Eliot Ness (20 page)

Eliot—and, more important, Cullitan—was willing to test Stotts’s theory.

***

Captain Harwood went on trial in December, the first of the eight indicted officers to have his day in court. Every day, men and women packed the gallery. Housewives plunked down on the benches in the second and third rows, tutting at the testimony and offering up their opinions, oblivious to Harwood’s family sitting near them. Men stood in the back, craning their necks for unobstructed views of the bootleggers on the witness stand, men they once bought pints from and shared jokes with. Harwood was the man on trial, but most of the attention focused on Eliot, who sat in the
courtroom every day. Spectators wondered about the notes he constantly jotted down on large yellow pads. They thrilled when he whispered to his “undercover men,” who flagrantly carried their guns on their hips for everyone to see. Reporters began what would become a years-long habit of speculating about the safety director’s courtroom demeanor, how he seemed “neither at work nor at play, neither bored nor excited.”

Just as with the Cadek trial, the bootleggers, saloon owners and bartenders who took the witness stand told of Harwood and his men brutalizing them during Prohibition, usually with the harassment ending with Harwood telling them they should pay up “in order not to be bothered.” One former bootlegger said that when he refused to pay, Harwood insisted he “would be sorry.” In the weeks that followed, he said, a series of raids forced him to get out of the business. Still another man, who ran a saloon without a liquor license after repeal, maintained that Harwood encouraged bootlegging right up into this very year.

James C. Connell, attorney for the defense, refused to concede the high ground. A bulky, energetic man with an actorly flourish in court, he contended that Harwood was the victim of a revenge plot by bootleggers, instigated by Councilman Anton Vehovec. The thirty-eight-year-old lawyer blasted the safety director for bringing forward tainted evidence. Unlike Cadek, Harwood took the stand to profess his innocence. He testified that as captain of the Fourteenth Precinct, he did not undertake any gambling raids “because there were written orders that Captain [Emmett] Potts would take care of all gambling and slot machine complaints.” Potts was well known to have been the corrupt Mayor Davis’s street enforcer. The testimony didn’t help: Connell didn’t have those orders to present to the court, nor did he have any witnesses to back up the claim. Cullitan then subjected the captain to eight hours of cross-examination, tripping him up on numerous points, including his son’s business activities.

Worse yet for the defense, the reporters covering the trial reacted to Harwood’s testimony with unconcealed disgust. The
Plain Dealer
’s Philip Porter, who had followed Harwood’s career for more than a decade, found the defense outrageous. “Harwood’s ludicrous story of being a kindly law enforcer, victim of a foul plot by bootleggers and reporters, was a good laugh to those who knew him,” he wrote. “He has never been anything but a tough, ruthless conniver, using his blue suit to cover his phenagling [
sic
].” Newspapermen knew all about the police force’s worst offenders and always had, but they’d mostly kept quiet over the years for fear of being shut
out of police stations and even courtrooms. Eliot now gave them license to let loose.

Cullitan rode the public outrage. “The defense largely has been muddying the waters, claiming that we are trying to destroy Harwood,” he said in his closing argument. “He is the one who dirtied himself, by lining his dirty purse with bootleggers’ money.” The prosecutor, well aware of the attention being paid to Eliot throughout the trial, also vigorously defended the safety director.

“Mr. Ness is of a different political faith than I am,” the Democratic prosecutor said. “I do not know him socially or move in the same circles. But I do want to say to you that I have nothing but admiration for the determination he has shown in his efforts to rid the city of gangsters, mobsters, racketeers, and to clean the police department of crooks. I want you to remember that he is doing this work for every decent citizen—for you, for me and for us all.”
*

