Max Allan Collins - Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting Americas Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology

Eliot Ness in the 1950s.

Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection

1956

T hey made a strange pairthe broken-down businessman, honest to a fault, and his sportswriter acquaintance, bullshitter to the core.

The locals would see them wandering the streets of the mountain-bound Pennsylvania hamlet, the writeryounger, thinner, sandy hair recedinghustling to keep up while his companion charged ahead. Even in middle age, the businessman retained the broad shoulders of an athletic youth. A neat, careful dresser since childhood, he wore tailored suits when his bank balance advised buying off the rack.

The writers tattered sport jacket was about as fancy as he got. Why hed come to town got around quick; his syndicated column carried his name even to this corner of western Pennsylvania. But the idea of writing a book about his new palwho had moved here to prop up a failing paper companystruck some as an attempt to make a fast buck.

The sportswriter could use the cash. A gambler and a womanizer, he invented charming tales to cloak the darkness in his past. When he heard this aging executives storya real adventure that sounded like fictionthe old pro just knew it could sell. Properly spun into a book, the yarn might even make them both rich.

If only this guy could remember it all.

The two would stroll the picture-perfect town square, with its elegant Victorian courthouse, lofty cupola topped by a gilded statue of Lady Justice. She carried her trademark scales but lacked her usual blindfolda reminder American justice was anything but blind.

The businessman seemed to know everyone; locals greeted him warmly. People up in the Alleghenies often nursed suspicion of outsiders, like this city boy here less than a year. Yet the sportswriter marveled at how they seemed to welcome his companion, and not because of his past.

The locals had heard the tales Eliot Ness shared over drinks in a nearby tavernstories of gangsters and G-men, writ large across the colorful canvas of Prohibition-era Chicago. Some refused to believe any of it. Why would somebody like that ever end up here? Others thought the newcomer chose this out-of-the-way spot to hide from the mob.

The sportswriter, Oscar Fraley, nursed his own doubts. Having learned what this guy did before entering the paper business, Fraley had stared at the older man, trying to find the gangbuster.

Ness looked a decade older than his fifty-three years. A once-boyish yet sharp-featured face had gone bloated and soft, youthful freckles still littering a complexion mottled from years of drinking. His eyebrows drooped, heavy bags under his eyes, brown hair thick as ever, parted off center nowno longer straight down the middle, time perhaps teaching him nothing in life was so evenly parsed.

Twenty-five years before, Eliot Ness had inspired the creation of the most square-jawed detective in popular culture. Now his own firm chin was disappearing into the folds of his neck.

Yet the former G-mans old iron will and stubborn determination remained just below the surface. Although hed moved where deer hunting was a way of life, he wanted nothing to do with guns, wouldnt even permit one in his house.

Ive seen too much of shooting and killing, hed say.

Eliot Ness remembered the violence of the old dayswhen a friend and comrade wound up on a slab, shot in the eye. Ness had never liked guns and often went unarmed, even when any other cop would have packed heat.

But hed had plenty of reasons to fear for his life back when gangsters had threatened and followed him. They tried to pay him off, too, but he refused to be bribed, as did most of his men. In a city where everyone seemed to be for sale, these incorruptible Prohibition agents soon earned a new name.

The Untouchables.

Memories of those days stayed with Nessthe thrill of raiding illegal breweries, crashing in with a battering-ram truck and rousting the workers before they knew what hit them. Waiting at the base of a telephone pole, watching out for armed thugs, as an Untouchable put in a wiretap. Alerting the citys most powerful gangster that a parade of confiscated beer trucks would soon rattle past his headquarters in broad daylight.

And he remembered May 3, 1932, when twenty-nine-year-old Prohibition agent Eliot Ness helped escort Alphonse Scarface Al Capone from the Cook County Jail to Chicagos Dearborn Station and a train headed for federal prison. Press photographers and newsreel cameramen captured the two men marching through the train shed, surrounded by onlookersthe only time Ness met the man newspapers called his nemesis.

On the platform, watching the train roll away, the young federal agent reflected on years of raids and stakeouts, wiretaps and paperwork. He and his men had crippled Capones bootleg empire, smashing the breweries that financed the gangsters rise to wealth and power. But they hadnt been the ones to defeat him in courtthat fell to the Treasury Departments Intelligence Unit, which built the income tax evasion case that sent Scarface away on an eleven-year sentence, while Nesss conspiracy case took a backseat. Only privately would the Untouchable admit disappointment.

We did our part, of course, he told the press. But the real work of sending Capone to prison was done by the tax investigators. Our job was more spectacular, that was all.

The sportswriter needed more than a few scattered anecdotes to weave a compelling narrative, and Ness struggled to give Fraley what he wanted, names and details eluding him. The two men puzzled over scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, wiretap transcripts, letters, and other documents, trying to assemble the pieces of a life lived long ago.