Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  But first Peter needed capital. In McGregor, Iowa, a bustling little Mississippi River town, he got a job in a lumberyard. Two years of labor and thrift earned him enough for a move to South Chicago.

  Peter established himself in a small community on Chicago’s far southern outskirts called Kensington—the last stop on the Illinois Central, where rail-riding hoboes hopped off, giving it the nickname “Bumtown.” “Little more than a swamp,” as one local paper put it, Kensington was a cluster of boardinghouses and saloons around a rail yard with scant to recommend itself to an aspiring baker. The roads were rutted, muddy, and often impassable, especially for the heavy wagons used by wholesale bakers.

  Three bakeries in the area had failed before Peter got there, one owned by another Norwegian who welcomed an offer to buy—a risky but shrewd investment for a near-penniless immigrant. Still, Peter could see Kensington was changing.

  In 1881, industrialist George Pullman opened a new factory just across the tracks from Kensington to build his famous railroad sleeper cars. Around the facility, he created a rigidly structured “model town” designed as a kind of workers’ utopia. Wrapped in the trappings of wealth, employees supposedly wouldn’t feel the “discontent and desire for change” that gave birth to labor unions.

  Stately brick homes lined clean, orderly streets, the modern marvels of gas lighting and indoor plumbing standard. The town—also called Pullman—was a self-interested social experiment, an attempt to mass-produce workers as “elevated and refined” as the cars they made. For its founder and namesake, the operation just made sense—as a “strictly business proposition.”

  Pullman selected this spot for its isolation on the low prairie, away from Chicago’s “evil influences.” Other than Kensington, the only other settlement in the area was Roseland, a well-established Dutch farming town dating to when Chicago was a frontier fort. The sudden influx of workers swelled both communities, turning “Bumtown” into boomtown.

  The town of Pullman had no saloons, and the Dutch kept a tight rein on drinking in Roseland, so Kensington became the place where workers went to “raise hell.” Saloons sprang up like poisoned mushrooms. Saturday night was Pullman’s payday, the “busy season” in Kensington, when police could count on twenty arrests for drunken brawling. George Pullman hadn’t escaped the “evil influences” of the big city—he’d brought them south.

  “Leave the well-paved, well-sewered, and well-cleaned streets of [Pullman],” a rabble-rousing reverend wrote, and you’d find “the half-hid-out streets of Kensington, with its open sewers, its piles of decaying vegetation, its pools of stagnant water, its ill-ventilated and tumbledown tenements, its scores of liquor shops and houses of doubtful character.”

  Yet many workers preferred living in Kensington and Roseland, where they weren’t forced to hide their ethnic identities behind uniform brick facades. Those who lived in Pullman could never own their own homes; everyone paid rent to the company. Without notice, Pullman inspectors could invade a worker’s home and redecorate, automatically taking the cost from wages.

  And if residents weren’t living up to Pullman’s standards, they could be kicked out on ten days’ notice. The company also charged for the use of the only church, which no congregations could afford, leaving the house of God largely vacant.

  “The company care nothing for our souls,” the employees would say, in hushed tones. “They only want to get as much work as possible out of our bodies.”

  But for Peter Ness, Pullman’s nightmarish utopia was a dream of opportunity. The sale of meats and groceries was restricted to the Market House at the center of town, where Peter secured a stall to sell his bread. The punishing $40-a-month rent meant access to a captive audience of roughly eight thousand people.

  Before long, Peter’s business outgrew the small stand, and in July 1885 he and a partner built their own wholesale bakery at 373 East Kensington Avenue. The brick and stone structure, with “Peter Ness” written high and proud, might have seemed bigger than their business could support, but the neighborhood was bound to grow into it. Peter bet on the future in another way, too, leaving plenty of space upstairs for a family.

