CHAPTER 8
“There it is,” Joe Leeson said. He sounded relieved, as if the block-long building they had carefully staked out for a month might have been quietly lifted up and carried away in the night. The building, at 1632–1642 South Cicero Avenue, sat in a heap on the side of the road, like a fresh bear dropping. Leeson and Eliot watched from the cab of their idling truck as steam puffed from vents along the building’s sides, nearly invisible in the snow-lashed landscape. The nation’s freight rail loadings, a key indicator of Chicago’s economic health, were down thirty-two thousand from the previous week, and 25 percent from the previous year. This was no surprise. Gross national product had fallen by more than a third since the beginning of the downturn—and was still falling. The pain was spreading far and going deep. Yet Al Capone’s breweries blasted away, as hard and often as they dared. The agents had figured out that this brewery was producing at least a hundred barrels of product a day. Eliot wanted to take it down at the height of its production cycle.
The truck heaved and coughed in neutral as Eliot exchanged hand signals with agents in the car behind. They needed to be synchronized. The squad had spent weeks preparing for this moment. It was late March already. Their plans had been put on hold three weeks earlier by sixteen inches of fresh, fluffy snow, which buried parked cars and bleached city streets for miles. Even now, old piles of snow still choked alleys and clogged gutters, and a persistent gray mist cut visibility to a few feet. But the squad could wait no longer. The convoy had begun its slow trek up the main boulevard in Cicero shortly after dawn. The truck at the head of the pack had five men in it, including Eliot in the front passenger seat, wearing a leather football helmet. More men trailed in black sedans. Intent on the element of surprise, Eliot and his team—plus a handful of borrowed police officers—had planned the raid “as we would design a football play.” Everyone knew what he was supposed to do.
The Prohibition Bureau had long before learned that Capone’s breweries were kept behind reinforced steel doors and came equipped with escape hatches. Most brewery raids over the years had bogged down right at the start. There’d be dozens of men balled up in front of the building, as if in a huge rugby scrum, loudly banging on the doors with sledgehammers and crowbars. By the time they actually made it inside, the brewers and sometimes all of the equipment were long gone.
Eliot’s raid would be different. The squad’s small size and insular method of working lowered the risk of any wayward cop or dry agent tipping off the Outfit. The more pressing issue was how best to quickly get inside the brewery’s walls and prevent escapes. To solve this problem the squad built a huge, snowplow-like battering ram, shaped almost like an arrowhead. The team worked on it in a government garage on the northwest side, usually late at night. They kept it hidden from other agents in the bureau; Eliot didn’t even tell Johnson about it. The battering ram would be the team’s secret weapon. For Eliot, the possibilities were electric. It was Arthur and Excalibur.
Eliot waved his hand, and Leeson put the heavy truck into low gear and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. Whiteness streaked past the windows. The battering ram vibrated against the grille as the truck slid and gained speed. There was a flash when it hit. Eliot blinked and peered through the windshield as the truck groaned. He could feel his heart bouncing around his ribcage; he could hear wood cracking. The truck lurched and then struck a second set of doors, this time solid steel. After a shaking, stuttering, endless moment, with Eliot holding onto the seat to keep from flying into Leeson’s lap, the steel seam sprang with a thunderous clap. The truck’s headlights shone into a dense, dark nothingness. Eliot could hear the tiny thuck-thuck-thuck of his men scaling ladders to the roof, the trailing sedans clumping to a stop behind the truck and officers jumping out. Everyone was doing his job. Things were happening, the plan was in motion, but Eliot saw only an empty building. No stills. No barrels of liquor. Nothing. “My heart sank,” he remembered. He sat there, stunned. He had failed. It had all been an elaborate ruse; the real brewery was somewhere else. He was sure of it.
But then, one of the agents—probably Leeson, the most experienced brewery raider on the team—spotted a blip of light from an interior door swinging shut, and yelled out. Eliot realized all at once what he was looking at. The Mob wouldn’t reinforce a dummy operation with solid-steel doors. It was just the front room that was a dummy, painted black to simulate a vast empty building. Eliot leapt from the truck and raced toward the invisible door. As he banged through it, the brewery—the vats, the burners, the pumps—came violently into focus, as if being squeezed from a tube. Eliot and his men kept running “and were on the necks of five operators in less time than it takes to tell it.” The brewers, shocked and scared, gave up without a fight. The squad captured not only the clutch of men operating the brewery, but three trucks and all of the brewery’s equipment. A huge haul, an unprecedented haul, for a raid on a Capone operation.
