Fenger's Most Famous Alumnus: Eliot Ness

Not at all like Robert Stack

My own mother, who went to Fenger like I did, didn’t even know this. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about it when I went there. Nonetheless, a very real person, Eliot Ness

grew up in my old neighborhood in Chicago and did go to Fenger. At the time, Fenger wasn’t this building yet, which opened in 1926

but this

which is now called Curtis Elementary School.

Spoiler: this will test your beliefs on what a “hero” is. You’ll have to come to grips with the fact that humans are complicated, and they can do heroic things at some times and be a complete failure at others. Their story can get embellished by other people with their own agendas, e.g. TV ratings. Ness’ heroic deeds were 25+ years in the past when Oscar Fraley become his “co-writer” (really, the ghostwriter). He died before it was published. That was when the Star Maker Machinery got going. Ness wasn’t around to correct it.

Ness the Myth

I’d bet most people, when they picture Eliot Ness, see Robert Stack

or Kevin Costner

starring in the eternal good vs. evil battle: wicked Al Capone against the virtuous, incorruptible Eliot Ness and his band of Untouchables, tough, upright men who could not be bribed. Perfect Hollywood. In the end, Capone went to prison, so “good” triumphed, right? Well, it’s complicated, but Ness definitely did not send him to prison.

I forced myself to watch the Kevin Costner movie so you don’t have to. There is almost nothing in it that’s factual. Not even “embellished” — it’s just plain “made up.”

The Untouchables is pure, 100% fiction. To name just a few inventions:

• There was no Malone-like policeman (Sean Connery) who schooled Ness on police work.

• The Untouchables were not chosen from the police force but from other Federal employees.

• There wasn’t even an accountant named “Oscar Wallace” (the Terry the Toad actor from American Graffiti).

• The actual accountant who put the tax case together was named Frank Wilson, and he did not report to Ness or even communicate with him. Needless to say, he did not go on raids with Ness.

• There was no battle on horseback at the Canadian border.

• A Mob accountant was in fact located, but it was by Wilson, and in Miami. There was no gunfight in the train station.

• Capone and Ness only met in person once, when Capone was being put on the train to prison.

• Frank Nitti was not thrown off a building by Ness.

• The judge did switch the juries, but it was before the trial started.

• Capone did not switch his plea to guilty; in fact, he switched it the other way, to not guilty, when his plea deal fell apart. That’s why they had a trial. The jury convicted him.

The counter-myth is “No, Capone was nailed for tax evasion and Ness had nothing to do with it. It’s all false and he was nothing but a PR invention!” If you watch Ken Burns’ documentary on Prohibition, that might be what you believe.

But the counter-myth is wrong, too. Before we go on: who, exactly, is pushing this counter-myth? Well, well, it includes a couple of PBS elites (if that term is not redundant)!

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

(Novick is the longtime collaborator of Burns.)

The Chicago Tribune said,

Filmmaker Ken Burns, promoting his new documentary, “Prohibition,” recently said that Eliot Ness “is a PR invention.” Burns’ co-producer Lynn Novick added that “Eliot Ness had nothing to do with catching Al Capone.” Burns and Novick follow a new line of critics, including author Jonathan Eig, who in his book “Get Capone” reduces Ness to “buzzing around like a fly, pestering the bootleggers.”

In another source,

Ken Burns, promoting his 2011 television documentary about Prohibition, said that Ness was nothing but “a PR invention.” Burns’s codirector, Lynn Novick, added: “He raided a few old breweries and busted up some stale beer. Then, after he retired, he wrote a book in which he just made stuff up.”

First of all, his “co-writer” Oscar Fraley actually wrote the book, and did make stuff up for Hollywood. Ness died before the book was even published, and was uncomfortable with the sexing up of his story. By then he was broke and an alcoholic (we’ll get to that later), and probably willing to try anything for a buck.

As for “a few old breweries and busted up some stale beer”: we’ll get to that, too. I would have thought someone who graduated from Yale could do a little better at research (how do you “bust up” beer?).

(You won’t find those quotes in this interview)

The Real Truth

Eliot Ness was born in Roseland in 1903. His Norwegian father Peter Ness operated a bakery at 373 E. Kensington Ave., and later a chain of bakeries. He graduated Fenger in 1920.

By then, his family lived at 10811 S. Prairie, and after high school, he got a job painting. Peter was appalled and thought Eliot would be a failure in life. Eliot enrolled at the University of Chicago.

His brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie, worked at the Prohibition Unit of the Department of the Treasury, and in August 1926 he helped Eliot get hired. Prohibition was deeply unpopular, and the officers in the Unit were often corrupt. It was not a popular agency. Nonetheless, Eliot had always been drawn to detective stories, and anyway, it was a job.

This isn’t the place to tell the story of Al Capone and the bootleggers, a tale that’s been told and embroidered many, many times. Suffice it to say that the Mob ran Chicago, the public was fascinated with them and somewhat sympathetic, and beer trucks made regular deliveries without any interference from the law.

Chicago Heights

Ness’ first big operation was in Chicago Heights, a southern suburb and a mob capital for brewing and selling beer. Their city government was completely corrupted, and anyone could just walk around and sniff the beer breweries. He went undercover posing as a corrupt cop, and eventually met with suspicious Mob honchos. In one tense meeting, a mobster stood behind him and asked his boss, in Italian, if he should plunge the knife into Ness’ back right then and there. He only realized later how close he’d come to death.

There were no Tommy guns going rat-a-tat-tat, the capsule Hollywood summary of that whole period. Ness really wanted to get the Big Guy, Al Capone, but they settled for a major cleanup of Chicago Heights. In one episode, Ness and a colleague were being tailed by mobsters in another car, and finally they made a sharp turn and parked diagonally across the street, so that their pursuers had to stop. Ness and partner jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered the men out of the car. Ness searched the car and found a revolver with the serial number filed off, filled with dum-dum bullets, and concluded that the gun was meant to kill him. How’s that for a “PR invention,” Ken Burns?

For you Roseland readers: the Ness family was then living at 11015 South Park Ave.

If you’re not from Roseland: that street has been renamed in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wiretapping Capone’s Brother

Two things ended the Era of Good Feelings for Al Capone: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and election of Herbert Hoover in 1928. President Hoover ordered his men to get Capone, whatever it took. The citizens of Chicago, by then, were getting embarrassed at all the bad publicity.

Ralph Capone, who really ran Al’s bootlegging business, had his headquarters at the Montmartre Cafe in Cicero. It was decided to bug his telephone, and in those days, there was no requirement to get a warrant. However, it required actually going into a junction box high up on a pole near the target and finding out which circuit it was, and they weren’t labelled. The poles were usually in the alley behind the house or business. Naturally, Ralph had his minions stationed all around the cafe, so you couldn’t just climb up the pole and install your tap.

Ness came up with a decoy scheme: he took the top off a Cadillac, put four men in it, and had them drive slowly past the cafe. The Capone men noticed it, naturally, and thought it was some rival gang ready to attack. All the men in the alley redeployed to the front, Ness and his telephone lineman drove down the alley, and the lineman went up the pole. He would have been a sitting duck if anyone wandered back, but he painstakingly listened to each connection until he heard Ness’ secretary talking. Ness had had her call the number and engage in a long conversation so the lineman would know when he’d found it.

Amazingly, the scheme worked and he found the Montmartre’s connection without being discovered. He installed the tap, and Ness and others listened to all the phone conversations for months, being bored senseless most of the time but learning an immeasurable amount about the bootlegging business.

The Glory Gets Shared

At this point (1931) there were a lot of law enforcement people after the Mob. It was not the Hollywood story of Untouchables vs. Capone.

The tax evasion team convicted Al’s brother Ralph. Other police raids on Mob businesses succeeded in cutting the supply and raising the cost of illegal liquor. Ness’ wiretaps confirmed that the Mob was hurting.

Frank Wilson, a staffer from the Intelligence Unit in Baltimore, was assigned to Chicago to get Capone on tax evasion. Wilson was a man who could have been an insurance salesman in another life. He was dedicated and emotion-less. His tolerance for poring over ledgers for days at a time was limitless. Nothing could shake him, and in the debunkers’ tales about Ness, Wilson deserves all the credit for getting Capone and Ness deserves none.

The truth was that they both did. Proving that Capone actually had income when he dealt in cash and went to enormous lengths to keep his name off paper was nearly impossible (but not quite, as it turned out). In 1931 it was not at all clear that Wilson would ever succeed, and there was a 3-year statute of limitations (or was it 6?) on tax evasion offenses, so even if he did get the proof, it might be too old.

The Walls Close In

The taxmen were closing in on Capone, and his lawyer attempted repeatedly to work out a plea bargain with minimal jail time for the Big Guy. By this time, Hoover and his Attorney General were in no mood to let him off easy, and those talks never came to fruition.