  That same summer, twenty-one-year-old Emma King boarded a ship in Norway and retraced Peter’s journey to Chicago. Her father, an English engineer, helped build Norway’s first railroad; her mother was a Norwegian dressmaker. Emma grew up in small-town Ullensaker, Peter’s last Norwegian place of residence. Almost certainly they had known each other; someone in America, presumably Peter, paid for Emma’s ticket to the States. They married on April 2, 1886, when Peter was thirty-six and Emma twenty-two. Six months later, they had their first child, Clara. In the next few years, three more would follow—Effie, Nora, and Charles.

  Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1889, while his business prospered thanks largely to its prime location. With Kensington to the south, Roseland to the west, and Pullman to the east, the Ness bakery sat at the intersection of three expanding communities bursting with steady paychecks and mouths to feed. Business was so good that by 1892, Peter and his partner opened a second bakery in South Chicago.

  Then disaster struck—early one January morning in 1893, the Kensington bakery caught fire. The Nesses, still living upstairs—their youngest, Charles, not yet two—managed to escape the burning building unharmed. But two firefighters were buried under a collapsing wall, one killed instantly, the other badly injured. The fire consumed four buildings on that block, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

  “The origin of the fire is not known,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “but the starting point is supposed to have been Baker Ness’ oven.” Peter estimated his own losses at $3,000.

  Peter didn’t take long to rebuild, and soon had the Kensington bakery up and running again. As the year wore on, however, things only got worse, as a series of bank failures and business collapses threw the country into a depression.

  The Pullman Company slashed wages and laid off thousands, yet George Pullman refused to lower rents. That winter found many starving families unable to heat their beautiful rented homes. Workers began to meet across the tracks in Kensington, away from prying company eyes, talking about organizing and collective bargaining—exactly what Pullman had built “his town” to avoid.

  Peter Ness didn’t go in for that kind of talk, but he hated seeing his neighbors suffer due to Pullman’s intransigence. A year after his business and home were burned out, Peter gave free bread to families who couldn’t afford it, and never asked to be paid back.

  On May 11, 1894, after Pullman refused one last time to raise wages and lower rents, his workers walked out. Kensington became the front line in a battle that would change the course of the American labor movement. Down the block from the Ness bakery, at Turner Hall, strikers met to hear young labor leader Eugene Debs inveigh against “the paternalism of Pullman.”

  In June, the American Railway Union announced a boycott of all railroads handling Pullman cars, bringing much of the country screeching to a halt. Trains could no longer deliver mail and food into Chicago; prices shot up. The strike divided the city—you were either with workers or management.

  Peter Ness chose workers.

  Always a believer in a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s work, he couldn’t fault his neighbors for demanding as much from their employer. Nor had he forgotten he owed his success—his foothold in America—to the people who made up this community. He gave strikers his support by feeding them for free. Many others did the same, donating food, money, and medical care, allowing workers to hold out much longer than Pullman expected.

  But once the strike stopped the mail, making it a federal matter, President Grover Cleveland sent in troops, and riots broke out. Mobs destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of railroad equipment, while the grounds of the previous year’s World’s Fair—the “White City” that had dazzled millions of visitors—went up in flames. Two thousand federal troops, and scores more police and militiamen, finally
brought the chaos to an end.

  The strike was a calamitous defeat for organized labor. Workers gradually returned to the town of Pullman, by now officially part of Chicago, but they never forgot their anger. When George Pullman died in 1897, his will wisely stipulated his grave be lined with asphalt, concrete, and steel, to protect his remains from vengeful employees.

  But while Pullman’s actions damned his memory forever on the South Side, Peter’s generosity made the baker one of the community’s most respected citizens. Perhaps he was too soft a touch, loaning money to those in need and never seeking repayment. His “reputation for integrity and philanthropy,” as one local biographer put it, was “unexcelled by that of any citizen of that suburb.”

  The turn of the century found Peter and Emma still living above the Kensington bakery with four children and several live-in servants. Peter turned fifty that year but worked as hard as ever, closely overseeing the work of his eight employees and five bakery wagons. In November, Emma turned thirty-seven; their children ranged in age from nine to fourteen. Any new additions to the family would likely be after the girls reached marriageable age.

