingness to believe the worst, Eliot agreed to be interviewed by a reporter in his city hall office. He knew he had made a mistake by refusing to tell the officer at the hospital his name—and that his attempt to set things right by calling Blecke had only made the situation worse. As the reporter began the interview, Eliot sat at his desk, fidgeting, his eyes jumping about the room. He sighed, long and deep.
“It was very slippery and the thing just happened like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “My first thought was for my wife, because I thought she was the most seriously injured. She had had the wind knocked out of her. After she regained consciousness I got out of my car and went over to the other driver and told him who I was.
“I had told Mr. Sims that we would follow him to the hospital but Mrs. Ness said she was feeling better and would rather go home,” he continued. “After I got home I immediately called the hospital and talked to someone. I didn’t know who he was. The person at the other end of the wire asked who was talking and I said the other party. . . . I wanted to make sure that the injured man was all right, but I didn’t identify myself. I said that I would have my insurance adjusters on the job in the morning. . . . At no time did he say he was a policeman.”
Eliot gazed at the reporter for a long time, trying to gauge his sympathies. “I have never regretted anything more in my life,” he said. “I felt I was discharging my duties to the others involved. Obviously, I was trying to avoid publicity.”
The interview did not shut down the scandal. The battering in the press continued, the accident rehashed time and again in editorials and gossip columns. Newsmen and politicians who had long tired of Eliot’s golden-boy image embraced the vicious stories. It wasn’t until nearly a week later that the official police report reached the newspapers, where it was buried on the back pages. Written by Koneval’s partner, Patrolman James Webster, and submitted before he knew the safety director was involved in the collision, the report declared:
The injured man [Sims] stated that after the collision the other driver stopped and came back to his auto and asked if he were injured, and assisted in every way to get him to the hospital and told him he would be taken care of.
In considering the fact that there was no liquor involved and that the injured man showed no desire to prosecute, and also the time of day and condition of the pavement, I did not think it was necessary to make any further investigation . . .
After a short meeting with Eliot, Mayor Lausche tried to put an end to what the Press was calling “L’Affaire Ness.” “So far as I am concerned, it is a closed matter,” the mayor told reporters. “If there was any delinquency about filing the report, Mr. Ness already has more than paid the penalty. If it were not for the position he occupies, the accident would not have commanded the attention it did and would have called only for a routine investigation.”
Six days later, Eliot attempted to change the subject by announcing an updated plan for improving the fire department. This included replacing a station house, building a maintenance facility, and purchasing two thirty-foot fireboats. It wasn’t enough to turn the tide. Just as newspaper columnists were running out of ways to tweak Eliot over the car accident, news broke of four white teenage schoolgirls having sex with black nightclub entertainers, possibly with money exchanging hands. The newspaper story shocked the city. The scandal worsened when rumors circulated that one of the girls had also had sex with Cleveland police officers. Charges now flew that Eliot hadn’t done anything to clean up prostitution during his long tenure as safety director, leading to a culture of promiscuity in many Cleveland neighborhoods. Prostitution was “just as deep and just as open as it was during the regime of Mayor Harry L. Davis,” said Jane Hunter, a prominent African American activist in the city and founder of the social-service organization the Phillis Wheatley Association.
Mrs. Hunter was trying to keep blame from falling on the black community, but her accusation was true enough. Eliot had targeted brothels controlled by the Mob, but otherwise he’d paid little attention to lifestyle sex crimes such as fornication, sodomy, and bigamy. Eliot agreed with August Vollmer that sexual deviancy was an issue for social workers and doctors, not the police. A student of police history, he believed that a crackdown on vice for its own sake was doomed to fail in a big city and was a good way for a police department to get bogged down. He didn’t want to make the same mistake Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had made in New York and Police Chief Francis O’Neill had made in Chicago. Both of them had led unsuccessful vice campaigns that had damaged their careers. As a result, Eliot had ended up doing too little—and now it had come back on him. Underage white girls were being corrupted in the city—by Negroes, no less—and the safety director had done nothing about it. A new wave of condemnation washed through the newspapers.
