CHAPTER 20
The constant stream of news about Eliot’s police-corruption investigation—and even the more recent blaring headlines about a “maniac killer” on the loose—couldn’t bring Clevelanders down. Big things were afoot, exciting things. In the first sign that the economy finally might be improving, the city had lined up more than a hundred and fifty conventions and trade shows for 1936, ranging from the Loyal Ladies of the Royal Arcanum Supreme Council to the biggest catch out there, the Republican National Convention, which promised drama and excitement as the highly motivated opposition sought a candidate to defeat President Roosevelt.
But best of all would be something even grander than the Grand Old Party: the homegrown Great Lakes Exposition. Boosters had come up with the idea of a huge, summer-long bash. They billed it as a celebration of the city’s centennial, but its real purpose was to lift Cleveland’s reputation around the country and thus help pull it out of the Depression. The organizers sought to make it bigger and better than Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933. They were determined to outshine even the Nazi Olympics, scheduled to kick off in Berlin a month after the Cleveland Expo’s launch. Headed by philanthropist and former city welfare director Dudley S. Blossom, the civic committee had quickly drummed up $1.5 million, including sizable donations from Standard Oil of Ohio, Republic Steel, Bell Telephone, Sherwin-Williams, The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, and U.S. Steel.
Early in the year, police cleared out Tin Can Plaza for the exposition grounds. The campus would stretch from West Third Street to about East Twentieth Street, including the lakefront, the downtown Mall, the Public Hall auditorium, and Municipal Stadium, where Major League Baseball’s Indians played. All told, the exposition would take up 125 acres, a fair amount of it reclaimed from decrepitude. After years with virtually no new construction, a series of impressive new buildings suddenly rose into the sky downtown, along with a huge bandshell and a temporary “International Village.” To connect downtown with the lakefront, the Expo built a 350-foot bridge over the railroad tracks. The city laid down fifteen miles of new asphalt roads and installed new water and sewer lines. Expo construction put nearly three thousand men to work.
The plumped-up work rolls were great, but no one forgot that the point was to bring out-of-towners—and their money—to Cleveland. This exposition would not be highbrow. Scheduled to open on June 27 for a hundred-day run, there would be bathing-beauty contests, fan dancers, and three dozen showgirls “5 feet 6 inches and upward.” There would be boxers, prestidigitators, comedians, midgets, circus animals, dueling orchestras, and a rotation of celebrities such as Xavier Cugat and Ted Weems. Let Adolf Hitler top that.
Officially, the Expo was a family-friendly extravaganza, but city officials decided to be liberal in their definition. Sex, after all, was what the public wanted. “They have forced it on us,” insisted Almon Shaffer, who was in charge of concessions. “The pressure has been so great no man could stand against it. . . . You have no notion how popular sex is with a lot of people.” The triumphant French Casino nightclub exhibit, one of the biggest buildings in the International Village, promised “Callipygian Beauties Treading Pavanes and Rigadoons in Diaphanous Garments that Will Be the Talk of All America!” Mayor Burton ordered bras painted on the nude posters outside the nightclub, but he offered no comment on the braless ladies inside. He didn’t need to. The women spoke up for themselves. “I feel wicked as hell—I’ve never appeared this nude before, and my family don’t know what to think,” admitted Trudye Mae Davidson, who, as Toto Leverne, was the French Casino’s headliner. A nearby stall called the Little French Nudist Colony went further still. For twenty-five cents, customers received a four-minute peep through special windows at live naked girls lounging around a bath. What saved the show from the censors: “trick lighting and reflecting processes” that reduced the girls to four inches in size and gave thousands of squinting men headaches.*
Beauty came in many forms at this exposition—including huge. The heroic figure Beauty—along with its male counterpart, Protection—rose above the campus like the Second Coming, nude save for a slash of plaster cloth across her privates. Eliot surely noticed the mammoth sculpture when he walked through the exposition grounds during a safety inspection at the beginning of June. He also must have noticed the artwork’s creator. Everyone else did. The contrast between artist and art was extreme, so much so that a reporter couldn’t help but comment on it in print. “The enormous statues that will greet visitors to the Great Lakes Exposition this summer measure 12 feet from toe to top, but the sculptress responsible for them is not much more than 5 feet tall . . . in high heeled shoes,” the reporter wrote.
