Rivals: Eliot Ness vs J. Edgar Hoover

In a force known for corruption and ineptitude, he was known for turning down bribes bigger than his annual salary.

He was 28, a college graduate, with blue-gray eyes, slicked-back dark hair and a square-set jaw, and he had a way with the press.

When he took to calling his men “the Untouchables,” because the abuse they took from Capone’s men reminded Ness of India’s lowest caste, reporters adopted the nickname as a metaphor for the squad’s refusal to take bribes.

Soon newspapers across the country were celebrating Ness as Capone’s nemesis.

But two years later, Ness’ flood of raids, arrests and indictments was running dry. Capone was in prison, the Untouchables had been disbanded – the last days of Prohibition were ticking away.

Ness had been reassigned to Cincinnati, where he chased moonshiners across Appalachian foothills. Hoping for another chance at glory, he applied for a job with J. Edgar Hoover’s budding Division of Investigation—the future FBI.

al capone’s jail cell

A former U.S. attorney in Chicago wrote to recommend Ness.

Hoover expedited a background investigation.

One of his agents crisscrossed the Windy City and collected testimonials to the applicant’s courage, intelligence and honesty. The current U.S. attorney told the agent Ness was “above reproach in every way.”

Back in the Chicago Prohibition Bureau office for a weekend in November 1933, Ness spoke with a friend on the phone about his prospects.

“Boss is using his influence,” he said. “Everything appears to be OK.” He said he would take nothing less than special agent in charge of the Chicago office.

He said it loud enough for another Prohibition agent to overhear. Soon word reached the Division of Investigation’s current special agent in charge in Chicago.

After seeing Ness’ references, Hoover wrote him on November 27 to note that Division men started at $2,465 a year—well below the $3,800 Ness had listed as his senior Prohibition agent’s pay.

“Kindly advise this Division whether you would be willing to accept the regular entrance salary, in the event it is possible to utilize your services,” Hoover asked.

There is no record that Ness responded. Maybe he never got a chance.

The next day, the special agent in charge in Chicago began dispatching a string of memos to headquarters in Washington, D.C.—41 pages of reports, observations and transcripts.

The memos make up the core of a 100-page FBI file on Ness that was held confidentially for eight decades, until it was released to me under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Amid a catalog of innuendo and character assassination, the file includes a troubling allegation that the lead Untouchable was anything but.

Beyond that, it illuminates the vendetta Hoover pursued against Ness throughout their careers—even after Ness was in his grave.

That vendetta was launched just a week after the director had inquired about Ness’ salary requirements.

On December 4, 1933—the day before Prohibition ended—Hoover sat with the file at his desk. Across a memo reporting the overheard phone conversation, he scrawled, “I do not think we want this applicant.”

“This place is O.K.’d by the United States Senator’s Office,” read the typewritten note, which bore the name of an aide to Senator J. Hamilton Lewis of Illinois.The penciled note carried the same message but added Lewis’ Chicago office address and: “Or see E. Ness.”

Until then, E. Ness would have seemed destined to join forces with Hoover. Born in 1902 on the South Side, he was raised by Norwegian-immigrant parents. Peter Ness, a baker, and his wife, Emma, instilled in their youngest son a strict sense of integrity.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in business at the University of Chicago, he followed his brother-in-law into the Prohibition Bureau.

Later he returned to the university to study under the pioneering criminologist August Vollmer, who argued that beat cops—typically poorly trained, beholden to political patrons and easily corrupted—should be replaced by men who were insulated from politics and educated as thoroughly in their profession as doctors and lawyers.

The United States needed such lawmen as the corruption of Prohibition gave way to more desperate crimes—the bank robberies and kidnappings of the Great Depression.

In the summer of 1933, U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings declared a new war on crime and gave Hoover free rein to build the once-obscure Bureau of Investigation into a powerful new division (which would be renamed the FBI in 1935).

Hoover hired agents who had college degrees and respectable family backgrounds. He also punished them for leaving lunch crumbs on their desks, or overlooking a typo in their memos, or arriving for work even a minute tardy. Still, as Congress passed laws expanding the list of federal crimes, his unit became the place any ambitious lawman wanted to work.

Melvin Purvis was Hoover’s kind of agent. He was the son of a bank director and plantation owner in South Carolina; he left a small-town law firm to join the division in 1927.

Aloof and aristocratic, with a reedy voice and a drawl, he was, like Hoover, a bit of a dandy, favoring straw hats and double-breasted suits decorated with pocket squares.

Hoover made him the special agent in charge in Chicago before he was 30, and he became the director’s favorite SAC. In letters addressed to “Mel” or “Melvin,” Hoover teased him about the effect he supposedly had on women.

Still, everyone knew Hoover could be mercurial, and in 1933 Purvis had reason to worry. He had run the Chicago office for less than a year.

That September, he’d staked out a tavern two hours too late and blown a chance to catch the notorious bank robber Machine Gun Kelly.

So when he got wind that Ness was angling for his job, he moved quickly.

A lot of the information he sent to Hoover was puffed up, undocumented or tailored to appeal to the director’s prurient streak.

Ness, he complained, had failed to take down Capone. (It was common knowledge then that Capone had been convicted of tax, not liquor, violations.)

