The defining moment of Ness’s early career in Cleveland occurred on the frigid night of January 10, 1936, when he was summoned to a raid in progress on the Harvard Club in Newburgh Heights, one of the city’s bestknown gambling dens. The county prosecutor, Frank T. Cullitan, had begun the exercise earlier that evening by trying to break down the club’s steel door, but he and his men were driven off by James “Shimmy” Patton, one of the owners, who wielded a machine gun with conviction. Cullitan and his men retreated to a nearby gas station, where the prosecutor called for backup, only to be refused by local law enforcement agents. In desperation Cullitan called the safety director, Eliot Ness, and when Ness tried to assemble a raiding party, he met with the same reaction, obviously the result of payoffs and politics-as-usual in Cleveland. Even Harold Burton, the reform mayor responsible for appointing Ness, refused to assist because the prosecutor was a Democrat while the mayor happened to be a Republican. Undeterred, Ness went to a nearby police station, recruited a group of twenty-seven volunteers (an ad hoc Untouchables), and drove to the Harvard Club, pausing only to tip off reporters that he was about to generate headlines for the morning edition.
When all was in readiness, he strode to the barricaded doorway, knocked, and announced, “I’m Eliot Ness. I’m coming in with some warrants.” As Ness liked to tell it, he then summoned all his expertise in jujitsu and with a mighty kick broke down that steel door, charged inside and, once more drawing on his skill in the martial arts, knocked down a gunman about to blast him to kingdom come, whereupon the Harvard Club emptied. According to the official version, however, after Ness knocked on the door, he and his men stood around in the freezing cold for five minutes or so, until the door opened (without a kick), and a man wearing a tuxedo approached Ness and demanded, “Who the hell are you?” Ness replied by flashing his badge and walking past the bouncer. The only violence, according to the official report, was a scuffle between one of the club’s employees and a couple of reporters. Since more than five hours had elapsed since Cullitan had begun the raid, its patrons were long gone, taking most of the gambling apparatus with them. Nevertheless, the newspapers told of the safety director’s heroism as he took the notorious gambling den by storm, adding another episode to the fast-gathering legend of Eliot Ness. He was now the most visible public servant in Cleveland, his reputation eclipsing even that of Mayor Burton. It was only a matter of time, people said, until young Ness ran for mayor of Cleveland.
In his lust for publicity, he traded on his reputation as a former Untouchable by establishing an elite cadre of undercover agents in Cleveland whom he dubbed the “Unknowns,” and he set them to work wiretapping and shadowing elected officials and police suspected of corruption. Since the Unknowns operated behind a veil of secrecy, their mere existence gave them extraordinary power to intimidate; they became, in effect, his secret police. Yet their investigations turned up relatively little in the way of scandal and corruption, and in the end the only public official forced to resign was Ness’s own assistant, John Flynn.
To make matters worse, Ness also failed to solve Cleveland’s most notorious crime problem: the so-called torso murders. Over a period of two years, a serial killer had murdered and dismembered at least six victims in the Cleveland area. Although each corpse had been mutilated, the dead were a varied lot: male and female, black and white. The lack of a common thread hindered investigation, although each murder caused a sensation and inspired a massive manhunt for the culprit. Through it all, Ness failed to make a useful contribution. Although he was quick to tip off reporters to flashy raids and investigations of police corruption, he ducked questions concerning the torso murders. His behavior suggested that he had no interest in a matter of public safety, even one as pressing as the torso murders, unless he could use it to reap personal publicity.
By 1938, the reputation of Eliot Ness, once the darling of Cleveland, or at least its newspapers, had entered a decline. His stock sank even lower when he announced that he and Edna were getting divorced; his terse public comment on this sensitive issue—“We both realized a mistake was made, and we set out to correct it”—alienated many of the city’s Catholics. His name was mentioned in connection not with police work but with the women with whom he had been seen even before the announcement of his divorce. In fact, Ness was spending an increasing amount his time at two posh watering holes, the Bronze Room at the Hotel Cleveland and the Vogue Room at the Hollenden Hotel, where the management reserved a table for their prominent regular, who was generally with a pretty young companion. Indeed, women adored him. Marion Hopwood Kelly, who was married to Ralph Kelly, Ness’s good friend, remembers him as “the sexiest man I’d ever known. He used to say to me, ‘I’ll never forget the first time that I saw you. You were wearing a red dress.’ I was just so flattered that anybody remembered me for anything.” It was not his virility that appealed to women or even his good looks so much as a certain lost boy quality about him; women did not want him to make love to them so much as they wanted to mother him.
