Eliot Ness

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Eliot Ness

Bureau of Prohibition

Eliot Ness
April 19, 1903–May 16, 1957 (aged 54)
Place of birth Chicago, USA
Place of death Coudersport, Pennsylvania, USA
Rank Chief Investigator of the Prohibition Bureau for Chicago in 1934
Director for Public Safety for Cleveland, Ohio

Eliot Ness (April 19, 1903 – May 16, 1957) was an American Prohibition agent, famous for his efforts to enforce Prohibition in Chicago, Illinois, as the leader of a legendary team of law enforcement agents nicknamed The Untouchables.

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[edit] Birth and early life

Ness was born in Chicago, the youngest of five, to Norwegian bakers Peter and Emma Ness. Because his four older siblings were almost grown by the time he was born, Eliot received a large amount of attention from his older sisters while growing up. As a young boy, Ness was interested in reading, especially Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. He was educated at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and law. He began his career as an investigator for the Retail Credit Co. of Atlanta. He was assigned to the Chicago territory, where he conducted background investigations for the purpose of credit information. He returned to the University to take a course in criminology, eventually earning a masters degree in the field.

[edit] Career

In 1926, his sister's husband, Alexander Jamie, a Bureau of Investigation agent (this became the FBI in 1935), influenced him to enter law enforcement. He joined the Treasury Department in 1927, working with the 300-strong Bureau of Prohibition in Chicago.

Following the election of President Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon was specifically charged with bringing down Al Capone. The federal government approached the problem from two directions: income tax evasion and the Volstead Act. Ness was chosen to head the operations under the Volstead Act, targeting the illegal breweries and supply routes of Capone.

Seeing the endemic corruption in Chicago law enforcement, Ness went through the records of all the treasury agents to create a reliable team, initially of fifty, later reduced to fifteen and finally to just eleven men. Raids against stills and breweries began immediately; within six months Ness claimed to have seized breweries collectively worth over one million dollars. The main source of information for the raids was an extensive wire-tapping operation.

An attempt by Capone to bribe Ness's agents was seized on by Ness for publicity, leading to the media nickname "The Untouchables." Glorified accounts of the era written many years later tell tales of assassination attempts on Ness, and the murder of one of his agents. These are of questionable accuracy. Ness had excellent contacts with the press and did draw media attention to his raids on the Capone outfit's breweries.

The efforts of Ness and his team had a serious impact on Capone's operations, but it was the income tax evasion which was the key weapon. In a number of federal grand jury cases in 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of tax evasion and also 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. On October 17, 1931, Capone was sentenced to eleven years, and following a failed appeal, he began his sentence in 1932.

[edit] After Capone's conviction

Marker at Lake View Cemetery
Marker at Lake View Cemetery

Ness was promoted to Chief Investigator of the Prohibition Bureau for Chicago and in 1934 for Ohio. Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, he was assigned as an alcohol tax agent in the "Moonshine Mountains" of southern Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and in 1934, he was transferred to Cleveland. In December 1935, Cleveland mayor Harold Burton hired him as the city's Safety Director, which put him in charge of both the police and fire departments. He headed a campaign to clean out police corruption, and to modernize the fire department, and also tackled illegal gambling, racketeering, and other organized criminal activities.[1]

By 1938 and 1939, Ness' personal life was completely transformed, while his career began to have some ups and downs. Ness concentrated heavily on his work, which may have been a contributing factor in his divorce from his first wife, Edna. He declared war on the mob, and his primary targets included Big Angelo Lonardo, Little Angelo Scirrca, Moe Dalitz, John and George Angersola, and Charles Pollizi. Ness also oversaw the hunt for the Cleveland Torso Murderer, a vicious serial killer operating in the Cleveland area from 1935 to 1938. Some historians suggest his failure to solve the torso murders may have contributed to his exit from what was otherwise a remarkably successful career in Cleveland,[citation needed] but his critics at the time pointed to his divorces, his high-profile social drinking, and Ness' conduct in a 1942 car accident.[1]

Ness moved to Washington, D.C. in 1942 and worked for the federal government in directing the battle against prostitution in communities surrounding military bases, where venereal disease was a serious problem. In 1944, he left to become chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company based in Ohio. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in 1947 and was forced from his job at Diebold in April 1951.[2] He eventually came to work for North Ridge Industrial corporation in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. With Oscar Fraley he co-authored the book, The Untouchables, which was published in 1957 shortly after his death at the age of 54 following a heart attack.

