CHAPTER 16
January was wreathed in darkness. A thick blanket of smoke had smothered the city for a month, squeezing out everything but a collective mood of gloom and anxiety. Cleveland “was well on its way toward winning the dubious honor of being known as ‘The Dark City,’” the Press wrote. The lack of sunshine wasn’t the only problem. A cold spell gripped the region, the worst in more than a year. In the early morning blackness of Sunday, January 26, the watchman at the Hart Manufacturing plant on East Twentieth Street periodically stopped during his foot patrols to stamp and shimmy in place. It didn’t help. The cold hit like a fast-acting poison. The watchman didn’t see anything suspicious during his shift. He didn’t see anything at all save for the dirty snow underfoot, the breath fogging the air in front of him.
It wasn’t until midmorning that anyone noticed the two baskets on the ground behind the factory. At about 11 a.m., a woman bent down and peeked under the burlap sacks that covered them. She continued on through an alley and around the corner to the White Front Meat Market on Central Avenue. She announced there was a basket of hams sitting against a wall behind the Hart building. The butcher, concerned that someone had broken into his shop overnight, went out to take a look. When he returned, shaken, he called the police.
Inside the baskets, detectives discovered two human thighs, an arm, a hand, and the lower part of a woman’s torso, all neatly wrapped in newspaper. The basket and its contents were coated in coal dust, suggesting an initial hiding place for the remains. Patrolmen began to scour the area. They found two pairs of white women’s underwear, also wrapped in newspaper.
Police identified the remains through fingerprints as those of a local barmaid, Florence Polillo, aka Florence Martin, Florence Sawdey, and Clara Dunn. The autopsy determined that “before her death, her entire reproductive system had been removed along with half her appendix.” The report indicated that “all the cut surfaces had clean edges,” meaning the dismemberment had been done with a surgeon’s skill.
The newspapers jumped on the gruesome discovery. They competed for the biggest, most startling headline—“Woman Slain, Head Sought in Coal Bins”—and offered up every lurid detail about the find. They catalogued the body parts, piece by piece, as if this could help readers solve the case. Only rarely—and incidentally—did they provide a glimpse of the victim as a real person. “She usually ironed on Saturday, and when I found she wasn’t there, I was worried,” her landlady told the Press. “She never gave us any trouble, and the only bad habit I noticed was that she would go out occasionally and get a quart of liquor—bad liquor, too—and drink it all by her lonesome in her room.” The city’s smallest paper, the Cleveland News, made a connection between the “hams” left behind the Hart building and the dismembered Lady of the Lake from more than a year before. The paper pointed out that police still didn’t have an ID for the victim of that now-forgotten 1934 case.
The Lady of the Lake wasn’t the only connection to be made. Four months before, in September 1935, a grisly double murder had baffled police. Two boys found a headless, emasculated man along a slope of Jackass Hill in Kingsbury Run, an industrial ghetto on the east side of the city. The corpse lolled on its side, as if the man had just drifted into a midday nap when something horrific happened. Drained of blood, he was naked except for cotton socks. Later in the day, another headless, emasculated corpse, older and stockier, was found nearby. A reddish-black discoloration to the bodies, like with the Lady of the Lake, led investigators to believe the killer had tried to burn the corpses. Sweeping the area, patrolmen stumbled over the heads and genitals in the underbrush.
The younger headless man was identified through fingerprints as Edward Andrassy, a twenty-nine-year-old knockabout and former psych-ward orderly. (The police weren’t able to identify the older man.) Investigators learned that Andrassy was an occasional marijuana dealer, and that a few weeks before his murder he had gotten into a bar fight with someone associated with the Mayfield Road Mob, the city’s most powerful gang. His father said that “Edward lived in continual fear of his life.” The idea that his murder was a gang hit made some sense. This recent spate of bizarre killings might all be about the Mob sending some kind of message. Florence Polillo was a part-time prostitute, another racket run by the underworld. Middle-aged, chubby, and depressive, she wasn’t their kind of prostitute, but still, the Mob didn’t like freelancers. It was a long shot, but it was as good a guess as any.
Police worked the gangster angle of the Andrassy case hard. Tips poured into Central Station, overwhelming the secretarial staff, but not all the calls came from cranks. Dudley McDowell, a security officer for the New York Central Railroad, had spotted a swank green coupe in Kingsbury Run on numerous occasions before the double murder. Clean, expensive cars were a rarity in the Run. The coupe’s driver always scanned the area with binoculars from the top of Jackass Hill before climbing into the car and blasting away. McDowell, a professional, had taken down the car’s license-plate number as a matter of routine.
