CHAPTER 2
It didn’t take long for Eliot to get the action he craved, the kind that would impress a starry-eyed secretary during hushed, conspiratorial lunchtime conversations. Shortly before Eliot joined the team, Golding and his men had captured Juliano. Golding insisted the arrest justified the raid in which Beatty was shot, seeing as Juliano had been the target that night. Thus, the arrest justified Beatty’s shooting. This was how Golding thought. “The way of the transgressor is hard, the Bible states, and it seems to me that the work of enforcing laws is no cinch,” he announced to the press. The special agent in charge had recovered his verve.
One thing you could say about Hardboiled Golding, he was consistent. He never learned from his mistakes. By summer, the Beatty debacle had receded in the public’s mind, which to Golding meant it never happened. He was ready for action again. On August 21, a few weeks after Edna and the other secretaries had had their secret weekend holiday, Golding’s special agents burst into rooms 803 and 804 of the City Hall Square office building downtown, seeking records for the Northside booze syndicate.* This was the first major raid by the squad in which Eliot played a key role; he was charged with securing the first room. Golding would praise a handful of agents in his official report (Eliot was among those he singled out), but no one outside of the special squad would view the mission as a success. That was because in the second room, room 804, a man named Merle Adams had responded to the intrusion by punching an agent in the jaw and fleeing, sliding out the door on freshly polished shoes and scrambling down the hall like an overeager puppy. One of the raiders, Arthur Franklin, gave chase, pulling out his revolver as he leapt into the hallway. Up until this point, office workers along the length of the floor had been watching from doorways, agape at what appeared to be an audacious robbery. Now screams echoed in the enclosed space, and men and women rushed inside their offices and underneath desks. A deafening pop resounded throughout the floor. This prompted more screams and gasps from the scattering peanut gallery. Franklin—a twenty-three-year-old “student dry agent,” it would turn out—watched as the fleeing man issued a small “Ooopphhhh!” and dropped to his knees at the top of the stairwell. The student agent turned and strode back to room 804. He leaned his head in. “I got him,” he announced.
That hardly was the end of it. While the intern boasted about his marksmanship, Adams slowly righted himself and continued his flight. He made it down to the seventh floor before Agent Edward Gill, following the trail of blood, caught up to him. More office workers watched as Gill whacked the wounded man in the head with a blackjack. Gill and another raider carried the suspected liquor-syndicate accountant back up to the eighth floor and ran the gauntlet of gapers down the hallway. “Get into your offices, we’re government men,” the agents barked as they alternated between hefting and dragging Adams, periodically thumping him with their clubs. “For God’s sake,” Adams finally wailed to no one in particular, “call Mrs. Adams at Longbeach 4800 and tell her I’m shot.” Leaving the door to the office open, the agents dropped Adams into a chair and told him to open the cashbox or else. They put wet towels on his wound in a halfhearted attempt to stop the bleeding and continued to threaten him when he didn’t respond. Then they took the phone receivers off the hooks so they could concentrate on the safe without interruption. A woman from across the hall, after watching for half an hour as Adams bled through the clump of towels, decided she should call a doctor. Someone else had already called the newspapers, and the reporters beat the doctor to the scene. “Get out—we’ll smash your cameras and your faces,” a special agent bellowed when the hacks arrived in the doorway. This, they should have known by now, was not the best way to handle the press.
“Hardboiled George Golding’s special prohibition squad shot a fleeing suspect yesterday in the City Hall Square building,” the Chicago Tribune blared. The city’s newspapers had plenty of eyewitnesses to feature, and none of them put the special agents in a positive light. Office workers had crowded around the hacks to tell about being violently shoved back into their offices “by a couple of boys who looked like college students and who dressed as such but who kept displaying gold badges and yelling, ‘We’re federal agents: get back.’” Miss Constance Bemis, a secretary, told reporters that Agent Franklin “acted as though he were in a frenzy” as he chased the suspect. She added: “I was standing in the hall when the men ran out, the agent with gun in hand . . . I nearly fainted when I saw the other man crumple to the floor as the bullet struck him.”