Years later, Eliot would call his mission to dry up Capone “an obsession.” This was the moment it became one. In those excited, wild minutes after Leeson pounded down on the accelerator and the truck jumped forward, Eliot felt “a certain sense of exhilaration, maybe even exultation.” He felt alive. It would ruin him for normal life for years. He had been so careful and deliberate through the years, a follower of rules, an inveterate worrier. Now he had found a new god. From here on out he would do almost anything to recapture the emotional high that came from crashing through Al Capone’s doors.
Standing in the middle of the room, Eliot took it all in. There were nineteen vats, each capable of holding about fifteen hundred gallons. Some thirty thousand gallons were on site and ready to be shipped. He knew that nothing like this had ever been captured before. Not in Chicago. Chapman moved around the room like a quartermaster. He wrote down the number of each truck, examined every piece of brewing equipment. He couldn’t stop smiling. A valuable piece of hard evidence connecting Capone to bootlegging would be found on this day, in this building: a truck the gangster had bought before he stopped putting his name to things. “Circumstances connected Al Capone with this purchase, with the activities of the racket and also with income from the fruit of the racket,” Eliot wrote. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
The truck seizure was meaningful, but the biggest catch of the day was a person, not a thing: Steve Svoboda, Capone’s chief brewmaster. Stocky, cow-faced, with a wide, pessimistic mouth like a dried-up old nun, Svoboda stared at the floor as beer sluiced around his feet. Behind him, agents smashed barrels and opened up the spigots of the vats. Soon they would all be wading ankle-high through beery foam.
***
The Capone network shuddered only for a moment. The press praised the unprecedented assault (Eliot clipped and saved the news reports), but that didn’t matter much to the Outfit. Svoboda made bail and returned to brewing, production shifted to other breweries, business went on as usual. Which was exactly what the Capone squad had hoped would happen. The team’s agents continued tailing trucks coming out of the barrel-cleaning plant, which inevitably led to new discoveries: another cleaning facility, a sales office where clerks took orders from speakeasies. Wiretaps followed, leading the squad to more breweries and providing them with a nearly definitive list of Capone’s customers.
On Saturday, April 11, the squad took down a second large brewery, this one at 3136 South Wabash Avenue in Chicago. The seizure of the two breweries—the one in Cicero and now this one—would cost the Capone syndicate about $10,000 a day in revenue, Eliot told reporters as his men packed prisoners into a paddy wagon. The raid had been an almost perfect replication of the Cicero assault, except this time with better weather. The squad once again used the battering ram and once again arrested Svoboda, who didn’t even bother trying to run. “We were to arrest him again and again as we took subsequent breweries,” Eliot wrote in the first draft of his memoir. Evidence gathered in these raids—along with Eliot’s testimony—would be used to indict Svoboda on Prohibition charges, putting pressure on the brewer to testify against others. One more thing for Capone to worry about.
The raid may have been a carbon copy of the earlier brewery mugging, but the aftermath wasn’t. After busting up dozens of barrels of beer, hauling away prisoners, and posing for newspaper photographers, Eliot and his agents shut the doors to the building—the large tanks and pumps still inside—and climbed into their cars. They drove off, leaving no one to keep an eye on the place. Darkness fell, and as the hours passed the street remained silent, with no police guard anywhere. A surprising oversight, but perhaps understandable considering all the excitement.
The Mob noticed. An eyewitness report captured the scene the next morning:
At 11 o clock four sedans swept into the neighborhood. For twenty minutes they cruised about. Nothing was seen to arouse suspicion. Then the four cars took up strategic positions so that from four street corners they could sight a car approaching from any direction.
With the sentinel cars posted, another car rolled into the neighborhood, up the street and in front of the brewery. The car halted and Bert Delaney . . . hopped out with two other men. He sauntered to the brewery door, took a key out and unlocked the door. He and his companions walked in and away went the car that had carried them there.
A few minutes’ wait and a five-ton truck appeared and rolled up and into the brewery.
Delaney was one of Capone’s brewers, second only to Svoboda. He was directing the two men as they loaded a 2,500-gallon tank onto the truck when a sudden, violent cacophony outside spun him around. The drivers of the sentinel cars were pounding on their horns. None of the men in the brewery had time to react: federal agents appeared out of the shadows, surrounding them. They had been hiding in and around the building all night, slapping themselves to stay awake, peeing quietly in dark corners. One of the lookout cars screamed past the building, the horn wailing. Delaney watched it disappear from sight. He sat on the truck’s fender and put his head in his hands.
