Douglas Perry - Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero

The Real Eliot Ness

W hen Walter Taylor arrived, Betty was still in the kitchen, standing over her husbands body. She was sobbing fitfully, in a daze. Her ten-year-old son stood nearby, paralyzed by fear. A doctor was there, too, and someone else, a business partner of the man sprawled on the floor.

Taylor had witnessed this ghastly tableau many times over the years. He was the towns deputy coroner and the editor of the local newspaper. But this time was different.

The dead man was lying on his back, his white shirt twisted across his bulk. In the sink basin, smashed glass sparkled in the dissipating light. Hed been getting a drink of water when the coronary hit. Betty had come in from the garden and turned the faucet off before she saw her husband there on the floor. She screamed, high and long and loudloud enough to bring their son running from the neighbors yard. She continued to sob now, a guttural sound, too deep and raw for such a pretty woman. It will be all right, Betty, someone said, and that was as much as she could take. She started to collapse. The business partner grabbed her before she fell.

Taylor turned away. Hed seen enough. He walked out of the kitchen, past the soot-stained mantel in the living room with the cherubic white angel suspended above it. The angel, its wings aflutter, gazed toward the trauma unfolding in the kitchen. Betty had made the piece. Someone had once told Taylor that she had been a student of a famous sculptor. Outside, Taylor found the neighbors milling about. The poor man had been sweating when he came up the walk, one of them said. He looked like he was in pain, another offered. Taylor moved away from the bystanders and picked up his pace. It was a warm, humid evening, and he was wearing a suit, but he ran all the way back to the office. He was a newsman. He had to let the world know it had just lost Eliot Ness.

***

The world didnt much care. Taylors report went out on the Associated Press wire on that balmy spring day in 1957, but few newspapers bothered publishing an obituary. The New York Times, Americas paper of record, did not take note of Nesss death. In Chicago, the place of his birth and where he raised the once-famous Untouchables squad, the Tribune gave his life barely one hundred words. It got his age wrong. Arnold Sagalyn, despite being a newspaper executive in the Washington, DC, area, heard about Nesss death only because Betty called him a few days later. Sagalyn made a small noise, a kind of pained grunt, when Nesss widow gave him the news. He thought of Eliot like a big brother. Ness had taught Sagalyn how to carry a gun, how to unnerve a suspect, how to mix a drink. The call couldnt have been easy for Betty, either. The reality of her husbands death had settled on her by then, but she didnt know Sagalyn well. Hed worked with Ness before she came on the scene. Hed been close with Eliots previous wife, Evaline. Betty called him because she had nowhere else to turn. Her husband had left her nothing but debts and dreams. Sagalyn sent her some money.

Not everyone was so sympathetic. David Cowles, the superintendent of criminal identification for the Cleveland Police Department, had also worked with Ness during the glory years. But unlike Sagalyn, he didnt owe his career to the fair-haired boy. He thought Ness had hogged the headlines. The last time I saw Eliot, he didnt have two pair of shoes to wear, Cowles would recall when asked about his former boss. He was a heavy drinker.... I think he had four or five wives, didnt he?

Broke, alcoholic, and dead from a massive heart attack at just fifty-five. Such a fate for Eliot Ness was inconceivable to most everyone who knew him during his long law-enforcement career. This was the golden boy who crashed Al Capones party in Chicago. The young, irrepressible top cop in Cleveland who announced there was no room for traitors in the police departmentand then set out to prove it. The detective savant who, like his fictional hero Sherlock Holmes, could stun a stranger by deducing some core aspect of his character simply by observing the twitch of his lip. (As one of the resident experts on the crime quiz show Masterminds, Attention!, he solved the mysteries so quickly the radio program burned through its material at twice the expected rate and had to go off the air.)

He really captured the imagination of the public in his early years, John Patrick Butler, a former aide for Cleveland mayor Thomas Burke, would recall years later.

By the time of Nesss death, however, that hero worship was long gone. He hadnt been a lawman for more than a decade. Desperate for money, his ambitious business plans in shambles, Ness had been working on a memoir when he collapsed in his kitchen in the tiny town of Coudersport, Pennsylvania. The book hadnt been his idea. His business partner, Joe Phelps, was a childhood friend of Oscar Fraley, a hack for United Press International. On a trip to New York, Phelps and Ness met the journalist at a bar, and Ness sat quietly while the two old pals played remember when. During a lull in the conversation, Phelps had jerked a thumb at Ness and said, Youll have to get Eliot to tell you about his experience as a Prohibition agent in Chicago. Hes the guy who dried up Al Capone. Maybe you never heard of him, but its real gangbuster stuff: killings, raids and the works. It was plenty dangerous.

Ness smiled bashfully and shrugged. It was dangerous, he said.

At Phelpss urging, Ness offered up some old stories. Fraley, fascinated, told his new drinking companion he should write a book, that it could bring him a nice chunk of change. Ness shrugged again, but Fraley wouldnt let it go. He said hed write it for him. Some weeks later, Fraley called Ness at home in Coudersport. He told him he had pitched a book proposal to New York publishers, and hed found one that wanted a memoir about the Untouchables. Ness stared at the telephone receiver. I can hardly believe it, he finally said. You think it will be interesting?