Ness’s romantic dalliances were invariably linked to alcohol—lots of it—for only when he drank did he feel relaxed enough to lower his guard, a guard he had learned to maintain since childhood, when his mother and sister had ruled his fate. He consumed six or eight drinks in the course of an evening, and like many an alcoholic, his tolerance was high, and he rarely appeared drunk, merely relaxed, pleasant, and flirtatious. Yet the spectacle of the city’s safety director (and former Prohibition agent) spending night after night in a lounge, drinking with an ever-changing cast of women, created the wrong impression. His newspaper pals told him to ease the pace of his drinking and dating, which by Cleveland standards bordered on the scandalous, but he ignored their well-intentioned warnings, preferring to divert himself with bizarre practical jokes. One night he invited the governor of Ohio, Martin L. Davey, and Dan Moore, another state official, to join him for a drink. While the men chatted, a man in the lounge began to cause a stir by trying to sell drugs. In reality, Ness had hired an actor to play the dope pusher, who took to his role with a will, provoking another patron to violence. Appalled by the sordid doings, Governor Davey fled the scene, climbing down a fire escape to make sure no one saw him. Ness enjoyed his prank, but his behavior was completely at odds with his professional responsibilities and his reputation. On another occasion he bugged his apartment just before hosting a party for about two dozen of his friends. Among the guests that night was Marion Hopwood Kelly. “When the party was nearing the end,” she recalls, “he told us what he had done, and he began to play back the recording. On it, we heard women talking with other women’s husbands. He managed to pick up quite a lot, and even though it stopped short of scandal, it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. People were not amused. They were not amused with that at all.”
There were other lapses in judgment, all the more surprising to those who witnessed them because they ran counter to the image Ness took pains to project. A particularly embarrassing episode began when he ran a red light in Cleveland’s Italian district and one of the residents shouted abuse at him. Ignoring police procedure, Ness pulled over and got out of the car. His antagonist approached him and suddenly slammed Ness’s head between the car and its door. Assisted by a policeman, Ness went to nearby University Hospital for stitches, but he refused to file a complaint against his attacker, even though the cop urged him to take action. No, said Ness, he didn’t want this kind of publicity, and he didn’t receive it. The local reporters remained loyal to their friend, and they kept all mention of this and similar incidents out of the papers. Even so, the word got around that the safety director was capable of strange behavior, and the talk about Eliot Ness running for mayor died away.
In late 1938, Ness, now thirty-five, returned to form, at least for a while, by directing a series of raids uncovering the largest numbers racket in the city. The leads produced by these raids led him to investigate the inner circle of Cleveland’s rackets, the Mayfield Road gang, led by Morris B
arney “Moe” Dalitz, who had served his apprenticeship with the Purple gang in Detroit, where he had distinguished himself as a bootlegger and bookkeeper. Arriving in Cleveland, Dalitz quickly rose to the top echelon of the Mayfield Road gang, which, as everyone in town knew, maintained headquarters in suite 281 at the Hollenden Hotel. The reign of the Mayfield Road gang came to an abrupt end in April 1939, when Ness appeared before a grand jury, which in turn indicted no less than twenty-three racketeers—men such as Charles Polizzi, “Big Angelo” Lonardo, and “Little Angelo” Scirrca. The Mayfield Road gang was never the same after that. Many of its members, including Moe Dalitz, fled Cleveland, which was a victory for Ness. However, as the years passed, they moved west, not stopping until they reached Las Vegas, where under the direction of Moe Dalitz they transformed that desert hamlet into a gambling empire.
By this time Ness was seen most often with a woman named Evaline McAndrews, an illustrator and former model. Evaline was twenty-seven, alluring, divorced, and a former student at the Art Institute in Chicago; in fact, some said she had originally met Ness during those days. On October 14, less than a month before Al Capone was released from Terminal Island, Ness and McAndrews wed secretly in Greenup, Kentucky. “Ness’ Bride to Keep House—and Career, Too,” declared the Plain Dealer on their return. The newlyweds moved into an apartment on Lake Avenue, and when Eliot returned to his office in City Hall, Evaline resumed her job at Higbee’s department store, where she drew fashion illustrations. For a time, the union was blessed with happiness. “Evaline liked being Eliot’s wife when he was a famous and influential public official,” a friend once explained. “She liked his prominence and power and fame. He loved her, no question about that. He always called her ‘Doll.’ ” Theirs was not a conventional household, for they were often joined by another woman, who acted as Evaline’s bodyguard. She looked the part, tall and muscular, and had once worked as a bouncer in Florida, and, as a publicity stunt, married a dwarf. The three of them—Eliot, Evaline, and the female bodyguard—were often spotted around Cleveland, raising eyebrows wherever they went. This arrangement was altogether too Bohemian for Cleveland, whose citizens expected Ness to live up to his fair and square reputation.