Elisabeth Andersen Seaver, with her bulbous cheekbones and petite figure, could fire a man’s imagination more than any statue ever could. No one was ever surprised to learn she was taken. The beautiful thirty-year-old sculptress was the wife of architect and watercolorist Hugh Seaver. Hugh had a solid reputation in the city, but Elisabeth was making a name for herself entirely separate from her husband. Her talent had brought her into the spotlight against her better nature. Throughout her life, teachers, clerks, and friends would misspell her name—with a “z” instead of an “s” for the first name, and an “o” instead of an “e” for her maiden name. The placidly acquiescent Elisabeth—Betty to her friends—sometimes spelled it wrong, too, rather than correct someone else’s mistake. When she came out of the Cleveland School of Art in 1927, adjunct instructor Guy Cowan tapped her to work at his influential pottery, an impressive first job for any new art-school graduate. The Cowan Pottery produced arguably the finest, most distinctive commercial pottery in the country, helping define the city’s art movement. Her signature work for Cowan was Spanish Dancers, a seductive, nine-inch-tall decorative piece that one critic called “spirited . . . very modern in treatment, simple and stylized without being in the least extreme.” Following a brief tenure at the pottery, she won repeated first-place honors at the May Show, the city’s popular annual art competition. Her success became a source of discord in her marriage, for Hugh could be petulant and insecure. Elisabeth nevertheless graduated to more ambitious work, including stone-relief panels at the city hall of her hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a public fountain in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Now, back in Cleveland, she was embracing epic statuary. Hugh didn’t like it, which made Elisabeth feel guilty, but she kept working. She wanted to have her own life.
Elisabeth spent long days on the exposition grounds, high up on scaffolding, the fragile rack of her shoulders tilted into the lake’s snapping wind. The commission from Sherwin-Williams had come in at the last possible moment—less than a month before the statues needed to be finished and in place on the Mall, where they would bookend the performance space occupied nightly by the Great Lakes Symphony Orchestra. She had cast the pieces with two tons of clay and was now lacquering them to survive a hundred days in the sun. “It’s a twelve-hour-a-day job,” she said a week before the Expo’s official launch. “I start in at 7:30 a.m. and am lucky to leave by 7:30 in the evening.”
Elisabeth’s dedication to her work was impressive, but it was not monomaniacal. From her perch near the top of ten-foot-high scaffolding, she noticed Cleveland’s director of public safety moving about the grounds on his inspection tour, his hat pulled low on his head, topcoat flapping behind him. That’s a very attractive man, she thought when she caught her first live glimpse of Eliot Ness. Below her, the city’s celebrated safety director had to stop every few strides to shake hands with Expo workers who stepped into his path. Elisabeth didn’t climb down to join the crowd on the director’s trail. She didn’t like to be pushy. But she made a mental note to secure an introduction.
***
Focused as always on work, Eliot decided there should be a police exhibit at the Expo featuring a fingerprint service. He believed this simple booth would help solve crimes in the region for years to come by bulking up the department’s noncriminal fingerprint files. Officers manning the stall would take one hundred thousand prints during the Expo’s one hundred days. Eliot also prominently displayed Victim No. 4’s plaster death mask in hopes of identifying the man. Just as it had at the morgue, the man’s striking face was an irresistible draw, with many Expo-goers lingering in front of the display for long minutes. Alas, no one came forward with the man’s name.