  But three years later, on April 19, 1903, Emma gave birth to a fifth and final child, a son, in the flat above the bakery. The Nesses named the boy after Victorian novelist George Eliot, probably never realizing this was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans.

  Peter insisted his son would have no middle name, despite friends arguing for “at least a middle initial.” Customarily, in Norway, a child would bear his or her father’s first name as a patronymic—Johnsen, in Peter’s case, marked him as the son of John. Tradition dictated his son’s middle name be Peterson.

  But the Nesses were Americans now, and their child would bear a simple, American name: Eliot Ness.

  Technically, Eliot Ness was the native Chicagoan and Al Capone the transplant, but the former’s upbringing made him the outsider. Chicago fit Capone like his fine silk underwear, Brooklyn preparing him well for life in the bustling, brawling Loop and the rough-and-tumble South Side. But Roseland and Kensington were an enclave apart, separated from the city by miles of undeveloped prairie, operating by a very different set of rules.

  Ness grew up in a neighborhood in transition—moving, like the rest of the country, from an agrarian past into an industrial future. Farmland still dotted the area and many streets remained unpaved, even as heavy industry increasingly moved in. Just a few blocks from the Ness bakery sat the Sherwin Williams paint factory. Every day of his childhood, Eliot’s nostrils experienced a mingling of the sweet smell of baking bread and the toxic fumes of brewing paint.

  Kensington remained the place where locals went to get decent food and drink, serving as a release valve for its buttoned-down neighbors. But sleepy, stolid Roseland—a community proud of its “pretty homes and well-kept lawns”—grew to dominate the area, its Dutch influence keeping things tame.

  Local police were, by Chicago standards, honest and competent; people generally respected law and order. The moralistic influence of the Dutch Reformed Church, which filtered into the schools and every aspect of community life, discouraged vice.

  Industrialization brought with it plenty of immigrants—like Capone, Ness grew up surrounded by diversity. His family lived in a largely Italian area of Kensington, apart from the Norwegian enclave in West Pullman, and young Eliot would hang around the bakery with the sons of Italian immigrants. Workers who came to Roseland and Kensington had often been recruited for their skills, and those who wanted jobs could get them. With little incentive to make a living outside the law, street gangs and juvenile delinquency were rarities.

  In his 1929 study of organized crime in Chicago, sociologist John Landesco perfectly captured the gulf between Al Capone and Eliot Ness.

  “The good citizen has grown up in an atmosphere of obedience to law and of respect for it,” Landesco wrote. “The gangster has lived his life in a region of lawbreaking, of graft, and of ‘fixing.’ That is the reason why the good citizen and the gangster have never been able to understand each other. They have been reared in two different worlds.”

  Many who grew up in the heart of the city also learned to navigate boundaries of class, race, and crime—shifting their personalities to fit their surroundings. Capone excelled at this: much of his appeal came from his contradictory capacities for great kindness and extreme cruelty . . . the murderer who gave generously to charity.

  Ness, meanwhile, grew up the son of a respected man in a tightly knit, circumscribed community, much more like a small town than a big city. He never learned to wear a false face so blithely as Capone.

  Even as an infant, Eliot was remarkably well-behaved.

  “He was so terribly good he never got a spanking,” Emma Ness recalled. “I never saw a baby like him.”

  He grew into a blue-eyed, freckle-faced kid with a shaggy head of brown hair and a good sense of humor. He was bookish but loved the outdoors, passing many afternoons in the Palmer Park playground a few blocks north of the bakery.

  As the youngest member of the household by more than a decade, Ness spent much of his youth around adults, and he grew up closest to his mother. Her influence, and that of his three sisters, left its mark on his personality. Somewhat sensitive, he was “a good listener among older members of the family,” as a brother-in-law recalled, and preferred the company of girls to boys, always bowing out of playing war or other masculine games.

