Eliot Ness (34 page)

Literary Life

L
ate in 1955, North Ridge Industrial managed to get a printing facility into operation. The company finally had a real product—not just a promise—it could sell. Eliot and Joe Phelps headed to New York for a series of sales meetings.

On their first night in town, a school friend of Phelps met them at their hotel. His name was Oscar Fraley; he was a reporter for United Press International. “Ness sat listening while Phelps and I enjoyed one of those good old ‘long-time-no-see’ bull sessions,” Fraley would remember. It was late and the men were drunk when Phelps nodded toward Eliot and told Fraley that this was “the guy who dried up Al Capone.” He’d been involved in raids and shootouts and much more during the Prohibition days, Phelps insisted.

Fraley turned to his old friend’s colleague, waiting for the punch line. After all, Eliot didn’t look like much. He was soft and puffy, with heavy bags under his eyes. He had been a pleasant enough companion all night, but he hadn’t really said anything, focusing chiefly on ordering drinks for himself and the others. Now Phelps egged him on. Eliot waved away the encouraging noises, embarrassed at being put on the spot, but he was smiling. Downing another drink, he began to talk.

As Eliot’s story took shape, Fraley found himself listening intently.

The “words rushed out in a smooth flood which mixed wit, perception and warmth,” Fraley recalled. It was clear that Eliot enjoyed transporting himself into the past, back to a time when he led a more exciting—and more useful—existence. When success seemed so easy and natural. The men ended up in Eliot’s hotel room, where Eliot collapsed on the floor and kicked off his shoes. He kept talking. He told Fraley and Phelps about secretly hitching a ride on the back of a beer truck to ride into a hidden brewery. He told them about standing at the bottom of a telephone pole, gun drawn, as a fellow agent tapped the line to Ralph Capone’s place. He told them about Frank Basile, dead on the side of the road at twenty-seven. Eliot’s eyes welled with tears.

“Let’s knock this off and get some breakfast,” Eliot said, embarrassed at the narrative’s mawkish turn. He shook himself and climbed to his feet. It was six in the morning.

The three men started to put themselves together, combing their hair, shaking out their jackets.

“Someday, you should write a book on your experience,” Fraley said, finally voicing what he’d been thinking for hours. “You might make some money with it.”

Eliot looked over at Fraley, a rueful smile on his face. “I could use it,” he said.

Over breakfast, Fraley persisted with the idea. He told Eliot he would write the book for him. Slowly, he won over his new friend. He pointed out that Al Capone, who died a gibbering loon, had become a legend in the years since Prohibition; he was Casey at the Bat for the criminal class. Everyone knew the mighty Al Capone. But what of the men who laid him low, who turned his overconfidence against him? They were forgotten. Fraley was a newspaperman and a history buff, and yet even to him the Untouchables and Eliot Ness had meant nothing. Eliot agreed with Fraley that the agents who had worked day and night to bring down the Capone syndicate deserved some recognition. After returning home, he typed up a handful of stories from memory, packed up his scrapbooks, and sent them off to New York. In the accompanying letter, he wrote, “Am enclosing additional background and incidents of the Capone case. If you find parts sketchy on which you would like more detail, please drop me a note.” Fraley, reading through the material, felt like he’d stumbled upon a hidden treasure chest. He’d been looking for a promising book project for years, and now one had fallen right in his lap. Working feverishly, he wrote half a dozen sample chapters, inventing dialogue and simplifying the narrative, and sent them to his literary agent. Within days he had a deal for a memoir about the Untouchables’ crusade against Capone. When Fraley called and said the publisher Julian Messner Inc. wanted his life story, Eliot was stunned. He had figured he’d never hear from Fraley again.

