“There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Eliot Ness said.
I sat slumped in a hard wooden chair in Eliot’s spartan, orderly office in the Transportation Building on Dearborn.
“And who would that be?” I asked.
“Al Capone,” Ness said, with the smile of a mischievous kid.
Eliot was leaning back in his swivel chair, sitting with his back to his rolltop desk. He was a fairly big guy, about my height-six feet-with broad shoulders on an otherwise lithe frame; his upper torso had gotten powerful from a stint dipping radiators at the Pullman plant as a youth.
The biggest surprise about Eliot Ness-for those who’d read newspaper and magazine accounts of his exploits as a gang-busting prohibition agent-was his youth, his boyishness. Eliot was twenty-eight years old, with a ruddy, well-scrubbed appearance and a sprinkling of freckles across his Norwegian nose. That he was an ambitious young exec moving up the ladder of life was evident only in his impeccable three-piece steel-gray suit and black-and-white-and-gray speckled tie.
“Actually,” Ness said, reconsidering a bit, or pretending to, “I’d prefer you didn’t meet him. I just want you along to listen.”
“Listen to what?”
“Snorkey says he can get the Lindbergh kid back.”
I sighed, shook my head. “It’s just a scam, Eliot. Besides, none of it has anything to do with me.”
He put his hands behind his neck, elbows flaring out. “Nate-you’re the resident kidnapping expert around this town right now.”
I gave him a Bronx cheer. “Why, ’cause I stumbled onto getting some bootlegger’s kid back for him? We couldn’t even make the charges stick against that Rogers dame!”
He shrugged with his eyebrows. “How were you to know Hymie Goldberg would claim the woman was acting as his intermediary?”
“Yeah, right-his intermediary. That’s why her brother Eddie shot it out with a cop.”
Eliot shrugged again, shoulders this time. “Why do you think these snatch-racket gangs prey on their own kind, so often? Their victims are primarily borderline characters like themselves-bootleggers and gamblers and the like. Who know their fellow underworld denizens would never seek help from the cops at the outset, and won’t rat them out at the finish line.”
Eliot was the only guy I knew who might actually use the word “denizens” in a sentence, let alone one that also included the phrase “rat them out.”
“But these days,” he continued, “most major gamblers and bootleggers and panderers don’t go anywhere without bodyguards. So the snatch-racket boys are looking to greener pastures, monetarily speaking.”
“Like the Lindberghs.”
Eliot nodded. “We’re already seeing a pattern of industrialists and bankers and businessmen being hit. Remember the Parker case in California? That little girl was dead and dismembered before the ransom was even collected.” He sighed, shook his head. “With prohibition winding down, kidnapping could be the next big racket.”
“Well, it’s easy money. What are you gonna do?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Eliot answered it literally. “I’ve sent a petition to the federal government. Recommending capital punishment for the transportation of a kidnapped person from one state to another.”
“You’d like kidnapping to be a federal crime?”
He nodded sharply, smiled the same way. “No offense, Nate, but too many local cops are either incompetent or on the take.”
“I’d tip my hat to you,” I said, “if my hands weren’t so full of apples I took off pushcarts.”
“That’s not fair, Nate.”
“Hey, I’ve seen J. Edgar’s boys operate. Third-rate accountants and lawyers who graduated bottom of the class.”
“I’m not talking about Hoover-I’m talking about my own unit…and the IRS squad, of course. Speaking of which…Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson are going up from Washington, D.C., tomorrow, to Hopewell, New Jersey. To meet with Lindbergh.”
“Why? Kidnapping isn’t a Treasury matter by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Well…I don’t think Lindbergh has any more confidence in J. Edgar’s boys than you do. That’s why he called his pal Ogden Mills…”
“Who?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “The Secretary of the Treasury? Of the United States? Of America?”
“Oh. That Ogden Mills.”
“Lindy wanted Mills to send him the agents who ‘got Capone.’”
“Meaning you, Irey and Wilson.”
“Yes. But I’m tied up with the mop-up operation here, and besides, Irey and Wilson would rather work without me, I’m sure.”
