Acts of grace and mortal sins, one leading inexplicably yet inevitably to another.
In his forty-eight years, Capone had left his mark on the rackets and on Chicago, and more than anyone else he had demonstrated the folly of Prohibition; in the process he also made a fortune. Beyond that, he captured and held the imagination of the American public as few public figures ever do. Capone’s fame should have been fleeting, a passing sensation, but instead it lodged permanently in the consciousness of Americans, for whom he redefined the concept of crime into an organized endeavor modeled on corporate enterprise. As he was at pains to point out, many of his crimes were relative; bootlegging was criminal only because a certain set of laws decreed it, and then the laws were changed. He also cunningly promoted the notion that the criminal, or, to employ his euphemism, the racketeer, redistributes wealth, taking it from the rich, who scarcely miss it, and giving it to the poor, who cannot come by it any other way. Finally, there was the symbol most closely associated with him—the machine gun. Although there is no evidence that Capone himself ever used one, it belonged to his way of life, la mala vita.
• • •
In his last, liquor-sodden years, Eliot Ness entered a spiral of decline. In 1948 he returned to the Diebold Safe Company, commuting forty miles from his rented home in Cleveland to Canton. However, he spent more time on the road, drinking, than he did in his office. Each day he would stop in Kent, Ohio, for more than a few drinks. While drifting through town, he became intrigued by the local automobile dealership, a Lincoln-Mercury agency; there Ness struck up a friendship with the manager, Jack Foyle, who was almost twenty years younger. Theirs was almost a father-son relationship. “He was a very lonesome man looking for a friend,” Foyle came to realize. “He was totally depressed by his defeat in Cleveland for mayor. He took it very hard. He was ostracized.” Eventually Ness bought a car from Foyle; it was a “jazzed-up Mercury coupé, dark green. He wanted a car with all the fancy things you could buy—the spotlights and the chrome and the bumper guards, all the trimmings.” Although Ness was chronically short of money, he paid $2,000 for his new car, all of it in cash. “I remember specifically he counted out the cash for it,” says Foyle.
Even after the purchase, Ness never failed to stop for a drink with young Jack. “He would drop by about 3:30 or 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon on his way home, and we went down to the Kent Hotel. I would have two drinks, and he would have twenty-two. He would drink ’em like water.” But then, when it was time to leave, Ness could not pay because he did not have his wallet with him—or so he claimed. In fact, Foyle discovered that Ness almost never had his wallet with him. “Then all of a sudden he’d have money, and he’d pay for the drinks with a twenty-dollar bill and say to the waitress, ‘Keep the change.’ ” Since Ness drank so much, Foyle was naturally concerned about the drive home, but Ness insisted he was able to make it back to Cleveland. “He was a typical alcoholic driver,” Foyle told himself. “The car knew where to go.” Then one evening Foyle received a call from the local police station. It turned out that a man claiming he was Eliot Ness had been picked up for driving while intoxicated, but he had no wallet, no identification, and insisted the police call Foyle, who would be able to identify him. “I went down to the police station,” Foyle recalls, “and the chief of police said, ‘Are you sure this is Eliot Ness?’ I said I knew goddamn well it was.”
After that incident, the two became even better friends and drinking partners, and Ness passed the drunken afternoons reminiscing about the good old days in Chicago and especially Al Capone. He even took to calling Foyle “Al Capone,” and the two of them would kid about it, Al and Eliot having a drink, and even the waitresses and the bartender got in on the joke; they all started to call Foyle “Al Capone.” But when the laughter died away, Ness would be consumed by self-pity, the lost opportunities, the vanished hopes. He was haunted by the unsolved “torso” murders that had plagued his tenure as safety director in Cleveland and by his repeated failures in the business world. He complained of his treatment at Diebold. “They’re putting me out to pasture,” he would say, his voice filling with resentment. Were it not for a little driving mishap, he told himself, he could have been mayor of Cleveland, and after that, who knows? Senator Ness. Governor Ness. But it was not to be. He blamed J. Edgar Hoover for his defeat, without explaining why. For a time he’d had it all, a beautiful wife, a glamorous job, but then the life of this one-time Prohibition agent became a page from a WCTU tract concerning the evils of drink.
