via J. Edgar Hoover vs. Eliot Ness. Who won?
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked police and sheriffs across the country to give the FBI any information they obtained about “espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, subversive activities and violations of the neutrality laws.”
Hoover responded by reviving his radical-hunting General Intelligence Division, dormant since 1924.
At the same time, a confidential presidential directive authorized naval intelligence to investigate potential sabotage and espionage. Working with a reserve lieutenant with the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ness quietly convened a meeting of Cleveland industrialists.
He told them he wanted to create a spy network in their factories, and he asked them to fund it through a sort of dues system.
An FBI file on the network, also obtained through a FOIA request, notes that one of his investigators told a plant supervisor that the benefits of membership included “the good will of the Cleveland Police Department and police protection in the event of labor troubles.”
Ness briefed the FBI’s special agent in charge in Cleveland—who sent an alarmed letter to Washington. Hoover was appalled, by both the potential for interference and the appearance of extortion.
“It looks more and more like either a labor-baiting move or a promotion racket—with a $50,000 budget,” he wrote in his spiky cursive across a memo in the file.
Rumors of Ness’ effort reached Cleveland’s labor leaders. Mistakenly believing the FBI was involved, they demanded an explanation from Attorney General Frank Murphy.
Hoover immediately sent Murphy a memo saying Ness’ plan was “most repugnant to the bureau.” Someone—either in the bureau or in Murphy’s office—showed the memo to Cleveland CIO leader A.E. Stevenson, who went public with it.
“Mr. Hoover’s description of the plan was that it was ‘very repugnant’ to him,” Stevenson told the Cleveland Press, “a remark that hardly coincides with Mr. Ness’ declarations in the daily papers that he is working in close co-operation with the Federal Government.” (Ness did say that, but he was referring to the Office of Naval Intelligence.)
Stevenson called for Burton to fire Ness. Burton declined, and Cleveland newspaper editors, who had attended the meetings about the spying plan, rose to Ness’ defense in editorials.
Blindsided, Ness called FBI headquarters and asked to talk to Hoover directly. Hoover refused to take his call.
“I’m in charge of the city,” Ness told the FBI’s special agent in charge in Cleveland, according to an FBI memo, “and I’m worried about [someone] blowing up the downtown section or blowing up some Standard Oil tanks, which are all along the river….If anything happens, I’ll collect the blame.”
Ness traveled to Washington and asked one of Hoover’s assistants why the FBI had disclosed confidential information about his work.
“I told Eliot Ness that the FBI had never shown anything to Stevenson,” the assistant wrote in a memo to Hoover.
“He…wondered why the information concerning the Director’s attitude had been made available to an individual other than him….I informed Mr. Ness that he in effect was asking the Director to engage in a political controversy.”
Hoover wrote that a “very nasty situation” was developing between Ness and the unions, and “it appears that Ness is trying to find some way whereby he can blame the FBI.”
In a display of false neutrality, Hoover declined to comment publicly. While the FBI started its own plant-protection program, agents visited Cleveland factory owners to discourage them from joining Ness’.
He launched it anyway, and it gave rise to a police “subversive squad” that investigated purported radicals for the next 30 years. The FBI file notes that private detectives in Ness’ network maintained a secret office and shared the names of 76 suspect individuals with an FBI agent.
As his relations with the FBI soured, Ness lost his patron: Mayor Burton was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1940.
For years, Ness had employed secret investigators to probe police corruption and hidden them as “laborers” on the city hall payroll.
After Burton left, a city councilman outed them. Union-friendly newspaper columnist John W. Raper began to call the safety director “Neverwas G-Man Ness,” mocking him for having been a mere liquor agent, not part of the increasingly renowned FBI.
When his friend Frank Lausche was elected mayor in 1941, Ness kept his job.
But Lausche’s support couldn’t protect Ness from a disaster of his own making.
On a snowy night in March 1942, he and his wife spent several hours dining, drinking and talking with friends at a downtown hotel.
Driving home at 4:45 a.m., Ness hit another car. The other driver, a 21-year-old man, suffered a broken kneecap. Ness acknowledged he’d had “several drinks” that night but blamed the crash on an icy road.
He resigned a month later—and moved to Washington, D.C., where he had an even harder time staying out of Hoover’s way.
As director of the federal Office of Social Protection, Ness traveled the country to encourage local authorities to suppress prostitution near military installations.
“Every soldier, sailor or war worker who is infected by a prostitute is put out of action just as effectively as if he were struck down by a Japanese bullet,” he told the National Sheriffs Association in September 1942.
Though Ness spent much of his career battling vice, he was a reformer, not a prude.
He believed that women in the sex trade had been “ostracized” and “blocked…out of legitimate employment.”
The Social Protection program, he wrote, should be approached as “a public health and protective measure without any suggestion of a moral crusade,” because of Americans’ “almost universal resistance” to “government supervision of sexual morality.”