Elmer Irey, Frank Wilson and Eliot Ness were indeed the feds who nailed Capone. Eliot’s Justice Department unit squeezed Capone’s financial nuts in the vise, and confiscated the records Irey, Wilson and their pencil-pushers turned into evidence. But there was friction between Justice man Ness and the IRS boys; both factions seemed to resent the credit taken by the other.
“I’ve recommended a Chicago Police Department liaison be assigned to the case,” he said. “On site, at Hopewell.”
“Why?”
“Early indications are this is a gangland operation, very possibly of midwestern origin. I’ll fully brief you, before you leave….”
“Brief me!” I sat up. “What are you…?”
“I’ve cleared it with your boss.”
“Sapperstein?”
“Chief of Detectives Schoemaker. And the Chief himself. And the Mayor. You’re going to Hopewell.”
I opened my eyes wide as I could and looked at nothing. “Well…that’s swell. Nice break from hanging around train stations and bus depots. And it could be good for my career, but…why me?”
Eliot shrugged. “You made some nice headlines, cracking the Goldberg case.”
I snorted. “Right. I killed two guys up there, and what did it amount to? The dame went free, the case was closed, and who knows how many accomplices are still running around loose?”
Eliot waggled a lecturing finger at me; he was barely a year older than me, but he had a bad habit of treating me like a kid. “Nate, you put a baby back in his mother’s arms. Doesn’t matter that it’s the arms of some bootlegger’s common-law wife. A kidnap ring getting busted up, and a kid going safely home, is exactly what the public wants to hear about right now.”
“Well. It was dumb luck.”
“Much good police work is. The case got enough national play that when I spoke to Lindbergh on the phone yesterday, and mentioned you, he was enthusiastic that you come.”
My skepticism was fading; excitement was creeping up the back of my neck. “But, Eliot…why did you suggest me?”
His face was blank and hard. “I don’t trust Irey and Wilson-that is, I don’t trust their judgment. They’re good investigators, when they’re examining ledger books…but they don’t have your street savvy.”
“Well, thanks, but…”
“You should know a couple of things. My suggestion that you be sent was met with enthusiasm in various quarters.”
“Why in hell?”
He shrugged. “Different people want you out there for different reasons.”
“Such as?”
Eliot counted them off on his fingers. “Lindbergh wants you because he thinks you’re some kind of police hero, who saved a child. I want you there for my own purposes. But…there are people within the department who want you out there because they feel, should it come to that, you can be ‘handled.’”
Now I was getting irritated; I shifted in the hard chair. “Just because, once upon a time, I…”
He held up a hand. “Nate. I know. The Lingle case put you in plainclothes. But it also taught you a few lessons you did not expect to learn. I assume you’re still carrying the Browning your father…”
After a beat, I nodded.
He smiled faintly. “I don’t have many police contacts, Nate. You’re one of a very small handful of men on the Chicago force that I feel I can trust. I’m right about you. The men in the shadows, who think you’ll sell out for a sawbuck, are wrong.”
“Eliot, you are so right,” I said. “It would take at least a C-note.”
He didn’t know whether to smile or not. So he just shook his head.
“Come on,” he said, rising. “I want you to hear what Snorkey has to say….”
Cook County jail was on the West Side, not far from my old stomping grounds, in the midst of a Bohunk neighborhood where Mayor Cermak had relocated both the jail and the county courthouse. His Honor did this, he said, to “help real estate” in the area. That was about as straightforward a statement as any Chicago mayor ever made.
The assistant warden, John Dohmann, took us up five flights in a steel-and-wire elevator that opened onto a heavy iron-barred door, labeled Section D. Dohmann turned a heavy double key in the lock and revealed bars that enclosed the vast sunny concrete room that was Alphonse Capone’s cell, a cell that might have housed fifteen in this badly overcrowded facility. Outside the bars, facing the cell, sat a United States deputy marshal with a billy club on his belt.
I’d lived in Snorkey’s kingdom for many years, and it was unnerving approaching the monarch’s throne room, even if it was concrete and steel.
Capone-who wore not a jailhouse-gray uniform, but a blue flannel suit with a tan shirt and no tie-sat playing cards at a table with the only other prisoner in the cell, a small, pretty young man of perhaps nineteen. On the way up in the elevator Dohmann had mentioned that Capone had been allowed the cellmate to help him pass the time with handball and cards. Looking at this kid gave the term “handball” new implications.