“You had to blame most of his conversation on alcohol,” Foyle insists. “I wouldn’t say all of it, but a good deal. He wanted praise, and he wanted someone who would listen to his stories with great compassion. And I was that person.” Ness’s wife, Betty, apparently was not. “From what I could tell he did not get along too well with his wife,” says Foyle. “He was reluctant to go home. Whenever he’d leave he’d say, ‘I’m gonna get killed when I get home. I’m gonna be murdered. She’s gonna be unhappy.’ In my book, he was kind of a womanizer. I never saw him actually picking up a woman, but he did a lot of cocktail party talk. He was a very lonesome person.”
Ness had some comprehension that his drinking had become a serious problem. When he was settled in his den, he would remark to his housekeeper, Corinne Lawson, that he was “writing an article about alcoholism,” but he was only kidding. He did not summon the will to seek treatment. Since Lawson observed Ness at close hand, she became increasingly aware of his drinking and the profound sadness underlying it, a sadness that Ness would attempt to dispel with a stream of lighthearted patter. He would tell her about Al Capone, boasting that “Scarface” shot at him nine times in all, but he outran the bullets. The line was good for a laugh but not much more. “We had such sad times,” Lawson recalls of those days. “One time the butcher told us that they couldn’t extend credit to us any more, and I began to wonder what was going on. Then they wanted to buy a home in Shaker Heights. Well, Mr. Ness sent a check for $3,000, and a month later they sent it right back because the owners didn’t want any part of him. They didn’t want Mr. and Mrs. Ness to buy because they drank too much.” Even the owner of the house Ness rented no longer wanted any part of him. She wanted the Nesses out because they left cigarette burns on the carpet and the furniture, including the grand piano.
By 1953, Ness had left Diebold. He now worked for the Guaranty Paper and Fidelity Check Corporation, a subsidiary of the North Ridge Industrial Corporation of Cleveland. His salary came to $150 a week, much of which he drank away. The company was then experimenting with a new process of watermarking checks to prevent forgery, and Ness decided to invest in the company, but ultimately the process proved too expensive to be practical, and his division headed toward insolvency. Ness was staring at failure once again. To attempt to generate interest in his product, Ness, accompanied by a colleague, John Phelps, visited New York in 1955. On this trip Phelps happened to meet Oscar Fraley, then a sportswriter with United Press International. By this time, Ness had been trying without success to find someone to collaborate with him on his book about how he brought down Al Capone. Phelps sold Fraley on the idea: “You’ll have to get Eliot to tell you about his experience as a Prohibition agent in Chicago. . . . Maybe you’ve never heard of him but it’s real gangbuster stuff, killings, raids and the works. It was plenty dangerous.” And, to look at Ness now, a sad, sweet-natured drunk, it also seemed plenty unlikely. Ness mumbled something to the effect that it had been dangerous, he supposed, and he spent the rest of the night gradually reliving the era—or, rather, his version of it, with Eliot Ness cast in the starring role reality had denied him—for the benefit of Fraley. When he was done, the young sportswriter suggested that Ness write a book about his adventures. “You might make some money with it,” he advised.
“I could use it,” Ness said. Thereafter he devoted his spare time to the project, writing down stories, collecting old scrapbooks. “He told me the reason why he wrote that book was that he d
idn’t have any insurance,” Lawson remembers. “In fact, he didn’t have any money. He was broke, and he didn’t know what was going to happen to Bobby, the boy he and his wife adopted.” To add to his woes, he had a heart murmur.