The papers railed against Golding’s “terrorist” tactics—first the Beatty shooting and now this—and called for his dismissal. Editorials and analysis about the raid dominated the city’s front pages. The Tribune even used the City Hall Square incident to indict the entire Prohibition Bureau. “All previous records for brutality, depravity, and utter ruthlessness in prohibition enforcement were broken during the last 60 days, when dry sleuths in widely scattered sections of the country killed three citizens, maimed dozens more, and even seduced a schoolgirl—all ‘in the line of duty.’” That proved to be the last straw. The killings and the ruined schoolgirl had nothing to do with Golding, but it was because of him that the news was now flying around the country on the wires. The special agent in charge wasn’t going to be able to brazen this one out.
The state’s attorney charged Agents Franklin and Gill with “assault with intent to commit murder,” and neither U.S. Attorney Johnson nor the bureau publicly supported them, as they had Caffey. Willebrandt was so upset at Golding’s recklessness that she supposedly never spoke to him again. The Treasury Department called Golding back to Washington, and he left without a word to the press or his men. Yellowley, Chicago’s bureau administrator, abruptly disbanded Golding’s squad, calling a press conference to make the announcement. The Prohibition Bureau dismissed a handful of the special agents from the service and reassigned the rest. Two weeks later, Yellowley named Jamie as the acting special agent in charge and told him to build an entirely new team.
***
Just a few years before, prohibitionists even in their worst nightmares wouldn’t have been able to conjure up the need for someone like George Golding—or even Alexander Jamie. At first the federal prohibition force was primarily a PR outfit. Veteran temperance activist Georgia Hopley, hired by what was then the Prohibition Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, spent the first two years of the dry era on the road, heralding the Eighteenth Amendment.* She loved the assignment. The stout, stern-faced woman, always in her signature birdcage dresses, found herself inspired by the transformation she was seeing everywhere: sober faces, healthy faces. America on the rise. At one stop in 1922 a reporter asked her if more women were drinking today than ever before. Hopley snorted, but with a smile, as if a child had said something funny. “A certain type, perhaps,” she said. “But not the backbone of the nation.”
Hopley saw what she wanted to see. She loved to quote “the highest authority of the Nation,” President Warren G. Harding, a personal friend, on the glories of dry America: “In every community men and women have had an opportunity now to know what prohibition means. They know that debts are more promptly paid, families better fed and clothed, and more money finds its way into the savings banks. The liquor traffic was destructive of much that was most precious in American life. In another generation I believe that liquor will have disappeared not only from our politics but from our memories.”
The president, of course, did not for a minute believe his own words. White House staff, if not President Harding’s good friend Miss Hopley, had seen the great man casually drinking alcohol in the Oval Office on more than one occasion. But even such a sight could not possibly have swayed the dusty-dry sisters and brothers of the movement. It made sense in those early years that Georgia Hopley would serve as the public face of the dry force. The prohibition movement had been founded and largely driven by women—women who had seen husbands, brothers, and fathers destroyed by drink, their weekly paychecks washed away, their children gone hungry. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the movement began to pick up momentum, the typical American adult knocked back ninety bottles of 80-proof liquor every year. The rise in the popularity of spirits, thanks in part to modern distilling innovations, had created a new class of drunks: addled, unrepentant, irredeemable. Something had to be done. Righteous members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Hopley’s predecessors, sought to change hearts and minds by gathering in front of saloons to pray and cry.
Yet even decades later, after years of the WCTU marching through the streets of major cities, of the Anti-Saloon League declaring (and proving) that its sole purpose was “administering political retribution” against politicians who opposed prohibition, few Americans seemed to believe a booze ban could ever actually happen. When the Volstead Act—the Eighteenth Amendment’s enforcement arm—went into effect in January 1920, a full year after the constitutional amendment was adopted, the new reality caught many by surprise, emotionally if not intellectually. “The whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse,” Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane wrote in his diary the day before the liquor ban officially took hold. True enough, the world was now skew-jee, but prohibitionists, despite their astounding legislative success, proved to be deadly wrong about what would occur next. Most activists believed that removing the temptation—the brewery-owned saloons on almost every commercial corner of every decent-size town in the country—would cause the desire to fade away, like smoke from a dying fire. Never mind that the booze business was—or had been—the fifth largest in the country, or that to millions of Americans drinking was as culturally significant as marriage. Never mind that the timing was particularly poor. The World War, finally ended in 1919, had brought about a most unexpected lucidity. Millions of Americans suddenly seemed to accept that life was short and ugly, and that maybe there was nothing to come after it. The war had changed everything—art, music, politics, literature. The old world had been swept away completely, as if it never existed. Americans in the 1920s wanted to listen to jazz and to dance, and they did. They wanted to buy automobiles and drive them fast, and they did. Most of all, they wanted to drink. Prohibition—a strange remnant of that old world, somehow renewed—had to be defied. They might not have been able to articulate why, but legions of Americans felt a kind of moral imperative to defy it. No law had ever inspired such contempt across the country.