“Ness!” Capone said, and stood, walking over with a huge paw thrust forward.
Eliot wore the faintest ironic smile as he accepted the hand through the bars and shook it.
“No hard feelings between us, right?” Capone said, with a disarming grin.
“None,” said Eliot.
Capone wasn’t as big a man as you might think, and-like his adversary Eliot Ness-was much younger than the public thought of him, perhaps thirty-two or-three. His shoulders were broader than any fullback’s, however, and his head was as round as a pumpkin. His full face was deceptive, as he was not fat.
What really struck me, though, were his eyes: greenish-gray, small and round and glittering, half-lidded under black bushy eyebrows that met between them like conspirators.
When he placed his big, veined hands on the bars, it was like a strong man about to bend them for a stunt; but his feet were small, almost dainty, in expensive black leather shoes with pointed toes.
“Is there any news?” Capone asked, earnestly.
“About what, Al?” Ness asked.
“The kid!”
“Nothing.”
Capone sighed sadly.
I stood by the seated guard, back a ways. Eliot never made a move to introduce me and Capone hardly gave me a glance; I was just another nameless Ness man, accompanying the chief. Why insinuate myself into this conversation between old friends?
Besides, I kind of savored the irony of having Capone mistake me for an Untouchable.
“Understand this, Mr. Ness-I don’t want no favors. If I ain’t able to do anything for that baby, lock me the hell back up.”
“Looks like you are locked up, Al.”
“Look. I know how you feel about me. But if they’ll only let me out of here, I’ll give ’em any bond they need. If they’re interested in getting that child back!”
Capone was trying to sound sincere in his concern for Charles Lindbergh, Jr., but what he conveyed was menace.
“You accompany me yourself, Ness. I will spend every hour of the night and day with you at my side, till we get that kid back.”
“Just the two of us, huh, Al?”
“And I’ll send my younger brother to stay here in the jail and take my place till I get back. You don’t think I’d double-cross my own brother and leave him in here, do you? Even if I could make my getaway from the great Eliot Ness! Hah?”
Ness said nothing; his faint ironic smile said it all.
Capone’s gray complexion began to redden. The lids had lifted off the gray-green eyes. In the jail cell, the pretty gunsel was playing solitaire, paying no attention to any of us. Sunlight through the barred windows made patterns on the floor.
Capone tried to channel his anger into earnestness. “Let me have a chance to show what I can do! I would know in twenty-four hours whether the child’s in the possession of any regular mob, or some single-o working his own racket. Anybody that knows anything in the underworld knows he can trust me. There is no mob going that wouldn’t count on me to make the payoff, if the family of the kid wants to go the ransom.”
“And what do you want from the federal government, Al, if you manage to pull off this trick?”
He cut the air with his hands, like an umpire calling somebody safe. “It’s no trick. If I can’t do any good for you, then I come back here, and let justice go on with her racket.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Al. What do you want if you succeed?”
His hands clenched into softball-size fists. A vein in his forehead began to throb; his scar turned white on his fleshy cheek. His expression was like a very pissed-off bull studying a red cape.
“What the hell do you think, Ness? I want out! I want this goddamn sentence set aside! What in fucking hell do you think I want? I was railroaded! I was double-crossed!”
Capone had worked out a plea bargain that would allow him to pay off his tax debt and get a two-and-a-half-year sentence, which with good behavior he could have done in a walk. But Judge Wilkerson had not been party to the deal, and sentenced him to eleven years in federal prison.
“You guys want me to cough up three hundred thirty-six thousand dollars! I don’t know where you get these figures, ’less it’s the moon! You never proved I ever received onedollar-maybe you proved I spent some money, but that don’t prove I have any income. What I spent might’ve been given me by admiring friends. And you guys can’t tax gifts!”
“Al, like the man says-tell it to the judge.”
“The judge! That son of a bitch won’t even let me out on bail! Other people convicted on income-tax raps get set free, till the highest court passes on their appeal. Not Capone! They leave me to rot in stir. They make me pay expenses of the trial-they don’t do that with no others. Fifty fuckin’ grand I paid!”
