The hiring process showed that, though he may have been the biggest name in the country’s sixth-largest city, Eliot remained small potatoes on the national stage. Wilson and Vollmer were stars in police circles everywhere; Eliot was still viewed as the smart-aleck kid who had hassled Al Capone. But Eliot’s prospects brightened when the pursuit of his more eminent competitors ran into hurdles. The Public Administration Service’s executive director David L. Robinson Jr. visited Vollmer in Chicago and concluded that “the old gentleman’s health . . . would not permit him to undertake any kind of a full-time job.” He also lamented the difficulty of luring Wilson into government service unless the veteran police chief could be assured that it would not affect his professorship at the University of California. As a result, the job seemed to come down to Eliot and Ashworth. In his official report on the hire, Robinson wrote:
Both Wilson and Ashworth are highly intelligent, broad in their concepts and interests, and possess a forceful, but pleasing, personality. I haven’t the slightest question that either would be an excellent choice for the position of director of the division. I doubt if either would accept a position as assistant director.
Elliot [sic] Ness is earnest and sincere, has a good personality, and is reputed to have done a splendid job in Cleveland. He possibly has more “savoir faire” than either of the other two men, but not to any significant extent. He probably would be slightly less acceptable to police authorities through the country than would the others because he has been a civilian director of public safety rather than having come up through the military ranks in a police department. . . .
In summary, I am inclined to think that any one of the three would do a good job. If I were responsible for filling the position, I probably would offer it first to Ashworth, next to Wilson, if he could secure leave of absence [from the University of California], and next to Ness.
On Friday, April 10, the Bataan Death March began in the Philippines. In her nationally syndicated newspaper column that morning, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “The war news is bad today. Even though it has been hanging over us for weeks, so many of us had hoped that courage could dominate hunger and weariness and over-powering numbers.” A couple of hours after reading the First Lady’s grim report, Eliot received word that he had been chosen for “War Service appointment as Director of Social Protection P-8 $8,000 per annum.” Somehow he had prevailed over Wilson and Ashworth. He would be hired as a temporary employee “for a period not to exceed the duration of the war and six months thereafter.” Eliot exulted. He hugged Evaline and spun her around. She hadn’t seen him so excited in months. The next morning, he called Mayor Lausche with the news.
Nearly two weeks later, on April 23, Eliot turned in his official resignation as safety director, to “fulfill my duty to the nation in the work to which I have been assigned in connection with this country’s armed forces.” He wrote that “it has been my privilege to have been allowed to work unhampered” as safety director. In a summary memo about his term, which he submitted with his resignation letter, he heralded the new professionalism of the police department, declaring—with some validity—that it had become a model for big cities across the country. “At the beginning of my tenure in office the police department was at a low ebb, morally and in efficiency,” he wrote, adding that the police-corruption trials he spearheaded had served a valuable purpose. “The so-called purge which was undertaken at that time had three very good results. It raised the morale of the officers and men who had been doing an honest job and who resented the conduct of their dishonest superiors. It established the confidence of the public in the police department. And it revealed that the number of persons implicated in dishonest practices was a small percentage of the whole force.”
Eliot did not meet with reporters or issue a public statement. After turning in his resignation, he drove home and stayed out of sight with Evaline. The newspapers did not take offense at the snub. After pillorying him for the past six weeks, all three daily papers rediscovered their admiration for Eliot now that he was headed out the door.
“Taking Mr. Ness’s record as whole, including all the errors and omissions, we think he is the best safety director Cleveland has ever had, and we have no doubt that his term of office will gain increasing luster by future comparisons,” the Press wrote.
Under the header “Six Eventful Years,” the Plain Dealer wrote that “Burton never regretted [appointing Ness safety director].”
In fact, Ness became the star performer in the Burton cabinet and added greatly to the mayor’s political strength.
In his six-year career under three mayors, Ness displayed personal courage, initiative and ingenuity. . . . The task of finding a successor to Ness will not be easy.
Clayton Fritchey, horrified at the way his paper had attacked Eliot over the car accident, weighed in as well with a stirring tribute to his friend’s work.
Cleveland is a different place than it was when Eliot Ness became Safety Director. Ness restored a sense of hope and pride to a beleaguered community. Cleveland was in desperate need for a lawman with the talent and integrity of Eliot Ness. Today, policemen no longer have to tip their hats when they pass a gangster on the streets. Labor racketeers no longer parade down Euclid Avenue in limousines bearing placards deriding the public and law enforcement in general. Motorists have been taught and tamed into killing only about half as many people as they used to slaughter.
More personally meaningful to Eliot than even Fritchey’s public accolade was the benediction of the man who had taken a chance on him when Eliot was just thirty-three years old. A week after he announced his resignation, Eliot received a letter from Senator Burton.
Dear Eliot:
Now that you are leaving Cleveland and taking up your full-time work in Washington, I wish to add a personal word of appreciation of the extraordinary public service which you rendered to Cleveland during the past six years.