Instead of the tranquility and good will the prohibitionists had expected, the Eighteenth Amendment brought turmoil and violence. And, somehow, alcohol. It was everywhere, more so than ever before. The Volstead Act hardly worried anyone. Indeed, for the right kind of entrepreneur, the possibilities of Prohibition proved endless. A huge, long-established industry had been wiped off the books with the arrival of the constitutional amendment, but the trucks, equipment, supply chains, relationships, know-how, and other accoutrements of the liquor business were still there in the real world, waiting for a new breed of men who didn’t mind taking new kinds of risks. The spoils would go to those who thought big—and showed no mercy. In Chicago, the country’s second largest city, vice king Johnny Torrio was such a man. Torrio brought in a twenty-one-year-old hood from Brooklyn named Al Capone shortly before the Volstead Act went into effect. Torrio’s gang took control of many of Chicago’s breweries, whose owners at first saw the gangsters as saviors. Without the underworld’s intervention, the brewers would have had to produce yogurt or soft drinks to stay in operation, and where was the self-respect in that?
Few members of Congress—or managers in Washington’s Prohibition offices, for that matter—had anticipated this. Gangsters were now industrialists. The new economic landscape meant hoodlums suddenly did everything on a much bigger scale than they ever had before. Such was especially the case in Chicago, which overnight became the headquarters of Prohibition resistance. Once upon a time the city’s hoods ducked into alleys when they saw a copper. Now they greeted him warmly and slipped him an envelope. They had no other choice; any half-competent patrolman with a functional nose could find beer being brewed in the city. Next came payoffs to judges and politicians. The notoriously corrupt William “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s mayor since 1915, had primed the city for the gangland takeover of its police department and judicial system. By 1923, as much as a million illicit dollars a month were going into the pockets of Chicago officialdom. A visit the following year showed Mabel Willebrandt just how bad things were. In the nation’s second-largest city, she sneered, police suffered from “sleeping sickness”—her picturesque way of saying they were taking money to look the other way. When Prohibition agents conducted raids on speakeasies, they usually found cops happily drinking at the bar.
This scared Willebrandt. Trying to enforce the law, she said, was “like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter.” The assistant attorney general hadn’t been a prohibitionist before she joined the Justice Department. She freely admitted that she’d “had liquor in my own home in California.” But she and her allies believed that if the government allowed the Volstead Act to go unenforced, terror and violence would take over society. Criminal gangs would run the country. That was why, in the middle of the decade, she had helped run Hopley and other temperance veterans out of the bureau and replaced them with a force of professionally trained law-enforcement agents. Of course, by then it was too late. Gang control had already arrived—again, especially in Chicago. “The skies were black with smoke from ‘alky’ cooking plants, beer was as easy to get as water, and it was a foolhardy policeman who dared molest a citizen peddling whiskey that would eat a hole in a battleship,” noted Elmer Irey. No place in America took to illicit drinking like Chicago. Songwriter Fred Fisher called it “that toddlin’ town,” and he meant it literally. Hundreds of men stumbled and twirled around the downtown Loop every evening, looking for a taxi or the steps to the elevated trains. The booze that inspired most of these late-night interpretive dances came from Torrio’s so-called Outfit, which dominated the bootlegging scene from its headquarters in the western suburb of Cicero. “Chicago, the world’s Fourth City, has fallen,” a local reporter wrote of the Outfit’s sudden and extreme rise to power. This news quickly spread far beyond the Chicago metropolitan area. When Torrio’s forces, led by young Capone, took over Cicero’s elections in 1924, the New York Times highlighted the Chicago Problem on its front page, declaring that “bullets, bricks, blackjacks and fists were used generally instead of ballots to decide the issue.” The election, wrote another paper, was the underworld “announcing that it realized its power.”