He was married to Edna Staley from 1929 to 1938, illustrator Evaline Ness from 1939 to 1945, and artist Elizabeth Anderson Seaver from 1946 until his death. He had one son, Robert, adopted in 1947.[1] His ashes were scattered in one of the small ponds on the grounds of Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.

[edit] Popular culture

  • Great Lakes Brewing Company makes a beer in his honor, "The Eliot Ness", because Ness allegedly "frequented the Brewpub's bar during his tenure from 1935–1941 and, according to popular legend, was responsible for the bullet holes in the bar still evident today."[3]
  • Protógenes Queiroz, deputy of the Brazilian Federal Police, was nicknamed "Eliot Ness" by some journalists because of his actions in "Operation Satiagraha", which arrested the banker Daniel Dantas, managing director of asset manager Opportunity Capital Partners and charged with money laundering, tax evasion and racketeering to embezzle public funds. During the action, Protógenes was put off from the operation after it's beginning because his investigations lead the Federal Police to high-ranked politicians. He's known among friends for his desire for justice.[citation needed]

[edit] Novels

Max Allan Collins used Ness as a supporting character in a series of mystery novels set in Depression-era Chicago. Ness was the law enforcement contact and best friend of the protagonist, hard-boiled private eye Nate Heller, a role similar to the one played by Captain Pat Chambers in Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels or Sergeant Dennis Becker on the television series The Rockford Files. Later Collins spun Ness off into his own series, based on the period when he was Cleveland's Director of Public Safety. The first book in Collins's Ness series, The Dark City (1987), begins as Ness is hired as Safety Director by the newly elected mayor, and attempts to uncover the identity of the so-called "Outside Chief," the high-ranking police officer in charge of police corruption in the city. The second, Butcher's Dozen (1988), fictionalizes Ness's investigation of the "Mad Butcher" serial murders. The third, Bullet Proof (1989), depicts Ness's investigation into labor racketeering. The fourth, and, thus far, last novel in the series, Murder by the Numbers (1992), fictionalizes Ness's campaign against illegal gambling. Collins has also used Ness as a supporting character in his best-selling graphic novel Road to Perdition and its prose sequel Road to Purgatory.

[edit] Comic books and graphic novels

  • Dell adapted the television series The Untouchables into the comics medium in two issues Four Color Comics.
  • Max Allan Collins also used Ness in an Elseworlds graphic novel featuring Batman called Scar of the Bat, in which it is suggested that a masked vigilante, dressing up like a giant bat, is taking on the Capone Mob at the same time that Ness is beginning his own campaign against them as a rookie federal investigator.

[edit] Television and film

  • Ness also appeared in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, "Mystery of the Blues" as Indy's roommate at the University of Chicago. They, along with a young Ernest Hemingway, attempt to solve a mystery surrounding the murder of Indy's boss. Al Capone is found to be responsible, but he cannot be brought to justice, as police corruption has started to take hold. While this is theoretically written to be part of Eliot's motivations later in life, and both Ness and Hemingway did live in Chicago during the timeline given, all accounts of him, Hemingway, and Capone here are obviously fictional.

[edit] Animation

[edit] Video games

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
  2. ^ NY Times April 14, 1951 "Executive Changes"
  3. ^ Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio
  4. ^ David Fincher Uncovers A "Torso" (January 12th, 2006)

[edit] External links

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