From: ed_eck@milkwy.enet.dec.com 
Subject: Elliot Ness after the Untouchables
Keywords: Elliot Ness, Cleveland Torso Murderer, Nickles
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 15:25:28 GMT


I put this together for an internal DEC notesfile. Perhaps some readers
of a.t-c will find it interesting.

    I have a book called _Torso_ (subtitle: Eliot Ness and the Search for the
    Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run) by Steve Nickels that's about
    Ness' later career in Cleveland. After leaving Chicago, Ness
    drifted from post to post within the government for a few years
    then settled in Cleveland where he became
    involved in the (to people who follow this sort of thing) well 
    known Cleveland Torso serial murders. Begining in 1934 Ness was the 
    Commissioner of Public Safety, in charge of the Fire and Police
    departments. He fought a war on several fronts, against the incredibly
    corrupt police department as well as the entrenched mob elements. At the
    time Cleveland was one of the few large cities that was controlled
    by the mob; Alvin ("Creepy") Carpus recalled in his biography that he
    was able to live openly in Cleveland for several months while hiding
    from the police and on another occasion Machine Gun Kelly was given 
    a place to live and a job at a local private club. Ness led many raids
    against mob controlled operations (one run by the son of the local police
    chief) and spent much of his own time in
    Cleveland's Third District (aka "The Roaring Third") following up leads
    and investigating police corruption; this led to a major invesitgation 
    of the Cleveland police, resulting in several convictions. Ness was 
    an extrodinarily effective and dedicated leader who reformed every aspect 
    of public safety, reducing youth crime by 80% in one year and reforming 
    Cleveland's traffic laws until the city that was once second in the nation 
    in traffic fatalities was soon named as "safest in the country." The
    stress and long working hours resulted in his first divorce; he would 
    ultimately divorce again and marry for a third time.

    A Democrat mayor was elected in the early 1940's and Ness resigned soon 
    after in a scandal involving suspected drunken driving and a hit-and-run.
    Ness soon became a sucessful businessman with the Diabolt lock
    and safe company and an inport/export business based in New York City.
    He later ran for mayor of Cleveland but was defeated by the largest
    margin in history. After this his luck went bad and he spent the 
    next 10 years (until the mid-1950s) in obscurity. Nickels
    reports a family acquantance as saying that in Ness' later years
    he was seldom seen without a drink (Of course, Ness never had any
    thing against alcohol itself; he enforced prohibition because it
    was the law of the land.) Evidently Ness liked to tell the stories
    of his years in Chicago (with a tendency to embellish his own role) 
    and might have become somewhat of a minor pest. In 1957 Ness got 
    together with a writer who wanted to do his biography, but Ness died 
    of a massive heart attack a few months before it was published. In 
    1959, _Desilu Theater_ produced a TV version of the book, and the 
    TV version of _The Untouchables_ followed a year or two later. 
    The Capone family sued the producers.

    Oh, yeah--Capone was convicted of Income Tax evasion (! The
    only thing they could pin on him, despite his semi-public
    murder of the two guys who killed his mentor, Big Jim 
    Colissimo) [Or was that Torrio?] (Hey--ya live in the same neighborhood 
    as Nicola Sacco like I do, you get interested in this stuff...) and 
    eventually died of syphilis after being released from Alcatraz.

    Counter to legend, Ness had nothing to do with Capone's conviction.
    The Justice Department formed two squads to get Capone, and Ness headed
    the section that went after Capone for criminal violations; there
    was a separate investigation into Capone's taxes. Also counter to
    legend, Capone was born in Brooklyn, not Italy (which accounts for
    his ties to the Black Hand on the Brooklin docks and to the Adonis Club,
    and recalls the strange story of Capone's leutenant, "Machine Gun McGurn.")

    Ed E.


     And not far from the homes of Lizzie Borden and the Black Dahlia, either!

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