His problem was the May Act, a new law that defined prostitution near defense installations as a federal offense.
When military officials invoked the law in parts of North Carolina and Tennessee, FBI agents arrested prostitutes by the hundreds.
The bureau wanted the law invoked elsewhere, but the military and Ness’ boss at the Federal Security Agency, Charles Taft, insisted that it be used only as a last resort.
One Saturday night in October 1942, Ness was in Norfolk, Virginia, where police chief John Woods had shut down the local brothels only to see them migrate just beyond the city limits. Woods and the Navy had assembled a shore patrol to pursue them.
To give the shore patrol a chance to work, Ness told Woods, he would oppose an FBI takeover of anti-prostitution efforts in Norfolk. “Super-sleuths,” he called the FBI agents, acidly. Woods told the local FBI office, which passed word to headquarters.
“Ness is obviously the stooge for Taft, who[se] practical approach to this problem is startling in his abysmal ignorance,” Hoover scrawled across a previously released FBI memo.
When the Office of Social Protection asked the FBI for photos of convicted prostitutes for an exhibit, Hoover’s confidant Clyde Tolson wrote,
“This is [a] Ness outfit.
I am opposed to any cooperation.” In a handwritten reply, Hoover added, “I concur.”
In another memo, FBI agent R.F. Cartwright recounted his effort to discredit Ness at an Army conference on sexually transmitted diseases.
“[I] emphasized particularly the cooperation we receive from police in the May Act areas,” Cartwright wrote. “This was done to counteract the efforts of Ness to set himself up as the liaison between the Federal Security Agency and the police authorities.”
In 1943, Ness tried to persuade Woods to leave Norfolk and take his old job as Cleveland safety director. Woods asked the FBI for advice. “He is of the opinion that the Bureau does not hold Ness in very high regard,” an FBI official wrote to Hoover, “and he would do nothing to incur the enmity of the Bureau.”
“There is no advice I would give him,” Hoover replied, “except to beware of Ness.”
In 1944, Ness returned to Ohio to become chairman of the board of the safe and lock company Diebold Inc. Three years later, he ran for mayor of Cleveland against incumbent Thomas Burke and lost in a landslide. Afterward, according to Capone biographer Laurence Bergreen, he told a friend he blamed Hoover. It’s uncertain why, but a close look at the race suggests two possible reasons.
In the weeks before the election, Burke announced a new program of cooperation between the FBI and the Cleveland police, undermining Ness’ campaign claim that Burke was weak on crime.
And when Ness accused Burke of allying with a communist faction in the CIO, Burke revealed that Ness, as public-safety director, had maintained a secret office staffed with private detectives—the same office that was mentioned in FBI memos from 1940.
“We have seen enough of the Gestapo and secret police in recent years,” Burke proclaimed. “It’s not for us.”
Forced out of Diebold for lackluster performance in 1951, Ness went to work for a struggling check-printing company.
Divorced and remarried again, he and his third wife adopted a son, and he worried over how he would provide for his new family.
Through a friend he met a United Press International sportswriter named Oscar Fraley, who persuaded him to collaborate on a memoir.
Fraley embroidered Ness’ recollections with accounts of gunplay and dime-novel tough talk and created a fiction with Ness as a solitary hero.
Ness went along with some of the book’s exaggerations and deceptions but asked Fraley to tone it down.
Then he died of a heart attack at age 55 on May 16, 1957.
A few months later, the book was published under the title The Untouchables.
Though the book didn’t sell particularly well, Desi Arnaz, who owned Desilu Productions with his wife, Lucille Ball, optioned it for a television series.
Arnaz had a cordial relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, but the project would test it.
One of the first episodes, in October 1959, depicted Ness as leading the FBI’s 1935 raid on the Florida hideout of the Barker Gang—the climactic gun battle of the bureau’s war on Depression-era crime.
Hoover learned of the episode a few days before it aired and dispatched an agent to confront Arnaz.
The producer agreed to kill planned episodes featuring the arrests of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, which would have had Ness replacing Melvin Purvis in the hero’s role.
But he declined an FBI demand that a disclaimer include the line, “Eliot Ness and the Treasury agents featured in tonight’s episode had nothing whatsoever to do with this case.”
On October 22, 1959, Hoover sat down to watch the Barker Gang episode of “The Untouchables” and seethed. “I saw it and it was bad,” Hoover scrawled across a memo in an FBI file on Arnaz.
“We must find some way to prevent FBI cases from being used thr[ough] such subterfuge as in this instance. It is a fraud upon the public.”
But he couldn’t stop what Oscar Fraley set in motion. “The Untouchables,” starring Robert Stack, ran on ABC from 1959 to 1963 and fixed Ness’ image as an American folk hero. By then, the FBI so dominated federal law enforcement that viewers assumed Ness had been one of Hoover’s men all along.