Scarface and the Untouchable

by Max Allan Collins

  And they had to pay off countless cops—of the $52 profit the gang made from each barrel, the Secret Six estimated $20 wound up paying off police, Prohibition agents, and other officials, a staggering $2 million weekly.

  The beer trade had done more to corrupt local government and empower the criminal class than any other vice, turning gangsters into industrialists and police into their employees. By early 1931, Robert Isham Randolph and others were lobbying for a change in the Volstead Act, to legalize the sale of beer without another constitutional amendment. Even if hard liquor remained outlawed, damming up this torrent of illicit revenue would deal a death blow to criminal syndicates like Capone’s.

  Eliot Ness agreed but wouldn’t wait around for a change in the law.

  “We had to . . . find a vulnerable point,” Ness reflected. “We decided on the breweries because their product is bulky and because they have the toughest transport problem.”

  The breweries also evidenced the greatest capital investment and biggest income generator. By shutting them down, Ness hoped to dry up that foamy $2 million weekly “slush fund” for bribes. If Capone couldn’t make his regular payoffs, then police would stop protecting his rackets, making them that much easier to find and destroy.

  And the more Ness’s men cut into the Outfit’s bottom line, the more the gang would struggle to pay its salaried employees—money was the glue holding the syndicate together, without which it would splinter, perhaps even turn on itself.

  “Kill the revenue,” Alexander Jamie said, “and you kill the gang.”

  Ness wasn’t content with shuttering each operation. He wanted to catch the brewers in the act, adding their names to his conspiracy case and locking them up, even briefly, to further stretch the gang’s resources. Locating each brewery required weeks of agents working slowly and carefully so as not to blow their cover. They soon learned saloons received deliveries every Friday, stocking up for weekend business. All Ness’s men had to do, in theory, was wait for trucks to arrive and then follow them back to their source.

  But the Outfit had ways of keeping its breweries well hidden. One night, the special agents tailed a beer truck from a Cicero speakeasy to a nearby garage. After forty-eight hours, the truck hadn’t moved, stashed there to cool off, leaving their pursuers at a dead end.

  Then the agents tried pulling over a truck fully loaded with beer and interrogating its driver. But the trucker had picked up the barrels at a spot far from the brewery. That way, if he fell into federal hands, the trucker wouldn’t know anything to hurt Capone.

  Ness’s agents examined financial records, seeking to trace the purchases of brewing vats. But the gang had covered its tracks too well. Then it came to Ness—the Outfit must use the same barrels over and over again. They made a shell game of shuffling trucks and drivers around, confusing anyone who tried to follow their movements. But if the special agents could keep their eyes on the kegs, they’d eventually find the breweries that filled them. . . .

  Ness ordered Maurice Seager and ace driver Joe Leeson to camp out at a large saloon south of the Loop. They arrived around 9:00 P.M., just when business would start to heat up, and watched the alley. As the hours crawled past and the beer flowed, empty kegs piled up out back.

  Then, around 2:00 A.M., two men drove up and loaded the used barrels into a truck. Leeson and Seager followed them around the South Side, the trucks making more pickups before hauling their cargo to an old industrial building near Comiskey Park. Fearful of being spotted, the special agents sped off, then returned to rent rooms nearby.

  “We, of course,” Ness wrote, “thought at last we had located a Capone brewery.”

  But they hadn’t. Leeson and Seager had stumbled onto a plant where used barrels were washed and steam-cleaned before being refilled—the Capone mob had adopted modern hygienic practices. Instead of a single brewery, the agents had discovered something much better—a wellspring that, with care, might lead to several more targets.

  Over the next few days, Leeson and Seager watched truck after truck leave the barrel-cleaning plant, each guarded by two pearl-hatted gangsters in “a souped-up Ford coupe.” After years of working without interference, the guards had grown complacent, no longer watching their backs.

  Still, the special agents took no chances, tailing the coupe a few blocks at a time, then picking up the trail when another convoy rumbled by the same spot the next day. Leeson and Seager made their careful way to another cooling-off garage, across the street from a vacant lot, where the agents took up watch, crouching in the high grass into the small hours of the morning.