Through the plate number, police identified the car’s owner as Philip Russo. Detectives went to the man’s house on East 140th Street, but the place had been abandoned. Russo had disappeared.
***
Eliot took little interest in the gruesome case of the prostitute in the picnic baskets. It was one isolated murder, he figured. No doubt the work of a lunatic, someone who’d inevitably be caught soon. Besides, he was too wrapped up in the mundane details of his new job, the kind of details no reporter or headline writer could possibly find interesting. He was fascinated by the science of traffic safety, for example. Cleveland was one of the most dangerous cities in the country for motorists, and Eliot decided he would change that. He declared that the traffic division no longer would be “the Siberia of the police department.” Also the city’s police stations and firehouses were in terrible condition—vermin-ridden, moldering, filled with useless, antiquated equipment. He wanted to fix that, too.
The fire department was not one of Eliot’s top priorities during his first months in office, but that didn’t mean he neglected it. Though he had no experience with firefighting, he immediately reimagined the typical fire official’s typical day. He believed firemen should feel the same sense of urgency in their work, day in and day out, as police officers. He declared that when they weren’t fighting fires or taking care of their equipment, firemen should be focused on fire prevention, “instead of just hanging around in their fire stations waiting to respond to fire alarms.” He sent out orders that officials in each battalion would conduct daily—not weekly or monthly but daily—inspections of commercial and industrial buildings within their area. Faced with concerns about men being taken out of their firehouses, he announced that he would equip battalion cars with two-way radios, allowing inspectors to react just as quickly to a call as if they were in the station. Eliot ignored complaints from the department brass that he didn’t know what he was talking about. “People resent change,” he said with a shrug. “There are folks who start out: ‘This guy Ness is crazy.’ That’s part of the job.”
The city’s lawmakers, so far, were not among the resentful. With cheers for the Harvard Club takedown still rolling through the newspapers, Eliot convinced the council to pony up precious funding for the city’s first-ever police training school. He considered this a game-changing victory. Some big-city police departments offered formalized training to recruits—this was mostly started during Prohibition in response to the rapid rise in organized crime—but these continued to be the exceptions. Many departments, including Cleveland’s, simply handed new officers a badge and a gun on their first day and sent them out on the streets. They were expected to learn the job entirely by doing it, at best with tips and mentoring from veteran policemen.
Throughout the winter and spring, Eliot would oversee every aspect of the training school’s establishment and launch. He found classroom space, designed the curriculum, and selected the instructors. The instructors included local jiujitsu expert Dewey Mitchell, the police laboratory’s majordomo David Cowles, and various senior officers in the department. He selected trainees, too, personally recruiting student leaders at local colleges. (He also quietly recruited African Americans, believing they would do a better job policing their own neighborhoods than white officers.)
Eliot made it clear to the academy’s first class that they would be a new breed of police officer in Cleveland. “If people have been accustomed to giving you things for nothing prior to your becoming a policeman, I suppose it’s all right for you to continue to accept those things,” he told the group of cadets. “However, if people who never gave you anything for free before now want to give you something without charge, you can conclude they are buying your badge and uniform.”
Along with giving advice, Eliot served as an instructor, too. He especially enjoyed helping out with the self-defense courses. The Press ran a series of photos of the young, good-looking safety director showing off holds and escape moves. “Suppose you were a bandit and told Safety Director Eliot Ness to ‘stick ’em up,’” the paper offered. “He might surprise you in any one of 30 different ways. And the next thing you’d know, you’d be on the ground. You might have a broken leg, a broken arm or ‘just be stunned.’”
“He has become as quick as a cat,” Dewey Mitchell said proudly.
By now, a legend had been born. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be Eliot Ness. Mayor Burton’s son, a college student, asked his father if he could spend the summer working for the safety director. By the end of Billy Burton’s first week, Eliot had him staking out a bookie joint. Before school let out, Eliot spoke to hundreds of elementary-school boys who sported their official Dick Tracy badges. “You have a badge just like mine,” Eliot said, prompting a wave of cheers and whistles. At about the same time, an unshaven man in a dirty overcoat walked into the mayor’s office and told the secretary he was there for his meeting with the mayor. When asked for his name, he said “Eliot Ness.” He disappeared before security arrived. A few days later, the same man walked into the safety director’s office, sat down at Eliot’s desk and got to work. This time, one of Eliot’s men grabbed him. He was turned over to police for a psychiatric evaluation.