An early model of the breathalyzer, called a “Drunkometer,” sits alongside other historical items from police departments across the country.

A disgruntled Untouchable had told him the squad held a drinking party.

(If so, it was kept quiet; Prohibition Bureau personnel records mention no party-related infractions.) Ness’ family looked down on his wife, and he preferred their company to hers.

(Purvis knew Hoover liked to scrutinize his agents’ fiancées or spouses and sometimes tried to break up relationships he found objectionable.)

the real untouchables

But the most incriminating part of the file came directly from one of Ness’ fellow Prohibition agents. His name was W.G. Malsie. Newly transferred to Chicago as the acting head of the Prohibition Bureau’s office there, he didn’t know Ness and wasn’t inclined to defer to his reputation.

When Joe Kulak reported for questioning the day after his still was busted, Malsie wanted him to explain his protection notes.

It turned out that they had been written by his friend Walter Nowicki, an elevator operator in the building where Senator Lewis kept an office. Nowicki accompanied Kulak to the interview. A transcript of the interrogation is among the documents released to me.

Nowicki told Malsie he’d gotten to know an aide to Lewis on elevator rides and eventually paid him $25 to $30 to protect Kulak’s still.

Twice, he said, he’d seen the aide talking with Ness. And once, in front of Ness, Nowicki asked the aide to put Kulak’s still “in a safe position.”

The aide “patted Mr. Ness on the back and told him to give the boys a break,” Nowicki recalled.

Then he wrote down the still’s address and gave it to Ness, who tucked it into his inside coat pocket.

“What did Ness say?” Malsie asked.

“He said that it would be OK,” Nowicki replied.

Later, Nowicki said, he approached Ness in the building’s lobby and asked him again about Kulak’s still.

“He said that if the police bothered Joe there will be no case on it,” Nowicki recalled.

“What did you say to Ness about giving him money for protection?” Malsie asked.

“I told him that I would take care of him,” Nowicki said. “He shook his head and didn’t answer.”

In Nowicki’s account, Ness speaks carefully. He never asks for or takes any money.

It may be that he had no intention of protecting the still, but he certainly leaves the impression he’s on board.

And there is no record of his reporting the approach.

If Nowicki’s story is true, then Ness, who made sure all of Chicago knew he turned away the Capone gang’s bribes, was less righteous when a political connection asked for an illegal favor.

Below: [Al Capone]. Eliot Ness Typed Letter Signed with Related Papers. Chicago; August 9, 1933. A reference letter from Chief Inspector Eliot Ness on behalf of Special Agent Lyle B. Chapman. Chapman was one of the original members of Ness’ Untouchables, the group who worked from 1929-1931 to investigate and arrest Al Capone and his organization during Prohibition.

The exact consequences of Nowicki’s account are impossible to establish. A supervisor questioned Ness about it, but his answers—along with any other documents from 1930 to 1933—are missing from his file at the National Personnel Records Center.

(Many famous employees’ files were stripped by souvenir hunters or rogue researchers decades ago, an archivist told me.)

Nor are they in the FBI’s Ness file or Nowicki’s case file. Malsie believed Lewis’ aide was fired, according to the FBI file.

But court records contain no indication that anyone
was indicted or tried in the matter.

A month after the raid on Kulak’s still, Ness was transferred to Cincinnati. That could have been a routine reshuffling as the Prohibition Bureau shrank—or it could have been exile for a tainted agent.

That fall, the FBI file shows, Malsie relayed word of his interrogation and a report of Ness’ overheard phone call to the Division of Investigation, where the information quickly landed on Melvin Purvis’ desk. Soon Ness’ chances with Hoover were gone.

The rejection may have been a blessing in disguise. In 1934, Melvin Purvis led the law-enforcement teams that gunned down John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.

Suddenly he was the most famous G-man in the country, so famous that some missteps in the hunt for Dillinger—spotty surveillance, bumbling informants—were overlooked.

Hoover never forgave him for outshining the bureau. Over the next few months, he pulled his former favorite SAC off prominent investigations, assigned him to interview job applicants and sent him to staff an outdoor firing range in midwinter.

When Chicago Times editor Louis Ruppel called the FBI to pass on a rumor that Purvis had gotten drunk at a party and brandished a gun, Hoover demanded an explanation from his agent.

(“An unmitigated and unadulterated lie,” Purvis said.) In July 1935, he quit the bureau and traded on his fame to become a pitchman for Gillette razors and Dodge cars.

Despite Hoover’s attempts to scuttle his career, Purvis also served with an Army war-crimes office during World War II and served as counsel to two U.S. Senate committees.

Ness, meanwhile, found his escape in Cleveland, where he was transferred by the Prohibition Bureau, renamed the Alcohol Tax Unit.

The nation’s sixth-largest city was a correspondingly large den of vice—bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, union-led extortion rackets, all protected by paid-off police.

Ness spent most of 1935 theatrically busting untaxed stills and caught the eye of Harold Burton, who became known as Cleveland’s “Boy Scout mayor” for his personal rectitude and opposition to organized crime.

That December, Burton shocked Clevelanders by making Ness his public-safety director. The new head of the police and fire departments was only 33.