  They saw the trucks driven out around 3:00 A.M., then tailed the convoy on foot. A truck pulled into 1632 South Cicero Avenue, a squat garage with an arched roof a short distance from the cooling-off point.

  Confident they’d finally found a brewery, Ness put a round-the-clock watch on the Cicero garage. His men reported two trucks carrying empty barrels showed up every day around 4:30 P.M. The vehicles exited forty or forty-five minutes later, riding a lot lower. Ness laid plans for a raid, set for early morning when he knew brewers would be on duty.

  Sports fan Ness designed the operation like a football play. Two cars, each carrying five men, would roll up to the brewery and cover all exits. Then, sixty seconds later, five more agents would come in through the front door. Anyone trying to flee would run into the arms of the waiting men. Ness gathered ten special agents, members of his own unit plus five from the regular Prohibition force, including a rookie Ness picked up himself. The mousy young man made a poor fit among the brawny Capone squad.

  Shortly before dawn on March 25, the fifteen raiders gathered in a rented room and received their assignments. They set out for Cicero in a convoy of two cars and a big, heavy truck that could cart off whatever they seized. A block or so from the brewery, they stopped, awaiting 5:00 A.M.—zero hour.

  Several agents went to the truck and grabbed ladders with muffled tips, to scale the roof. The two cars drove off to take their prearranged places near the exits. Ness and the rest rumbled up to the building in their truck, getting out with guns drawn. Trying to force their way in through the front, they discovered the big double doors would not give.

  With the other agents in place and time slipping away, Ness’s men had to think fast—quickly, they decided to use their truck as a battering ram. The driver climbed in, and backed into the entrance.

  “The doors fell with a great loud clap,” Ness recalled, “and at that moment my heart sank. There was no brewery!”

  Instead, he saw a large, vacant space.

  But this was just a “false face,” designed to fool would-be raiders, the far wall painted black, making the place look empty. The special agents rushed over, found another set of doors, and forced through them. They came upon a red truck that looked like a moving van, its engine running, as if recently abandoned.

  In fact, a special attachment to the motor was pumping wort, the raw material fermented into beer, from a 2,500-gallon tank inside the truck through a hose and into a massive vat hidden deeper inside the building.

  The special agents smashed in yet another set of doors and finally found the actual brewery.

  “We entered the place,” Untouchable Barney Cloonan recalled, “and there were three guys inside—very surprised guys, too.”

  The workers stood rooted, too stunned to move, the federal agents arresting them without a shot fired.

  The fresh, yeasty scent of brew in their nostrils, the agents saw, everywhere they looked, “genuine Capone beer”—31,800 gallons in fourteen enormous vats and five large cooling tanks. Sixty barrels sat ready for delivery. All told, the raid cost Capone $100,000 in seized equipment, trucks, and product, robbing him of a brewery capable of turning out one hundred barrels of beer a day.

  The setup matched the brewery Ness had seen at 2108 South Wabash. Evidently, the Outfit ran their plants like franchise operations. Among the arrested men was Steve Swoboda, the gang’s top brewmaster, who o
versaw production at several breweries. The special agents emptied Swoboda’s pockets and examined his personal effects, searching unsuccessfully for anything tying him to Capone.

  Then, after an inventory and taking some samples of beer for evidence, they smashed the vats and broke up the barrels, creating what the Evening American called “an amber flood that would bring tears to the eyes of any beer lover.” Thick, frothy waves coursed over the floor like knee-high snowdrifts.

  Riding high off his victory, Ness headed back to the Transportation Building to meet with Colonel John F. J. Herbert, chief of the regular Prohibition force. Ness intended to thank Herbert for the loan of his men, but the colonel only gave him an accusatory stare.

  “What did you do to him?” Herbert asked, referring to the rookie agent Ness had taken along.

  The fresh agent had come in before Ness arrived, ready to turn in his badge and gun.