Fraley flew to Cleveland and later Coudersport to work on the book with Eliot, but it didn’t go well. Eliot’s mind was muddy. The confident storytelling the newsman witnessed in New York had disappeared. “Eliot knuckled his brow, stamped about the room and berated himself as he groped for names, places and incidents half forgotten,” Fraley would recall. The two men took long walks so Eliot could clear his head in the fresh air. Eliot
talked about the Cleveland Mob, the torso killer, reforming the Cleveland Police Department, hobbling labor racketeers. His years as safety director—that’s what he was most proud of. That’s when he made a lasting difference. He pounded his fist as he listed his accomplishments. Why didn’t a publisher care about
that
story? Why didn’t Cleveland voters care about it back in ’47? Fraley had a hard time getting Eliot back on topic. The Capone operation remained hazy. Eliot didn’t seem very interested in revisiting those days anymore. The reporter, after returning to New York, would ultimately decide to fill in the gaps with his imagination.
*

However conflicted he may have been about a book on the Capone squad, Eliot loved the idea of the literary life, of being a writer, as he had claimed to be back when he and Evaline got married in Kentucky. He was aware of his ex-wife’s burgeoning career in publishing. She now lived in a swank apartment in Manhattan thanks to her work on children’s books. Eliot didn’t know that Evaline’s long-sought creative success did not bring her happiness, though he wouldn’t have been surprised. She would soon marry again, to an engineer named Arnold Bayard, but he was not her third True Love. She’d given up on such childish ideas. She continued to drink heavily, just like Eliot, her alcohol consumption becoming the one certainty to every day. Slowly and methodically, her drinking would destroy every relationship in her life.
When she died, in 1986 at seventy-five, her husband had her cremated and told the owner of the funeral home to throw the ashes in the trash.

Eliot probably didn’t expect the literary life to bring him happiness either. He would be satisfied with some financial security, or even a brief cash infusion. He began to spend his evenings telling Capone stories at the Old Hickory Tavern in an effort to corral memories that fit with the draft chapters Fraley was sending him. The other patrons thought he was telling tall tales. On some evenings, he would walk over to the Wilkinsons’ house on Ross Street and ask Dorothy to take notes while he talked. “He wrote the book on the backs of unused [Fidelity Check Corporation] checks, and Dorothy would type them up and then throw the originals in the wastebasket,” Lewis Wilkinson recalled years later.

Eliot began to think of those wild years chasing Capone as a beautiful dream, colorful and alive and yet somehow frustratingly unclear. He thought about tracking down some of the old gang to ask about their
memories, but he never got around to it. It probably wouldn’t have helped anyway. More than two decades after the Capone squad’s last mission, those glory days seemed no more plausible to the other Untouchables than they did to Eliot. Most of them were closing out government careers in anonymity. Not many had distinguished themselves in the years since they’d helped send the world’s most powerful gangster to federal prison. In 1951, Paul Robsky’s career ended in shame after a drunk-driving arrest. The fifty-four-year-old ATU agent was driving a government car without permission, having disconnected the speedometer cable to avoid detection. In the agency’s last efficiency report on Robsky, submitted a month before his arrest, his supervisor wrote “that at one time he was regarded as a capable Special Investigator but that for the last two years he has not been regarded as even a mediocre character.” Barney Cloonan also worked for the ATU for two decades after Prohibition, even though his supervisors knew he had probably taken bribes from the Chicago syndicate during the dry years. He would never get promoted above the special investigator level at which he’d entered the agency. The FBI kept a “Derogatory Data” file on him. William Gardner continued to struggle with drink, wrecking his career, driving off a succession of wives and alienating his children. He hadn’t held a regular job since before the war. He was in the process of moving to Arizona, where he’d live off a small pension and sink into ill health.

Of course, not every member of the team peaked with the Capone hunt. Marty Lahart enjoyed a long, fruitful career in the ATU. Sam Seager and Joe Leeson rose rapidly in the federal bureaucracy after Prohibition, though neither would get to fulfill his potential. Leeson died suddenly of a heart attack in 1944. He was just forty-six. Seager died two years before him, at fifty-two. Lyle Chapman was run out of the federal government after repeal, but he made an impressive recovery. After World War II, he put his mathematical mind to work on a rating system for college football. By the 1950s he was forecasting game results on the radio. He still liked to brag about his connection to Al Capone, showing off a 150-page file on the case that he really shouldn’t have had in his possession. “I often find myself looking it over,” he admitted. “It brings back exciting memories.”

Eliot’s exciting memories, filtered through and expanded by Fraley, landed on his doorstep in Coudersport in the spring of 1957. Opening up the manuscript, he found himself filled with foreboding. He’d been stuck
in a low-level depression for months, maybe years. He had never really expected anything to come of the book project. He didn’t believe that his story—his life—was worth writing down. William Ayers would recall that as Eliot read through Fraley’s manuscript “he was many times on the verge of chucking the whole project because the book made him out to be a hero, which he honestly didn’t consider himself to be.”