Unable to afford living in Cleveland, Eliot and Betty Ness moved with their young son to a comfortable old home in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. It was 1956, and Ness worked in an office on Main Street. He lived a smalltown life, with fixed routines and few of the distractions that had marked his time in Cleveland, to say nothing of his youth in Chicago. He spent much time at a local bar, where he became known as the fellow with the brokendown car who spent his days drinking and talking about how he got Al Capone. His listeners indulged him, but few believed him, for Ness looked like the aging businessman he was, not the daring federal agent he claimed to be. Occasionally Fraley visited, and work on the book, now called The Untouchables, proceeded at a measured pace. Ness and Fraley eventually found a publisher, Julian Messner, who was willing to gamble on the project. Ness received an advance of $200, the market value of his dreams. At the end of April 1957, the galleys arrived from New York, and the book was scheduled to appear in the fall. He eagerly awaited publication; it was something to live for.
On May 16, 1957, Eliot Ness came home from work early, as usual, and went straight to the kitchen, where he prepared a scotch and soda. It was to be his last taste of liquor. Betty was in the garden at the time. She called to him, and he failed to answer. At about 5:15 she entered the kitchen and found him lying on the floor, the remains of his drink sprinkled around him. Eliot Ness was dead of a heart attack. He was just fifty-four years old.
At the time of his death Ness was nearly $10,000 in debt, and the cost of his funeral—$350—added to his widow’s burden. His assets were few. He left just $273 in his checking account, and his thousands of shares of the troubled Guaranty Paper Corporation would fetch only a few hundred dollars. Although The Untouchables became a popular success and the basis of the hit television series on ABC beginning in 1959, Betty Ness, also handicapped by alcoholism, had precious little to show for it. She received some royalties, but the checks were infrequent and small, $32 here, $28 there. When she finally ran out of money in the midsixties, she moved in with Corinne Lawson, the woman who had been their housekeeper in Cleveland, although Betty did not view the arrangement quite that way. She explained to Corinne that she wanted to stay for just a few days or perhaps weeks while she looked at hotels in Cleveland. The stay lasted three full years, and Betty Ness continued to drink throughout that time. “I would find bottles under her bed and everywhere,” says Lawson, “but she and Mr. Ness had done so much for me and had been so nice that I didn’t care about that.” Meanwhile, Eliot Ness’s widow lived on food stamps—“just like all the rest of my friends around here,” Lawson recalls. “Sometimes I would go and get the food stamps for her.”
She died soon after, and a few years later, their adopted son, Robert, died of leukemia. It was not the end Eliot Ness would have wanted for his son nor for his attractive, talented third wife. Nor was his own death, hastened by alcohol, one he would have chosen for himself. No doubt Ness would have reveled in the celebrity the television version of The Untouchables posthumously conferred on his name and reputation, even if most of its tales sprang from fancy rather than fact, for he loved publicity above all else, with the possible exception of pretty young women—and his badge. If F. Scott Fitzgerald had ever troubled to write about the life of a detective, he might have taken Eliot Ness as his model, for his life, with all its unfulfilled promise, illustrated one of Fitzgerald’s favorite axioms, that there were no second acts in the lives of Americans.
• • •
Mt. Olivet Cemetery was not the final resting place for the earthly remains of Al Capone. The family was not pleased with the location of the grave. According to some reports, it was located on unhallowed ground. Then, too, it had become a magnet for curiosity seekers, and the family looked on them with disfavor, as well. In life, Al Capone had been highly superstitious about tombstones and abhorred the thought of desecration. For this reason, the body of Al Capone was exhumed amid great secrecy and moved to the broad expanses of Mt. Carmel Cemetery, where so many of Al Capone’s enemies and allies, everyone from Dion O’Banion to William McSwiggin, slumbered sub specie aeternitatis. The Capone family purchased a spacious family plot in Mt. Carmel. It was here that Al Capone was reburied, where Frank Capone was reburied, where Gabriele Capone, after being disinterred from his burial ground in New York, was reburied, where Teresa would be buried when she died in 1952, and where the other Capones would all eventually be buried. The grave of each family member was marked by a small, simple stone lying flat on the ground, containing the name of the deceased, the year of birth and of death, and the legend “My Jesus Mercy.” No stone was larger than another. Even in death, campanilismo ruled the lives of the Capone family.