Eliot read every word printed about him. He cut out and saved even the most damning and unfounded accusations. The way coverage of the teen-sex scandal focused on him, rather than on the men actually involved in the aberrant behavior, showed him that he had lost his moral authority in the city. He fell into a depression. As far as he was concerned, this latest brouhaha served as proof that the criticism he’d faced over the car accident had been deserved and probably had been a long time coming. He had always assumed he would suffer cosmic retribution for failing to live up to his own expectations; now it had arrived. He stopped going out to the nightclubs after work. He stopped taking meetings with anyone but his safety department staff. With Evaline working long hours on a Higbee’s campaign every evening, he holed up at the boathouse, drinking alone and listening to recordings of Shakespeare’s tragedies from his extensive record collection. He took long drives, too. He had always liked to drive—his high school yearbook had proclaimed him “an automobilist”—but it wasn’t speed he was after but simply the feeling of motion, the illusion that he was going somewhere. When, after a few weeks, he finally surfaced from his self-imposed social and professional exile, he had made a decision: it was time to leave the best job he’d ever had.
CHAPTER 31
This Is War
Eliot wanted to do his bit for the war effort, just like everyone else. He’d been issued a national draft order number—1359—but he wouldn’t be joining the army. He was about to turn forty. He instead decided to pursue the directorship of the Social Protection Division in the federal Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services (ODHWS), an opportunity he’d been mulling since it first came up in January. The division was charged with reducing the venereal-disease rate among military personnel, a mission that included working with police departments across the country to suppress prostitution near military bases and war-related industries. He had been volunteering with the agency part-time since September, making him an obvious candidate now that war had been declared and the operation needed a full-time leader. He believed that if he could land the job it would prove that criticism of his Cleveland record on prostitution was misplaced.
Federal spending for military preparedness had reached nearly $75 million a day by the end of 1941, but the Social Protection Division remained strictly small-time, with a staff of just twenty-four. Still, the government sought out high-profile men for the directorship—including August Vollmer, former Chicago police superintendent (and Vollmer protégé) O. W. Wilson, Houston police chief Ray Ashworth, and former California assistant health director H
. D. Chope. There was a good reason for this ambitious recruitment: managers at the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services needed a dynamic leader in the Social Protection Division who could do a lot with a little—and fast. No one really wanted to talk about the venereal-disease problem in the military, but it couldn’t be ignored. The service branches would reject more than sixty thousand of the first million men called in the draft because they showed symptoms of VD. Thousands more would miss training time or deployment because they had to undergo treatment. On top of that, the arsenic-based cure was lengthy, brutal, and no sure thing. (Newly developed penicillin was just making its way onto the market.) With the Nazis in almost total control of Europe and the Japanese sweeping across the Pacific, America’s generals needed every man they could get. Congress underlined the seriousness of the problem by passing the May Act, which gave the federal government the power to take over the policing of towns or districts “deemed to be hazardous to the troops by the secretary of war or the secretary of Navy.”
Eliot fought hard for the position. He argued passionately for complete repression of prostitution, dismissing the worries of some doctors (and some of the other candidates for the job) that this would lead to “the spread of illegitimate sex and disease among the better class of girls in the community.” Eliot wanted to shut down red-light districts and launch an education campaign to encourage enthusiastic “amateurs”—“victory girls,” “good-time Charlottes”—to rethink their behavior. He listed Lausche and Burton as references, as well as Illinois governor Dwight Green and former Unknown Frank Wilson, who had just joined the U.S. Secret Service. The hiring committee contacted his references, and then went in search of more. Arthur Miles, assistant regional coordinator of the Defense Housing Administration, wrote to the committee that “Mr. Ness is a very good man. . . . He is one of the best half-dozen legal administrators in the country. I certainly would rate him very close to [O. W.] Wilson. He would do very well, probably as well as Wilson.” Cleveland Trust Company chairman Delo Mook offered an explanation for the one significant stain on Eliot’s character: his divorce. “From the publicity and from various private information available to me,” Mook wrote, “I form the opinion that the trouble in Mr. Ness’s first marriage was due to character defects in the lady and not to any fault of his.”
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