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  The dark city

  ( Eliot Ness - 1 )

  Max Allan Collins

  Max Allan Collins

  The dark city

  ONE

  DECEMBER 11–17, 1935

  CHAPTER 1

  A smoky, cloudy haze hung over the city, turning the afternoon into night. Crane your neck back as far as you liked, you still couldn't make out the top of Terminal Tower, the Van Sweringen brothers' fifty-two-story tribute to the city and them-selves. The Vans were broke now, or claimed to be, and their tower complex-with its department store, office building, bank, hotel, and restaurants-loomed over the city like a joke, an ironic middle-finger reminder of more prosperous times, when the Depression wasn't hanging over the city like the smoke and clouds that for almost a month now had made every day a night.

  Traditionalists continued to call it "the Forest City," and the Chamber of Commerce flacks were insisting it was "the Vacation City"; but the papers were calling Cleveland "the Dark City," and not only because of these sunless days. Times were hard. On Public Square, amid statues of the city's founder Moses Cleaveland and legendary mayor Tom L. Johnson and various Civil War heroes, near the foot of a lavishly decorated, gaily lit giant Christmas tree, panhandlers and prostitutes prowled, often seeming to outnumber pedestrians. Those pedestrians seemed weary, cloaked in cynicism, as gray as the afternoon night around them, seldom speaking to one another, the cold wind from Lake Erie chilling their bones.

  Not that everyone in Cleveland, on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 11, 1935, had given in to depression, either emotional or financial. At least one man was feeling good. He was one of the lucky ones: he was employed. More than that, he liked the line of work he was in, even if in recent months his job had begun-he would have to admit, if pressed-to bore him.

  But not this afternoon. This afternoon, this bleak gray afternoon, he was smiling with anticipation. It was a tight smile, a poker player's barely-there smile, though the laugh lines around his gray-blue eyes gave him away. He was eager. He could smell the kill. He was handsome, in a boyish, almost baby-face manner, with a trail of freckles across his nose, and his Norwegian stock was apparent, despite the dark brown hair. He was a young man of thirty-two who stood six feet but seemed taller, possibly because he was so slim. This slimness belied his powerful arms and shoulders, the legacy of a, stint in one of Chicago's South Side auto plants dipping radiators in his youth. His tan camel-hair topcoat seemed a bit big for him, but the snap-brim fedora gave him the proper air of authority for the Chief Agent of the U.S. Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax Unit.

  He was sitting on the rider's side of a ten-ton flatbed truck, the back of which was loaded with scaling ladders, the front of which was a specially constructed metal prow, an ugly sideways v whose point was aimed for-ward. The truck was moving in low gear down Sweeney Avenue, just outside Cleveland's industrial flats along the winding Cuyahoga River, through an area of ware-houses and working class housing, rumbling over miles of railroad tracks. Two carloads of agents were already at the large red brick building on Sweeney Avenue, having preceded the truck by a minute or so. Agents from these cars would unload the ladders, once the steel bumper had burst open the door of the suspected distillery.

  Eliot Ness had done his homework on this one. But the agent behind the wheel of the truck-a heavyset, grizzled veteran named Bob Hedges, who didn't much like his college-boy boss-had done most of the legwork. A week ago Hedges had walked Ness around the building at Sweeney and Fifty-third, on an afternoon as gray as this one.

  "Take a look," Hedges had said, pointing to the back of the brick building where yellow-stained icicles hung like frozen urine.

  Ness had nodded. The staining was characteristic of an illicit distillery. Steam and fumes seeped through the walls and discolored the ice.

  "Bob, we've had this place under surveillance for months," Ness said, shaking his head, digging his hands in his topcoat pockets. "We've never seen any molasses or sugar go in, and nothing ever seems to come out."

  Hedges lifted a thick finger and lectured his chief. "But they got a guard on the front door. A regular gorilla. Something's the fuck up."

  Ness sighed. He didn't much like Hedges and his rough manner, but he did respect the hard little man's instincts. Hedges was a good, honest cop. Ness didn't ask for anything else from his men.