Two days before Capone won his freedom, Ness’s boss, Mayor Harold Burton, won reelection and shortly thereafter launched a successful campaign for senator. (In 1945, President Truman appointed Burton to the U.S. Supreme Court.) Under Burton’s replacement, Edward Blythin, Ness was rarely heard, rarely seen, and nowhere near as active in public affairs as he once had been. He and Evaline moved into a showy boathouse in Lakewood, and Ness frittered away his time attending parties and drinking; he was much more likely to be seen in a tuxedo than wearing a shoulder holster. Behind his genial façade, Ness was a man haunted by ghosts of the past, especially the shade of Al Capone. Entering his late thirties, no longer the boy wonder of law enforcement, Ness began to reminisce about his days in Chicago chasing Public Enemy Number 1 and the vanished world of the Prohibition era. The more he reminisced, the more he embellished his tales until it seemed that he had managed to knock off the Capone empire singlehandedly.
Capone’s malady also haunted Ness, who launched a crusade against syphilis at a time when the disease was still not discussed in polite society. Growing restless with his job and with Cleveland, Ness yearned to move on to better things, but he was blocked at the FBI by Hoover’s intransigence. In his boredom, he pursued this public health issue in the hope that it would lead to a new career. He became a consultant to the Federal Social Protection Program. The position allowed him to travel to Washington and establish contacts designed to further his career. Borrowing a tactic from the Chicago Crime Commission, he began calling venereal disease “Military Saboteur Number 1.” Although Ness’s concern was foresighted, his zeal struck his friends and coworkers as quixotic and more than a little peculiar. “Most were genuinely puzzled as to why a man with Eliot’s virtues—a brilliant mind, an engaging personality, a reputation for integrity—would commit his time and talents to a cause as unconventional and unrewarding as curbing the spread of social diseases,” writes Steven Nickel in Torso, an account of Cleveland’s most famous unsolved murder case—a case, incidentally, that remained unsolved at the time Ness undertook his public health crusade. By 1941, his indifference to public safety became an issue, and when a Democratic mayor took over City Hall, rumors circulated that Ness’s days in office were numbered. His enemies, and he had acquired many by this time, insisted on replacing him with someone who enjoyed the blessing of J. Edgar Hoover and the cooperation of the FBI.
Ness had come to a difficult pass in his life, and it was then that he self-destructed in a spectacular manner. On the night of March 4, 1942, he chose to mark the publication of a lengthy article on syphilis in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences by drinking the night away at the Vogue Room with his wife and another couple. When the lounge closed, the revelers repaired to a hotel room for more drinking, and not until 4:30 in the morning did Ness and Evaline leave for home. Tired and drunk, Ness drove quickly along Bulkley Boulevard (now West Memorial Shoreway), trying to negotiate the icy road in the dark. He lost control of his car, went into a long skid, and crashed into another car, injuring the driver, twenty-one year-old Robert Sims. Ness staggered from his car, determined that Sims was still alive, and left the scene of the accident, refusing to give his name, although Sims had the presence of mind to note the license plate: EN-3. This distinctive vanity plate was known throughout Cleveland, and police quickly tracked down Ness.
For once his friends on the newspapers were powerless to protect him, and the scandal of Eliot Ness, director of public safety, involved in a hit-and-run accident while under the influence of alcohol filled the city’s dailies. After maintaining silence for several days, he held a press conference in which he offered lame excuses for his behavior. Yes, he had been drinking. No, he was not drunk. And as for the accident, “It was very slippery and the thing happened just like that.” He did further damage to himself when he claimed he had planned to follow the injured driver to the hospital but was distracted by his wife, who’d had the wind knocked out of her. In sum, he insisted, “There was no attempt at evasion in any particular.” Few believed him, and a cry for his resignation went up. Ness successfully maneuvered to avoid prosecution for the accident, but on April 30, 1942, he resigned in disgrace. One of the few voices raised in his defense belonged to Clayton Fritchey of the Press, whose farewell assessment attempted to put the Ness record in the best possible light. “Cleveland is a different place than it was when Eliot Ness became the safety director under former mayor Burton late in 1935,” Fritchey reminded his readers.