  “If the job is anything like that,” the rookie had said, “I’m through!”

  Ness couldn’t possibly relate. The raid had given him the kind of rush he always craved, and the sight of those brewers, staring dumbly at the agents as they stormed in, tickled his peculiar sense of humor.

  “It’s funny, I think, when you back up a truck to a brewery door and smash it in,” Ness said. “And then find some individuals inside that you hadn’t expected.”

  Eliot—who was only just getting started—would make many such discoveries in the months ahead.

  Less than a week after the Cicero raid, Ness welcomed a new agent onto the squad—Robert D. Sterling, forty-eight and the oldest on the team, after more than a decade with the Prohibition Bureau. His record of building conspiracy cases, including one against a sacramental-wine racket, surely appealed to Ness. But when it came to busting mobsters and other violent violators, Sterling had little to offer.

  “He is not a criminal investigator nor will he ever be,” Dwight Avis wrote. “My impression is that he dislikes criminal investigative work and suffers from personal fear,” particularly when gangsters were in play. Sterling would last only three weeks on the Capone squad.

  Now that they were moving from investigation into action, Ness needed a different breed—aggressive, take-charge raiders sharing or even exceeding his own thirst for excitement. Just in time, the perfect pair of agents arrived, skilled investigators who’d cut their teeth chasing moonshiners.

  Ness had been after Paul Wenzel Robsky for some time. Robsky, thirty-three—high forehead, intense gray eyes, and full lips—lacked investigative experience but made up for it in brass, his appetite for danger running deep. He had been a pilot in the Great War, signing up as a Prohibition agent in South Carolina because “it might be interesting and exciting.” Thanks largely to Robsky’s own recklessness, the job more than lived up to expectations.

  One time Robsky tried to stop two fleeing bootleggers by throwing himself onto the roof of their car, only to have them both bail out with him still hanging on. Thrown from the out-of-control auto as it barreled down a mountain, Robsky got away with a broken ankle. The driver, less lucky, fractured his skull and, Robsky recalled, “was never right in the head again.”

  Arriving in Chicago in early April for “a temporary detail,” Robsky found his new boss “nervous and tense, sort of collegiate looking, a nice guy doing a job.” The newest squad member spent his nights on stakeout or bent over a phone receiver, listening to Outfit members talk about “Snorky.” Never did he feel the same rush he’d felt while breaking up hillbilly stills.

  But he did good work, and Ness soon made his temporary assignment a permanent one.

  The other new arrival was Marion Andrew Rockwell King, twenty-seven, a lean Virginian who joined up April 14, the only team member younger (by two months) than Ness. Energetic, fearless, he had a talent for undercover work.

  “He is young, dependable and hard-working,” wrote the commissioner of Prohibition in early 1930, “and is the type of employee the Bureau seeks.”

  Like Robsky, King came on a temporary appointment, which Ness arranged to make permanent in May. With King on board, the team reached its full ten-man strength; Ness finally had the flying squad he’d envisioned since December.

  He also prepared to deploy a new weapon, something Leeson and Lyle Chapman devised on his orders. Since their truck had served so well as an impromptu bulldozer, Ness hoped to keep using it to bust down brewery doors. But he knew the vehicle couldn’t take such repeated abuse without modifications, and suggested protecting its radiator with a heavy steel bumper mounted on the front.

  Chapman designed the attachment; Leeson, once a welder, probably constructed it, creating a flat, horizontal battering ram out of old streetcar rails. These reinforcements may not have been much to look at, but they enabled the truck to plow headlong into a brewery instead of backing in.

  The agents kept up their barrel-cleaning plant surveillance on the South Side. Following the barrel trucks grew more difficult as the guards realized they might be tailed. Ness’s men had to tail the trucks on parallel streets, or somehow manage to get ahead of the gangsters and watch them in their rearview mirrors.

  Eventually, these barrel convoys led the team to an apparently vacant warehouse at 3136 South Wabash Avenue—THE OLD RELIABLE TRUCKING COMPANY, according to the sign out front. But the special agents detected a familiar faint aroma and took up watch, to see if the Outfit would tip its hand.

