“Dumdums are often used in killing big game, such as bears,” observed one firearms expert, “[because] they cause death quickly by profuse bleeding.” Using them on a human being was “monstrous,” and such bullets were even banned from the battlefield. Gangsters made notorious use of them! What were they doing in a federal agent’s service revolver?
Within a week, the Treasury Department promised to break up the squad, transferring Golding and his more zealous agents out of Chicago. But Hardboiled went right on battling bootleggers in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Back in the Loop, the Prohibition Bureau began looking for a less controversial special agent in charge.
Alexander Jamie put himself up for the job, again pleading his case to George E. Q. Johnson, who called the commissioner of Prohibition. The squad, Johnson believed, needed the leadership of “a Chicago man” who knew his way around the city. After some political infighting, including objections from both Yellowley and Golding, Jamie became the Chicago office’s de facto special agent in charge, which the Bureau made official on November 30.
Another year and a half would pass before Golding’s arrogance caught up with him. In July 1930, with Golding stationed in Albany, New York, all the female employees in his office walked out, claiming he’d tried to force himself on each of them. Over the next few weeks, five other women came forward. Among them was Edna Stahle, who told investigators Golding had “succeeded in kissing and embracing her in spite of her objection” back in 1928, when they both worked in the Chicago office.
Ever the fighter, Golding denied the charges and did everything he could to slander his accusers. In a florid, fifty-nine-page memo, he declared himself the victim of a huge conspiracy, promising to “fight until the last” to clear his name. His superiors were unconvinced.
“It is impossible to believe that the eight female employees who are witnesses against Mr. Golding,” wrote one official, “and who are located in five different cities of the country, have entered into a conspiracy and perjured themselves in order to have Mr. Golding dismissed from the Service.”
On October 18, 1930, Golding’s tumultuous federal career finally reached its overdue end with his dismissal from the Prohibition Bureau.
Before becoming special agent in charge, Jamie had never risen higher than second in command. Now he could finally make his mark, as the federal war on crime gathered momentum. In Chicago Heights, for example, his brother-in-law’s undercover investigation had begun to turn bloody.
Word had gotten around that Eliot Ness “was on the take.” He kept up the masquerade, waiting for more leads to pour in. In mid-November, after several Prohibition agents seized a still on the Near West Side, a bootlegger from Melrose Park offered Ness a payoff to make the case go away.
Ness made sure to check with his superiors, who ordered him to accept the bribe as part of a growing web of evidence that bootleggers in the southern and western suburbs were all part of one big criminal conspiracy, with Chicago—and Al Capone—at its center.
Back in the Heights, Joe Martino was boasting about the great deal he’d cut with the feds. Special Agent Don Kooken, he said, was just “one of the boys,” and a good man to have in their pockets. But Kooken was already appearing before a secret grand jury, testifying about his dealings with the Heights mob.
The special agents got warrants to raid the eighteen stills uncovered in Calumet City, but didn’t have enough men to hit all at once. This left no choice but to borrow a few regular Prohibition agents. Ness didn’t trust these men for a second, knowing the crooked ones would tip off the bootleggers at the earliest opportunity.
So they arranged to meet in Chicago and broke up into small groups, each with a special agent in command. They kept the locations of stills secret until the last moment, after which they didn’t let the borrowed raiders out of their sight. The busts were successful, netting several bootleggers, considerable equipment, and great quantities of alcohol.
On November 27, the grand jury indicted Giannoni and Martino on bribery charges, the former managing to evade arrest, the latter putting up no resistance. Ness went with federal marshals to arrest Martino at home, where the bootlegger meekly tossed a handgun to the floor. Ness felt a twinge of pity for a man clearly scared out of his wits. Martino, posting a $10,000 bond, was on the street that night.
Federal officials probably assumed they could use the bribery indictment to pressure Martino into turning state’s evidence. The fixer knew all about the crooked ties between government officials and Heights gangsters, information the special agents badly needed.
