Giving Elliot Ness His Due

by John Aquino on 01/29/14

A January 10, 2014 proposal from three U.S. senators to name the headquarters of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in Washington after Elliot Ness has drawn fire from Chicago alderman Ed Burke and others who have suggested that Ness had no more to do with bringing Al Capone to justice than Mrs. O'Leary's cow had to do with the Chicago fire of 1871.

Burke cites a Ness biographer that the man was far removed from the film and television portrayals of Ness by Kevin Costner and Robert Stack.

I have written a great deal about the differences between film portrayals and the facts. And Burke has a point. But I think his argument is both harsh, disrespectful of the real-life Ness, and much ado about something most people already knew.

I have a personal memory here. I was growing up when the tv series The Untouchables starring Robert Stack as Elliot Ness debuted. My family lived in Washington, D.C., and we took visiting relatives to see the FBI building there. I kept whispering to my Mom, "Are they going to talk about Elliot Ness?" The FBI agent giving the tour asked for questions, but I was too shy. My mother, reluctantly, shouted out, "They want to know about Elliot Ness!" I remember that, rather than make fun of the tv series, the FBI agent was incredibly respectful of Ness. "Elliott Ness was not an FBI agent. He was a federal agent working for the U.S. Treasury Department and part of the team that brought down Al Capone. He did good work," the agent said about Ness, who had died not too long before. The agent couldn't resist a jibe at the end, though, saying, "Of course, FBI revolvers only shoot six times," referring to tv heroes who seemed to be able fire off a dozen shots from a six-shot gun without reloading.

That FBI agent's evaluation of Ness seems to be supported by facts. Ness was part of the Treasury Department's two-pronged effort to bring the Chicago-based gangster Al Capone to justice: Ness headed the group that went after Capone for violations of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) while the second group gathered information to prosecute Capone for tax evasion. Ness and his "Untouchables," so named because attempts by Capone's men to bribe them were rejected, raided Capone's breweries, stills and speak-easies, caused millions of dollars worth of losses for Capone, and built up a 5,000 count Volstead Act case against Capone. There were numerous attempts against Ness' life and one of his men was murdered. But, while both the Volstead Act and tax-evasion counts were part of the indictment against Capone, it was the work of the tax-evasion group and the 22 tax counts in the indictment that ultimately brought Capone down in 1931.

After Prohibition ended in 1933, Ness became Cleveland's safety director where he was in charge of both the police and fire departments, helped modernize the police department, and fought police corruption. His work in Chicago and Cleveland would seem to be reason enough to honor him with a building named after him.

Ness' later life was not as happy. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Cleveland in 1947, went through several marriages, failed in business, and battled alcoholism. Toward the end of his life he worked on a book about his career with former newspaper man Oscar Fraley. Ness' contribution appears to have been talking to Fraley and writing 20 pages that are currently in the collection at Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland and that appear to be fairly accurate. Ness died in 1957 at the age of 54 shortly before the book was published. Fraley, like some newspapermen at the time, felt the need to make stuff up.

The book The Untouchables was purchased for television by Desilu Studios, run by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. The tv series debuted on the ABC network in 1959. The first few episodes carried the credit, "Based on the book by Elliot Ness and Oscar Fraley." Later episodes carried the credit, "Suggested by the book by Elliot Ness and Oscar Fraley." While early episodes were based on incidents in Fraley's already embellished book, the scriptwriters stretched the truth even more. Since they needed to fill three television seasons of roughly 40 episodes each, they had Ness capture Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson and other criminals whose capture the real Ness had nothing to do with. Toward the end of the series, they ran out of real-life villains and made some up.

For one episode called "The Big Train," the scriptwriters brought the "what-if" technique to a real-life event. Capone was transferred from the Atlanta State Penitentiary to the newly-built Alcatraz prison on an island just off the coast of San Francisco in 1934. The scriptwriters imagined what would have happened if Capone's gang had tried to break him out in transit. They utilized the cliche idea of a corrupt prison guard who was bribed to help Capone escape. One of Capone's guards was still alive at the time and after the episode was broadcast sued for libel in state court. You see, he had bragged for years that he had guarded Capone and so felt people would identify him with the fictitious corrupt prison guard in the tv show. The state court refused to dismiss the case, and ABC reached a settlement with the guard. Capone's widow and son also sued ABC about the show--unsuccessfully.

Brian De Palma's 1987 movie The Untouchables was also "suggested" by Fraley and Ness' book and made even more things up, as did a second television series that often had Capone and Ness meeting face-to-face. In real life, they do not appear to have met.

Ness was no saint. In his heyday, he loved publicity. It was he who probably leaked the story of one of Capone's men trying to bribe Ness' men and that inspired the name given to Ness and his men. But he was also a hard-working law enforcement officer whose failures were off the job.

And so, while the television and later the screen Elliot Ness were far removed from the real-life article, little of that was Ness' doing. And he did, for almost two decades, accomplish a great deal for the benefit of law enforcement. He also, in his life and in his embellished film and tv personas, inspired young men and women to fight crime, to join the police department, to become federal agents. And that is not a bad legacy.

Copyright 2014 by John T. Aquino