When you accepted the appointment in 1936 [sic] as Director of Public Safety, under my administration as Mayor, you tackled the most difficult situation in the City Government. You more than met expectations and throughout the past six years, you have repeatedly moved into one field after another where you have cleared up a particular matter at hand.
The safety forces of a City are a key to its good government. Under your direction, these safety forces in Cleveland were changed from a bad to a good influence. . . .
Under your directorship, there grew up in the Department a high standard of integrity and of professional performance. I hope that you feel that the sustained effort which you put into this work has been worthwhile. It has contributed benefits not only to the City of Cleveland but to municipal government in general in this country.
The men and women who worked directly with Eliot didn’t need the press’s reevaluation any more than Burton did. They had never wavered in their admiration of their boss. The secretaries in city hall appreciated his shy, low-key manner, which ran counter to the usual barking management style of safety directors. Some of them left work in tears on the day of his resignation. Eliot had also bonded particularly well with the young investigators and police officers assigned to the safety department. “Eliot was a great man to work with,” Luther DeSantis, a detective in the department, said years later. “We all loved him and learned a great deal from him.”
“Eliot was a wonderful guy to work for,” recalled Arnold Sagalyn. “He was very affable, very bright and innovative. Cleveland was a corrupt city—a lot of officers taking bribes. There was no real training at that time for police officers. He changed that. In many ways, he modernized that police force. He made Cleveland a better place.”
***
Eliot left one significant piece of unfinished business when he turned in his city hall credentials: the policy and clearing house case. But he never gave up on it, and neither had Cullitan. Three months after Eliot left Cleveland, many of the accused finally received
their day in court. On July 3, kicking off a series of trials, ten men were convicted of extortion, including Angelo Lonardo and Willie Richardson. Eliot sent the county prosecutor a congratulatory telex.
A surprise came a month later, when a jury acquitted Shondor Birns of extorting some $4,000 from the former policy operator Oscar Williams. Williams, who hadn’t seen Birns in ten years, misidentified the defendant from the witness stand. He pointed to the wrong man after Birns and one of his attorneys surreptitiously switched places at the defendant’s table. Birns and the lawyer wore identical suits, shirts, ties, and shoes. This kind of stunt was exactly why Eliot had always sat in the courtroom for trials. McGill, the prosecutor, derided the seat-switching trick as the “Notre Dame shift,” but he couldn’t help but feel it wouldn’t have happened if Eliot had still been around.
Stepping out of the courthouse, Birns told a reporter he was “greatly relieved by the verdict. I’ve been carrying that charge over my head for more than three years and it sure feels good to be able to forget about it now.” He eased into the backseat of a car and, with a wave and a smile, was gone.*
Birns wasn’t the only gangster to escape justice. Angelo Scerria and a handful of other senior gang members remained fugitives. It bothered Eliot that so many of the top men managed to evade capture, but in a sense this turned out to be even better for Cleveland. Those who went to trial and were convicted served a few years in the pen and then returned to the city’s streets. The indicted mobsters who fled the area, however, were gone for good. A clutch of the fugitives settled in Las Vegas, where they took pieces of the Desert Inn and Stardust casinos. They found the money so good in the desert that they had no reason to ever go back home. Never again would organized crime hold the kind of power in Cleveland that it did in the 1920s and ’30s.
The Mob had been so weakened, in fact, that a cop was able to step into the breach. With the gang in turmoil, Ernest Molnar took over Cleveland’s numbers racket. He ran it for six years, until he was finally arrested in 1948. A police reporter who’d known Molnar for a decade was so shaken by the arrest he found himself unable to ask the lieutenant a coherent question. “Buck up, kid,” Molnar said as he left Central Police Station after his booking. “It isn’t the end of the world.”
PART III
Falling Star
“With regard to women I never had any information or indication that Ness had an interest in women excepting his own wife.” Some of Ness’s former colleagues would spend years protecting his reputation.
CHAPTER 32
Girls, Girls, Girls
Evaline was miserable. Every morning she woke up with a silent scream in her head—Let me out of this—but there was nowhere to go.
She had no home. The boathouse, and Cleveland, had been abandoned after Eliot secured the wartime job. Their furniture sat in storage. They lived out of suitcases in a succession of hotels in Washington, DC. Eliot dived into his work, as always, but the car accident and its fallout still weighed on him like wet winter wool. He worried that the scandal, the shame of it, could resurface at any time and undermine his reputation among the military officers and police chiefs he had to work with every day. “I don’t think he could stand criticism that well, especially when it came to his job,” Evaline recalled. “That’s why he tried to avoid publicity with the accident. It was just one of those things.”
