Eliot Ness Read online

  “Come and talk to the boss,” the twin statuary said.

  The agents stepped through to a back room, where they found Giannini and a “big, swarthy,” heavy-shouldered man—Joe Martino. They barely bothered with pleasantries. Eliot, assigned the role of eager beaver, laid it out for the don of Chicago Heights: a full partnership, all aspects of the business, including gambling and the other rackets. They could provide protection for everyone in the organization—everyone they knew about. Martino gave the kid a hard-eyed appraisal, before sitting back and sweeping the lot of them with a half-lidded gaze.

  “How do I know you can put in the fix?” he said.

  The agents waved their badges like backup singers. “Money will do anything,” one of them said.

  “How much?”

  Kooken smiled. “First we’ve got to see how much it’s worth to you.”

  Eliot, “the hungry one,” threw his knowledge of the syndicate’s operations in Martino’s face. The forty-five-year-old Mob boss had managed to stay out of jail—and the cemetery—for years while running a good-size bootlegging ring in a particularly violent corner of Chicagoland, but he apparently bought what this greenhorn agent was selling. He joked about owning Kooken, and local cops galore, and that he would own this pushy new kid, too. That made Eliot push harder still. The young agent loved the opportunity to assume a role, to take on a bigger and bolder personality than his own. He and Martino “had quite an argument about the amount to be paid,” Eliot recounted later. Finally, they grudgingly agreed on a weekly payment amounting to a thousand dollars a month, and the special agents shoved away from the table. No one seemed especially happy with how they were leaving things.

  Frank Basile, who’d been standing by the door like a servant, looked ashen as the agents turned toward him. He took Eliot’s arm. “The silk-shirted Italian has just asked Johnny whether or not he should let you have the knife in the back,” he whispered. The words penetrated slowly. Eliot stood there paralyzed. He noticed, for the first time, a lithe, stone-faced man in the background. He was indeed wearing a silk shirt. The other men in the room seemed to melt in place, Wicked Witch–like, leaving only this blank-eyed killer. “I felt young and alone at that minute,” Eliot would admit years later. He felt like an amateur. Until Basile pointed him out, he hadn’t even noticed this man who was proposing to kill him. Basile—his eyes locked on Eliot, searching for proof that he’d been heard—said the agent’s name, snapping Eliot back into real time. Eliot knew now, if there’d ever been any doubt, that this was no game. He managed to leave without turning his back to the mystery man.

  Eliot kept his paralyzing fear to himself. He didn’t tell the other agents what the silk-shirted man had said. He was too ashamed. He couldn’t accept that his fear was a normal and reasonable reaction. So the murderous query—spoken in Italian by the gangster, who assumed none of the federal men understood the language—did not get factored into the agents’ next move. Even if Eliot hadn’t been embarrassed by his terror, he wouldn’t have dared hold back the operation. He believed they were close. A thousand dollars for the three of them—Basile was just the driver and got nothing—was a good start, but not exactly a partnership. They had more work to do to prove their worth to Martino, to prove their power. There was only one way to do that: show the Mob why they should be taken seriously.

  Not long after the meeting, Eliot and Albert stood on the side of the highway outside of town, stamping their feet and clapping their hands to beat back the creeping numbness in their extremities. It was late and there wasn’t much traffic, but eventually the cold night disgorged two sets of massive headlamps. The agents stepped into the road and brought the booze-laden trucks to a gurgling, sliding halt. Moving quickly, shouting over one another, they yanked the drivers out of their cabs, “squeezed their balls and beat the shit out of them, hit them with clubs,” recalled a bootlegger who worked with Martino. “It looked as though the shipment would not be delivered, but then money changed hands, and the trucks got through,” the bootlegger said, amazed at the audacity of the move. Martino’s crew, he said, now understood that the agents “wanted to be a fifty percent partner in the stills and the whorehouses.”