***
Two days later, jacked up on success, Eliot took his men out to the site of his first big bust as a Prohibition agent: Chicago Heights.
This was not one of the squad’s carefully planned operations. The boys simply felt like knocking some heads, and so with nothing on the drawing board ready for action, their leader decided they’d do it the old-fashioned way. Once they reached the Heights’s city limits, Eliot stopped his car, got out, and took a big whiff. The others did the same.
What do you know—it worked. Following their noses, the agents walked up to a quaint Victorian-style house on Sixth Avenue on the east side of town. It turned out it wasn’t actually a house, just the frame of one. Inside was one large room where a group of men operated a distillery. Smaller stills chugged away in the basement and in the faux double garage behind the house. The agents dumped more than thirty thousand gallons of mash before they went on their way.
They drove down the street, around a few corners, and once again Eliot stopped his car, got out, and sniffed. Reporters caught up to the agents at their next port of call. This time they found beer rather than the hard stuff. Coming out of the makeshift brewery, Eliot beckoned the reporters over. “We secured convictions against fifty-six men in this neighborhood last year,” he told them. “We were just checking up today.” The squad ended the day with some sixty-five thousand gallons of alcohol mash and five Capone bootleggers to add to their ledgers.
The impromptu raids, not surprisingly, proved an embarrassment to the local police, who had no idea they were coming. Major Harry Stafford, installed as police chief after the dry bureau’s temporary takeover of the town in January 1929, arrived at police headquarters as Eliot and his men were walking out. “I can’t understand it,” Stafford told Eliot. “These fellows must have just slipped in. We’ve been keeping an awfully close check on things out here.”
Eliot was feeling confident after his run of success; he felt like a new man. He gave Stafford a little smile, savoring the moment like a postcoital cigarette. “I’ll be back,” he said, and swept out the door.
***
Eliot’s sense of smell may have been excellent, but Johnson and Froelich were more interested in his hearing. Back in 1928 the U.S. Supreme Court had knocked down Seattle bootlegger Roy Olmstead’s contention that phone wiretaps violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Ever since, law enforcement had been sticking in wires on the flimsiest pretenses.* Johnson and Froelich were especially keen to put taps to use, approving them on phones for virtually every office and backroom lounge that might have some connection to the liquor network. That meant Eliot would get to make use of the newest addition to the team: Paul Robsky, who had arrived early in April. The short, pigeon-chested former marine was itching to get in on the action. He’d spent the past three months in Philadelphia after being transferred from the cotton-mill town of Greenville, South Carolina. So far he hated big-city life, which as far as he could tell consisted of nothing but pointless stakeouts and even more pointless paperwork. He preferred the Southern style of bootleg enforcement. Almost every day in Greenville he had undertaken a high-speed car chase through the mountains, with gravel flying and squirrels exploding on his grille. Yeee-ha! He claimed to have run thirty cars off the road in one month. “Working with Ness was kid stuff compared with running down those moonshiners in South Carolina,” he’d tell a reporter years later.
In the Capone squad, Leeson handled the car chases, such as they were. Eliot brought Robsky in for the more pressing need: raking phone terminals, still a relatively rare technical skill, which Robsky had picked up while in the military. The new guy’s first assignment: Ralph Capone’s headquarters at the Montmartre Café in Cicero. Al’s brother, who’d already been convicted of income-tax evasion, headed up the Outfit’s bottling operation. Ralph’s piece of the pie was key to building a Volstead case against Al and other high-level members of the gang. Ralphie and his crew frequently took orders and dispatched deliveries from the phone at the end of the speakeasy’s bar. That being the case, they guarded the establishment like a prison. The operation would be the first of many wiretapping assignments for Robsky, but it also would be the hairiest, which was exactly what he needed to realize the Capone squad was the right gig for him. It also helped him to bond with Eliot, no small thing since Robsky hated all authority figures as a matter of course.
The squad rented a basement apartment just off Cermak Road, not far from the Montmartre. Robsky’s job was to climb up the telephone pole in the alley behind the club and connect the line going into the building with the one going into the apartment, thus allowing the agents to listen in on every phone conversation coming in or out of Ralph’s inner sanctum. The problem was that Capone thugs prowled the alley around the clock. Ralph was notoriously dense, but he was probably aware that federal agents might try to tap his phone. Certainly he knew that assassins sent by his brother’s rivals would prefer to enter from the back of the building rather than the front. Whatever the reason for the goons, the squad had to get them out of the alley.
