CHAPTER 12
At 4:29 p.m., on December 5, 1933, the news reached Chicago that the federal ban on alcohol was history. The announcement proved anticlimactic. The wettest city of the dry years remained quiet.
“Crowds were gathered in a few of the loop bars, but what cheers were heard were sporadic, and there was no general hilarity, although the real celebration was expected to come later in the evening,” reported the Herald and Examiner. The paper added that “little groups of four and five girls, homeward bound from loop offices and shops, were frequently seen at the bar ordering ‘sidecars’ and ‘manhattans’ and other mixed drinks in a manner that indicated they were not novices.” No one could mistake the implication. The saloon would not become the husband’s refuge once again. Women were publicly in the sauce and were staying there, which bar owners thought was just fine. Downtown, the longest queue could be found not at a flashy drinking spot but at the Federal Building, where dealers—including many longtime bootleggers—rushed to pay newly adopted federal liquor license fees.
At about seven o’ clock, a reporter named Warren Brown walked over to a popular downtown hotel and asked the maître d’ what the younger generation was drinking on the first night in fourteen years that anyone could legally buy and consume liquor. “What else do they know, but gin and what they call ‘hootch’?” replied the maître d’. “Wine? They don’t know anything about wine. They don’t order wine with their dinners. They wouldn’t know how to drink wine with their dinners if they did.”
Later, his notebook full, Brown stepped into the hotel’s elevator. A fellow passenger was already in the box, rubbing his hands together, his cheeks flushed. “I suppose you’re getting ready for a big night?” the man asked the elevator operator.
“Me?” said the operator. He smirked, and turned back to the controls. “I have been getting it all the time, as much as I want, whenever I wanted it. It’s just Tuesday night to me.”
***
The best of the bunch from the Capone squad continued in liquor enforcement after the end of the Prohibition Bureau. Repeal, after all, did not put an end to bootlegging. The legalization of alcohol meant real revenue, desperately needed revenue, for the federal government. Men were needed to make sure everybody was paying up. Longstanding bootleg operations, the Chicago Tribune pointed out, “continue to operate wildcat and compete unfairly with the legitimate concerns by evading the $5 a barrel tax, and by using gang tactics to force saloonkeepers to buy their products.”
Joe Leeson moved over to the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU), the Prohibition Bureau’s bureaucratic successor. He was quickly identified as a rising star in the agency. Sam Seager became a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s Intelligence Unit, working under Elmer Irey. He became an expert at fingerprint and handwriting identification and was soon tapped to head up the Buffalo division. Marty Lahart stayed with the Chicago Prohibition office until the arrival of repeal, when he moved to the Alcohol Tax Unit and transferred to Saint Paul, Minnesota. Two months after the Prohibition Bureau discharged Paul Robsky, the government brought him back on a temporary basis. By the end of the year, the Justice Department had hired him full-time and sent him back to Greenville, South Carolina.
Cloonan remained in the Denver Prohibition office until July 1933, when, lacking strong references from Chicago, he was furloughed in anticipation of Prohibition’s repeal. But since no official investigation had been opened against him, the Alcohol Tax Unit rehired him in February 1934. Some weeks later, the agency assigned him to Chicago, and that’s when red flags popped up. This time the agency launched a thorough investigation. His faltering marriage was laid out in bureaucratic detail, including that he “had not provided food and clothes” for his estranged wife and their adopted son, and that “Cloonan had struck [his wife] with his fists and had otherwise abused her, on three separate occasions.” He also owed money to his mother and sister. In the end, though, the evidence wasn’t enough to fire him. His domestic troubles ultimately were his own business. And too much time had passed to reach a definitive conclusion about the bribery allegations, though the report determined there was “considerable evidence tending to show that in February, 1932, Cloonan was in collusion with certain violators, and was accepting money from them.” Cloonan was not disciplined and, again, was not informed that he’d been investigated. He would continue to work for the ATU, though with few opportunities for advancement.
As for Eliot, in September 1933 he joined the Justice Department’s Alcohol Beverage Unit, a transition agency for Prohibition Bureau agents during the march to repeal. (It would later evolve into the Treasury’s Alcohol Tax Unit.) He’d gained some nice publicity as the public face of the “Untouchables,” but ultimately it didn’t mean much. Al Capone’s fame would continue to grow after he disappeared into the federal prison system. His gangster credentials transcended Prohibition. He hadn’t just trafficked in illegal liquor; he was the highest-profile, most successful, and most vicious gangster in American history. Eliot’s celebrity, however, would fade away almost as quickly as it had arrived, like a fever breaking. His fame was inextricably linked to the dry years, an era everyone wanted to forget even before it was officially over. But at least the government was happy with him. The unit’s Midwest administrator gave Eliot an impressive raise, to $3,800 a year, and assigned him to Cincinnati.* The raise took some of the sting out of having to move away from his hometown, but only some of it. When he arrived at his new posting he found he was completely unknown in the office; no one had heard of the Untouchables. He felt like he was starting over.
Eliot had a secure career as a liquor cop, which was no small thing during the Great Depression. But what he really wanted was to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then called the Division of Investigation. He wanted a broader purview than alcohol. He submitted an application, and on October 30, George E. Q. Johnson wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of the division, a young administrator named J. Edgar Hoover.
Dear Mr. Hoover:
Mr. Elliot [sic] Ness, who is at the present time an assistant investigator in charge in the office at Cincinnati, Ohio, (prohibition department) informed me today that he has pending an application for appointment with the Bureau as a regular agent.
I saw a great deal of Mr. Ness while I was United States Attorney. He is a graduate of University of Chicago, is intelligent and has a fine experience.
During the Government’s investigation of the Capone gang and their ramifications he had a special division working which reported to the United States Attorney; under his direction these men did a splendid piece of work. His integrity was never questioned and I recommend him to you without reservations.
Yours very truly,
GEORGE E. Q. JOHNSON
Eliot thanked Johnson in a letter from Cincinnati, dated November 6, 1933. “Throughout my connection with the Government,” he wrote, “I have been constantly benefited by action taken in my behalf by you, and I know that this again will prove very beneficial.” He was wrong about that last part. His record with the Prohibition Bureau, backed up by Johnson’s recommendation, should have made him an excellent candidate for the Division of Investigation, but that turned out to be the problem. Unlike the liquor agents in Cincinnati, Hoover had read the accounts of the Untouchables that had gone out on the national wires. And he would not allow anybody into his agency who might possibly upstage him. He squelched the application. Unsatisfied with that, he began a low-level interagency smear campaign against him. Even ten years later, with Eliot out of federal service, Hoover would still warn his agents to “beware of Ness.”