  If Ness cared what others thought, he didn’t show it—a quiet loner, he was never one to assert himself socially. At Pullman Elementary and Calumet Junior High, the clean-cut, well-scrubbed kid dressed nicely and didn’t bother trying to fit in. Some kids took this for arrogance—“like he thought he was better than everybody else,” one classmate recalled—and tried to put him down with the nickname “Elegant Mess.”

  But in truth, this shyness was mixed with a kind of proud self-reliance. Young Eliot had “a mind and a will all his own,” his mother said. Although some would later accuse him of being a Boy Scout, he never joined. He preferred going his own way.

  He also liked to work. Practically from the day he was old enough for a paper route, Ness took every odd job he could find, helping out in the bakery, too, frequently tending to the twenty-seven horses that pulled his father’s wagons. The afternoons and evenings in the bakery, learning its ins and outs, were precious to the boy, because it meant quality time with his father.

  Eliot said his father “never had a lot to say, but when he did speak, I knew it was something worth listening to.” He did regret not seeing his father “all that much,” and wished he’d gotten to know him better.

  Although the bakery stole Ness’s real father away, a surrogate appeared in the form of Alexander Gleig Jamie—an imposing, six-foot Scotsman whose hawk nose and piercing gaze were seemingly on loan from Sherlock Holmes. Jamie would have a lasting influence on Ness’s character and career, a mentor guiding him much as Johnny Torrio did Capone.

  Like Torrio, Jamie was born abroad in 1882, emigrating from Sterling, Scotland, to the United States as a child. He grew up in Pullman, attended school there, and clerked for the company for seven years, internalizing the ethos of that company town. Honest, dependable, hardworking, Jamie shared with Peter Ness the immigrant’s determination to make good in America.

  But for Jamie, hard work alone was not enough. He was, at heart, a political operator, who made sure to ingratiate himself with those worth knowing. He joined the right organizations, cultivated the right friendships, and never hesitated to pull the right strings. Unlike Peter Ness, Jamie sympathized not at all with the plight of the workingman. He aspired to management.

  In October 1907, when Eliot was four years old, Jamie married the eldest Ness daughter, Clara. Two years later, the couple had a son, Wallace Ness Jamie, and moved in with the Nesses on Kensington Avenue. At that time, Peter’s business was “in a precarious condition,” Jamie recalled.

  The losses on stale bread had made wholesaling too c
ostly, forcing Peter to focus on the more profitable retail market. He hired Jamie to manage his Kensington bakery, and together they helped get the business back on a more stable footing. Jamie now had more than twenty bakers to supervise, but always found time for his young brother-in-law, Eliot.

  Ness, in turn, grew up much closer to his nephew Wallace, six years his junior, than to his actual siblings. He took it upon himself to protect Wally, teaching him how to defend himself against bullies.

  Ness soon became known around the neighborhood as a protector willing to stop older kids from picking on younger ones. One neighbor recalled Ness taking care of two brothers after their father was injured at the Pullman plant. They had no one to look out for them, so Eliot stepped in, even offering to help pay the bills, though the brothers wouldn’t take his money. By appointing himself the guardian of those smaller and weaker than he was, Ness had found a way around his shyness—he could be liked and respected by the neighborhood kids without really being one of them.

  Religion, too, set the Nesses apart from the larger community. Life in Roseland centered on its churches, many dating back fifty years or more to the first Dutch settlement. But the Nesses were Christian Scientists, a new sect arriving in the area only in the 1890s, following reports of miraculous healings in West Pullman.

  For the faithful, such healings proved diseases were imaginary, according to founder Mary Baker Eddy, an erroneous manifestation of the human mind. Our true nature, like God’s, was perfection. These ideas inspired suspicion and disdain among many Americans, and no doubt raised a few eyebrows among the Nesses’ conservative, churchgoing neighbors. Roseland’s Christian Scientists didn’t even have their own building until 1912, meeting for services in public meeting halls or each other’s homes.