But Martino kept his mouth shut. More than the old code of omertà, this was simple self-preservation—he knew his partners would silence him at even the slightest hint of cooperation. To stay alive, he had to prove that he could still be trusted, even at the risk of going to jail.
But it was already too late for Joe Martino. After all that bragging about his close relationship with special agents, the gang didn’t care whether he was an informer or just plain stupid. Either way, he had to go.
Two days after his arraignment—on a cloudy, snowy afternoon—Martino stood outside his saloon on East Sixteenth Street, hands in pockets. He didn’t see the assailant come up behind him, raise a revolver, and fire several times. Dumdum bullets smashed through Martino’s skull, pulping his face the way a propeller churns water. The fixer dropped to the pavement, his hands still in his pockets.
The killer expected a getaway car to pull up and spirit him away, but none came. He sprinted down East Sixteenth Street, shooting wildly at anyone who got too close, and disappeared down an alley. Only then did a pair of cars cruise past Martino’s corpse, apparently looking for their confederate. Each vehicle paused at the curb, then sped off.
The operation reeked of haste and desperation. The killer had acted in broad daylight, before several witnesses, practically within sight of a police station, his escape nearly botched. This slapdash killing convinced police the Heights mob was running scared. Still, Martino’s secrets had died with him.
A Chicago Heights Star reporter found Martino’s corpse “lying on the sidewalk, its head trailing blood. . . . Scores of curious spectators . . . gathered about, silent and impassive.”
From Martino’s home, just across the street, came his wife and seven-year-old son. Mrs. Martino stood silent for a moment, then collapsed with a scream, while her son knelt by his father’s corpse, hugging it, wailing. By the time police arrived, both were drenched in the dead man’s blood.
“That,” Ness wrote, “was the end for Joe Martino.”
* * *
Martino’s death set off a cycle of slaughter threatening to derail the entire investigation. George Johnson and his assistants had already begun bringing witnesses before the grand jury for a conspiracy indictment aimed at cleaning up the Heights. But now they found themselves in a race to get testifiers to court before the gangsters could wipe them out.
One key witness was thirty-five-year-old LeRoy Gilbert, police chief of South Chicago Heights, a different municipality with cleaner cops than the Heights. A slight man with a carefully trimmed mustache, Gilbert had worked closely with Johnson’s office to break up the local liquor racket. The chief had befriended a pair of bootleggers by promising to “get them out of trouble” following an arrest. Then he testified against them, and was slated to return to the grand jury two days later, when prosecutors expected him to give further damning testimony.
The night before his court date, Gilbert relaxed with his wife in the living room of their bungalow. Sitting in an easy chair, reading the newspaper, his back to the window, his head outlined by a reading lamp, he made a perfect target.
Outside, two killers hurried up to the window, feet crunching softly in the snow. They climbed up on a lattice outside his window, rested the barrels of a pair of sawed-off shotguns on the sill, and opened fire.
Three blasts ripped Gilbert’s head open. A stray slug caught his wife in the hand, nearly severing a finger. G
ilbert’s thirteen-year-old daughter rushed into the room to find her father nearly decapitated and her wounded mother crawling toward the kitchen.
Citizens, including the dead man’s brother-in-law, formed an impromptu posse. But they only succeeded in shooting up a couple of cars not wanting to stop for a mob of armed strangers—in one vehicle, a twenty-two-year-old Canadian typesetter got drilled through the forehead while riding home after visiting his fiancée.
Chicago officials reacted with horror to the utter breakdown of law and order in the Heights. With the police chief’s death, the gangsters had crossed a line—Gilbert was an honest officer of the law, hence off-limits. Yet the Heights mob murdered him in cold blood at home, in front of his family. Suddenly, no one was safe, especially not Ness and the other government agents still working in the Heights.
The next major witness was Ness’s driver and informant, Frank Basile, who had just received a $90 bonus from the Prohibition Bureau for his help in locating stills. On December 11, Johnson brought him before the grand jury to testify about his long history with the South Side rum ring. Basile’s testimony was the linchpin of the government’s case. With it, Johnson said, they had everything they needed for an indictment. The prosecutor left Basile with an order not to go anywhere by himself.