Eliot came up with a plan: on a bright, warm afternoon, Leeson and a handful of his fellow agents set out on “bait detail.” The men slowly cruised past the front of the Montmartre in a big black Cadillac, the top down, giving everyone and everything a good long look. They went around the block, and then chugged past the club again, this time at an even slower pace and with everyone in the car taking notes. The Outfit noticed the agents right off, and the unusual behavior made the boys nervous. A couple of hoods came out of the club to watch. After the agents spent about five more minutes circling the block, the flunkies had seen enough. They jumped into a car, pulled out into the street, and followed the Caddy. Now a second car full of dry agents came along, also with its top down, also with the agents giving everyone and everything the stink eye. While the first Cadillac took its pursuer on a leisurely tour of Cicero-area Mob hotspots—gambling dens, prostitution houses, speakeasies—the second Cadillac took over the job of slowly and suspiciously circling the Montmartre and the nearby Western Hotel, over and over.
As the second Cadillac got in on the action—with a third ready to go, if needed—Eliot and Robsky hoofed it over to the backside of the alley. The agents, both wearing workmen’s coveralls, peered in. It was a long, narrow passageway. A tailor’s shop had been stuffed into one of the corners like a finger in a dike. The alley’s walls rose higher, indicating the back of the speakeasy. Eliot stepped past the tailor’s hovel while Robsky, squatting in the shadows, put on his tool belt and spiked climbing shoes. Eliot spotted two gangsters midway down the alley: they were smoking cigarettes, the outlines of fat guns bunching up their coats. Finally, after yet another pass by the second Caddy, the back door to the speakeasy swung open, and the goons began nodding and yessing at someone. The door banged shut as the alley dwellers stubbed out their cigarettes, climbed into a sedan, and started it up. When the car turned out of the alley to join the convoy, Robsky hustled over to the telephone pole, with Eliot right behind him. Robsky looked up at the terminal box etched against a blinding blue infinity. “It seemed to be miles away,” the squad’s newest agent remembered thinking. “But, clamping my lips together and throwing one quick look at the unguarded back door of the Montmartre, I jammed my spikes into the pole and started my ascent. The higher I reached the more naked I felt, even though the figure of Ness standing tensely below me with drawn gun offered a certain amount of solace.”
A certain amount, but not enough. Robsky moved rapidly at first, with the crablike shuffle of telephone men everywhere: hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. He’d made it about halfway up the pole before he got a funny feeling.
He looked down. He was certain he’d heard something. He found Eliot directly below him, heater at the ready. Robsky’s eyes flicked over to the back of the club. He saw nothing. But someone could come banging through that door at any moment. Someone was sure to. He felt a prickle along his temples, another at the base of his spine. He’d begun to sweat. Panicked sweat. He closed his eyes, willed it away. He forced himself to look up. The terminal box stretched into the heavens. A pinprick at the top of the world. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Hand, hand, foot, foot—
Robsky froze. Someone had come through that door. Shit.
He didn’t look down. He listened, hugging the pole like it was a Teddy bear. It was nothing, he told himself. A passing car braking at a stop sign. A street vendor slamming open his drawer for a customer. It wasn’t the back door of the Montmartre Café. No way. He’d have heard gunshots by now.
He crab-walked higher. Hand, hand, foot, foot, push. Now he could see the terminal box. It was a real thing, with real dimensions. It existed.
When he finally made it to the top, Robsky threw open the box and stared inside. There were at least a hundred and fifty terminals. He developed a headache. He glanced down—Eliot was still there, unmolested—and he turned back to the box. He quickly raked the lines. A secretary at the bureau was supposed to call the Montmartre at exactly four and flirt with the bartender so Robsky would recognize her voice. It was now about ten past.* Chapman had been assigned to the phone in the Cermak Road apartment, where he would be talking with Lahart at the office, two more recognizable voices in the babble. Robsky flipped down one row and across another. Nothing. He looked down at Eliot until he got his attention and shook his head. Eliot waved at him to keep trying. Robsky began flipping through the terminals again, his fingers cramping from the stress. His breathing became ragged. Hanging up there in plain sight, he felt like “a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.” At last he hit one—Chapman, his distinctive booming laugh—and a minute later he got the secretary. Bingo. He gave Eliot the OK sign, slammed the door to the box, and began to work his way down the pole. He hit the ground with a spine-jarring thud, huffing, his face red from exertion and excitement. He beamed at Eliot, and his boss returned a dreamy smile. They ran out of the alley, pausing at the side of the building to pull themselves together. Robsky shrugged off his equipment. “Phew,” he said. “I still can’t get over thinking what would have happened if those monkeys had come back while I was up there at the top of the pole.”