Ness stood with folded arms; his smile was gone. So, I gathered, was his patience.
Snorkey sensed that, too.
“I just don’t understand you guys,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, but damn near whining. “When I came to Chicago eleven years ago, I had only forty bucks in my pocket. I went in a business that didn’t do nobody no harm. They talk about the unemployed. Well, I give work to the unemployed. At least three hundred young men are getting from one hundred fifty dollars to two hundred dollars a week from me, in the harmless beer racket. Put me out of business, and all my men lose their jobs-they have families and little houses. What do you think they’ll do? Go on the streets and beg? No. These are men I’ve taken out of the holdup and bank-robbery business and worse and gave real jobs. Where will they go, and what will they do, when you put me out of business?”
“We’ll find cells for them, too, Al.”
His eyes blazed. “You’re so high and fuckin’ mighty! Sharing in a bootlegger’s profits by way of income tax, you’re aiding and abetting after the goddamn fact. It’s like the G was demanding its percentage of a bank burglar’s haul!”
“Old news, Snorkey. Very old news.”
The rage was bubbling in Capone, but he restrained himself.
“Look, look,” he said, patting the air in a peacemaking gesture, “never mind that. Never mind any of that. I just want to help, here. There isn’t a man in America that wouldn’t like to return that child to its folks, whatever it cost him personally.”
He pointed to a picture of his young son gilt-framed by his bed in the cell.
“I can imagine,” he said, gray-green eyes glistening in the sorrowful mask of his round face, “how Colonel Lindbergh feels. I weep for him and his lovely wife.”
“Do you really?”
Capone’s lip began to curl in a sneer, but he pulled back, and meekly said, “They’ll listen to you, Ness. You tell them.”
“Then tell me something you didn’t tell anybody else. You’ve run this vaudeville routine past Captain Stege, and Callahan of the Secret Service…but if you want to convince me, tell me something new. Tell me why you really think you can get that little boy back.”
Silence hung in the air like a noose.
Capone licked his fat lips and, mustering all the earnestness he could, said, “There’s a possibility a guy who did some work for me, once, did this awful thing. He is not in my employ now. Understood? But if he did it, and I can find him-and I can find him-we can get that kid back.”
“Who is it, Al? Give me a name.”
“Why in hell should I tell you?”
“Because you care about that kid. Because you cry yourself to sleep at night, over this ‘awful thing.’”
Capone lifted his head, looked down at Ness suspiciously. “If I tell you, you’d take it as a show of…sincerity?”
“I might.”
The glittering eyes narrowed to slits. “Conroy,” he said.
“Bob Conroy?”
The big head nodded once.
Eliot thought about that. Then he said, almost to himself, “Conroy lammed it out of Chicago years ago.”
Conroy was said to be one of the shooters in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Word was he’d gone east, when the heat got turned up after that noisy little affair.
Capone clutched the bars. “I can find Conroy. Get me out of here. Let me help.”
Ness smiled blandly at Capone. “I wouldn’t let you out of that cell to save a hundred kids.”
The round face filled with blood.
“So long, Snorkey.”
“Only my friends call me that,” the gangster said ominously. “You son of a bitch…who the hell do you think you are…”
“I’m Eliot Ness,” Eliot Ness said pleasantly. “And you-you’re right where you belong.”
From behind us, as the deputy was unlocking the big steel door for us, Capone called out, “I’m going to the papers with this! Lindbergh’s going to hear about my offer!”
Going down in the elevator, Eliot said, “Lindy already has heard, obviously. That’s why Irey and Wilson are going up there. To advise him.”
“Do you take Capone seriously?”
“Well, this morning, President Hoover and his cabinet discussed his offer.”
“Jesus.”
“The Attorney General suggested exploring whether Capone’s proposal would have to be referred to the Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“For Pete’s sake, Eliot. Capone’s just trying any desperate measure to get out of stir…”
“Right. But how desperate is he?”
“What do you mean?”
“Desperate enough to engineer this kidnapping himself, so he can ‘solve’ it, and earn his freedom?”
The elevator clanked to a stop.
“What do you think, Eliot?”
“I think with Capone,” he said, “any evil thing is possible.”