  And there indeed was a guard posted at the big brick building, except for occasional lunch and supper breaks like the one the guard was on now, giving Ness and Hedges the opportunity to case the joint.

  Also, the location was perfect for a mob distillery. It was roughly halfway between the Woodland Avenue neighborhood, home of many Italian-Americans, some honest and some not so, and Newburgh Heights, where just beyond the city limits wide-open gambling joints like "Shimmy" Patton's Harvard Club and "Gameboy" Miller's Thomas Club flourished. As a cost-cutting measure, the Mayfield Road mob had been supplying their clubs with tax-free bootleg hooch, often filling and refilling bottles that had once contained legal liquor and retained the proper labels.

  Ness found a broken window to peer in. He could see nothing, except what appeared to be a cinder floor.

  "Looks empty in there," Ness said.

  "It's a still, I tell you," Hedges said. "The mother of all stills."

  Ness nodded noncommittally. "Let's get out of here before the gorilla gets back."

  Hedges shook his head in frustration, but he brightened in the car, when Ness told him, "I think you're right about that place. And I think I know what's going on back there…"

  He had directed Hedges to check the records in the city engineer's office at City Hall. "Look for any abandoned sewer line that might be near the Sweeney Avenue building."

  "Bingo," Hedges had said, entering Ness' small office in the Standard Building without knocking. He had blue-prints in his arms; he spread them out on Ness' battered rolltop desk, on top of the other papers there. "Aban-doned sewer-brick construction, with an interior diameter of five feet. Runs right by the place."

  Ness looked over the blueprints. "The same sewer runs past Molaska Products, I see."

  "I noticed that too," Hedges said and grinned. "That's Mo Horvitz's molasses company."

  "It sure as hell is," Ness said, sitting up. "And we know what they're up to, don't we. They're pumping molasses through the old sewer line from their storage tanks to the basement of the Sweeney Avenue building."

  "Agreed. But how the hell are they getting the alcohol out?"

  Ness reexamined the blueprints. "I don't know. Is there a gas station in the area?"

  "It don't show on there," Hedges said, waving at the blueprints, "but yeah, there's a couple. You think they're pumping the booze out of the basement through these old sewer pipes, to a gas station?"

  Ness nodded. "Old Chicago trick. Big tank truck comes into the station, supposedly to fill the station's storage tanks. Only the tank trucks come in empty… and go out full."

  "But not of gasoline."

  "Not hardly," Ness said.

  Now they were nearing the padlocked double front doors of the brick warehouse, the truck in second gear. The burly but sleepy guard bundled in an overcoat and sitting on a barrel reading the Police Gazette, suddenly sprang to, his eyes round as poker chips, and yelled, "Hey!", and headed for the hills.

  Ness braced himself on the dashboard as the wooden doors grew larger before him, and then with a splintering crunch the steel prow and the truck behind it flattened the doors and rolled right over them, into the big, open-and very empty-warehouse.

  Ness hopped out of the truck, yanked his. 38 from under his arm, and called back to his agents. They were pulling the ladders off the back of the flatbed, to cover the roof, where most distille
ry escapes were made. Several agents were already posted in back and around the building.

  Hedges climbed down from the cab of the truck and his feet scuffed at the cinders on the floor.

  "Let's find the basement," Ness said, and Hedges tagged along, an axe in his hands.

  The axe carved open the basement door, and the two men headed downstairs, into another massive open area.

  "Shit," Hedges said. "They've cleaned it out."

  It was cold down there; their breath was smoking.

  "Not quite," Ness said.

  The stills had been dismantled and moved out, but their shadows remained in the cement; there had been six of them, each around four feet in diameter. A major setup. Doing some quick math, Ness figured that when they were up and rolling, they were turning out two thousand gallons daily, minimum.

  A massive operation like this one could only have been pulled off with the collusion of Cleveland's celebratedly corrupt police force. Those sons of bitches made Chicago's bent cops look straight.