Preparations for the Expo were a distraction from the police-corruption investigation, but by the time the extravaganza opened to the public, the safety director had identified his next target: Captain Michael J. Harwood of the Fourteenth Precinct. For months, a city councilman named Anton Vehovec had been insisting that Harwood and his men looked the other way on organized vice in his district. Harwood dismissed the councilman’s claims. “Vehovec has made a mountain out of a molehill,” he said. “This vice stuff is greatly exaggerated.” The councilman, the police captain suggested, was a buffoon who just wanted attention.
Incensed by Harwood’s insult, Vehovec asked Eliot to take a walk with him through the district. He said he would show him a booking joint run by Harwood’s son. Eliot didn’t know what to think of the accusation—Harwood was right that Vehovec was a blowhard—but he took the councilman up on the offer. Late on the morning of June 6, at about the same time that Victim No. 4 was being put on public display at the city morgue, Eliot, Vehovec, Detective Walter Walker, and a couple of reporters came up to 1775 Ivanhoe Road NE. The front of the building housed a restaurant, but it was obvious something else was going on. There were men in the corner booths on each side who clearly weren’t patrons; Eliot and Walker pegged them as lookouts. The men in the booths froze when they realized it was the city’s safety director staring them down. Over just a few minutes, more than two dozen men entered the restaurant—and went straight through to the back. Eliot and Walker followed them and discovered a buzzer for entering a room behind the kitchen. Even though he didn’t have a search warrant, the safety director decided it was “imperative to enter.”
Eliot tried the buzzer, but he couldn’t gain access. So Detective Walker began pounding on the door with a brick. When they finally made it into the room, they found the back door wide open. There were twelve men remaining in the room, the floor littered with gambling receipts. Eliot and the detective grilled the men, most of whom were drunk. Three admitted they had been playing blackjack. Some of the others said they were listening to race results when people began piling out the back.
As Eliot and Walker were gathering up signed statements, a young, heavyset man walked through the door. He stopped abruptly, surprised at what he was seeing. Eliot asked him who he was. Harwood, the man said, in a tone that suggested he believed he should be asking the questions. Edward Harwood, Captain Harwood’s son. He said he owned the building.
“What are you doing here?” Eliot asked.
Harwood chewed his cud for a moment, his eyes darting around the room. The ball finally dropped: these were cops. Harwood said he had been at his family’s restaurant, a few blocks down the street, when he heard “something funny was going on down here.”
Eliot sat him down and began peppering him with questions. Harwood said he rented the back room to someone named Joe. He said he didn’t know the man’s last name. He admitted he had been in the room many times in recent weeks but insisted he had no idea that Joe was running a gambling parlor. In a report, Eliot would call Harwood’s claim of ignorance a “thin denial which warrants careful investigation.” He added: “His whole story is contradictory, is hesitantly told and leaves many things to be explained, particularly how such an establishment could run in a precinct commanded by his father.” Indeed, Eliot would later learn that Harwood had been in the betting room all morning, but, luckily for the raiders, he had made a trip to the drugstore just moments before Eliot and his group arrived. The younger Harwood was an expert at turning a room quickly. He could empty it of all evidence of betting and have gamblers playing Ping-Pong and pool within three minutes. He’d later tell an associate that if he had been in the room when the safety director and his men started banging on the door, they “wouldn’t have gotten anything at all.”
But he wasn’t in the room when the raid started. He had walked in fifteen minutes later, so now he was in trouble. Harwood asked to make a phone call. A few minutes later, another man arrived in the back room. The man said his name was Joe McCarthy and that he was the proprietor. He admitted it was a gambling joint and said “Eddie” knew nothing about it.
“Didn’t Harwood telephone you to come down here or he would have to take the rap?” Eliot asked.
“I’m the guy,” McCarthy said.
“You’re quite sure you want to take the rap on this?”
McCarthy was sure—but Eliot wasn’t going to let him. The safety director found keys on Harwood that worked the locks in the gambling room. The keys found on McCarthy did not.
Now it was Eliot’s turn to make a phone call. He reached Chief Matowitz at Central Police Station and told him to immediately relieve Edward Harwood’s father of his command of the Fourteenth Precinct. The younger Harwood barked at Eliot that he couldn’t do that. Eliot asked Matowitz to hold the line, turned to Harwood and told him to pipe down.
