THE DARK CITY (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  Cooper's counsel had depended on the cops' testimony holding more sway with the jury than Cullitan's nine bootleggers. But, it seemed to Ness, the detailed and convincing tales of the latter made the vaguer testimony of the former seem thin indeed. So did the defense attorneys' efforts to show that an "underworld plot" against an honest cop had brought Cooper here.

  The Cap, as the bootleggers often referred to him, did not take the stand in his own defense.

  The only confrontation Ness had had with Cooper was the same Saturday afternoon that the Black Swan had been raided. Ness had gone back to his office, called Cooper there, and informed him he was on suspension.

  "Your badge and gun," Ness had said, seated at the conference table.

  The big man had stood there and complied, slowly, his round face no longer jovial, the gun clunking on the table.

  "I don't have to tell you what happened this afternoon," Ness said. "You've talked to your son by now no doubt."

  Cooper said nothing. His face was blank, though his eyes seemed rheumy.

  "This department," Ness said, "is just going to have to get along with one chief from now on. Yes, I know you're the so-called 'outside chief.' But before too very long, believe me, you'll be inside." He nodded to the door. "That's all."

  Cooper cleared his throat, then spoke, tentatively: "You're definitely filing charges?"

  "That's right."

  "Suppose I was willing to retire?"

  "No."

  Cooper smiled, but with a trace of scorn. "You can't give me the break you'd give anybody else, can you? You need the publicity I'll bring you. To get your budget passed, Monday."

  "Yes."

  Cooper's faintly sneering expression remained. "I see."

  "But I'd bust you just as hard even if that weren't the case."

  Cooper's face went blank. "I—I see."

  The man turned slowly and trudged toward the door, where he paused and looked back at Ness and said, "Being a cop is a hard job, Mr. Ness. Maybe if you weren't so goddamn young, you'd know that. There's a lot of suicides in this trade. There's a lot of long hours and misery. There's also a lot of wrong people with too much money. I just wanted the right people to get some of it. I just wanted them to be able to take care of their families. I'm not ashamed. I just made sure I treated my boys right."

  "What would you know about it?"

  Cooper narrowed his eyes, confused. "Know about what?"

  "Being a cop."

  And Ness looked down at the paperwork before him— Cooper's suspension—and heard the door click shut.

  As for Gwen, there'd been no confrontation at all. She hadn't shown up for work on Monday. On Tuesday Ness received a businesslike written request from her to be transferred elsewhere in City Hall. He saw no reason not to, and passed the request along to Personnel with his approval.

  He had seen her in the City Hall halls, from time to time, but she had looked right through him, stonier than the marble under her feet. She looked thinner, but as pretty as ever, despite the glasses and pinned-back hair that marked her office style.

  He'd gone back to the apartment, when Heller headed back for Chicago, because the boathouse was too full of her. For right now, anyway.

  There had been minor cuts, but his budget for the police and fire departments had passed, even though it required a tax hike. Even Councilman Fink hadn't dared vote against it, what with the press Ness had gotten. And Fink had gotten the vote out in his district to help float the necessary bond issue.

  In the weeks, months, since the Black Swan hit, Ness had again been away from his desk, working as his own chief investigator. He'd been down gloomy alleyways and in grimy basement apartments and in fancy suburban homes. He had personally interviewed sixty-six witnesses who said they'd paid money to policemen for protection.

  No police witnesses had come forth yet. The city's corrupt cops, with the usual code of silence, were locked into shielding each other. But, their leader gone, their network smashed, all that remained for Ness was to root them out one by one. Which he had set about to do.

  He had completed an eighty-six-page report, which he'd delivered two weeks ago to the county prosecutor's office. He figured Cullitan and his boys would have at least twenty cases to prosecute, among them two precinct captains (of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth), a deputy inspector, two lieutenants, and a sergeant. He expected these cases would flush out other bad cops, sending them scurrying into early retirement.

  But he'd made one mistake. After he handed over the graft report to Cullitan, he took a week's vacation at a lodge in the woods on the lake, courtesy of one of his slush-fund angels. And during that week, he left his assistant, John Flynt, in charge.