On the evening of December 16, the seven women and five men on the jury announced they had reached a verdict. Harwood entered the room with a small smile on his face. Word had come down the previous night that one jury member—an elderly woman—was holding out for acquittal. It sometimes took just one person with passionate conviction to turn the tide. With Harwood standing stiffly next to his lawyer, the bailiff opened the verdict and read it out in a clear, deep voice. A collective gasp rolled through the courtroom, and Harwood put his face in his hands. Behind him, his wife fell off her chair, passed out cold. He had been convicted on six of seven bribery counts. One of the police captain’s two daughters, Helen, began to sob uncontrollably. Harwood himself struggled to control his emotions. “Harwood’s face was ashen,” Fritchey wrote. “Then, as the blood returned to it, he became livid. He parted his lips as if to speak—and words would not come.” Judge Frank Day asked Harwood to comment on the verdict, but the defendant didn’t seem to hear. Tears came to his eyes. He walked out of the courtroom without saying a word. Harwood’s wife and daughters, all weeping, followed him out. His other daughter, Mrs. Marie Kohl, turned to Eliot. “Thank you for this, Mr. Ness,” she said. As she passed by, she spat on him. Eliot said nothing. He waited until she had disappeared out the doors before wiping the spittle from his face.

Many of the attorneys for the other seven indicted officers sat in the back
of the room. The looks on their faces—disbelief, discouragement, maybe fear—would be duplicated across the city’s police precincts when newspapers arrived in the morning. The Cadek conviction hadn’t been an aberration, a one-off thanks to a weird subplot involving cemetery plots and hoodwinked immigrants. No, the world had changed. The impossible was now possible. Director Ness actually was cleaning up the police force, one crooked cop at a time.

***

Once he’d pulled himself together, Harwood turned his attention to winning on appeal. Just days after the conviction, he hired private investigators and technical experts. He wanted to show that Cleveland’s safety director had framed him and the other seven officers.

Without informing his lawyer, the newly convicted former policeman offered two women $100 each to lure the prosecution’s most damning witnesses into a trap. The women, Mrs. Marie Murray and Mrs. May Green, agreed to the plan—and decided not to tell their husbands, who worked for Harwood at the Green Derby. Murray and Green were young and sexy, with pointy breasts and fat, bloodred lips, but they were new to femme fatale duty. Only one of the witnesses, Casper Korce, took the bait. The former bootlegger, who had testified against Harwood at trial and against others during grand-jury proceedings, followed the ladies to a swank West Side apartment that had been wired for sound. Murray and Green got Korce liquored up and unbuttoned, and began to press him about how much he “got out of the cases.” Korce thought he was getting the celebrity treatment, seeing as his name had been in all the papers, but the good times abruptly ended when his dirty talk proved a turnoff. “I was offered $2,500 to testify for Harwood instead of against him,” Korce said. The mood ruined, the women handed him his hat and sent him on his way.

Harwood tried again, paying the women another $100 each to invite Korce around a second time and press him harder to “open up” about the safety director. Korce again gave in to the women’s winks and smiles; once in the apartment, he yammered on about his bootlegging days and how Ness and Fritchey had interviewed him for hours about his relationships with police officers. But the women couldn’t get him to cough up anything incriminating on Eliot or the reporter. Korce, no doubt turning blue from frustration, found himself pushed out the door again. Harwood was even more frustrated. He told Murray she would have to testify that she’d heard Korce say that Ness had paid him $3,200. The woman, though afraid
Harwood would tell her husband about her participation in the seduction plot, refused. She would rather have her husband mad at her than Eliot Ness.

After Harwood’s conviction, it was Deputy Inspector Burns’s turn in March. The trial was a carbon copy of Harwood’s, including a handful of repeat witnesses. The bootleggers assigned the same litany of abuses to Burns that they had to Harwood; some of Burns’s colleagues on the police force, meanwhile, took the stand to insist the defendant was a stand-up guy, as honest as they come.
As the jury filed out of the room to begin deliberations, the fifty-five-year-old Burns, a “tall, husky, handsome man” and a popular officer in the department, approached Eliot and stuck out his hand. “I just want you to know that, no matter what happens, there are no hard feelings,” he said. “I know there was nothing personal in your activities.”

Eliot was surprised—and visibly moved—by the gesture. He was sensitive about how the rank and file in the department viewed him. The emotional outburst that Harwood’s daughter directed at him at the end of her father’s trial had hit him hard. He shook Burns’s hand. “Nothing personal at all,” he said.

Five hours later, the jury returned and pronounced Burns guilty on all five counts. The deputy inspector smiled for press photographers and did not look at Eliot as court officers led him from the room.

