By BRYAN BURROUGH Feb. 19, 2014 7:12 p.m. ET Douglas Perrys Eliot Ness : The Rise and Fall of an American Hero is a fine little biography of a man who doesnt really deserve one. After all, the only reason that Ness, the storied Depression-era crime fighter, is even remembered today is the hoary old TV drama The Untouchables, which ran on ABC from 1959 to 1963 and later spawned the 1987 movie starring Kevin Costner. Both the series and the film had as loose a connection to the facts as the pulpy memoir on which they were based, co-written by Ness and a wire-service hack named Oscar Fraley in the year or so before Ness drank himself to death, sad and forgotten, in 1957. In popular lore it was Ness and his band of hard-charging Prohibition agents—so immune to gangster bribes that they were deemed untouchable—who took down Al Capones criminal empire, did battle with successor kingpins such as Frank Nitti and all but single-handedly cleaned up the city of Chicago. This is, to put it mildly, a stretch. While the Untouchables squad certainly did some fine work, it didnt topple Capone; it existed for barely two years, and while Ness appears to have been as honest and dedicated as his myth held, a number of his top men, Mr. Perry demonstrates, turned out to be very touchable indeed. Mr. Perry, an Oregon-based writer, does a nice job of separating fact from fiction. Little about his subject, he writes, foretold prominence. The last of five children born to a workaholic South Side baker, Ness was a mamas boy who got his job at Chicagos branch of the Prohibition Bureau in 1926 thanks to nepotism; his brother-in-law and idol, Alexander Jamie, was a top man there. Shy and prone to depression, Ness was a hardworking if otherwise unremarkable agent until Jamie urged that he be named head of the offices special squad, sometimes known as the Capone squad, in October 1930. At the time Ness was all of 27. Whats true is that Ness led a handpicked team who out of nowhere launched a full-on attack on Capones beer-making operations, tapping his telephones and crashing armored trucks—Ness built and attached a battering ram to the front of one of them—into a half-dozen of the gangsters secret breweries. This is rip-roaring stuff, and Mr. Perry tells it with gusto. Ness located the breweries, he writes, after noticing empty beer barrels stacked up outside speakeasies. When trucks picked up the barrels, Ness followed them to one of Capones barrel-cleaning plants and later followed other trucks as they returned the barrels to the breweries. Brilliant. Whats not true is that any of this had the first thing to do with Capone going to prison 18 months later. Nesss work did lead to Capones indictment on liquor violations, which generated the burst of publicity that briefly brought Ness and his men to national attention. (One wishes that Mr. Perry could have pinpointed the source of the untouchable nickname that surfaced in these stories, but about all he can say is that it probably came from a reporter.) Before Capone could be brought to trial, however, he was convicted in a federal tax-evasion case. While Ness remained a public figure in Chicago, posing in front of shattered beer barrels and the like, he had vanished from the headlines by the time Prohibition finally ended in 1933. Hed gained some nice publicity as the public face of the Untouchables, but ultimately it didnt mean much, Mr. Perry writes. Nesss moment or two of local celebrity would fade away almost as quickly as it had arrived, like a fever breaking. His fame was inextricably linked to the dry years, an era everyone wanted to forget even before it was officially over. That Ness accomplished little in Chicago is symbolized by the fact that Mr. Perry wraps up this period of his life in the first third of the book. A full half of Eliot Ness is devoted to his second act, as Clevelands director of public safety from 1935 to 1942. It was in Cleveland, then the countrys sixth-largest and possibly most corrupt city, that Ness truly made his mark, prosecuting dozens of bad cops, closing busy gambling dens and doing battle with northern Ohios mighty Mafia affiliate, the Mayfield Road gang. Here Ness entirely fills his mythic shoes, emerging as an adored public servant, the squeaky-clean crime-buster he never quite became in Chicago. The newspapers and citizenry loved him, but if this section of the book doesnt quite pack the narrative punch of his Untouchables days, well, theres a reason they dont write many biographies of Depression-era police chiefs. Nesss decline was a product of his taste for women and whiskey, and both contributed to the incident that drove him from Cleveland, a March 1942 car crash on an icy road when he and his party-hearty second wife were returning, presumably inebriated, from a long night trolling nightclubs. When Ness didnt promptly report his role, the Cleveland newspapers turned on him with a vengeance. Ness was so stunned that he fled town to head up a federal operation dedicated to cleaning up red-light districts around domestic military bases, an effort to fight venereal disease. He returned to Cleveland after the war to launch a halfhearted campaign for mayor, but his time had passed, and his drinking, born in the high-stress days and nights of battling mobsters, had become problematic. I would have two drinks, one old friend recalls, and hed have twenty-two. In his last years Ness took a series of corporate jobs, but they amounted to little, and after he toppled over from a heart attack at his final home in Coudersport, Pa., the newspapers all but ignored his death, the Chicago Tribune giving him barely 100 words. His memoir, published a month later, and the resulting television series, brought him the fame he never earned during his life. Eliot Ness is a clean and easy read, marred only by Mr. Perrys penchant for casual terms and period slang. Men are guys. A dangerous situation is hairy. Gangsters give cops the stink eye. A woman with nice legs has a great pair of stems and so on. Its a sad story in the end, but one well told. Mr. Burrough is the author of Public Enemies: Americas Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 07:17:10 +0000
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