MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  Time was something you let pass; you enjoyed. Something you disposed of, not let rule you. Sal was a better, happier man, now that he had absorbed this view of life. Look how Little Angelo ended up, because he was impatient; because he couldn't accept things like they were. Sal had no intention ending up that way. He was a new man. A man with a future. A man without an ulcer.

  The soccer game between the good-looking young people had broken up. Sal padded out onto the white beach, his feet in sandals, a big towel rolled up under his arm. He threw the towel out and spread himself on it, belly-down; let the warmth of the sun blanket him. Bake him. Turn him blacker.

  He thought about Ness, smiling into the towel as he contemplated that smug bastard being out of work soon. That fucker wasn't so much. Big-shot Ness never figured out who the Mayfield Road gang's inside man with the cops was. . . .

  Vice cop Moeller—who had tipped Lombardi and Scalise and certain key others, who had lied about getting a tip from that nigger Hollis about that Democratic Party raid which was such an embarrassing fuck-up—was even now the primary police "fixer" on the east side. Even now, Moeller was serving the independent colored policy operators and Councilman Raney and the other big nigs. Even now, Moeller remained a trusted Ness associate. What a laugh. What a great big goddamn laugh!

  Sal chuckled to himself as he turned over on his back, but suddenly a cool shadow fell across him. Had the sun gone under a cloud? He opened his eyes.

  The silhouette of a man hovering over him blotted out the sun. Sal sat up, and the man came into focus: a big loose-limbed colored man in a baggy brown suit and a misshapen charcoal fedora.

  "What you laughin' about, chump?"

  "Johnson?" Sal got on his feet, acting angry but in reality startled. "Jesus, Toussaint Johnson . . . what the hell are you doin' here?"

  Johnson smiled; it was a tight smile, like a razor had cut a place in the black face for white to shine through. "You're bein' extradited, Sal," he said, pleasantly. "Vacation's over . . ."

  Sal, feeling naked in his swimming trunks, gestured with open palms. "Take it easy, take it easy—there's no rush. Can't we work something out?"

  "Nope."

  Now Sal's anger was real. "Hey—I like it down here. I'm not ready to go back to Cleveland—not till your boss is out of office, anyway."

  "Oh, you're only goin' back to Cleveland for trial. Sal. After that, you'll be headin' to prison—and then overseas."

  "Overseas?"

  The smile broadened. "Federal judge ordered your citizenship revoked, last week. Something my 'boss' has been workin' on for a long while. You're goin' back to Italy—after you get outa stir in five or ten years."

  Suddenly Sal's stomach began to churn. To burn.

  "Let's get you some clothes," Johnson said, and took Sal by the arm. "Can't get on a plane dressed like a jaybird."

  Sal, almost sputtering, said, "You can be a very rich man, Detective Johnson. Name your price."

  "Don't got one."

  Sal laughed harshly, but it caught in his throat as he felt himself being dragged toward the hotel by the unrelenting Negro.

  "You don't, huh?" Sal said. "How's one hundred grand strike you? That's a lot of money for a colored boy."

  Johnson's big head was shaking side to side. "You ain't buyin' yourself outa this one, Sal. You doin' the time."

  Salud y pesetas, y tiempo para gastarlas. . . .

  "Then," Johnson continued, "you takes a little trip back to spaghetti land."

  Sal stood his ground, jerking Johnson to a stop, breaking his grasp. "Who the hell do you think you are, boy? Eliot fuckin' boy scout Ness? Get off your high horse, Toussaint! You're no goddamn saint—you were on Rufus Murphy's payroll for years!"

  "Yeah I was," Johnson said, menacingly. "'Fore you had him killed."

  Sal swallowed and looked into the black, hateful carved mask of a face, and said nothing. Sal had just learned his final Mexican lesson about time: It had run out for him, and caught up with him.

  Toussaint Johnson latched onto the trembling man's arm and hauled Black Sal Lombardi, his skin burned damn near as dark as Johnson's own, off the beach and into custody.