Just one of those things. That sounded like Eliot talking, not Evaline. She long before had stopped trying to match her husband’s smiling, come-what-may shrugs in the face of adversity, his cool, detached reasonableness. She needed to scream, to get the blood pulsing through her veins like Niagara Falls. Every month or so she would embrace this need. She cried and broke plates and let herself be swept away by it all. It was necessary. By now she recognized that her husband could use a good scream, too. She believed that instead of letting his frustration out, he allowed it to eat him alive. It was his blindness to how trivial the car accident really was that had plopped him down in wartime Washington in a rinky-dink job. Eliot surely would have been in the running for any big-city police-chief position that opened up, but he had rushed to make his part-time VD gig a permanent one, lest he never receive another offer. When the Social Protection job didn’t come to him quite as easily as it probably should have—O. W. Wilson seemed to have been everyone’s first choice for the position—he no doubt saw it as confirmation that his career had gone into the deep freeze. On top of all that, he faced the terror of midlife’s official arrival. He was now forty years old. He had suddenly aged out of his boy-wonder status, that cherished part of his identity that had set him apart from the crowd for years.
Despite his shaky confidence, Eliot still refused to do anything in his professional life halfway. He hired Arnold Sagalyn as his information and reports specialist, and together they “designed a systematic, comprehensive program,” Sagalyn wrote, “that made it virtually impossible for a prostitute to meet and pick up a serviceman; and if she did succeed, impossible to find and transport him to a hotel or a motel that would give them a room.” Every serviceman diagnosed with VD had to fill out a form that helped the Social Protection Division track down how and where he had been infected. Eliot strong-armed alcohol distributors into discontinuing deliveries to bars where soldiers had met prostitutes, which led the bars to self-police the local sex trade in their establishments. A cab driver found to cart around “chippies” and their johns faced the forfeiture of his license or the cancellation of his gas-ration card. Sagalyn marveled at how Eliot attacked the military’s venereal-disease problem the same way he had attacked Cleveland’s corruption problem.
As he had done in Cleveland, Eliot created a corps of undercover investigators who would identify the active prostitution operations near Army, Navy and Air Force bases and urban installations, to provide the OSP [Office of Social Protection] with the names of the principals and individual prostitutes involved.
The undercover men would arrive in a town and insinuate themselves into the hotels, bars, and restaurants that served soldiers. They reported their findings directly to Eliot and made special note of whether police or mobsters played a role in the sex industry. The problem was, there were army bases and defense plants all over the country. His handful of new Unknowns couldn’t investigate them all. Eliot had to rely on local sheriff and police departments to carry out his program, which meant he had to convince them of its importance. With his division’s miniscule budget taken up by his investigators, Eliot decided to sell his anti-VD program himself in towns and cities across America. Even if he could have farmed it out to staffers, he really wouldn’t have wanted to. He was determined that the effort not have “any suggestion of a moral crusade,” and he didn’t want to threaten anyone with invocation of the May Act unless absolutely necessary. He didn’t trust anyone else to make the pitch.
Though he hit hard at businesses that allowed prostitution to thrive, he showed an unusually enlightened attitude toward the professional girls whose livelihood he was determined to stamp out. Sagalyn recalled Eliot being moved almost to tears by research that indicated the average prostitute had been abused by a parent or husband “and was often unable to read or write.” Disturbed by the tendency of local authorities to blame the prostitutes themselves for their community’s vice problem, Eliot pushed beyond the purview of the division’s mission by creating an unofficial network of social workers and health officials. Girls found to be infected were detained and treated, but Eliot didn’t want to incarcerate hundreds of women for the duration of the war. He wanted to give them better options. He hadn’t focused on prostitution when he was safety director in Cleveland, but now he would try to save girls across the country from the sex industry. “Many of them have come from broken homes, deprived families,” he wrote in a report justifying his efforts. “Often their education has been limited, and they have had no specialized job training. They have simply drifted from one poorly-paid, dead-end job to ano
ther, and—lacking both emotional and economic stability—have eventually taken the path of least resistance.” He insisted that “sympathetic, trained case workers should be available in each town or vice district for personal interviewing of women arrested in enforcement of repression.” Whenever possible, he sent prostitutes to Civilian Conservation Corps camps for vocational training.
Evaline sometimes went on the road with Eliot, “living in dreary hotels in towns near army bases where Eliot conferred with the mayors,” she remembered. Eliot, the city boy, found he liked small-town America. He appreciated the easy, natural friendliness of the people, the no-nonsense, let’s-roll-up-our-sleeves attitude to whatever problem they faced. These people weren’t whiners, and they didn’t put on airs. Better still, they liked him back. His reserved, unpretentious amiability allowed him to fit right in. “Eliot liked that job,” Evaline said. “We’d go to all of those small towns and he’d advise them on how to get rid of their red-light districts. We met a lot of funny people in those towns, believe me.” There can be little doubt about that. Not just anyone went down to the town hall to hear a man from Washington talk about sex diseases. Eliot would give his lecture, show some gross pictures, and then spend hours patiently answering questions from the kooks and the civic-minded alike. The actual useful conversations, with town councilors and the police on how to implement his program, took place before or after the public meetings. After each trip, he and Evaline would return to DC and try to find a hotel that had a room for them.
Eliot Ness Page 32