CHAPTER 17
Frank Cullitan turned in his chair and looked up. The county prosecutor’s face—“as Irish as the keeper of the Blarney Stone,” in one colleague’s phrase—broke into a warm smile. Despite Cullitan’s welcoming countenance, Neil McGill hesitated at the door. The fifty-two-year-old chief assistant prosecutor had been a farm kid; you could still see it in the sidelong way he entered a room, in the wary squint of his eyes when he met someone new. He always looked ready to take a heavy blow.
“Want you to meet Eliot Ness, our new safety director,” Cullitan said, waving McGill in.
Eliot, sitting across from Cullitan, leapt to his feet. “Glad to know you, McGill,” he said, grasping the lawyer’s hand.
McGill, a formal man of the old school, “felt a slight twinge of resentment at this free-and-easy use of my surname on first meeting.” He was Mister McGill even to longtime associates. He indicated his displeasure by offering a testy greeting in return, calling Eliot simply “Ness”—that would show him.
McGill wasn’t sure what to make of the man standing before him. The safety director had managed to get himself in the papers quite a lot during his first two months on the job, and he’d come off looking a whole lot better than McGill’s boss, Cullitan, with the raid on the Harvard Club. Looking him over, the assistant chief prosecutor could reach only one conclusion: he sure was young. McGill examined Eliot’s “boyish face and disconcerting and disarming boyish smile.” He decided he “just did not appear mature enough to cope with the Mayfield Mob, the policy and other rackets, the payoffs to the corrupt police and the racketeering in labor circles.”
Eliot would get a lot of that in the weeks and months ahead.
The three men sat down in the large, cluttered office. The flagpoles outside thrummed in the wind. The lake, visible in the distance, shifted like a sour stomach. “Your move, Mr. Ness,” Cullitan said.
Eliot got right to it. He was going to move aggressively, he told the two men. He wanted full cooperation in his investigations. And he wanted that cooperation no matter how much political pressure came with it—and there would be political pressure. It was an impressive, forceful call to arms, offered up in plain language. This young man who seemed so insubstantial at first glance now showed McGill that “behind that boyish smile was grim determination and the will to do a thorough job.”
Cullitan answered Eliot, but he addressed himself to McGill. “Needless to say, Mr. Ness will get the full cooperation of this office. You, as chief assistant county prosecutor, will be playing an important role, along with Mr. Ness, in cleaning up the city.”
McGill nodded, his enthusiasm for the conversation building. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “Where do we start?”
“At the logical place. We start at the source,” Eliot said. “This thing called ‘vice and corruption’ is a many-headed serpent. We’re going to start by lopping off those heads, one at a time, and let the chips fall where they may. Both of you know, as well as I do, that crime cannot flourish in any city without protection, police protection, and I have reason to believe that the crooks and gangsters are getting plenty of it in Cleveland. So we start with the police.”
McGill turned to Cullitan. The county prosecutor grinned in reply. Yes, you’re hearing what you think you’re hearing, the grin said.
McGill had figured Eliot Ness would ratchet up his move against the gambling rackets, for that would allow him to lead late-night raids—and heroically kick down doors—with the press watching. Everyone understood that to effectively pursue organized crime in Cleveland, you had to address police corruption, but for years honest safety directors and police chiefs had ignored the rot in the police department while doing the best they could against the Mob. (The dishonest ones sat on their hands entirely, or worse.) If a safety director actually went after the real problem, he knew that one wrong step—firing a politically connected cop, for example—could end his tenure. But the new safety director wasn’t one of the boys and didn’t seem to care about his political future in the city.
“It’s going to be hard getting evidence against the police,” Cullitan said. Police corruption hadn’t been tackled in Cleveland partly because previous city administrations had been partners in the dirty game. But another reason, the prosecutor pointed out, was that even the honest cops were loath to rat out their colleagues. That brought Eliot to his feet.
They would have to depend on “unconventional witnesses,” the safety director said.