Early the next morning, Ness got a phone call from Don Kooken to come at once to the Kensington Police Station. The cops had a body, found at dawn on the far South Side—perhaps the agents might be able to identify it. With a growing sense of dread, Ness traveled to the squat, brick fortress sitting a couple blocks from his father’s first bakery. Next door was Doty’s Funeral Home, where police had taken the corpse. Ness hated such places, particularly the smell. But he went in with Kooken, and the mortician escorted them into the back room and lifted the sheet.
Frank Basile looked back at Ness blankly with his remaining eye.
Basile had been taken for a ride—picked up on his way home from a card game and driven to a vacant lot. His killers shot him repeatedly in the face. Basile’s bulldog had been with him, and they shot it, too.
Ness liked to think his years as a federal agent had hardened him. But here was someone he’d known and trusted, laid out on a slab with much of his face blown away. More than just an informer or a wheelman, Basile had been a comrade, a friend—and if not for Basile, Ness might have been knifed back at that East Chicago saloon. Eliot would have been stretched out, cold and lifeless, not this young father of three, going straight for the first time.
Prosecutor Johnson’s case suffered a major setback with the loss of this key witness. But, most distressing, one of their own had been slain—Basile was a federal man in everything but name.
“The challenge to the government is clear-cut and definite,” Johnson told the press. “The time has come for action—to bring every possible force to bear and bring Basile’s murderers to justice.”
Ness threw himself into the hunt. The prime suspect was the man Basile’s testimony most definitely damned—Lorenzo Juliano. But even if Juliano had ordered Basile’s murder, surely someone else had pulled the trigger. Police found a notebook in Basile’s coat pocket and used it to piece together his movements in the days and hours before his death. Within a week, they had a promising suspect—Tony Feltrin, forty-two, a known Juliano associate.
Police arrested Feltrin and offered him a deal: Give up Juliano, and receive lenience in court. But Feltrin refused to talk and got locked up in the Kensington Police Station. His stay was brief. On December 19, he was found dead in his cell, hanging from his necktie.
That Feltrin would be left in a cell with only his necktie for company seems unlikely. But in those days, murder suspects cheated the official hangman with suspicious regularity. If Feltrin didn’t kill himself, “suicide” was a convenient way to cover up an interrogation gone wrong—or for a crooked cop to fill an Outfit contract. Either way, on a cold, cloudy Christmas Eve, the grave took Tony Feltrin.
But the evidence against the hanged man convinced Ness that Basile had been avenged, in some manner at least, and the young agent went back to building the case against the men who had ordered his friend’s murder.
“In Chicago Heights,” Ness wrote, “the heat was on.”
The special agents hit back by raiding the Cozy Corner, with Ness’s pal Marty Lahart in the lead. Lahart burst in carrying a sawed-off shotgun, and announced a federal bust. Immediately, as Ness recalled, “four revolvers and one shotgun hit the floor.” Miraculously, none went off.
As the other agents rounded up patrons, Lahart gathered discarded firearms, shoving the revolvers in his belt and holding the shotgun in his free hand. Then he charged upstairs.
Instead of finding gangsters on the upper floors, Lahart discovered prostitutes in various stages of undress, less than impressed with this flustered federal agent.
“Look who’s here,” one remarked. “Tom Mix!”
This rare flash of humor brightened the otherwise tense circumstances—Ness and the other special agents might be ambushed at any moment.
“We always traveled with sawed-off shotguns . . . ,” Ness recalled, “and when we went into a restaurant, we always took a corner table as the danger of our undertaking was becoming more imminent.”
Even so, Eliot Ness remained cool. Friends and coworkers marveled at his ability to keep spookily calm, considering him fearless. He wasn’t, really—he just kept his fear bottled up like the rest of his emotions, biting his fingernails and picking at the skin on his thumb until there wasn’t any left.