Like many Italians, the Capones did not bury their dead and forget them; they practiced ancestor worship. At the cemetery, the inherently matriarchal character of Italian families came to the fore. The women did most if not all the work of weeping, wailing, and the protracted business of mourning, as if they alone possessed the emotional intensity equal to the task. On a hot weekend, Italian families from Chicago often sought refuge under a shady tree at Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Families lavished so much attention on the grave and visited so often that it became an annex, practically a new address, where they ate from carefully prepared picnic baskets and lovingly tended the grave sites, weeding them, planting flowers, watering the grass over their beloved, all the while mumbling to themselves, or to the deceased, finding at last the words they were never able to utter when the deceased was still alive. In this way ancient family quarrels reached posthumous resolution.
• • •
There would be no resolution in the federal government’s quarrel with the surviving members of the Capone family, however. In 1950 Ralph Capone was summoned to Washington to appear before Senator Estes Kefauver’s widely publicized special committee investigating organized crime. There “Bottles” enlightened the members of the committee about various obscure aspects of the bootlegger’s trade, beginning with the size of his “organization,” which, he said, consisted of “two fellows and myself. That was all I needed.”
“Did you have trucks?” the committee inquired.
“No,” Ralph patiently explained, “the beer was delivered to me. I was given $2 a barrel for the beer. The beer was not mine. I got a commission to sell it for $2 a barrel.”
“You never even saw the beer?”
“That is true.” But he was less forthcoming when the committee asked him to name other members of the “Capone gang,” and when Ralph balked, they supplied some for him. They mentioned Jack Guzik, whom Ralph admitted he knew “very well,” as did his late brother, Al. And they mentioned Murray Humphreys, and, yes, Ralph said he also knew him “very well.” The same went for two other former Capone bodyguards, Philip D’Andrea and Louis “Little New York” Campagna. The committee also wanted to know how Ralph spent his time in Miami Beach. At the dog tracks, Ralph admitted. “When you showed up they rolled out the red carpet for you, didn’t they?” asked a committee member.
“Not necessarily,” Ralph testified. “When I went there they were out of red carpet.”
When the subject turned to the Mafia, Ralph turned as silent as a stone. All he knew about the Mafia, he claimed, was what he read in the newspapers. As flimsy as the claim sounded, there was some truth to it, for Ralph Capone had nothing to do with the Mafia, and the Mafia had nothing to do with him. But the committee had little comprehension of the subtleties of organized crime; to them the Mafia was synonymous with the rackets, and they made no distinction between the Outfit in Chicago and the Mafia’s five families in New York. After Ralph stepped down, John Capone, who also had some marginal involvement in the Outfit, appeared before the committee, where he spent hours parrying Kefauver’s questions. It ma
de for good theater, but John and Ralph admitted very little that was new. But the inquisition helped to ensure that the stigma of the Capone name would not fade. All the while, unknown to the members of the committee, the real head of the Outfit, Frankie La Porte, remained in secure anonymity in Chicago Heights,
If Ralph ever believed that his appearances before the Kefauver committee would earn him some relief, he was soon disabused of that notion. A few months after the hearings, his son, Ralph Jr., crushed by his father’s disgrace, committed suicide. In his Chicago apartment he washed down a mouthful of pills with a quart of scotch, and as the lethal mixture took effect, he wrote a pathetic note to his girlfriend, a singer named Jeanne Kerin. “I love you,” he managed to scrawl. “I love you. Jeanie only you I love. Only you. I’m gone—” He wrote no more and lived no more.
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