Chicago had become the symbol of all that had gone so wrong in the war on liquor. Willebrandt understood that the federal government had to take a stand there. She had sent Golding because the city needed her best general. And when he flamed out, poisoning public opinion, she decided to keep the special agency squad in place, even with three of its members facing murder charges. The fight would go on. For Prohibition, it was Chicago or bust.
***
It really couldn’t have worked out better for Eliot. He was one of the few special agents on Golding’s team to be kept on in Chicago. He’d received valuable experience under a daring leader but not so much that he’d ended up in the dock. And now he would serve under his own brother-in-law, who was more careful and professional than Golding, and who took Eliot’s best interests to heart.
It was far from certain, however, that Alexander Jamie would be able to remain in his new position for long. Before returning to Washington, Golding had done his best to destroy the man who was his logical successor. Jamie “is lazy and takes three hours to do that which another man would do in fifteen minutes,” Golding wrote in a memo to Yellowley. “He is sort of Bolsheviki, all the time expressing to other agents statements relative to his political power . . . and how he could have the Administrator’s post or mine whenever he desired.” The attack almost worked. Yellowley fired Jamie, only to have Johnson intervene on the assistant administrator’s behalf. Jamie was unemployed for twenty-four hours before he was returned to the bureau’s ranks and given the promotion—albeit without additional pay—to acting special agent in charge. Though he probably never saw Golding’s memo, Jamie knew Hardboiled had gone around the office slandering him. Already he was self-conscious about having only a grammar-school education and having gotten his start as an investigator by informing on union efforts for the Pullman Company, the Chicago maker of railroad cars and a notorious union buster. (When Eliot was in college, Jamie helped him land second-shift work at the Pullman plant as a stacker, a dangerous and physically draining job.) Now that Jamie had the position he’d always wanted, albeit on an interim basis, he was determined to prove that he belonged in the corner office. The disastrous Beatty and Adams shootings notwithstanding, he intended to lead an active, aggressive special agency unit.
To that end, his first target as acting special agent in charge was a big one: Chicago Heights, the industrial town about thirty miles directly south of downtown Chicago that Lorenzo Juliano called home. Nearby Inland Steel, producing a million tons of ingots every year, promised the Heights economic stability, which helped bring one of the first major highways straight through town, giving the burg the nickname “The Crossroads of the Nation.” The highway also made it a perfect place for bootleggers. Jamie and other bureau muckety-mucks believed the town was central to the syndicate’s statewide operations. They had good reason to think so: a lot always seemed to be going down in this small workingman’s city of twenty-two thousand. The dry law, the Tribune declared, had “transformed the peaceful industrial community with its happy homes into a haven for a great alcohol cooking ring, a terrain of contention, locale of alky wars and a battle ground of bootleggers.” In 1926, the Heights’s preeminent liquor boss, the Sicilian gangster Philip Piazza, had been ostentatiously murdered in front of his café in the middle of the day. Since then, more than twenty men had been killed in the town’s “alky wars.” Another Sicilian, Joe Martino, president of the local branch of the Unione Sicilione, stepped forward after Piazza fell, but others also were in the mix. The Torrio gang had been taken over by Al Capone after rival bootleggers seriously wounded Torrio in a 1925 attack. The Outfit’s influence stretched across most of the metropolitan area, and that included the Heights. Still, much of the violence seemed to be spurred not by Martino or Capone but by the trigger- and bomb-happy Juliano, a dapper, chubby man with a sleek little mustache fit for a cinema comic. The police believed him to be responsible for at least eight murders, including the beating death of a paramour he suspected of being a double agent. But the blood continued to flow even after Juliano’s capture. Earlier in the year, gangsters had shot to death South Chicago Heights police chief Lester Gilbert, who had resisted bribery attempts and even seized some of the bootleggers’ trucks. No one had been arrested for the murder.