  Since Heller's phone taps hadn't come up with anything against Flynt, and since Flynt had been minding the store effectively while Ness was away conducting field investigations, the young safety director had thought he could get away with leaving the department in Flynt's hands. In that week, however, Flynt leapt like a hungry dog on the job's patronage opportunities and began appointing fire wardens left and right, with the apparent guidance of councilmen like Fink, and without seeking the approval of, or even informing, Chief Grainger.

  What had really torn it, though, were Flynt's efforts in Cooper's favor. The acting safety director had immediately put through the paperwork on Cooper's retirement.

  Ness, who'd been without a phone during his vacation, immediately put the brakes on the retirement upon his return, and called Flynt into his office.

  Flynt stood like a man waiting for the firing squad to have at him, and proud of it.

  Ness took aim. "What in the hell was the idea of putting Cooper's retirement through? You're well aware I turned him down."

  "I believe you're wasting the taxpayers' money. I object to Cooper being brought to trial."

  "On what grounds, for God's sake?"

  "On the grounds that the evidence is such that he won't be convicted, and this office will be embarrassed."

  "I see. You figure any jury is bound to take a cop's word over that of bootleggers."

  "Yes, I do."

  "Well, I tell you what, Mr. Flynt. I realize gambling in this city is more or less illegal, but as two gentlemen of the old school, what say we have a little wager?"

  "A wager?"

  "If Cooper is found guilty, you'll resign."

  Flynt's smile under the twitchy little mustache was smug. "And if he's found innocent, you will resign?"

  "No," Ness said, smiling blandly. "You just won't have to."

  Flynt lifted an eyebrow. "And if I don't care to wager?"

  "Then I'll fire you right now. I'd like to see you go to the Civil Service Commission for help, after all the shit you've given them."

  Flynt swallowed dryly. "I accept the wager."

  "We needn't shake on it. I promise that if the outcome of the trial is such that you must resign, I won't embarrass you in front of the press. You've contributed to the department's efficiency and morale. I'll say so publicly."

  "Then why do you want my resignation?"

  "We just don't think alike, Mr. Flynt. You're too damn political."

  Flynt smiled. "And you're not? The next weekend you spend at some industrialist's lodge, or some quiet evening at Alexander Wynston's boathouse, why don't you ponder your own political debts?"

  And John Flynt had left, in a fleeting moment of victory.

  Fleeting, because now, as Ness sat in the courtroom of the Criminal Court Building, the foreman of the jury was pronouncing John S. Cooper guilty on seven counts of bribery.

  The courtroom sat in stunned silence, briefly, then a murmuring moved like a tide across the gallery, until the judge had to bang his gavel to stem it.

  Judge Day announced he would sentence Cooper on Saturday. Each of the counts of bribery carried a penitentiary term of one to ten years. Ness figured some of them would be served concurrently, however; he estimated this particular judge, an honest one, would hit Cooper with a
good twenty years.

  As the packed courtroom slowly emptied, Ness went forward to shake hands and trade smiles with Cullitan and his assistant McAndrew.

  "That little tome you dropped on my desk," Cullitan said, referring to the graft report, "is going to keep me looking at the inside of this courtroom for a long, long time. Thanks for a fine piece of work, Eliot."

  "Thanks for putting Cooper away. He has a little place in history, now—the first cop in Cleveland ever to be tried on bribery charges."

  "Hardly the last," McAndrew said.

  "That's right," Ness said. "I think, with your help, gentlemen, we're going to have a police department in Cleveland again."

  He thanked the prosecutor, whose hand he shook a second time, and moved up the aisle, feeling good, smiling, but his smile froze as he saw the attractive woman in the simple blue dress with a white collar, her blonde hair brushing her shoulders. She had lingered, keeping her seat, and only now stood, moving out into the aisle to block his way.

  "Thank you, Eliot," Gwen said, through her pretty teeth. "Thanks for nothing."

  "Is that what we had? Nothing?"