  "Look at this," he said to Hedges. The smaller man came over as Ness pointed up to a galvanized iron pipe, a flume containing several electric blower fans. "We need to find out where this leads."

  "There's a metal company next door," Hedges said. "Probably there."

  "Makes sense," Ness said. "Smoke from the boilers and fumes from this distilling room could be passed off as coming from the metal works."

  Ness prowled the basement further, discovered five workmen in the boiler room, all of them cowering near one of three massive boilers, several with tools in hand.

  "What is this?" one of them said, shrinking back.

  Ness laughed shortly, put his. 38 away. "A federal raid, but I wouldn't worry about it. You boys are dismantling these boilers, I take it?"

  "Yeah," the spokesman said. He was a beefy guy with five o'clock shadow and close-set dark eyes. "We're with Acme Boiler and Welding. We been working all week, dismantling these three steam-boilers."

  "Well, go on with your work," Ness said.

  Hedges bristled. "Christ on a crutch! Are you kidding? Let's take 'em in for questioning."

  "Dismantling a steam boiler is not a federal offense," Ness said. "Let's see what's going on upstairs."

  Hedges shook his head in disgust as the men resumed their work, and the sound of clanging metal followed the pair upstairs, where the other raiders had found nothing to speak of. No suspects, no alcohol, no nothing.

  A few minutes later, one of Ness' men did discover a six-inch water line that had been run across Sweeney Avenue to a railroad roundhouse, and connected with the city's water mains. Water for the operation of the distillery, then, had been heisted off the city of Cleveland. Probably with the complicity of city officials, Ness thought. Well, at least that goddamn Davis administration was past history now. Unfortunately, the city's tarnished coppers seemed to thrive no matter whose administration was in power.

  "I scratched my initials on one of those boilers," Hedges told Ness. The heavy set little agent had ducked back downstairs for a while,

  "Why did you do that?"

  "It'll turn up again, when they set this big still back up someplace else in town, and I'll be able to identify it."

  Ness shrugged. "Maybe."

  "What do you mean, 'maybe'?"

  "I think this operation may simply be shut down."

  "Bullshit! We didn't move fast enough on this, and they got wind of our raid, and they're moving it!"

  "Or maybe they're just out of business. Maybe they figure the risk isn't worth it."

  "Don't talk stupid."

  "It's over, Agent Hedges. Show's over. It's getting too late in the day to be a Prohibition agent-considering Prohibition's been over for, how many years now?"

  "The Mayfield Road boys ain't gettin' out of the alcohol business," Hedges insisted. "There's still dough in it."

  "You may be right," Ness said. He didn't want to argue the point.

  And to a degree, Ness knew, Hedges probably was right. The illegal product was cheaper than legal, what with federal and state taxes added on. Bootlegging would continue.

  But not like before. Not like Chicago. In both Chicago and more recently, in Cleveland, where the flow of liquor from Canada was the primary concern, there had been enough activity to keep the life of a "revenooer" lively. It had taken a long time after the advent of Repeal for a steady supply of good, legitimate liquor to reach the market, for the American liquor industry to gear back up and serve its public. The mob had been taking care of that public for a long time, and a transition period was to be expected.

  That transition period was over. These days the Cleveland boys-the Mayfield Road mob-were moving into gambling and numbers and union racketeering. Just like the Capone outfit back home. To Ness, the huge, empty warehouse on Sweeney Avenue, and the remnants of the mammoth distillery that haunted it, were symbols of an era's end. And proof that the job that had once done him proud was now a force. It just wasn't about anything anymore.

  He checked his watch. It was nearly four; he would have to get one of his raiders to give him a lift. He had a four-thirty meeting at City Hall with newly elected Mayor Burton, but he had no idea what it was about. Coordination between federal and local law enforcement perhaps.

  That would be a joke, considering the state of Cleveland's infamous police force. The boys in blue, not to mention the plainclothes dicks, had helped make Ness' job as a fed damn near impossible whenever he worked within Cleveland city limits. How he'd like a crack at those venal sons of bitches.