Outside, a clutch of reporters had gathered. Vehovec was giving an interview when Eliot stepped into the street. The hacks nearly knocked the councilman over to get to the safety director. “The matter has now gone far beyond the operation of a single bookmaking establishment,” Eliot told them. “It is a question of police efficiency, discipline and honesty in the Fourteenth Precinct, and every officer in it is going to be called on for a recital of everything that is known.”
Later that night, Captain Harwood met with his son at the family’s restaurant on Euclid Avenue and “bawled Eddie out.”
“You were a damn fool to go back in and let them get just the man they wanted,” the police captain hissed. He told his son he had “a good mind to take a belt to you now.”
***
Early in July, Tom Clothey and Keith Wilson began waiting around outside the police academy. They picked off their targets one by one over a couple of days, tapping them on the shoulder on the busy sidewalk or introducing themselves on the streetcar. Eliot had identified five men as the best recruits in the department. Now he needed them for temporary undercover duty. He simply could not trust anyone who already wore a badge.
The assignment: to take down a large bookie joint in the Eighth Precinct. Police officers protected the place, acted as its bagmen and muscle. The Unknowns had watched it for a couple of weeks, but they kept their distance. By now, the city’s gangsters could recognize many of the safety director’s investigators on sight. So on Friday, July 17, Eliot began sending his new conscripts up to the third floor of the building at 2077 West Twenty-fifth Street. The public safety department had issued each of the men a small amount of cash for placing bets and buying drinks. Over the weekend the fledgling officers lost all of it. The gambling equipment, they believed, was rigged.
On Monday evening, while some of the undercover men lounged in the bustling gambling room, a secretary in the safety director’s office called the Eighth Precinct. Her voice cracking, she told the patrolman at the desk that her husband had lost all of his money in the place on Twenty-fifth. The patrolman said, “Oh, you mean that bookie joint down the street.” Yes, she said, that bookie joint down the street.
Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the place; it was run by Tommy McGinty, a high-profile hood and boxing promoter. The secretary said she wanted the gambling den shut down. The patrolman was sympathetic to the woman’s plight, but he also was suspicious. After hanging up, he called the safety director’s office and asked if they knew anything about the call. The secretary claimed ignorance, and the cop didn’t realize he was talking to the same woman who’d just called. Ringing off, he then phoned the Ninth Precinct and asked if they could pop their heads in at 2077, because the Eighth didn’t have men available. The Ninth sent two patrolmen to the address, but before they arrived, the lights in the gambling den flashed off and on, which sent everyone into frenzied action. When the patrolmen stepped into the room, there was nothing to see. The officers tipped their hats, left the building, and reported to the Eighth that they found no evidence of gambling. Twenty minutes later, the place was packed with gamblers again.
The next day, Matowitz ordered the Eighth Precinct’s commander, Adolph Lenahan, to report to Central Police Station. When Lenahan arrived at the chief’s office, Matowitz handed him a resignation letter and told him to sign it. Lenahan, stunned, refused. The chief suspended him on the spot—for being drunk on the job. Lenahan demanded that he be taken to the hospital for a professional medical opinion on his condition, but Matowitz waved him off. Instead, he brought in two officers and told them to take Lenahan home.
A few hours later, Eliot and a raiding party rolled into the Eighth Precinct and turned onto West Twenty-fifth Street. Again the lights blinked at the gambling den and the joint’s employees launched into action. Except this time the five undercover men also came to life. They grabbed the operators. One tackled a cashier who was trying to dump receipts and recording books out a window. Gamblers headed for the exit, but Eliot, his assistant John Flynn, and a clutch of officers met them on the stairs. A paddy wagon arrived to take away suspects. For the next hour, the officers carried gambling equipment piece by piece down the narrow staircase to a police truck waiting at the curb. Men and women on the street, who had been living with raucous gambling parlors in their neighborhood for years, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. By the time the place had been emptied out, several hundred people ringed the building, agape at the sight.
