Eliot Ness

1926–1931

Ness' brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie, an agent of the Bureau of Investigation (which became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935), influenced Ness to enter law enforcement. Ness joined the U.S. Treasury Department in 1926, working with the 1,000-strong Bureau of Prohibition in Chicago.^{[1]:67-71, 96-105[4]}

In March 1930, attorney Frank J. Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission asked President Herbert Hoover to take down Al Capone. Agents of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, working under Elmer Irey and Special Agent Frank J. Wilson of the Intelligence Unit, were already investigating Capone and his associates for income tax evasion. In late 1930, Attorney General William D. Mitchell, seeking a faster end to the case, implemented a plan devised by President Hoover for sending a small team of Prohibition agents, working under a special United States attorney, to target the illegal breweries and supply routes of Capone while gathering evidence of conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act (informally known as the Volstead Act). U.S. attorney George E.Q. Johnson, the Chicago prosecutor directly in charge of both the Prohibition and income tax investigations of Capone, chose the twenty-seven-year-old Ness (now assigned to the Justice Department) to lead this small squad.^{[1]:170-172, 239-241, 247-250, 265-269, 311-314}

With corruption of Chicago's law enforcement agents epidemic, Ness went through the records of all Prohibition agents to create a reliable team (initially of six, eventually growing to about ten) later known as "The Untouchables." Raids against illegal stills and breweries began in March 1931. Within six months, Ness's agents had destroyed bootlegging operations worth an estimated $500,000 and representing an additional $2 million in lost income for Capone; their raids would ultimately cost Capone in excess of $9 million in lost revenue. The main source of information for the raids was an extensive wire-tapping operation. Failed attempts by members of the Chicago Outfit to bribe or intimidate Ness and his agents inspired Charles Schwarz of the Chicago Daily News to begin calling them "untouchables," a term Schwarz borrowed from newspaper stories about the untouchables of India. George Johnson adopted the nickname and promoted it to the press, establishing it as the squad's unofficial title.^{[1]:317-331, 349-365, 419-421, 493}

The efforts of Ness and his team inflicted major financial damage on Capone's operations and led to his indictment on five thousand violations of the Volstead Act in June 1931. But federal judge James H. Wilkerson prevented that indictment from coming to trial, instead pursuing the tax evasion case built by George Johnson and Frank Wilson.^{[1]:385-421, 493-496[5]} On October 17, 1931, Capone was convicted on five of twenty-two tax evasion charges. He was sentenced to eleven years in prison and, following a failed appeal, began his sentence in 1932. On May 3, 1932, Ness was among the federal agents who took Capone from the Cook County Jail to Dearborn Station, where he boarded the Dixie Flyer to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary – the only time both men are known to have met in person.^{[1]:423-461, 496-501[6][7]}

1932–1957

Marker at Lake View Cemetery

In 1932, Ness was promoted to Chief Investigator of the Prohibition Bureau for Chicago. Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, he was assigned as an alcohol tax agent in the "Moonshine Mountains" of southern Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and in 1934 he was transferred to Cleveland, Ohio. In December 1935, Cleveland mayor Harold H. Burton hired Ness as the city's Safety Director, which put him in charge of both the police and fire departments. Ness soon began a groundbreaking reform program inspired by the ideas of August Vollmer, which focused on professionalizing and modernizing the police, stopping juvenile delinquency, and improving traffic safety. He declared war on the mob, and his primary targets included "Big" Angelo Lonardo, "Little" Angelo Scirrca, Moe Dalitz, John Angerola, George Angersola, and Charles Pollizi.^{[1]:493, 529-530}

Billboard for Eliot Ness' 1947 campaign for mayor, seen in 1973

Ness was also Safety Director at the time of several grisly murders that occurred in the Cleveland area from 1935 to 1938 and made relatively small efforts during the investigations after being pressured by the mayor.^[8] Ness was the one who interrogated one of the prime suspects of the murders, Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, using a polygraph test. At one point in time, two victims of the serial killer were in close proximity to city hall, the place where he worked.^[9][10]

In 1938, Ness and his wife Edna divorced. His otherwise remarkably successful career in Cleveland withered gradually. He especially fell out of favor after he had the city’s large shantytowns evacuated and burned during the Cleveland Torso Murders. Cleveland critics targeted his divorce, his high-profile social drinking, and his conduct in a car accident one night where he was driving drunk. Although there were no victims in the accident, Ness, fearful that he might lose his job, tried to get the accident covered up. Later, his involvement in the accident was revealed by a local newspaper and he was forced to resign his position as Safety Director in Cleveland, Ohio. But he continued with the next Mayor, Frank Lausche.^[11]

In 1939 Ness married illustrator Evaline Michelow. In 1942 the Nesses moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the federal government. He directed the battle against prostitution in communities surrounding military bases, where venereal disease was a serious problem. Later he made a number of forays into the corporate world, all of which failed owing to his lack of business acumen. In 1944, he left to become chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company based in Ohio.^[12]