Meantime, Ness and his team worked tirelessly to find Capone’s bootleg business and dismantle it. These were the raids that made such great visuals on TV and in the movie. Even finding the breweries was not simple, since the truck drivers went to great lengths to cover their tracks. Finally, Ness’ men resorted to following the beer barrels! They figured that the Mob must be reusing them, and the barrels were indeed steam-cleaned between uses (note that the Mob was so modern and hygienic!). By following those, they found what they needed and raided a brewery on March 25, 1931. capturing 31,800 gallons of beer and taking down a brewery capable of producing 100 barrels a day.

After that raid, in which they’d had to back their truck into the brewery and use sledge hammers to break in, they fitted out the special truck with the battering ram on the front, which you see at 0:53 in the movie trailer at the start of this. That was not a Hollywood invention, but it was first used on April 11, 1931, not 1930. That raid netted 40,000 gallons of beer and wiped out a capacity of 180 barrels a day.

These raids were not meaningless, as debunkers like to say; they carried great personal risk to the Untouchables and inflicted massive financial harm on the Mob. Every Mob soldier who was thrown in jail, no matter how insignificant he was, required lawyer time and bail money from the Mob, and made the whole organization paranoid. They made frantic efforts to intimidate or bribe Ness and his men.

Capone was indicted for tax evasion on June 5, 1931. As I said before, Ness had nothing to do with it, but the government agents who did put the case together gave him special praise. He became a national celebrity, and was the real-life inspiration for the Dick Tracy comic strip. Ness continued his raids on the bootleg business, which forced the Mob to deliver under-filled barrels of beer and make speakeasy owners buy more than they needed. By September, the government estimated that the Untouchables had cost the Mob more than half a million dollars in seized vehicles and beer, wrecked brewing equipment, and legal fees.

Capone Gets Convicted

Capone’s lawyers did a miserable job of defending him. It was suspected that they were paid off to do that by other Mob captains who saw Capone’s fame as a business liability and were happy to be rid of him. The lawyers didn’t even ask for a change of venue and a different judge, even though the judge was clearly biased.

The period of the trial and sentencing was the peak of Ness’ fame. It was all downhill from there; not in terms of Capone’s fate (which was dismal), but in terms of Ness’ importance in Chicago. The government began stealing his agents and assigning them elsewhere. He’d gathered 1000’s of pieces of evidence for an indictment on conspiracy charges (to violate the Prohibition laws), but they were never used. Prohibition was being abolished anyway, the evidence was circumstantial, and the government didn’t think juries would be sympathetic to such a charge.

The Untouchables continued arresting any Mob member they saw, if only to force the Mob to spend its scarce cash getting them out of jail. Jealousy for Ness’ fame grew among the IRS agents who had done the tax work; they thought he was hogging credit for their achievements.

The public and the higher-ups in the Federal Government felt an enormous relief that they’d finally nailed the Big Guy. They lost interest in the Untouchables and Ness’ team fell apart. As Prohibition was ended, the Feds turned to busting unlicensed businesses who didn’t pay taxes. This was nowhere near as sexy as Tommy guns and guys standing on the running boards of speeding cars.

After Chicago

How many people even know what Ness did after Capone went to prison? Or care?

I’ll be brief, then: he ended up in Cleveland, and was the Director of Public Safety for a while. Cleveland was probably the most corrupt city in the US at the time; the cops were on the take and the Mob ran gambling joints with police protection. Ness became a local hero when he put several high-ranking police on trial for bribe-taking and sent them away. He also professionalized the police force, doing things that we now take as standard, like putting radios in cars and having a training academy. He sent mobsters to jail. He was featured in national magazines.

Then things went south and kept going. He got divorced and quickly remarried. He was involved in an auto accident that looked like a hit-and-run, although it was ambiguous what actually happened. The press, which loves to build people up and then tear them down, turned on him viciously. He started drinking. He left Cleveland and took a minor job in the war effort. His second wife left him. He remarried yet again.

After the war, he returned to Cleveland, became chairman of Diebold, and eventually ran for Mayor as a Republican, against a very popular Democratic incumbent. He lost in a landslide, and people said he might have won in 1941, when he was the most famous man in Cleveland. His job performance at Diebold slipped and he took another job in Coudersport, Pennsylvania (you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it). That’s where he finally died, not before hooking up with Oscar Fraley, who fictionalized his story. The resulting book is the main reason you’ve even heard of Eliot Ness.

Conclusion

So was Eliot Ness a hero? He was a deeply flawed man who performed quite a few brave and heroic deeds. He could have made much better choices and his life could have turned out much better than it did, but I guess then he would have been a different person. Human beings are complicated, aren’t they?