  Eliot and Albert continued to hang around the Cozy Corners and collect their money, which they dutifully turned over to Jamie. Kooken moved on to another case, but the two younger agents made it clear to Giannini that they would take Kooken’s share as well every week. They also began pocketing $100 for each independent “alky cooker” in the area they reported to the Martino gang. The weekly grind of taking bribes and getting drunk soon paled, though. Nothing ever came of it. Their hijacking gambit hadn’t paid off. They had made a place for themselves in the crew, but while they were taking in good money week after week, they weren’t being given more responsibility. They couldn’t find out who else the gang was bribing or how exactly Martino’s distribution network worked. “It was apparent,” Eliot wrote, “that we were not going to be taken into the confidence of the gang any further.”

  As the calendar flipped to November, the head office told the agents they would have to make do with the evidence from their nocturnal treks around the Heights and their meetings with Giannini and Martino. Volstead violations and bribery were penny-ante stuff in the grand scheme of things, but better than nothing. Eliot and Albert obtained search warrants for eighteen stills. The stills were relatively small, but they were good enough to mobilize the special agency unit and garner the loan of a clutch of Prohibition agents.

  However disappointed he must have been at being unable to put together a conspiracy case, Eliot decided to make the best of the situation. That meant hitting the Cozy Corners hard, at the height of business. Eliot found himself teamed up not with Albert but with another young special agent looking to make his mark, Marty Lahart, a sparkly-eyed Irish kid who’d been one of Golding’s favorites. Accessorized with sawed-off shotguns and with a brood of Prohibition agents in tow, the two men stormed into the saloon. They planted their feet as if to release dueling jump shots and called out: “Everybody keep their places, this is a federal raid!” Stunned silence met the announcement, followed by the thump of weaponry hitting the floor. These were mostly customers and freelancers, not Martino’s men; nobody wanted a shoot-out with federal agents, especially when the G-men clearly had the drop on them. The Prohibition agents herded the saloons’ customers and staff to a wall and began to frisk them, while Lahart scooped up as many discarded guns as he could. He jammed four revolvers in his belt and slung a second shotgun over his shoulder. Eliot no doubt had told him about the delights on the second and third floors. Lahart took the stairs at a lope. “Everybody keep their places!” he yelled again as he bounded down the brothel’s hallway and banged open doors to expose the prostitutes in their natural habitat. These girls were not prone to hysterics. They’d seen a lot of violence; they’d been on the receiving end of it and accepted it as normal. One girl, nonplussed at the sight of Lahart weighed down with guns, cracked: “Look who’s here. Tom Mix.”

  The Cozy Corners raid was about sending a message—and nothing else. The eighteen stills, hidden in houses and industrial buildings around town, were the real target. Agents spent the night smashing through doors and carting away brewing equipment and ledgers. “Luckily, the raids were successful,” Eliot recalled, “and in most places we captured prisoners, machinery and alcohol.”

  Not all the evidence made it into the evidence lockup. Late that night, Eliot showed up on the doorstep of Armand Bollaert, his University of Chicago fraternity brother. Bollaert followed his friend out to the curb, where he found the trunk of Eliot’s car packed to the gunwales with liquor. “It was the most beautiful collection of booze in the city of Chicago,” Bollaert would remember years later. Without a word between them, the two men hefted the alcohol into the house.

  ***

  You never knew what you were going to find on the side of the road in Chicago Heig
hts, but a dead body was never a bad guess. That winter, it became a great guess.

  Martino, inevitably, started the trend. On Thursday, November 29, with news trickling through town that an indictment had come down as a result of the raids, Eliot and Albert arrived at Martino’s home and politely knocked on the door. The gangster let them into the house, where the agents read him an arrest warrant. Martino had a revolver in his belt, and when the agents presented him with the warrant, he took out the gun and tossed it onto the floor. He stepped to the closet to retrieve his coat and hat, but he didn’t make it. He broke down. “He became deathly sick and we had trouble getting him to the station,” Eliot reported.