  Eliot Ness walked out into an afternoon that was turning into evening, though the difference was indiscernible. He tugged at his fedora, keeping his face out of the chill wind, not realizing that he had just raided his last still.

  CHAPTER 2

  On the northern edge of downtown Cleveland, a whisper away from Lake Erie, two buildings faced each other like granite reflections: the Courthouse and the City Hall. Between them was an expansive park, a continuation of the Mall, that 104-acre tract of land around which various public buildings gathered like pompous old men. The greenery was brown at the moment, except for the occasional fir, with patches of snow littering the expanse of lawn. On this afternoon the imposing structures were lost in the fog like everything and everybody else in the city; they were ghosts of the boom that had followed the Great War, fading stone memories of a Cleveland with a future.

  Harold Burton, mayor of Cleveland for just over a month, stood at a tall, wide window in an office that struck him as damn near decadent, and looked out at his gloomy city. He was not a naive man, and the gloom did get to him. But he felt nonetheless that the town could be turned around.

  Many years ago as a Harvard law student, he'd been inspired by what he'd read of Tom L. Johnson, the Mayor of Cleveland just after the turn of the century. Johnson was a man of money who waged war against the privileged class, a mayor whose four terms became the embodiment of progressive government in America. Young Harold Burton had decided Cleveland would be a fine place to establish a law practice, and besides, it was where his girlfriend Selma came from. A picture of Selma and their four children was on his desk nearby.

  He went to that desk but did not sit. From a plain wooden box amid many papers and between two telephones, Burton withdrew a big black Havana cigar. He lit it and puffed at it with some gusto. He never felt more the mayor than when he was puffing one of his big black cigars.

  Burton was just short of tall, a wedge-shaped, broad-browed man with short, prematurely white hair, a strong jaw and placid gray eyes above dark circles. He was forty-eight years old and looked every year of it. His brown suit was rumpled and the only natty thing about his apparel was the yellow-and-gold tie with the ruby stickpin (Selma's work).

  He felt ill at ease in the sprawling, lavish office with its high, ornately sculptured plaster ceiling. It was known as the Tapestry Room, after the five massive tapestries depicting the Indians of the Western Reserve in the wilderness days, d
raped here and there above the room's fancy oak paneling. His desk was nestled in the corner between a tall, wide, beige-draped window and a fire-place, its mantel covered with more pictures of Selma and the kids. One hundred thousand on relief, Burton thought, and I sit here like Nero fiddling. Only he wasn't sitting, nor was he fiddling. He was pacing, waiting for the man who could enable His Honor to carry out his top-priority campaign promise, if that man said yes to the job Burton planned to offer.

  Unfortunately, Burton felt the odds of this man's taking the job were slim. But goddammit, he had to try…

  Burton had been elected as a reform mayor-a Republican who had run as an independent, steamrolling over both parties' machines. Elected by the largest majority ever won by a mayoral candidate in Cleveland's one hundred years, Burton had a clear mandate. But the political waters where he had to swim remained muddy.

  The Republican mayor he replaced, Harry L. Davis, had used his two years to turn Cleveland into a wide-open town, with the loosest of standards at City Hall. Not only had crime increased, particularly gambling and vice, but the business of government had, through Davis' patronage tactics, gone all but bankrupt. Scrip was issued to meet city payrolls. Deficiency taxes were levied in order to have some cash on hand. Meanwhile, Davis spent much of his time out of town, and the newspapers, with which he'd feuded from the beginning, gleefully, and correctly, labeled him an absentee mayor.

  Burton had promised a return to efficiency in government; he had promised to bring a businesslike approach to City Hall.

  But he had promised more than that.

  He stalked the office, puffing the cigar, checking his watch. At four-thirty, he checked with his secretary.

  "When Ness arrives," he told her over the intercom, "send him right in."

  "Mr. Ness has been here for ten minutes, Your Honor."

  He didn't snap at the girl; he hadn't been in office long enough for his staff to learn to read his mind. He'd give them another week to do that.