The sun broke through on December 28, bringing the temperature up above freezing. That day Ness rode through the Heights in the confiscated Cadillac with handsome Al Nabers at the wheel, flush with confidence as their case approached its conclusion.
Then they became aware of being followed—“a flashy new car,” as Ness described it, stayed on their tail for a couple blocks. Nabers hit the gas. The other car did likewise. Nabers slowed down. So did the other car, careful not to overtake them.
Ness told Nabers to make a quick turn down a narrow side street, which he did, sliding through the intersection and parking the car diagonally so it would block the road. When their tail came around the corner, he had no choice but to stop to avoid hitting the Cadillac.
Ness and Nabers sprang out, guns drawn. They ordered the other driver, a heavyset Italian, to get out. Ness restrained the man, frisking him for a weapon while Nabers covered him with a shotgun. Then they searched his car, where Ness found a revolver with the serial number filed off, its chamber full of dumdum bullets.
“This was a killer’s gun,” Ness knew, lethal and untraceable, meant to be emptied into a victim and dropped next to his body. Neither Ness nor Nabers recognized its owner—his name proved to be Mike Picchi—but they had no doubt as to his profession.
“This gun,” Ness wrote, “was obviously meant for us.”
The special agents took Picchi to the Kensington Police Station and booked him. Then they drove a few blocks north to 11015 South Park Avenue, the sturdy brick home where Ness, by now a twenty-five-year-old federal agent, still lived with his parents.
The Nesses had recently moved from the house on South Prairie to this larger one with its own garage and yard, sitting across the street from the expansive campus of Pullman Tech High School. Peter Ness’s business was once again on firm footing.
Nabers was a frequent visitor, often staying overnight when work on the South Side ran late. That evening, he joined the family for dinner. Emma Ness seemed not to mind such intrusions, but she couldn’t hide the toll her son’s job took on her.
Eliot recalled her staying up late, waiting for him to come home from his latest stakeout, fussing over him before he left in the morning. She clearly feared he would be “killed by those murderers,” as she put it. Her son put on a brave face, trying never to bring his job home.
Around dinnertime, Ness got a call from an informant, a bootlegger who’d been trying to get in touch for
days, desperate to deliver urgent information he couldn’t give over the phone. He’d visited the South Prairie house looking for Ness, but found the family gone. He’d only been able to track Ness down because Peter and Emma held on to their old telephone number.
Somewhat reluctantly, Ness gave the informant their new address and told him to come right over. The bootlegger did so—while buying corn sugar in the Heights, he said, he overheard two Italians plotting to kill Ness. One instructed the other to use dumdum bullets. Now Ness had no doubt the mob wanted him dead.
They might try again, soon. Chief Gilbert had died in his home, his family in the line of fire. Ness couldn’t abide the thought of something similar happening under his parents’ roof. He reached out to the local police captain for a round-the-clock guard on the South Park Avenue house.
Then, doing his best not to alarm his folks, he moved out and got a room with Nabers, in another part of town. He wouldn’t allow himself to see Peter and Emma until this whole thing blew over.
Ness also stopped seeing Edna Stahle, his increasingly steady girlfriend, though he couldn’t cut her out of his life completely—she was Jamie’s confidential secretary, at the very center of the special agents’ activities, preparing their reports, recording witness testimony, taking tips from informants. She also kept track of the position of every agent in the field, meaning she knew exactly where Ness was as he probed the underworld of Chicago Heights.
For her sake, if not his own, Ness had every reason to wrap this case up.
As the New Year dawned, conservative estimates put the death toll in the Heights gang war at sixty. This, according to the Herald and Examiner, earned the town “the strange distinction of having the highest per capita murder rate of any city in the United States.” Newspapers declared the Heights “a center of lawlessness” and “the municipal sanctuary for killers and bootleggers.”
Local leaders decried their community hijacked by the criminal class. “The good name of a good city has been sacrificed on an altar of bloodthirsty racketeering and money-mad politics,” said the Chicago Heights Star, whose offices had been bombed the previous summer. They believed “the bad work can probably never be undone.”
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 17