  "Nothing. We had nothing."

  "I'd like to think we had something. I'd like to think you were more to me than just your father's daughter."

  Her upper lip curled. Her dark blue eyes were hard and cold and wet. "How would you like our little affair to go public? I don't think even your newspaper pals could resist gossip this juicy—the safety director's dalliance with the daughter of the convicted crooked cop. It has a sweet ring, doesn't it?"

  "It's a little late for blackmail, isn't it?"

  "It's never too late for revenge."

  "Revenge isn't my style, Gwen. Only time will tell if it's yours."

  He walked around her and away from her, on up the aisle, his smile gone.

  Sam Wild was waiting for him in the hall outside.

  "I see the captain's daughter waited to have a word with you," Wild said.

  "If you'd wanted a juicy story, you could've hung around and eavesdropped."

  They walked.

  "Can you still see," Wild asked, "after having your eyes scratched out?"

  "I don't blame her for being bitter."

  "Don't give me that! After what she did to you—"

  "What did she do to me?"

  "Well. That's between you and her, I guess."

  "Right."

  Their footsteps echoed.

  "Don't you figure her father put her up to getting next to you?"

  "I don't honestly know."

  "Don't you care, Eliot?"

  "I care. But I don't know. And Gwen's one mystery I'm not about to investigate any further." "I care. But I don't know. And Gwen's one mystery I'm not about to investigate any further."

  The sun was shining on the skyline of Cleveland this May afternoon in 1936, as Eliot Ness and Sam Wild walked to Mickey's, a hole-in-the-wall bar on Short Vincent Avenue. The safety director drank straight Scotch, and the reporter drank bourbon. By the time a wobbly Wild escorted a quite drunk director of public safety to a room in the Hollenden to sleep it off, darkness had once again fallen.

  A Tip of the Fedora

  I could not have written this novel without the support arid advice of my friend George Hagenauer. George accompanied me on a research trip to Cleveland where we visited the sites of the action in this novel, from the Clifton Lagoon boathouse to the old Central Police Station (where we got an impromptu tour of the mostly out-of-use facility, from a friendly Cleveland cop). Also in Cleveland we conducted research at the Western Reserve Historical Society, where the Ness papers are kept, and at the City Hall municipal reference library and the Cleveland Public Library. We encountered friendly, helpful people at all of these well-run facilities.

  As a child I was a faithful fan of the Untouchables TV show, and I suppose my interest in true crime stems from knowing that the classic Robert Stack television series had a basis in fact. However, with the exception of the early episodes (primarily the two-part pilot, "The Scarface Mob"), the series had little to do with the real adventures of Eliot Ness. In writing my historical novel True Detective (1983), I included Ness as a character primarily because I had always wanted an excuse to dig in and find out the real scoop on the man.

  I expected to be disappointed, because many—most— modern crime historians dismiss Ness; I had been led to believe Eliot Ness the gangbuster was largely a myth. Even as distinguished a figure as Hank Messick, whose Silent Syndicate (1967) is the only book-length study to date of the powerful Cleveland Syndicate, tends to shrug Ness off. I believe this tendency grows out of a sour-grapes attitude found among many of Ness' contemporaries in both the law enforcement and criminal communities. They resented the attention their better-known peer received, and in interviews with crime historians have unfairly and inaccurately debunked Ness. This post-TV backlash extends to John Kobler, who in his fine biography Capone (1971) downplays the role of Ness and his "Untouchables." This term really did appear again and again in newspaper headlines (and not just in Chicago), primarily after the conviction of Capone. That news coverage singled out Ness, who was responsible for the only non-tax-related grand jury indictment against Capone, covering five thousand separate Volstead Act indictments.

  Eliot Ness and the Untouchables were not, as revisionist historians would have you believe, an invention of the television age; Ness really did gain world-wide acclaim as "the man who got Capone." I have seen thousands of newspaper articles that prove it—in the personal (and very thick) scrapbooks of Ness himself.