  Martino understood what his arrest meant: he was now a liability to his fellow Chicago Heights gangsters—and to Capone. Everyone knew prosecutors would offer him a deal to talk, and no one could say for sure he wouldn’t. He spent the night in jail, and in the morning he posted a $10,000 bond. Around midday, his driver dropped him in front of his “soft drink parlor” on East Sixteenth Street in the Heights, where he stood on the curb and considered the crisp afternoon. A black sedan turned the corner at Wallace Street and eased down the main drag. The windows were rolled down despite the cold. All at once, Martino toppled backward like a narcoleptic—the witnesses all said they heard nothing—and the car continued to glide along the street, slowly disappearing into the gray day. Martino sprawled on the sidewalk in his own gore, his hands still in his pockets. He’d been pierced by a profusion of bullets. Men, women, and children gathered around to gawk at the town’s best-known citizen. “He apparently had not been [back] in the Heights for more than two minutes,” Eliot would marvel after seeing the police report.

  No one had any illusions about why the powerful Joe Martino now had to be swept up like a kicked Halloween pumpkin. Assistant District Attorney Dan Anderson told reporters that the new indictment clearly had served as the gangster’s death warrant.

  What was left of the Chicago Heights liquor ring began to unravel fast. A day after the murder, a massive explosion rocked Wellington Avenue on the West Side. Brewer Nick Guletto, noticeably nervous since being arrested along with Martino, had apparently gotten careless while operating a five-hundred-gallon still. He staggered from the building and collapsed. He died shortly after arriving at the county hospital. Ten days later, an unidentified man—police suspected it was Johnny Giannini, also named in the indictment—was found outside of town with two bullet holes in his head. He’d been thrown from a car.

  After another three days, a fourth body turned up. At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, December 12, a man walking to work on 127th Street found a corpse lolling in a drainage ditch. The way the limbs were twisted, he obviously hadn’t fallen where he lay. The dead man had been shot through the right eye four times.

  The police at the scene didn’t recognize the victim. Just another expendable junior goon, they figured. But shortly after the corpse arrived at a funeral home near the Kensington police station, someone identified him. The dead man wasn’t a mobster. He was Frank Basile. The police placed a call to the Chicago Prohibition office. Within the hour, a clutch of federal agents arrived at the funeral home, rolling up in matching black sedans. They fished a calendar out of Basile’s pocket. It had been filled out until 6:30 Monday evening.

  U.S. Attorney Johnson, his mind on the bigger picture, made a bloodless public statement about the murder. “Basile was a government witness and was to have been one in the future,” he said. “There is no doubt why he was killed. We will cooperate with the police to solve this murder.” Eliot took the news much harder. Basile wasn’t just a government witness to him; he was a colleague and a friend. When he saw Basile at the funeral home, laid out on a slab in a rubber body bag, he “felt hot tears stinging the corner of my eyes, a roaring in my ears.” He barely held it together. Had he been responsible for Frank’s death? Because he pushed so hard at that meeting with Martino that the man in the silk shirt felt compelled to offer his services? Because he couldn’t understand Italian—or Neapolitan or whatever the hell it was—and needed his friend to tell him what was said? He would never know. He’d tell Edna—and many others over the years—about Frank Basile.

  However unsettled he might have been, Eliot refused to be cowed by the murder of one of the bureau’s own. He became even more determined to bring down the booze ring: it was now personal. He and Albert made a point of being seen going about their business in the Heights, even though their cover as corrupt agents had been blown with the raid. They kept at it even after the police arrested a suspect in Basile’s murder: a small-time goombah named Tony Feltrin. They kept at it even after news got out that Feltrin had been found hanging by his necktie in a cell at the Kensington police station. Coasting around town in their government sedan, Eliot couldn’t help but feel eyes on him at all times. Everyone seemed to understand that this was now war. He and Albert kept sawed-off shotguns in their coat pockets. At restaurants, Eliot recalled, “We always took a corner table as the danger of our undertaking was becoming more imminent.” The jumpiness, the constant worry, became a habit. More than two decades later, long after leaving law enforcement, Eliot would still always sit at corner tables in restaurants, his back to the wall. He quietly, bashfully, smiled when friends ribbed him about it.