“Any offender that will come forth and testify against the police will be granted immunity from prosecution, as well as protection against retaliation,” he continued. “We’re going to promise them both. We’re going to contact every known offender in this city, if we have to go all the way back to 1920. Any offender who will come forth and testify will get both immunity and protection. In fact, my men are already at work.”
McGill told Eliot he was ready to get started. He actually had a lump in his throat. He would vividly remember this meeting for the rest of his life. It was risky to go after dirty cops in this city, and it was a risky strategy to use known criminals against them in court. They had never tried it in Cleveland—certainly not on the scale and with the seriousness Eliot was proposing.
The young safety director broke out that disarming smile. He stood and shook McGill’s hand and then Cullitan’s, seemingly well pleased with himself. “Well,” he said, “I must be about my master’s work.” He promised to be in touch, turned, and strode from the room.
Cullitan closed the door behind Eliot, swiveled to look at his chief assistant, and let out a long, jaunty whistle.
***
Cullitan and McGill might have wondered what Eliot meant when he said his men were already at work. The safety director’s office didn’t come with much of a staff, and police departments didn’t yet have internal-affairs divisions. But with the success of the Harvard raid, the world had opened up for Eliot. Now that his director was being celebrated around the city, Mayor Burton had no trouble coming up with the funds to hire a handful of secret investigators, answerable only to Eliot (and the mayor). Burton’s chamber of commerce supporters had indeed had enough of the padded costs that came from the Mob’s protection rackets, which affected everything from truck deliveries to janitorial services. And now, quite suddenly, they believed something could be done about them. So the money came in, and Eliot quickly made the hires. Having built up a bulky dossier on the area’s bootleggers and their accomplices while at the Alcohol Tax Unit, Eliot had excellent leads to get them started. His key hires, in fact, came from the ATU along with his files—including Keith Wilson and Tom Clothey, who had helped raise Eliot’s profile when the new mayor was looking for a director.
The team became known around the city’s newsrooms by a catchy nickname, the Unknowns, a sly nod toward Eliot’s famous Capone squad in Chicago. Which, of course, meant that this new team wasn’t exactly, well, unknown. Reporters who had sat through a boring budget meeting one night had learned that Flynn, Eliot’s executive assistant, officially would be in charge of a small group of “civilian investigators who will visit precinct stations and inspect the work of policemen on beats and in cruising squads.” Flynn, a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer and former Notre Dame football player, seemed ideally suited for such a role. He was six feet four inches tall, with broad shoulders, slicked-back hair, and the kind of abbreviated lip rug that Germany’s new fascist leader was making fashionable. He looked more like a gung-ho safety director than his boss. Flynn told the city’s financial officers that the new men under his charge would not be “spies.”
It hardly mattered that the team’s cover had been blown. By the end of the Unknowns’ very first week, everyone in the Roaring Third and other corruption hot spots was aware that new cops were poking around, even if they didn’t know whom exactly the men worked for. Wilson and Clothey were the lead investigators on the “secret” squad, but, as he made clear when he was hired, Eliot wasn’t going to sit around and let others have all the fun. He gave Flynn authority to make bureaucratic decisions in his absence, and he began disappearing from the office for days at a time. “No fox hound ever hit the trail quicker than Ness hit the trail of the corrupt police,” said McGill.
Eliot pushed himself hard, starting work early every morning and staying at it deep into the night. “Time meant nothing to him when he was on the job,” said Cleveland police deputy inspector Frank Story, who would sometimes cross paths with Eliot late at night. For days at a time, just like during the Untouchables’ period, Edna saw her husband only in passing. Flynn saw him little more than that. Eliot’s undercover investigators followed their boss’s example. Most of them were young and single, and so they didn’t have anyone at home to miss them.