  One night, with Ness and four other agents parked across the street, a barrel truck pulled up, a convoy car right behind. Without warning, four other cars appeared, each with two men inside. The gangsters got out and surrounded the special agents. Ness and his men sat poised to go for their guns.

  Then one man stepped forward—Bert Delaney, Capone’s buildings manager. After ordering his boys to stand down, Delaney approached Ness, eager to make a deal.

  “How much you guys want?” Delaney asked. How about $600? No? Two grand, then?”

  Ness remained stony-faced and silent.

  “All right,” Delaney said, “you guys set your own price.”

  “You haven’t got enough money,” Ness said, and drove off.

  The squad hit the warehouse at daybreak on April 11. As before, Ness sent his men to cover all six exits. Several agents grabbed ladders off the juggernaut truck and climbed onto the roof, where they waited by the fire escapes. Wearing a leather football helmet, Ness took his place inside the truck and gave the signal. The driver shifted into low gear and rumbled ahead, then plowed through the front doors, wood splintering like breaking bones, the impact shuddering through the truck.

  As the raiders burst in, a dozen shrieking alarm bells went off. While their partners used axes to hack into the other entrances, the special agents in the truck smashed through two more pairs of heavy doors before finding a working brewery.

  Then, Ness wrote, they “were on the necks of five operators in less time than it takes to tell it.”

  A few brewers tried to flee out the roof, only to run into more agents waiting to nab them. One arrested man was Steve Swoboda, out on bail after the Cicero raid. Another was Frank Conti, a top Capone lackey. Ness would arrest both again.

  Agents led the brewers away for questioning, pressing for any connections to Capone. Other squad members took stock of everything they’d seized, then destroyed it. With fourteen 2,500-gallon vats, five 1,800-gallon cooling tanks, and more than 40,000 gallons of beer, the brewery was the largest found in Chicago since Jamie’s raid the previous June.

  The plant could produce 180 barrels a day, Ness estimated, set up very recently, probably to replace the Cicero brewery. Mothballs lay strewn about, and an electric ventilation system purred, in a vain attempt to hide the stench of brewing beer. The Outfit had invested $25,000, only to lose it after four or five days.

  Ness suspected the gang would try to recoup. He ordered his men to spare several big vats, then made a show of leaving the brewery unguarded. Agents took up concealed spots. The next morning, they spie
d four cars cruising, searching for threats. Satisfied the coast was clear, the cars took up lookout positions.

  Then four men nonchalantly let themselves into the brewery and began loading a large vat onto a truck. The special agents dashed across the street as the lookouts honked their horns like mad. But the feds moved too fast, arresting four men, Bert Delaney among them.

  A few days later, the team turned up where the mob might least expect them—Chicago Heights. Ness had unfinished business there—in the two years since he and Jamie shut it down, the Heights had regressed. The special agents drove around like old times, letting their noses lead them to stills in three houses on the same block. They crashed into each, arresting five men and destroying tens of thousands of gallons of liquor. Ness told reporters these raids would help shore up the conspiracy case he’d built back in 1929.

  “We secured convictions against fifty-six men in this neighborhood last year,” he said. “We were just checking up today.”

  Local authorities seemed amazed to find bootleggers in their midst.

  “I can’t understand it,” said the Heights police chief. “These fellows must have just slipped in. We’ve been keeping an awfully close check on things out here.”

  Ness planned to make sure of that.

  “I’ll be back,” he promised.

  Sometime that spring, a young man showed up at Ness’s office looking for a job. Millions like him haunted American office buildings in those Depression days, shuffling from rejection to rejection as their savings bled out like a slow wound.

  Ness gave the young man a hearing, only to learn the potential recruit had no investigative experience, lacked education, and boasted no special qualifications. He could bring nothing of value to the Capone squad, unless he had some connection to the gang.

  “The Kid,” as Ness called him, offered precisely that—he said he could get a job through Jack Guzik and report back whatever he learned.