  Which is not to say Eliot’s worrying was pure paranoia. Chicago’s Prohibition Bureau office, noticing the collection of bodies piling up in little Chicago Heights, decided there was a conspiracy case there after all. The bureau ratcheted up its investigation once again, focusing anew on tying the liquor ring’s operations to city officials. Yellowley and Jamie pushed for more evidence, which meant more harassment at clubs and “soda parlors,” more interviews with suspects, more eavesdropping on conversations—and more violence from increasingly harried and desperate bootleggers. Three days after Christmas, while on one of their cruising tours of the town, Eliot and Albert noticed “a flashy new car” with a lone occupant right behind them for block after block. Albert punched down on the accelerator of their Cadillac—and so did the car behind. Next he slowed to a crawl, and so did their pursuer. Finally, following Eliot’s direction, he swung into a residential neighborhood, found a narrow street, and slid the car “diagonally across the street . . . forming a block for the car behind us.” Eliot leapt from the Caddy and grabbed the driver, pinning his arms to the wheel. Albert ran around the back of the car and pushed the barrel of his shotgun through the open passenger-side window. The man, who appeared to speak only Italian, was unfamiliar to them; they couldn’t recall ever seeing him at the Cozy Corners or any of the other gang hangouts in the area. But they found a gun on him, the numbers filed off. It was loaded with dumdum bullets, the kind that expands on impact, spreading the damage. Eliot, still thinking about his friend Frank, still blaming himself, believed he was the target.

  “This gun,” he said, “was obviously meant for me.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Flaunting Their Badness

  At 5 a.m. on January 6, 1929, a dozen Chicago police cruisers arrived at an undeveloped lot on East Ninety-fifth Street. The cars carried officers three abreast in the front and back seats. None of them knew why they had been sent to this desolate spot early on a Sunday morning. Then a small army of federal agents climbed out of parked sedans, their collars pulled up high, hats squashed down low. The agents fanned out in the subfreezing morning air, providing instructions to the cops, handing out arrest warrants. When a policeman clapped his hands to ward off the cold, he was told to cut it out. Agents gave each car a specific assignment and a time frame within which to accomplish it. Police officers were traded out with Prohibition agents so that each automobile was mixed. The cars idled in the lot for no more than fifteen minutes, the mission hammered home emphatically. Then doors slammed, engines revved, and the cars pulled onto the street and ripped southward, heading for the Chicago Heights city limits.

  This was the new world order. Republican Herbert Ho
over, an unabashed dry, had just been elected president of the United States in a landslide over the Democrats’ wet candidate, Al Smith. The president-elect publicly declared that the country faced a law-and-order crisis, and so the Chicago Prohibition office wanted to make clear to Washington that it was vigorously pursuing its mission. On Friday Jamie had told the press that Chicago Heights was “a Mafia nest and [bootlegging] ring operating in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and New York.” The Chicago office made sure the newspapers knew about the arrest of the man who had been following Eliot and Albert, a hoodlum called Mike Picchi. “George E. Q. Johnson and State’s Attorney John A. Swanson cooperated yesterday in the speedy indictment of an alleged Chicago Heights bootleg gangster, suspected of plotting the assassination of two prohibition agents,” the Tribune reported. Jamie and Johnson were setting the scene for what was to come next.

  Now, three days after that report, the papers were going to have a much bigger story. Someone arrested in the November raids clearly had talked, despite the best efforts of the area’s Mob enforcers. The caravan of police and federal agents crossed into Chicago Heights shortly before dawn, crunching over the icy back roads where gangsters had been enthusiastically tossing bodies the past two months. The two lead cars, one of them carrying Chicago’s deputy police commissioner, John Stege, split off from the rest and headed for city hall, where police headquarters was located. “It was felt that unless we took over the station,” Eliot wrote, “hoodlums throughout the town would be given the alarm from the police station itself.”