Eliot knew the police force was in bad shape, but what he found truly shocked him. Officers weren’t just taking bribes to look the other way. Well-organized cliques in almost every precinct operated as miniature crime families, with patrolmen kicking up to sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. Some officers acted as actual enforcers for racketeers; other cops ran their underworld bosses’ competition out of business through repeated raids that earned the officers promotions and public praise. Honest policemen were bullied into silence or slowly reeled into the malfeasance.
The Unknowns began following leads to restaurants and bars, to fruit carts and newsstands and laundries, promising immunity for cooperation. They met wary shop owners who offered up stony silence; no one wanted to put their business and possibly their life at risk to testify against something that had long been normal operating procedure in the city. “Patrolman Who?” they’d say. “Pay tribute—what’s that?” You couldn’t blame them for the dumb act. New administrations always promised to act against corruption, but none ever did, not really. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince people that this time was different.
Eliot made his objective clear to the public, stating baldly: “We have no place for traitors in the police department. We want to know on which team every man is playing, Cleveland’s or the underworld’s.” Then the safety director himself scored the investigation’s first significant witness when he convinced a fifty-six-year-old widow, the owner of an East Side social club, to end years of silence. The woman believed that harassment by police officers demanding bribes had helped lead her husband to an early grave, but she’d never dared say it out loud—until Eliot showed up on her door. Eliot excelled at getting people to disgorge information they had no intention of ever telling anyone. There was something about his boyish seriousness that could be hypnotizing. It was a hair’s breath from being ridiculous—it seemed so self-conscious, so careful, like little Oliver Twist asking for more. Sitting down with the widow, the safety director used his earnestness to devastating effect. He quietly cajoled her into admitting she’d been a party to public corruption—and then agreed with her that officers who’d sworn to uphold the law had taken advantage of her. Sure enough, the dam broke, and long-repressed emotions poured out. The woman swung from tears to anger as Eliot listened. “Line them up, director,” she finally told him. “Line up the police department and I’ll show you every crook.”
Eliot was prepared to do exactly that. This woman told him that during the Prohibition years she and her husband had paid Cleveland police officers $10,000 in protection money, not including $150 she forked over at Central Station one night to have a liquor arrest “fixed.” Better yet, he didn’t just have to take her word for it. The couple had carefully put down every payoff in a ledger book.
“My husband was forced to buy all kinds of tickets from the police,” she would tell a grand jury. “Generally, they cost $3 and $5 a piece and he always took at least two. Once when I asked Pa if he was going to a police clambake he had just bought a ticket for, he said: ‘No. That was held last week.’ My husband always paid. He never argued with them. I used to get mad when police would come in from other precincts, but my husband would say: ‘Keep quiet, now. This is all right.’”
What particularly infuriated her was that the police didn’t play by the rules they had made up. They’d arrest the couple whenever they needed a bust or just to show them who was boss. “About seven years ago Sergeant ______ came in with two cops,” she said. (The officers’ names were redacted from grand jury documents.) “They arrested me, put me in the squad car and took me to central station. There I waited in the courtroom for a long time while the police went into the judge’s office. Finally I told them I had to go home, that my husband was sick and the children would be home for lunch. They went into the judge’s office again and came out and said I had been discharged. They put me in the squad car and on the way they told me the ‘fix’ would cost $150. When I got home I got the money from my husband and handed it over to the Sergeant.”
The woman insisted that for seven years three patrolmen came into the club twice every week and she gave them $10 each. “I bought off everyone except the feds. . . . I had to pay police protection before I could pay my rent.” She said she also had to give officers free liquor, chickens, and other food. She ultimately identified thirty-seven police officers who’d “badgered” her for money.
Not to be outdone by their boss, the Unknowns soon collected reams of testimony from dozens of their own witnesses. The investigators mostly focused on the Prohibition years, 1920 to 1933, for bar owners and former bootleggers no longer had to worry about prosecution for Volstead violations. Said one saloonkeeper: “I didn’t mind paying the $25 a month or more, but after work the police would come to my bar and drink free and eat all my free lunch. Sometimes there wasn’t room at the bar for paying customers.”