Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago

719 Pages·2018·8.06 MB·English

by  Max Allen Collins

Dedication
In memory of
MICHAEL CORNELISON,
who brought Eliot Ness to life
Epigraph
There is something tragically wrong with a system of justice which can and does make
criminals of honest men and can only convict gangsters and racketeers when they don’t pay
their income taxes.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Untouchable Truth
Map: Organized Crime in 1920s Chicago
Rogues’ Gallery
Prologue: St. Valentine’s Day
Part One: Prairie Avenue Boys
One: 1895–1920
Two: 1850–1923
Three: 1920–1925
Four: 1925–1926
Five: 1925–1926
Six: 1926–1927
Seven: 1927
Eight: Spring–Summer 1928
Nine: Winter 1927–Summer 1928
Ten: August 1928–January 1929
Part Two: Citizen Capone
Eleven: January–March 1929
Twelve: February–October 1929
Thirteen: May–October 1929
Fourteen: December 1929–March 1930
Fifteen: December 1929–April 1930
Sixteen: March–June 1930
Seventeen: June–August 1930
Eighteen: June–October 1930
Nineteen: November–December 1930
Part Three: On the Spot
Twenty: December 1930–February 1931
Twenty-One: December 1930–February 1931
Twenty-Two: February–May 1931
Twenty-Three: Spring–Summer 1931
Twenty-Four: June–July 1931
Twenty-Five: Summer 1931
Twenty-Six: October 1931
Twenty-Seven: October 1931
Twenty-Eight: October 1931–January 1932
Twenty-Nine: February–May 1932
Thirty: 1932–1934
Epilogue: The Great American City
Acknowledgments: A Tip of the Fedora
Bibliography
Note on Sources
Source Notes
Abbreviations
Rogues’ Gallery Credits
Index
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Untouchable Truth
by Max Allan Collins
On Monday night, April 20, 1959, the first of a two-part TV presentation called
“The Untouchables” appeared on Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. I was eleven
years old, watching in Muscatine, Iowa, and I was dumbstruck. The next day, all
the kids—well, the boys, anyway—were talking about this hardhitting crime
show, the fact-based story of federal agent Eliot Ness and his band of
incorruptible lawmen, taking on the Al Capone gang during Prohibition.
Me, I was bowled over by how much it tallied with my obsession (which had
started at age six) with Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, particularly reprints of
1930s and ’40s comic strips. When the concluding “Untouchables” episode
aired, finally presenting Al Capone on camera (after the prior week’s crafty
cliffhanger), I was struck by how much Capone resembled the ’30s Tracy villain,
Big Boy.
I could hardly have imagined that less than twenty years later, I’d be writing
the legendary Dick Tracy strip and hearing Chester Gould confirm my
suspicions that detective Tracy had been based on Ness and the Untouchables—
a fact still little noted or known.
That was the beginning of my interest in true crime in general and Eliot Ness
specifically. I immediately read Ness’s memoir, The Untouchables (1957),
cowritten by sportswriter Oscar Fraley, as well as Fraley’s follow-up, 4 Against
the Mob (1961), about Ness’s later law enforcement career in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Ness-Fraley book has largely been dismissed as a fabrication, but one of
our many discoveries while researching this book has been to confirm how
surprisingly accurate it was. Fraley built his narrative on a decidedly
nonboastful, fairly short memoir by Ness, amplifying it with newspaper and
magazine accounts. But the ghostwriter paid no heed to chronology, and events
appeared in what struck Fraley as the most effective order. Ness protested to no
avail, taken out by a heart attack at fifty-four, before publication of the work that
would make him far more famous dead than he’d been alive.
Fraley’s readable if creatively rearranged account led to a backlash among
Ness’s contemporaries in law enforcement as well as Chicago journalists,
building him (inaccurately) into a glory hound. The enormously successful TV
series spawned by the Desilu Playhouse two-parter did Ness’s real-life
reputation no favors, either.
Ironically, the original two-part film (released theatrically as The Scarface
Mob) was the most accurate presentation on film Eliot Ness and the
Untouchables have ever received. Director Phil Karlson was a master at true-
crime noir, with The Phenix City Story (1955) behind him and Walking Tall
(1973) ahead of him (with its similar glorification of real-life lawman Buford
Pusser).
Featuring Hollywood star Robert Stack as a grimly charismatic Ness, the
“Untouchables” two-parter boasted a semidocumentary style, Roaring Twenties
nostalgia, and fast, violent action, with ’30s media star Walter Winchell’s rat-a-
tat-tat narration perhaps the masterstroke.
A much-fictionalized Chicago mob was amplified by similarly fanciful
episodes with Ness taking on such real-life criminals as Vincent “Mad Dog”
Coll, Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, Legs Diamond, and Lucky Luciano. J.
Edgar Hoover, never a fan of the real Ness, objected so much to the
Untouchable’s latter-day fame that he insisted the producers credit the FBI’s
work at the end of the Ma Barker episode. Capone himself (with Neville Brand
reappearing) was again featured only in the two-part episode, “The Big Train.”
The only other two-part The Untouchables episode, “The Unhired Assassin,”
was loosely based on the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak. That event also
became the subject of my detective novel True Detective (1983).
In the late ’70s, while teaching mystery fiction at a community college, I
happened to notice The Maltese Falcon’s 1929 copyright—the year of the St.
Valentine’s Day Massacre. That meant Sam Spade and Al Capone were
contemporaries—instead of Philip Marlowe meeting an Al Capone type, Al
Capone could meet a Philip Marlowe type.
In 1981, I set out to write a period private eye story around a real crime—the
Cermak assassination. I sought the help of George Hagenauer, a Chicagoan
whose knowledge of the city and its mob history was considerable. I said to