For instance:
POLICEMEN no longer have to tip their hats when they pass a gangster on the street.
LABOR racketeers no longer parade down Euclid avenue in limousines bearing placards deriding the public law enforcement in general.
MOTORISTS have been taught and tamed into killing only about half as many people as they used to slaughter.
During his seven years as its safety director, Cleveland had seen many sides of Eliot Ness: his thirst for publicity and his bold raids, as well as his curious lapses, his drinking and skirt chasing. In the end, his vices outweighed his virtues, and his law enforcement career in Cleveland, once so promising, so full of excitement and headlines and raids and Dick Tracy badges, came to an ignominious end. Hailed as a gangbuster by the time he was twenty-nine, he seemed destined to accomplish great things in law enforcement. At thirtynine, he was looking for work.
He persuaded Evaline to move with him to Washington, D.C., where he successfully lobbied to become the director of the Federal Social Protection Program. The couple lived there during the war years, trying to maintain their marriage until, in 1944, Evaline moved to New York and resumed her career as an illustrator. As the end of the war approached, Ness returned to Ohio without fanfare, this time to manage the Diebold Safe & L
ock Company, located in Canton. Initially, he made a favorable impression in his new post, restructuring the company and overseeing a merger with a competing entity, but he was constantly plagued by marital problems.
Even before Evaline divorced Ness on grounds of gross neglect and extreme cruelty he became involved with Elizabeth “Betty” Anderson, another woman with an artistic bent. She was a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art; like Ness, she was divorced and, like Ness, a heavy drinker. Betty became Ness’s third wife on January 31, 1946, and they later adopted a son whom they named Robert Warren Ness, but fatherhood did not prove to be a happy experience for him. By now Ness had left Diebold, left Cleveland altogether, and moved with Betty and the child to New York, where he became an executive with an import company. He had an office in Rockefeller Center, an annual income of $24,000, and a lingering reputation as a former law enforcement wunderkind, sufficient even now to bring him publicity in magazines such as Fortune, which noted that he “carefully avoids the appearance of being a young man in a hurry.” Yet he was still given to boasting. “My business affairs are in such excellent shape that I do not have to worry about a livelihood,” he explained to Richard Maher of the Cleveland Press, adding, “I have some ideas about public service—and I want to try them.”
In July 1947 Ness reappeared in Cleveland to run for mayor as a Republican. In explaining his reasons for seeking the office, he declared that at the time he resigned as director of safety five years earlier, Cleveland was a “vibrant, spirited city, interested in accomplishment and improvement. . . . I have returned to find it, by comparison, a tired and listless town; its air filled with soot and smoke; its streets dirty and in a most deplorable condition; its transportation system noisy, inadequate, and approaching insolvency. The equipment of its police and fire department is poorly maintained; its traffic moves painstakingly and with confusion; newspapers indicate that Cleveland streets are unsafe after dark. . . . Cleveland is going backward instead of forward.” Although he had been absent for a long spell, Ness’s candidacy was backed by such old friends as Ralph Kelly and Clayton Fritchey, whose newspapers rehashed the highlights of the candidate’s career as safety director while downplaying any reference to the hit-and-run accident that had brought about his resignation, his failure to find the torso murderer, or his several marriages. He amassed a war chest estimated at $150,000—three times greater than that of the Democratic candidate, incumbent Thomas A. Burke—and plastered the city with his campaign slogan, “Vote Yes for Eliot Ness.” He was always a man of promising starts, and his candidacy proved to be another example of that phenomenon. As the campaign wore on, he appeared to lose interest in the contest. His speaking appearances were notably lackluster, and his drinking had taken its toll on his demeanor and his appearance. The once-agile Ness looked flabby, ill at ease, and distracted during the final phase of the campaign. He continued to fraternize with pals in the opposing camp, such as Al Sutton, who now held Ness’s old job. “He’d come up to my office,” Sutton says of Ness’s strange behavior, “and I’d say to him, ‘What are you doing here?’ You’re running for mayor and I’m Safety Director for Tom Burke [Ness’s opponent]. He’s about fifty feet from here. Will you get out of here and don’t come back!’ ”
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