  A TIP OF THE FEDORA

  As was the case with the three previous Eliot Ness novels. The Dark City (1987), Butcher's Dozen (1988), and Bullet Proof (1989), I could not have written this book without the support and advice of my friend and research associate George Hagenauer. George and I, individually and together, have made numerous research trips to Cleveland, visiting many of the sites of the action in this novel. We have, on these trips, haunted the Western Reserve Historical Society, where the Ness papers are kept. We both are grateful to the helpful personnel at the Historical Society, City Hall municipal reference library and Cleveland Public Library.

  Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and some liberties have been taken with the facts; the remarkably eventful life of Eliot Ness defies the necessarily tidy shape of a novel, and for that reason I have again compressed time, occasionally re-ordered events, and used composite characters.

  Sam Wild represents the many reporter friends Ness had, including Clayton Fritchey of the Press, who, like the fictional Wild, was assigned to cover Ness full-time, and Ralph Kelly of the Plain-Dealer, who also covered the City Hall beat. Albert Curry represents the various hand-picked investigators who worked out of Ness's office, independent of the police department.

  Among the historical figures included here under their real names are Mayor Harold Burton; Chief George Matowitz; Executive Assistant Safety Director Robert Chamberlin; Prosecutor Frank T. Cullitan; Albert "Chuck" Polizzi; Webb Seeley; Clayton Fritchey; Maxie Diamond; and various incidental characters, including police officers and judges.

  Will Garner, the former "untouchable," is based upon Bill Gardner, who was indeed on Ness's Chicago Capone squad. To my knowledge, Gardner did not work with Ness in Cleveland; but according to several sources, including Oscar Fraley's Four Against the Mob, at least one former "untouchable" was on the safety director's staff of investigators. Ness did not publicize the names of his investigators, though Fraley implies in his slightly fictionalized book (most names are changed, for instance, and some dates) that this staff member was Paul Robsky. But in Robsky's own self-aggrandizing autobiography (co-written with Fraley), The Last of the Untouchables (1961), a work that outrageously all but omits Eliot Ness from the story of that famed squad, Robsky makes no mention of having worked in Cleveland. I chose to use Gardner as the basis for the ex-"untouchable" on the Cleveland staff because, frankly, I found him interesting.

  Among the fictional characters in this book who have real-life counterparts are Salvatore Lombardi; Angelo Scalise; Toussaint Johnson; Rufus Murphy; Councilman Eustice N. Raney; Sergeant Frank Moeller; Reverend James A. Hollis; Willie "the Emperor" Rushing; Frank Hogey; John G. Washington and his wife; Clifford Willis; Sergeant Martin Merlo; Evelyn MacMillan; the Keenan brothers; and various incidental characters.

  The appearance of Chester Himes as a secondary character (Katzi) in this novel is my way of giving a special tip of the fedora to this great American crime-fiction writer. The first volume of the Himes autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972), was particularly helpful in the writing of this novel.

  When I was in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa back in the early seventies, a radical black writer was, for a time, my instructor; on the first day of class, he asked his students (all of whom were white) to name their favorite black writers. This struck me then, and now, as specious; and while my classmates dutifully mentioned Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and other predictable choices, I mentioned Willard Motley and Chester Himes. The instructor derisively dismissed Motley—because Motley's famous, powerful novel Knock on Any Door, detailing a slum kid's journey to the electric chair, did not focus on the "black experience."

  The instructor was more charitable about Himes, though he ridiculed the author's "jive" depiction of Harlem, which (said
the instructor) had nothing to do with the real Harlem. The geography, among much else, was all wrong. Over the years I've heard this criticism echoed, and it wasn't until I began writing this book—and reread much of Himes, understanding that he had spent his young (criminal) life in Cleveland, and had lived only briefly in Harlem, and spent most of his adult life in Europe—that I realized the Harlem of Chester Himes was really Cleveland's infamous Roaring Third, aka the Bucket of Blood, Bloody Scovill, and Central-Scovill.

  Many of the criminals in Himes's Grave Digger Jones/Coffin Ed Johnson stories bear the names of real black criminals of 1930s Cleveland. The real cop that Toussaint Johnson is based upon was named John Jones—a common enough name, but it's interesting nonetheless that one of the handful of black cops in Cleveland during Himes's years there shares a last name with one of his famous pair of tough fictional detectives.