Eliot eased the brim of his hat back with the barrel of his gun. He offered up a Sam Spade smile. “Why, Paul, I had this little old .38 all ready.”
Robsky couldn’t help laughing. Remembering the moment many years later, he wondered if Eliot somehow believed that he, and not Robsky, had done the hard part. Not that it really mattered. Robsky’s boss got the tough-guy talk out of his system there on the sidewalk, because he couldn’t do it anywhere else. This wasn’t something he could tell the press about. The two men hustled to their car. They began celebrating—banging the dashboard and whooping—as soon as they closed the doors behind them. They knew they’d just made a big score. Eliot wrote later: “This tap was kept alive for many, many months, and we learned a great deal about the operations and personnel of the gang through it.”
***
With wiretaps in place at almost all known Capone offices, the late winter and spring of 1931 became a swirl of activity for the squad. They hit a brewery at 2271-2273 Lumber Street on the South Side, crashing through four steel doors at the rear of what appeared to be a garage. “The federal men found 140 barrels of beer, nineteen tanks of beer and wort and other equipment,” wrote the Chicago Daily News. The brewery, with a capacity of a hundred barrels a day, had been up and running for only a month. At a warehouse on Calumet Avenue, the special agents seized twelve thousand gallons of “iced beer ready for delivery for the weekend trade” and arrested James Calloway, Delaney’s chief assistant. (Calloway was already under indictment for conspiracy for his role in trying to retake the equipment from the raided brewery on South Wabash Avenue.) The agents ran a car off the road on the West Side and came away with $25,000 worth of wine. On his own Eliot chased a truck through busy downtown Chicago until the fleeing vehicle crashed into a post on Clark Street. There were only eleven barrels of beer onboard, but the driver was a wanted man. A few weeks later, the team took down a large still in suburban McHenry, north of Chicago.
During this raiding frenzy, Eliot became a regular at the Northwestern University forensic crime lab bankrolled by the Secret Six and run by Colonel Calvin Goddard. The lab was a one-of-a-kind experiment, predating even the FBI laboratory. Here Eliot met Leonarde Keeler, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy who was trying to gin up interest in his “Respondograph”—a lie-detector machine. Keeler was a disciple of police innovator August Vollmer, whose graduate-level police-administration course Eliot had recently taken at the University of Chicago. Eliot also became friendly with Clarence Muehlberger, the toxicologist for the Cook County coroner’s office. Eliot would grill Muehlberger about his expertise and its application to crime solving, watching him closely as he went about his business. Chemist John R. Matchett remembered seeing Eliot time and again hanging around the offices late at night, a “rather handsome man about five feet ten inches”—people always seemed to think him shorter than he was—“always smiling, but very earnest about his work.” Goddard and his pioneering research into ballistics especially fascinated Eliot. The special agent turned over to Goddard every gun his squad confiscated, with the hope of being able to tie a murder around the neck of Al Capone or one of his top men.
Eliot typically went to the laboratory alone. He worried about being seen as different, as the weird guy at the bureau, and he knew his interest in the crime lab wouldn’t help his image. Most cops and dry agents viewed the new field of police science with deep skepticism. A few years later, with Capone behind bars and headlines hard to come by, Northwestern sold the crime lab to the Chicago Police Department. The transition did not go smoothly. The criminologist Fred E. Inbau, who worked at the lab, invited command officers to come in so he could walk them through this new resource they had. “I have never met such a hostile group in my life,” he would recall. “I just about got on my knees and said, ‘Gentlemen, this is your laboratory. We didn’t ask you to come in here to instruct you. We just want to show you what you now have that you didn’t before.’” Inbau made it through his presentation, showing off the ballistics-matching equipment, the microscopes for examining soil specimens, and Keeler’s lie-detecting machine, but tension hung over the room. “The ones who had some feeling of understanding or sympathy about it were afraid to even ask questions,” Inbau said. “They didn’t know what image this would create among their colleagues who professed that they could do the job without all of this jazz.”