***

The police-graft investigation did not always offer up clear-cut cases.
Neil McGill prided himself on being a hard man, but he admitted he felt sorry for John Nebe, who came to trial three weeks after Burns. During Prohibition, the young patrolman had pocketed five bucks here and five bucks there, mostly to be somewhere else when men unloaded trucks full of liquor. “This was chicken feed compared to most of the bribes given (to the other indicted officers),” McGill noted. He pointed out that Nebe’s lawyers would focus on how poorly Cleveland police officers were paid. And that they could argue that Nebe wasn’t trying to get rich; he was just trying to keep a roof over his children’s heads and bread on the table. The policeman had a big, attractive family that surely would be sitting in the front row every day of the trial. That kind of thing could sway a jury.

“Eliot, we may have trouble in getting the jury to convict Nebe,” McGill told the safety director during a planning meeting. “You know that the difference between a bribe and a tip is that a bribe is given before the service is rendered, and a tip is given after a service is rendered. These amounts of five dollars and ten dollars are not in the bribe class.”

Eliot nodded. “That’s true, but you and I know, and Lieutenant Nebe knew, that a bribe, even disguised as a tip, is given to influence the conduct of a public officer or public official. We will let the jury have the facts.”

The jury hung on Nebe, just as McGill had feared, but Eliot would not let it go. Right was right, wrong was wrong. He convinced Cullitan to try the officer again.
The second time around, Eliot brought in three “surprise witnesses.” The trial judge agreed to put them on the stand even though the witnesses hadn’t mentioned Nebe in their grand-jury testimony.

Former bootlegger Louis Gregorcic, who had testified against Harwood and Burns in their trials, now said that he paid Nebe $50 a month for eight months during the later years of Prohibition. John Mozina, a butcher, told of being arrested by Nebe for having two gallons of sour wine in his home. Mozina said he paid Nebe $50 and that the case was subsequently dismissed. “He did not ask me for it; I just gave it to him,” he said. And finally, Mrs. Mary Anslovar insisted Nebe once forced his way into her home and took away a small amount of illegal booze she had. She said she paid him “$200 or $300” to stay out of the dock. All of these new bribery allegations involved much larger sums than what the witnesses in the first trial had claimed they’d paid the policeman. Eliot did not like to lose.

Nebe was convicted.

***

McGill worried that Eliot might be overdoing it with the investigation, that he might be pushing too hard. John Flynn, the assistant safety director, felt sure of it.
Flynn admitted privately to a friend that he thought the police-corruption investigation was “worthless.” His reason for concern, however, was very different than McGill’s.

Flynn was a Republican precinct committeeman in Shaker Heights, a well-to-do enclave on the eastern edge of the city. He had electoral aspirations, and during the summer of 1936 he had started making moves that smacked of political positioning. As acting safety director while Eliot was in the field, he appointed Louis Cadek’s nephew to the police force, jumping him over seven recruits who were ahead of him on the civil-service list.
When Eliot returned to the office, he revoked the appointment, calling it “ill-advised.” A reporter asked who exactly had advised Flynn, and the safety director snapped: “That’s what I intend to find out.”

He soon did, and he didn’t like what he found. He discovered that his assistant was, if not corrupt, then disturbingly malleable.
In just a few short months in the job Flynn had become known around city hall as the man to
see for “politicians who want little favors done.” With the assistant safety director exposed, a group of local power brokers had approached Eliot directly in July. They offered to secure the resignations of most of the policemen in his sights if he wouldn’t oppose pensions for the officers and would “call off the dogs”—that is, end his corruption investigation, which some political players in the city worried would eventually reach them. Eliot threw the emissaries out of his office. At about the same time, Flynn tried to push through a retirement request with full pension for Captain Harwood before formal charges could be brought against the officer. Eliot went before the civil-service board and put a stop to it.

The end came in December when Flynn popped off to a reporter as the jury in the Harwood trial was meeting. “I don’t believe they ever will convict him,” he told the hack. “It would have saved thousands of dollars to have accepted his resignation.” The next day, the verdict on Harwood came down. The above-the-fold headline on the front page of the
Cleveland Press
—“Police Captain Convicted on Six Counts He Took Graft from Bootleggers”—stood in stark contrast to Flynn’s comment, which the paper also highlighted. The assistant safety director submitted his resignation before the end of the week. He told reporters he would be returning to his private law practice.