  In addition to Himes, numerous books on modern black history proved helpful, in particular Kenneth L. Kusmer's A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930. A remarkable book of photographs published by the Western Reserve Historical Society enabled me to "see" black Cleveland of the thirties: "Somebody, Somewhere, Wants Your Photograph": A Selection from the Work of Allen E. Cole (1893-1970), Photographer of Cleveland's Black Community (1980). Several books not specifically about Cleveland were also helpful: Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Clayton (1945); Harlem: Negro Metropolis, Claude McKay (1940); There Is a River (1981), Vincent Harding; The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), as told to Alex Haley; and Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America, John Langston Gwaltney (1980). Also, my thanks to Mary Kent Blandin, who shared with George Hagenauer her early reminiscences of the numbers game.

  A much appreciated source of information on countless Cleveland subjects is the massive volume The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, compiled by David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski (1987), a project of Case Western Reserve University. How I wish I had had this wonderful research tool when I was writing the previous three Eliot Ness novels.

  The major research source for this book, however, was the files of various Cleveland newspapers of the day, including (especially) the black newspaper the Call and Post, which covered many key events ignored by the white Cleveland press. A number of books and magazine articles have been consulted as well.

  "A Mafia Family Legacy," a December 1985 Cleveland Magazine article by Stephen Sawicki, provided helpful background about the Mayfield Road gang, as did its companion piece, "The Lonardo Papers" by Edward P. Whelan.

  Four Against the Mob (1961), by Oscar Fraley, the co-author with Ness himself of The Untouchables (1957), despite its minor fictionalizing and constant name changes, remains a helpful basic source.

  A number of excellent articles about Ness have been written by Cleveland journalists. Undoubtedly the best, and probably the single most helpful source to me, is the article by Peter Jeddick, collected in his Cleveland: Where the East Coast Meets the Midwest (1980). Also excellent is the article "The Last American Hero," by George E. Condon, published in Cleveland Magazine (August 1987); Condon's book Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret includes a fine chapter on Ness as well, "Cleveland's Untouchable." Also helpful is the unpublished article written in 1983 for the Cleveland Police Historical Society, "Eliot Ness: A Man of a Different Era," by Anthony J. Coyne and Nancy L. Huppert. So is an article by FBI agent George W. Arruda, "Eliot Ness-Revisited," published in the May 1988 Investigator. And extremely valuable is the unpublished, twenty-two-page article written by Ness on his Capone days, prepared as background material for co-author/ghost writer Fraley on The Untouchables.

  Librarian Rebecca McFarland of the Rocky River Public Library, Rocky River, Ohio, was kind enough to send me a copy of the text of her well-researched and useful presentation, "Eliot Ness: The Cleveland Years," for which I thank her.

  Other books referred to include Mexico: An Extraordinary Guide (1971), Loraine Carlson; All the Best in Mexico (1944), Sydney Clark; Yesterday's Cleveland (1976), George E. Condon; Scientific Investigation and Physical Evidence (1959), Leland V. Jones; Crime in America (1951), Estes Kefauver; Mexico (1973), Jack McDowell; The Silent Syndicate (1967), Hank Messick; Cleveland-Confused City on a Seesaw (1976), Philip W. Porter; The Mafia Encyclopedia (1987), Carl Sifakis; Promises of Power (1973), Carl B. Stokes; Organized Crime in America (1962), Gus Tyler.

  I would like to thank my father, Max A. Collins, Sr., for sharing with me his reminiscences of his experiences as a white officer with a black crew in the Navy during World War II.

  I would also like to thank my friend Tom Horvitz, who has on numerous occasions shared with me his expertise about his native city, for this as well as the previous Eliot Ness novels. Tom also lent me his last name for the composite character, Mo Horvitz, who has figured in all four Ness novels to date, in varying degrees.

  Finally, I would like to thank my agent Dominick Abel; and, of course, my wife Barbara Collins, whose love, help, and support make the work possible.