The promise of modern science thrilled Eliot, but for the most part he filed away his burgeoning knowledge for later use. It was the future of law enforcement, a future he was determined to bring about, but it could not be the present. He recognized that success against the Outfit would depend on old-fashioned police methods. Throughout the team’s first months, he and his agents spent almost every night sitting in cars in the bruising late winter cold, their muscles twitching, their hands and feet so icy they felt scalded. They would take turns, one trying to sleep as the others kept watch. Eliot took pages of notes every night, describing everything he saw. He seemed to love every minute of it. Growing up in a house filled with memories of older siblings who were grown and long gone, he had in some ways always felt separate, alone in the universe. Now he felt that he was a part of something. Something substantive, something he could lose himself in.
It was a family, of sorts. Leeson, a former navy man, the quietest of the group, became the unit’s unofficial cook. Years later, in another life, he would always prepare the meal for dinner parties, then hand his wife the apron before the guests arrived and insist she take credit for it. He was less embarrassed about his culinary skill when around his fellow squad members. He would cook up simple, meat-heavy dishes and take them out to the men on stakeout duty. His wife, Dorothy, was a worrier. Almost as soon as he left the house, a pot of stew under his arm, she’d start calling around—to the office and the other agents’ homes—looking for him. All of the agents and their wives got to know her well.
The Capone squad lived in a hermetic, hothouse world of its own, like scientists racing against the clock to find a cure for a pandemic. To others working in the Prohibition Bureau offices, the team seemed to go everywhere together, always whispering to one another, communicating with nods and smiles. By now Eliot had earned respect around the office. His kindly manner and easy smile made people comfortable. As he walked through the halls in the morning he would light up when someone—anyone—said hello, as if he wanted to see no one else in the world. Agents and support staff noticed how, despite the stress he was under, he “never raised his voice or dressed down his men in front of others.” This didn’t necessarily mean he handled stress better than anyone else. Like Dorothy Leeson, he was a congenital worrier. Stanley Slesick, one of the Prohibition agents Eliot would tap to provide backup for large operations, always knew when a raid was coming. Eliot, he said, was a “nervous” man, and it showed in his eyes, his pallor. “He’d always bite his fingernails,” Slesick said.
***
Eliot had good reason to be nervous. He wanted to believe in every member of his team, but the fact was he couldn’t be sure whom he could trust. Even reporters had begun to speculate among themselves about the squad’s agents. “He and the six or seven other people that were called the Untouchables, I don’t know whether they were untouchable,” former Chicago American photographer Tony Berardi would recall. Berardi had made his reputation by snapping pictures of gangsters; he came to know many of them—and their business—well. He understood how things worked. “I think they were touchable,” he said of the Capone squad.
So did Eliot. He realized everyone potentially was. After the Cicero raid in March, an envoy from the Outfit told Eliot they’d match his annual salary every month if he played along. Eliot threw the messenger out of his office and immediately informed Johnson and Froelich about the bribe attempt. The next day, an informant who worked both sides told Eliot that the gang had dug up incriminating evidence on him. “They have information that you got your job under false pretenses,” the informant said. “Wouldn’t that go pretty hard against you on the witness stand?” Eliot told the man he wouldn’t need his services anymore.
These ham-handed bribe attempts forced Eliot to reevaluate his trusting nature once and for all. He knew the Mob must be approaching his men, too—and what did it mean if the guys didn’t tell him about the enticements? In the squad’s first couple of months, he and Seager periodically spied on their own agents, using Chicago police officers they believed they could trust. They told themselves it was just a fail-safe, to put their minds at ease, but sure enough, the information that came in occasionally proved disheartening. Leeson would later tell his second wife that “there were certain Untouchables in the beginning that were let go because they took bribes.”
Eliot and Seager had no choice but to stay vigilant, even after the squad had been pared down to a core group. The Outfit believed in the power of payoffs like it was a religion; they would never give up trying to force cash on agents. “Capone’s men would pop up from nowhere on a street and offer us money to lay off,” Chapman recalled years later. The offers weren’t just enticing. They were astounding. The amounts kept getting bigger and bigger. So whenever one of the squad’s raids turned up an empty warehouse, or a gangster disappeared right after a search warrant had been issued, Eliot would start to worry. And he and Seager would initiate a secret search for a new potential turncoat. By late spring, they had a couple of suspects—the usual suspects.