  The problem with dealing with Ness, post-Capone, in Cleveland, is not a lack of material. Particularly in his first several years as safety director, Ness was so active that his "adventures" defy the necessarily tidy shape of a novel. For that reason I have compressed time and used composite characters, on the one hand. On the other, I have largely ignored certain of his activities (sometimes mentioning them in passing), particularly labor racketeering' problems and the ongoing "Mad Butcher of Kings-bury Run" torso slayings. Some of this material may find its way into a later book or books about Ness.

  It should be noted that only a handful of the characters in this book are given their real names—Ness, of course, Mayor Harold Burton, Frank Cullitan and Chief George Matowitz are among these. Most of the others have been given names similar to their real ones, sometimes a variant spelling, off by a letter or two; this is my shorthand way of saying that I feel their use as characters, while based in fact, has wandered well into fiction. Other characters are composites, such as "Mo Horvitz," who represents a number of Cleveland syndicate members; and the two cemetery-scam victims. Also, the Ness investigation into corrupt cops was lengthy and complex and, in order to cover it properly here, elements of the Michael Harwood, Louis J. Cadek and Ernest Molnar cases were combined into the Cooper case. Gwen Cooper Howell is a fictional character; however, a bitter courtroom confrontation did occur between Ness and Captain Louis J. Cadek's daughter. Joe Fusca is a fictional character, based largely upon newspaper accounts of various cemetery-lot scam artists; his family history is based upon that of a real con-man clan. A few characters here are wholly fictional, although they too had real-life counterparts—Sam Wild, for exam-ple, represents the many reporter friends of Ness, particularly Ralph Kelly of the Plain Dealer and Clayton Fritchey of the Press. Fritchey, who did the work on the cemetery-lot racket attributed here to the fictional Wild, was assigned by his editor to cover Ness full-time, and became a virtual investigator for the safety director. And Ness did make use of private detectives like Nathan Heller and the McGrath Agency ops.

  Numerous books, magazine articles, and especially newspaper accounts of the day have been consulted in researching The Dark City. Several books deserve singling out. Hank Messick's previously mentioned The Silent Syndicate provided a helpful overview, as well as some specifics on the Harvard Club raid and other events.

  Another basic tool, and the only previous book on N
ess in Cleveland, is Four Against the Mob (1961) by Oscar Fraley, the co-author of The Untouchables; this is a rather compressed, somewhat fictionalized account (most names have been changed, dates altered, etc.) which deals not at all with Ness' personal life, but portrays well his achievements as public safety director.

  Of help in getting a fix on police procedural matters was Eliot Ness' own 1938 reorganization plan for the Cleveland police department. Such obscure documents as this, as well as various pamphlets, maps, and tear sheets, were dug out by diligent Cleveland Public Library personnel, in particular Karen Martinez of the City Hall branch and Joe Novak of the main branch.

  Three books by Cleveland journalists proved invaluable. Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret by George E. Condon (1967) has an excellent chapter on Ness, delving somewhat into the man himself; and it provided considerable local color. So did Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw by Philip W. Porter (1976), which digs into the politics of the city and also has some insightful Ness material. Both Condon and Porter were Plain Dealer reporters. Peter Jeddick's Cleveland: Where the East Coast Meets the Midwest (1980), a collection of Cleveland Magazine articles, includes a lengthy chapter which is the best biographical piece on Ness I have seen, an excel-lent, fact-filled character study which I drew heavily upon.

  An unpublished article written for the Cleveland Historical Society in 1983, "Eliot Ness: A Man of a Different Era" by Anthony J. Coyne and Nancy L. Hubbert, was also useful. A number of unpublished scholarly studies on ethnic groups in Cleveland were also of help. So was The Ohio Guide (1940), the Federal Writers' Project volume (in which Ness is mentioned rather prominently).

  A major source of insight into Ness was an unpublished, twenty-two-page article on his Capone days written by Ness himself, and used by his ghost Fraley as background for the book The Untouchables. Ness wrote very well; meaning no disrespect to Mr. Fraley, I feel it is unfortunate that Ness did not write his book unassisted, as his own voice was distinct and flavorful.