“The suspension by the chief brought the matter of the bookie joint to issue at once,” Eliot told reporters. “I have had it watched for a week, and Captain Lenahan will now be asked to answer why this establishment was allowed to run as openly as it was running.”
The next day, Eliot grilled the precinct’s deputy inspector, Timothy J. Costello, who admitted that his three sons worked for McGinty at a dog-racing track. Costello would survive the investigation, but the upward trajectory of his career abruptly ended. He soon would be reassigned to the police radio room. Lenahan, the precinct’s commander, told reporters he planned to fight the intoxication charge against him, but after a few days of thrashing, he quieted down. At the end of the month, he resigned from the force.
The safety director kept the pressure on. In the days that followed the raid, police barged into a dozen more gambling rooms around the city. A reporter caught up to Eliot one evening as the safety director was leaving city hall. He asked what was going on. “I am interested in whether the precincts are meeting their responsibility,” Eliot said. “A certain philosophy has grown up in the police department in the last ten years, and it takes some time to overcome it. I don’t want periodic activity. I want continued activity.”
***
Late in the summer, Eliot disappeared from public view. Reporters learned that he had given Flynn and Chief Matowitz the authority to handle “routine matters” while he was gone. They quizzed safety department staff and Mayor Burton’s assistants about his whereabouts but got nowhere. “He is the original mystery man, and none of his associates is ever completely in his confidence,” one reporter wrote about the safety director. “His speech sounds candid, but it rarely is.” When another hack happened to come upon the safety director on the street one day, Eliot refused to say what he was doing. “Mr. Cullitan will know how to get in touch with me,” he said, mysteriously.
The reporter didn’t know how lucky he was to score a Ness sighting. In August and September, Eliot quietly left the state time and again to track down witnesses and take statements. On one weekend he made a “sudden dash” to New York to interview a former bootlegger. Later in the year, federal agents would help him find two fugitives in northern Michigan who had been seen marching off into the woods. They came upon the potential witnesses near an icy lake, huddled under a tent, wearing business suits and polished shoes, trying to clap circulation into their extremities. Eliot and the agents probably saved the men from freezing to death. On the drive back to Cleveland, one of the men admitted he had been a “payoff collector” for Harwood. The other stayed silent, save for his chattering teeth.
The old guard, scared by the headlines and the incessant speculation about the safety director’s activities, began to play furious defense. When Eliot heard that patrolmen from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Precincts put the word out that no one who talked to the director or his investigators would be safe, he acted immediately. Like Judge Wilkerson swapping out the entire jury for the Capone case, Eliot ordered the Fifteenth Precinct to be completely turned over. Matowitz transferred twenty-two officers out of the precinct in a single day. He admitted to reporters that the safety director had handpicked their replacements. The move was so unusual that Eliot issued a written statement about it:
My investigation shows that there has been police collusion in the Fifteenth Precinct over a number of years and that condition has resulted in residents losing all confidence in police generally. My order should not be construed as a reflection on the men transferred today. I have not gone into their individual integrity. I have faith in most of them, but, as matters stand now, they are working in a shadow of suspicion that is detrimental to both themselves and the community in question.
Fenton E. Barrett, the captain of the Fifteenth Precinct until being transferred, insisted he would fight the stain on his reputation. A month later, like Lenahan before him, he resigned.
With the press cheering him on—“the community waited long for a safety director like Eliot Ness,” wrote the Plain Dealer—the housecleaning took on an irresistible momentum. Tipsters called the safety department with the addresses of police-protected gambling joints. Surveillance on one suspected officer would lead to others coming under scrutiny. The Ness mystique continued to grow and deepen. At city hall functions, suburban house parties, and inner-city bars, people talked about how the safety director had “spent one hundred consecutive summer nights following the trail of police crookedness through some of the city’s worst dives and some of the metropolitan area’s nicest suburbs.” He would be just as busy through the fall and winter.