Eliot Ness (29 page)

This Is War

E
liot wanted to do his bit for the war effort, just like everyone else.
He’d been issued a national draft order number—1359—but he wouldn’t be joining the army. He was about to turn forty. He instead decided to pursue the directorship of the Social Protection Division in the federal Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services (ODHWS), an opportunity he’d been mulling since it first came up in January. The division was charged with reducing the venereal-disease rate among military personnel, a mission that included working with police departments across the country to suppress prostitution near military bases and war-related industries. He had been volunteering with the agency part-time since September, making him an obvious candidate now that war had been declared and the operation needed a full-time leader. He believed that if he could land the job it would prove that criticism of his Cleveland record on prostitution was misplaced.

Federal spending for military preparedness had reached nearly $75 million a day by the end of 1941, but the Social Protection Division remained strictly small-time, with a staff of just twenty-four.
Still, the government sought out high-profile men for the directorship—including August Vollmer, former Chicago police superintendent (and Vollmer protégé) O. W. Wilson, Houston police chief Ray Ashworth, and former California assistant health director H. D. Chope. There was a good reason for this ambitious recruitment: managers at the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services needed a dynamic leader in the Social Protection Division who could do a lot with a little—and fast. No one really wanted to talk about the venereal-disease problem in the military, but it couldn’t be ignored.
The service branches would reject more than sixty thousand of the first million men called in the draft because they showed symptoms of VD. Thousands more would miss training time or deployment because they had to undergo treatment. On top of that, the arsenic-based cure was lengthy, brutal, and no sure thing. (Newly developed penicillin was just making its way onto the market.) With the Nazis in almost total control of Europe and the
Japanese sweeping across the Pacific, America’s generals needed every man they could get.
Congress underlined the seriousness of the problem by passing the May Act, which gave the federal government the power to take over the policing of towns or districts “deemed to be hazardous to the troops by the secretary of war or the secretary of Navy.”

Eliot fought hard for the position. He argued passionately for complete repression of prostitution, dismissing the worries of some doctors (and some of the other candidates for the job) that this would lead to “the spread of illegitimate sex and disease among the better class of girls in the community.” Eliot wanted to shut down red-light districts and launch an education campaign to encourage enthusiastic “amateurs”—“victory girls,” “good-time Charlottes”—to rethink their behavior.
He listed Lausche and Burton as references, as well as Illinois governor Dwight Green and former Unknown Frank Wilson, who had just joined the U.S. Secret Service. The hiring committee contacted his references, and then went in search of more. Arthur Miles, assistant regional coordinator of the Defense Housing Administration, wrote to the committee that “Mr. Ness is a very good man. . . . He is one of the best half-dozen legal administrators in the country. I certainly would rate him very close to [O. W.] Wilson. He would do very well, probably as well as Wilson.” Cleveland Trust Company chairman Delo Mook offered an explanation for the one significant stain on Eliot’s character: his divorce. “From the publicity and from various private information available to me,” Mook wrote, “I form the opinion that the trouble in Mr. Ness’s first marriage was due to character defects in the lady and not to any fault of his.”

The hiring process showed that, though he may have been the biggest name in the country’s sixth-largest city, Eliot remained small potatoes on the national stage. Wilson and Vollmer were stars in police circles everywhere; Eliot was still viewed as the smart-aleck kid who had hassled Al Capone. But Eliot’s prospects brightened when the pursuit of his more eminent competitors ran into hurdles. The
Public Administration Service’s executive director David L. Robinson Jr. visited Vollmer in Chicago and concluded that “the old gentleman’s health . . . would not permit him to undertake any kind of a full-time job.” He also lamented the difficulty of luring Wilson into government service unless the veteran police chief could be assured that it would not affect his professorship at the University of California. As a result, the job seemed to come down to Eliot and Ashworth. In his official report on the hire, Robinson wrote:

Both Wilson and Ashworth are highly intelligent, broad in their concepts and interests, and possess a forceful, but pleasing, personality. I haven’t the slightest question that either would be an excellent choice for the position of director of the division. I doubt if either would accept a position as assistant director.