After his second divorce and third marriage, he ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Cleveland in 1947,^[13] after which he was expelled from Diebold in 1951.^[12] In the aftermath, Ness began drinking more heavily and spending his free time in bars telling (often exaggerated) stories of his law enforcement career. He also spent himself into debt. Ness was forced into taking various odd jobs to earn a living, including electronics parts wholesaler, clerk in a bookstore, and salesman of frozen hamburger patties to restaurants. By 1953 he came to work for a startup company called Guaranty Paper Corporation, which specialized in watermarking legal and official documents to prevent counterfeiting. Ness was offered a job because of his expertise in law enforcement. The company soon moved from Cleveland to the quiet rural town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where operating costs were lower. He made a decent income from GPC and moved with his wife and adopted son into a modest rental house. Once again, he enjoyed going to local bars and regaling amazed audiences with his tales of crime fighting.

Archive

The Western Reserve Historical Society houses additional Ness papers, including a scrapbook (1928–1936), copies of newspaper clippings (1935–1950), a typewritten manuscript detailing Ness' career in Chicago, and miscellaneous papers, including a report on the Fidelity Check Corporation and Guaranty Paper, of which Ness was president.^[17]

Art, entertainment, and media

Numerous media works have been developed based on Eliot Ness' life and the legend surrounding his work in Chicago. The first of these resulted in Ness' last years from his collaboration with Oscar Fraley in writing the book The Untouchables (1957), which was published a month after Ness' death^[14] and went on to sell 1.5 million copies.^[18] This book, among Fraley's other books about the Untouchables, was heavily spiced with fiction, including fictional characters and events, to make the books more appealing to a general audience. The 21-page manuscript that Ness wrote for the book was a more trustworthy source and only included the real events that Ness experienced during his career. His manuscript is housed in the archives of the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio.^[13]

The book was adapted in multiple media and inspired many additional works. The best-known eponymous adaptations include the 1959 TV series The Untouchables starring Robert Stack as Ness and narrated by Walter Winchell and the 1987 film The Untouchables by Brian De Palma starring Kevin Costner as Ness and featuring Sean Connery and Robert De Niro. These two fictionalized portrayals, more than actual history, have inspired numerous novels, a second, |short-lived 1993 TV series titled The Untouchables (1993 TV series) and comic books such as Torso, as well as references in Rap lyrics (Tupac's "California Love") and television shows such as The Simpsons episode "Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment" (March 16, 1997), Supernatural episode "Time after Time", Legends of Tomorrow episode titled "The Chicago Way", and an upcoming episode of NBC's Timeless portrayed by Misha Collins. Ness was used in an episode of The Odd Couple and of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Ness is also depicted in his post-safety director period in novelist Craig McDonald's 2014 Hector Lassiter novel The Running Kind, set in December 1950, when Ness was working part-time as a bookstore clerk. Furthermore, the Netflix originals drama Narcos, concerning the exploits of narco traffickers and cartels in Columbia, features a reference to Elliot Ness where the DEA agent Javier Peña is referred to as Elliot Ness in Season 3, Episode 5, as a patronising parallel between their respective works in tackling organised crime.

Max Allan Collins used Ness as the "police contact/best friend" character in his series of historical private eye novels featuring Chicago detective Nate Heller. Later he spun Ness off into his own series, set during his tenure as Cleveland's Public Safety Director. The first book, The Dark City (1987), depicted Ness' getting hired and undertaking a cleanup of the graft-ridden police force; the second, Butcher's Dozen (1988), his pursuit of the serial killer known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Bullet Proof (1989) pitted Ness against labor racketeers intent on taking over Cleveland's food service industry. Murder by the Numbers (1993) depicted Ness' investigation of the numbers racket in Cleveland. All of these novels, while fictionalized, were closely based on actual cases investigated by Ness and the Cleveland Police. In 2018, Collins collaborated with historian A. Brad Schwartz on a nonfiction dual biography of Ness and Capone, entitled Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago.^[19]

The 2017 detective noire thriller book called "The Noir Evil" retells the events of a troubled Eliot Ness' investigation into the Cleveland Torso Murderer with elements of Lovecraftian horror

Beer

Cleveland-based Great Lakes Brewing Company, which claims several connections to Ness (including the brewery owners' mother having worked as his stenographer), named an amber lager "Eliot Ness"^[20] and included several subtle nods to his career in the beer description and label art.^[21][22]

Proposed building naming

On January 10, 2014, Illinois' U.S. Senators proposed naming the headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington, D.C. after Ness.^[23] If approved, it would have been called the Eliot Ness ATF Building. However, Chicago Aldermen Ed Burke (14th Ward) and James Balcer (11th Ward) opposed the resolution in an article in the Chicago Tribune. In a news release, Burke said: "Eliot Ness had a checkered career after leaving the federal government. I simply do not think his image matches the actual reality of his legacy."^[24]