George, “My private eye, offended by the rampant graft, will quit the Chicago
PD.” When he stopped laughing, George said, “Max, don’t you know? You get
on the PD for the rampant graft!” In that exchange, Nathan Heller was born.
Ever since, George has been my primary research associate on the Heller
novels, as well as many other historical thrillers. With Heller, the approach is to
research a famous unsolved (or controversially solved) crime, and when I’m
ready to write the definitive work on the subject, I write a private eye novel
instead.
Early on I had the idea of making Eliot Ness the honest law enforcement
contact for my somewhat shady PI—every private eye has a cop pal, after all.
But I’d read in Fraley that Ness and the Untouchables had disbanded after
Capone went to prison, with Ness gone from Chicago by 1933. The mandate of
my novel was authenticity, so I abandoned the notion of using him.
And then he turned up in the research! Ness was right there on the scene, after
two corrupt cops attempted the assassination of Frank Nitti. And into True
Detective he went. Ness appears in a number of subsequent Heller novels as
well, in particular The Million-Dollar Wound (1986), Stolen Away (1991), and
Angel in Black (2001).
In 1986 I was asked by an editor to spin Ness off into his own novels—a good
opportunity to explore his little-written-about years as public safety director in
Cleveland. George and I made several trips to that city and explored the
locations of potential Ness novels, from the castle-like boathouse on Clifton
Lagoon, where Eliot lived, to the dreary Kingsbury Run gully, where the serial-
killing Mad Butcher pursued his homeless prey.
Our research took us to the Cleveland Public Library, the City Hall Municipal
Reference Library, and the Case Western Reserve Society, where the Ness
papers reside. I expected to be disappointed. Noted mob expert Hank Messick’s
The Silent Syndicate (1967) explored the Cleveland mob while disparaging
Ness’s gangbusting role.
So when I found in the Case Western Reserve card catalog (remember those?)
an entry saying, “Eliot Ness Scrapbook,” I held out little hope. We’d already
been there all afternoon but asked to see the scrapbook anyway. A civil servant
slogged off dutifully to answer our request.
Near closing, the civil servant returned, pushing a hand truck laden with
perhaps half a dozen huge scrapbooks, each many inches thick and large enough
for a newspaper front page of the era to be pasted in. George and I exchanged
the same kind of dumbstruck look the original “Untouchables” broadcast had
generated in me.
Actually exploring this treasure-trove find—apparently the last person to use
the scrapbooks had been Oscar Fraley—meant returning the next day, and the
next, and many more after that. Examining such items as Ness’s eyeglasses and
a signed photo, I alerted the staff that this material should not be handed out to
the general public, and soon Case Western had put the scrapbooks on microfilm.
Among that material were postcards sent from a mental institution to Eliot
Ness by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. Eerily, the front of one postcard
depicted Neville Brand, insane and ranting, clutching prison bars, in a still from
Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954)—years before Brand would be Al Capone on The
Untouchables.
My four Ness-in-Cleveland novels—The Dark City (1987), Butcher’s Dozen
(1988), Bullet Proof (1989), and Murder by the Numbers (1993)—were followed
in 2004 by a play, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. A one-man show performed
by my late friend Michael Cornelison, Untouchable Life became a film of the
same name in 2005, airing on a number of PBS stations.
I had written the play, and then filmed it, in part because I wanted to go on
record with my version of Ness’s life. The research George and I did,
particularly on Butcher’s Dozen (the first book-length work on the Kingsbury
Run slayer), had been plundered without credit by other novelists and graphic
novelists, and by nonfiction writers, who apparently felt that not acknowledging
my work was fine because it was “fiction.”
I also wanted to address aspects of director Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, The
Untouchables. De Palma is a director I admire, and the film is well-made and
entertaining. The screenplay is another matter. David Mamet certainly created a
memorable speech for Sean Connery—“You wanna get Capone? Here’s how
you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun,” and so on.
But the historical inanities—inaccuracies doesn’t cover it—are unforgivable.
I have no trouble with liberties being taken with historical material for dramatic
purposes. But having Mounties chase rumrunners in a country where rum is
legal? Depicting a trial where a jury is changed midstream? Showing Eliot Ness
tossing Frank Nitti off a building? The screenwriter displays a lack of respect not
just for history but for his audience.
Untouchable Life attracted a high school student from Michigan to the Des
Moines Playhouse to see Michael Cornelison perform as Eliot Ness. A. Brad
Schwartz had been a Dick Tracy fan since around five years of age, having been
exposed to the film of that name (on which I was a creative consultant and wrote
the movie tie-in novel).
Just past age eleven—and this may sound very familiar—Brad saw a movie
called The Untouchables, recommended by his mother as being “like Dick Tracy
but real-life.” He became enamored with that film, which led him to my work,
including Road to Perdition, a graphic novel in which Eliot Ness appears. Brad
was fifteen the summer he came to Des Moines for the play Untouchable Life,
going to the premiere of the film in Rock Island, Illinois, in February 2005.
Somewhere along the way we got to know each other, and—while his college
thesis evolved into the Orson Welles book, Broadcast Hysteria (2015)—he
suggested we collaborate on a biography of Eliot Ness. I’d had several editors
suggest the same, but I felt Untouchable Life was my last word on the subject.