Elliot [
sic
] Ness is earnest and sincere, has a good personality, and is reputed to have done a splendid job in Cleveland. He possibly has more “savoir faire” than either of the other two men, but not to any significant extent. He probably would be slightly less acceptable to police authorities through the country than would the others because he has been a civilian director of public safety rather than having come up through the military ranks in a police department. . . .

In summary, I am inclined to think that any one of the three would do a good job. If I were responsible for filling the position, I probably would offer it first to Ashworth, next to Wilson, if he could secure leave of absence [from the University of California], and next to Ness.

On Friday, April 10, the Bataan Death March began in the Philippines.
In her nationally syndicated newspaper column that morning, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “The war news is bad today. Even though it has been hanging over us for weeks, so many of us had hoped that courage could dominate hunger and weariness and over-powering numbers.” A couple of hours after reading the First Lady’s grim report, Eliot received word that he had been chosen for “War Service appointment as Director of Social Protection P-8 $8,000 per annum.” Somehow he had prevailed over Wilson and Ashworth. He would be hired as a temporary employee “for a period not to exceed the duration of the war and six months thereafter.” Eliot exulted. He hugged Evaline and spun her around. She hadn’t seen him so excited in months. The next morning, he called Mayor Lausche with the news.

Nearly two weeks later, on April 23, Eliot turned in his official resignation as safety director, to “fulfill my duty to the nation in the work to which I have been assigned in connection with this country’s armed forces.” He wrote that “it has been my privilege to have been allowed to work unhampered” as safety director. In a summary memo about his term, which he submitted with his resignation letter, he heralded the new professionalism of the police department, declaring—with some validity—that it had become a model for big cities across the country. “At the beginning of my tenure in office the police department was at a low ebb, morally and in
efficiency,” he wrote, adding that the police-corruption trials he spearheaded had served a valuable purpose. “The so-called purge which was undertaken at that time had three very good results. It raised the morale of the officers and men who had been doing an honest job and who resented the conduct of their dishonest superiors. It established the confidence of the public in the police department. And it revealed that the number of persons implicated in dishonest practices was a small percentage of the whole force.”

Eliot did not meet with reporters or issue a public statement. After turning in his resignation, he drove home and stayed out of sight with Evaline. The newspapers did not take offense at the snub. After pillorying him for the past six weeks, all three daily papers rediscovered their admiration for Eliot now that he was headed out the door.

“
Taking Mr. Ness’s record as whole, including all the errors and omissions, we think he is the best safety director Cleveland has ever had, and we have no doubt that his term of office will gain increasing luster by future comparisons,” the
Press
wrote.

Under the header “Six Eventful Years,” the
Plain Dealer
wrote that “Burton never regretted [appointing Ness safety director].”

In fact, Ness became the star performer in the Burton cabinet and added greatly to the mayor’s political strength.

In his six-year career under three mayors, Ness displayed personal courage, initiative and ingenuity. . . . The task of finding a successor to Ness will not be easy.

Clayton Fritchey, horrified at the way his paper had attacked Eliot over the car accident, weighed in as well with a stirring tribute to his friend’s work.

Cleveland is a different place than it was when Eliot Ness became Safety Director. Ness restored a sense of hope and pride to a beleaguered community. Cleveland was in desperate need for a lawman with the talent and integrity of Eliot Ness. Today, policemen no longer have to tip their hats when they pass a gangster on the streets. Labor racketeers no longer parade down Euclid Avenue in limousines bearing placards deriding the public and law enforcement in general. Motorists have been taught and tamed into killing only about half as many people as they used to slaughter.

More personally meaningful to Eliot than even Fritchey’s public accolade was the benediction of the man who had taken a chance on him when Eliot was just thirty-three years old. A week after he announced his resignation, Eliot received a letter from Senator Burton.