Jamie decided he would break the Chicago Heights syndicate by taking out Martino and infusing the town’s bootlegging ranks with fears of turncoats. Of course, such a bold objective would require undercover work. It would require agents who knew the area, who understood the far South Side. His young brother-in-law, he recognized, fit the bill. The South Side was the city’s—the region’s—industrial heartland, its own world, cut off as if by an impassable moat from the glamorous bustle of downtown Chicago and the wild bohemia of the North Side. Instead of classical skyscrapers and elegant townhouses, the South Side offered “ungainly, picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses.” The noise—“a mighty clattering and reverberating of . . . echoes”—was ceaseless.
This was Eliot Ness’s world; he grew up on the far South Side and identified as a Southsider, not a Chicagoan. The difference from the rest of the city—in attitude, in outlook, in experience—was unmistakable. On the far South Side, men came home from work singed and defeated, a retreating army. Everyone drank, the men so they could face another day, the women so they could face their husbands. “I would not want to live there for anything in the world,” the Italian playwright Giuseppe Giacosa wrote after visiting Chicago in 1898. He would not have thought differently four years later when Eliot was born, on April 19, 1902.* He would not have thought differently eighteen years after that, when Eliot, still with no experience of any other part of town, graduated from Christian Fenger High School. Giacosa hated most everything he saw in the city, with its “extraordinary number of sad and grieved persons,” but he thought the South Side was by far the worst. Smoke hung from the air there like drapery. The neighborhood streets, hemmed in by steel plants and ironworks, “seemed to smolder a vast unyielding conflagration,” the mammoth blast furnaces glowing orange and white throughout the night. Children on the way to school clumped through hard granules of soot that fell from the sky like hail, through a deadened landscape where not even “a ghost of the sun shines.”
Eliot’s neighborhood, Kensington, started out as a railroad stop called Calumet Junction. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads met there in 1852 during the track-building boom that settled the West and made Chicago a central player in the country’s life. In the four decades that followed, immigrant Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Italians poured into the area. The nearby company town of Pullman, with its nine thousand worker-residents, banned saloons, so Kensington served the need, earning the nickname Bumtown. Eliot arrived on the scene in the wake of a catastrophic Pullman strike that had radicalized the area. Bumtown was where embittered unionists came to drink, shout about injustice, and fall down. (During his seven years with the railroad-car company, Jamie spent his evenings following these men from pub to pub.) During the World War, crowds in Kensington jeered as young men from the neighborhood marched off to boot camp, because the boys wore the same uniform as the federal soldiers who had beaten down strikers back in 1894. The kids of the far South Side were notoriously aggressive, innately mean. The area produced first-rate athletes in unusual numbers during the first half of the twentieth century, boys like Tony Zale (Gary, Indiana) and George Mikan (Joliet) and Dick Butkus (Roseland), boys who would do anything to win, to escape.
Eliot didn’t seem to fit. He was a mama’s boy, the youngest—by far—of five children. His mother, Emma, a Norwegian immigrant like her husband, missed her three grown daughters, who had married and left the house, and so she coddled young Eliot. Unlike his older brother, Charles, Eliot grew into a soft, amiable, unthreatening personality. Well into his teens, he reveled in his mother’s attention, in being seen as a good boy. At the same time, he struggled with blue moods. He would come home from school and shut himself up in his room to hide his depression. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings. He hated being asked questions. He liked to keep to himself. His mother indulged this solitariness. “Although he has a store of wit, he’s very shy in using it,” his high school yearbook noted. He wasn’t a joiner. As an adolescent, he became a dedicated football fan (he followed the powerhouse University of Chicago Maroons), but even though he was a good athlete, he never tried out for a team. He played tennis, an individual pursuit, a sissified country-club sport. Still, the South Side’s influence ultimately proved every bit as powerful as Emma Ness’s. He spent hours hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, day after day, until he was the best player at his school. After he landed a part-time job at a clothing store, he obsessively practiced his sales pitch in front of a mirror, determined to sell more suits than even the full-time staff. Whatever caught his interest, he became determined to win at it, to be the best. That’s the way it had always been for Eliot. That’s what Alexander Jamie was counting on now.