But he didn’t chuck the whole project. He conscripted Walter Taylor, the editor of Coudersport’s newspaper, and Betty to read the manuscript and help him choose “what to leave in and what to leave out.” Eliot tried not to think too much about it. He still had a day job to worry about. North Ridge was still struggling along, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. On May 16, he decided to leave the office early and finish up some work at home. He packed up his briefcase and headed out on foot, strolling down Main Street. Sweat rushed down his forehead; it was a warm, sticky day. As he passed the newspaper’s small office, he glanced in the front window and noticed that Taylor was at his desk, perhaps reading Fraley’s manuscript. He stuck his head in the door and suggested they have “a cool one.” Taylor begged off; he had an appointment in an hour. Eliot gave him a smile and continued on to Third Street. His colleagues in the office had noticed that he’d been in “exceptionally fine spirits” all day, but by the time he reached his house’s front walk he had begun to flag. The humid weather really took it out of him. He walked through to the kitchen, calling out to let Betty know he was home. He turned on the faucet in the sink and was reaching for a glass in the cupboard when a shock rolled through him. He wavered, losing his grip on the glass, which smashed into the sink. He dropped to the floor. Betty, out in the backyard watering the flowerbeds, found him a few minutes later. It was too late. He was dead at fifty-five.

Over the next few days, as telegrams arrived from U.S. senator Frank Lausche, former Illinois governor Dwight Green, and Harold Burton, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, many of his friends and acquaintances in Coudersport expressed surprise that Eliot Ness once had been such an important man. One local resident called him someone “you probably haven’t given a second look on the street.” Taylor, who had sent out the news of Eliot’s death on the wires, described him in affectionate but prosaic terms. He was “an understatement, a giggler, a man ‘you knew from somewhere,’ a man you’d pick out if you were looking for a fellow elbow-bender, a face in the crowd.” These friends would be even more surprised six months later
when his slam-bang memoir reached bookstores. In the twenty-five years between the disbanding of the Capone squad and his first meeting with Fraley, Eliot had never presented himself or his accomplishments as anything special.
Former Cleveland political insider John Patrick Butler, like so many others who knew him, would remember Eliot as the very opposite of a braggart. “He talked to me about his Chicago days but took no personal claim in doing more than having helped expose the size of the Capone empire and its widespread activities,” he said.

Worried about the book, Eliot had talked through his memories of the Untouchables with Betty during the last days of his life. He never dwelled on heroic action in these long, meandering monologues. He had grown sentimental, maudlin. He admitted to his wife that he was often scared during the Capone squad’s short existence. He told her about the time in the Cozy Corner when one of the goons had said in Italian: “Shall I put a knife in him now?” Eliot wasn’t proud of his reaction. He had been useless when he needed to be courageous, he told her. The mournful look in his eyes as he said it broke Betty’s heart. Eliot asked his wife if he could get rid of her target pistol and hunting rifle. He didn’t want guns in the house anymore. Hunting was a popular pastime in the Coudersport area, but Eliot wouldn’t teach their son to hunt. “I’ve seen enough killing in my life,” he said.

Eliot’s doubts about himself didn’t make it into the book. Fraley understood what would sell and what wouldn’t. “Don’t get scared if we stray from the facts once in a while,” he wrote to Eliot. Ultimately, Eliot couldn’t argue. He needed the money. He was more than $9,000 in debt. The book’s advance hadn’t arrived in time to prevent him from bouncing a $10 check. Talking about the book to a friend in Coudersport, he parroted Fraley, saying: “If you want it to be interesting you have to embellish it a little.”

Just a few weeks before his death, Eliot received some proof that Fraley knew what he was talking about, that everything might turn out all right for him and Betty and Bobby. He was in Cleveland for a business meeting. North Ridge Industrial was spiraling down, in desperate need of customers to stay afloat. He checked into the Pick-Carter Hotel and met up with an old friend, Milton Bowman. They had dinner in the Frontier Room, the décor of which featured old rifles and shotguns hung on the wood-paneled walls. Afterward, the two men went to Eliot’s room for a drink. The phone rang
just as they stepped into the room. Eliot’s eyes widened as he listened to the voice on the line.