Dear Eliot:

Now that you are leaving Cleveland and taking up your full-time work in Washington, I wish to add a personal word of appreciation of the extraordinary public service which you rendered to Cleveland during the past six years.

When you accepted the appointment in 1936 [
sic
] as Director of Public Safety, under my administration as Mayor, you tackled the most difficult situation in the City Government. You more than met expectations and throughout the past six years, you have repeatedly moved into one field after another where you have cleared up a particular matter at hand.

The safety forces of a City are a key to its good government. Under your direction, these safety forces in Cleveland were changed from a bad to a good influence. . . .

Under your directorship, there grew up in the Department a high standard of integrity and of professional performance. I hope that you feel that the sustained effort which you put into this work has been worthwhile. It has contributed benefits not only to the City of Cleveland but to municipal government in general in this country.

The men and women who worked directly with Eliot didn’t need the press’s reevaluation any more than Burton did. They had never wavered in their admiration of their boss. The secretaries in city hall appreciated his shy, low-key manner, which ran counter to the usual barking management style of safety directors. Some of them left work in tears on the day of his resignation. Eliot had also bonded particularly well with the young investigators and police officers assigned to the safety department. “
Eliot was a great man to work with,” Luther DeSantis, a detective in the department, said years later. “We all loved him and learned a great deal from him.”

“
Eliot was a wonderful guy to work for,” recalled Arnold Sagalyn. “He was very affable, very bright and innovative. Cleveland was a corrupt city—a lot of officers taking bribes. There was no real training at that time for police officers. He changed that. In many ways, he modernized that police force. He made Cleveland a better place.”

***

Eliot left one significant piece of unfinished business when he turned in his city hall credentials: the policy and clearing house case. But he never gave up on it, and neither had Cullitan. Three months after Eliot left Cleveland, many of the accused finally received their day in court.
On July 3, kicking off a series of trials, ten men were convicted of extortion, including Angelo Lonardo and Willie Richardson. Eliot sent the county prosecutor a congratulatory telex.

A surprise came a month later, when a jury acquitted Shondor Birns of extorting some $4,000 from the former policy operator Oscar Williams.
Williams, who hadn’t seen Birns in ten years, misidentified the defendant from the witness stand. He pointed to the wrong man after Birns and one of his attorneys surreptitiously switched places at the defendant’s table. Birns and the lawyer wore identical suits, shirts, ties, and shoes. This kind of stunt was exactly why Eliot had always sat in the courtroom for trials. McGill, the prosecutor, derided the seat-switching trick as the “Notre Dame shift,” but he couldn’t help but feel it wouldn’t have happened if Eliot had still been around.

Stepping out of the courthouse, Birns told a reporter he was “greatly relieved by the verdict. I’ve been carrying that charge over my head for more than three years and it sure feels good to be able to forget about it now.” He eased into the backseat of a car and, with a wave and a smile, was gone.
*

Birns wasn’t the only gangster to escape justice. Angelo Scerria and a handful of other senior gang members remained fugitives. It bothered Eliot that so many of the top men managed to evade capture, but in a sense this turned out to be even better for Cleveland. Those who went to trial and were convicted served a few years in the pen and then returned to the city’s streets. The indicted mobsters who fled the area, however, were gone for good. A clutch of the fugitives settled in Las Vegas, where they took pieces of the Desert Inn and Stardust casinos. They found the money so good in the desert that they had no reason to ever go back home. Never again would organized crime hold the kind of power in Cleveland that it did in the 1920s and ’30s.

The Mob had been so weakened, in fact, that a cop was able to step into the breach. With the gang in turmoil, Ernest Molnar took over Cleveland’s
numbers racket. He ran it for six years, until he was finally arrested in 1948. A police reporter who’d known Molnar for a decade was so shaken by the arrest he found himself unable to ask the lieutenant a coherent question. “Buck up, kid,” Molnar said as he left Central Police Station after his booking. “It isn’t the end of the world.”