BULLET PROOF (Eliot Ness) Read online

  "What about the trashing of our union hall?" Selby demanded. "That was company thugs who did that!"

  "I'm investigating that. If Republic hired that done, we'll prosecute."

  "Why should we trust you?" Selby asked.

  "Because my men haven't shot anybody," Ness said. "And they are not going to. Or would you prefer I provide you with a few martyrs, Mr. Owens? I know Republic Steel would appreciate it if I would throw some lead around, and scare your people back to work."

  Burton winced at that, but said, "We are not here to take sides, gentlemen."

  "We're here to keep the peace," Ness added quickly. "Now what do you propose to do toward that end?"

  Owens shook his head side to side. "We're on strike. We don't expect it to be easy."

  "Then why are you wasting our time?" Ness snapped. "If you want a bloodbath, don't expect me to aid and abet you, and then take the rap for you, too. I won't play savior for you, and I won't play villain, either. If you want to avoid more violence, then limit the number of your pickets and don't physically try to stop nonstrikers from entering the plant."

  "Scabs," Ballin said bitterly.

  "Not necessarily," Burton said, gesturing with an open hand. "This morning I had a call from Walter L. Wonder, who is chairman of the Republic Employee's Association. . ."

  "Company union," Selby snorted.

  "... and he claims twenty-two hundred of the thirty-eight hundred employed at Corrigan-McKinney are not on strike."

  Owens laughed at that. "That's utterly fantastic. We have better than fifty percent of Corrigan-McKinney, and more joining us daily."

  "Then strike peacefully," Ness said, "and wait for the company to come around."

  "You want us to limit our pickets," Selby said, eyes burning. "Well, why don't you reduce your damn cops at the mill?"

  "The number of officers on duty," Ness said, "will reflect the need, as the emergency requires."

  "Why don't you present your grievances to the police," Burton suggested, gesturing gently, "instead of bucking them?"

  Owens rolled his eyes, stood; he sighed theatrically. Made a show of looking about the Tapestry Room, from ornate ceiling to plushly carpeted floor. Then he smiled a smile that had nothing to do with happiness and said, "We're not getting anywhere. It's clear where you stand. But I would think that even from this ivory tower you could get a view of what's going on down in the real world—on your City Hall sidewalk, for instance." He nodded to the other two men, said, "Boys," and together they stalked out, Owens in the lead.

  Burton and Ness sat in silence. The mayor sighed heavily, lit another Havana and said, "What about tonight?"

  Ness looked at his watch. "When the eleven P.M. shift goes on, that's when all hell will break loose."

  "What do you propose we do about it?"

  "I don't know what you're going to do about it," Ness said, rising, "but I'm going to be there to catch it."

  And he left the mayor there to ponder that, while he went to his office to get Albert Curry, Bob Chamberlin, and a gun.

  CHAPTER 2

  Detective Albert Curry, behind the wheel of the black Ford sedan with the special EN-1 license plate, didn't know what to make of the situation. Or, to be more exact, he didn't know what to make of the way his chief was behaving in this situation.

  Curry had great admiration for Ness, who had in little more than a year made enormous strides toward cleaning up Cleveland's almost impossibly corrupt police department. Not to mention the safety director's record prior to coming to Cleveland, a record in law enforcement second to few in the nation, second to none when you considered his age.

  A prohibition agent in Chicago, assigned to the Justice Department and later Treasury, Ness and his small, hand-picked squad—known in the press as the "untouchables," due to their resistance to bribes, threats, and politics—had been instrumental in strangling the Chicago mob financially. Raiding breweries, confiscating beer trucks, seizing records, Ness and his crew earned much of the credit for sending crime kingpin Al Capone on his long ride up the river. This was followed by Ness's war against moonshiners in the mountains (and mobsters in the cities) of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, which proved similarly successful and publicity-making, landing Ness the choice but precarious job of Cleveland's safety director.

  Beyond this, Curry knew, Ness was at the forefront of modern thinking in police science and criminology, having trained at the University of Chicago under August Vollmer. With half a dozen successful crooked-cop prosecutions behind him, Ness was effecting his plan to update the force, switching over from foot patrol to patrol cars, reorganizing the traffic bureau, instituting a juvenile delinquency unit and much else.

  But what impressed Curry most about Ness was not his forward thinking or administrative skills, but the tendency of the youthful safety director to get out from behind his desk and direct investigations personally. Curry was well aware that a certain amount of Ness's detective work and "derring-do" reflected the mayor's need for the former T-man to create favorable publicity—which was why the badly factionalized city council had managed to get behind this administration, where Ness's police and fire departments were concerned.

  Curry knew, too, that Ness got restless when tied down to his office that he thrived on being out in the field. It was said that Eliot Ness took no greater pleasure out of life than when he was kicking down a door and conducting a raid.

  So it was no surprise to Curry to find himself driving Ness to the front lines of the volatile Republic Steel strike. What surprised Curry was seeing his chief strap on a shoulder-holstered revolver, back at Ness's City Hall office.

  Despite the somewhat deserved reputation Ness had for embracing danger, Curry knew that Ness rarely ever carried a gun. "They won't be so quick to shoot at you," he had explained, "if they know you can't shoot back." And resorting to the use of a gun to resolve a situation meant failure to born-diplomat Ness.

  Yet tonight Eliot Ness was carrying a gun into a situation. Odd, Curry thought; particularly considering the strict "no firearms" orders the police detail at Corrigan-McKinney was saddled with.

  But Curry said nothing about it to Ness, who had his fedora in his lap and rode leaning against the window, gazing out almost dreamily at the blush of red against the sky that was the signature of the steel mills.

  "On summer nights," Ness said, "we used to sit out on the porch and drink beer and watch the sky turn orange."

  "Sir?"

  Ness smiled gently without looking at Curry. "South Side of Chicago, where I grew up," he explained. "Roseland was my neighborhood... so close to the mills that if you faced east, you'd see an incredible glow on the sky . . . especially if they were opening the steel furnaces to clean out the coke."

  Curry had never heard Ness talk about Chicago, not even the Capone days, let alone anything about growing up.

  "Worked in the Pullman plant," he continued, "when I got out of high school. Dipping radiators. Hard work. I don t envy these men their lives."

  "The question is," Bob Chamberlin said from the backseat, "do you begrudge them a pay raise?"

  Ness stared out the window. Enough time had elapsed to make Curry think there would be no response to Chamberlin's question when Ness said quietly, "That's not my decision." Then a beat later: "I wish it were."

  Curry understood his chief's sympathies for the strikers, if not the contradiction of the gun under Ness's arm. Curry came from a working-class neighborhood himself, on Cleveland's far east side. His father—a skilled cabinetmaker sixty years of age—had been laid off two years ago by the furniture company that employed him for twenty-eight years. Curry, and his brother John, who also had a job with the city, were covering their parents' mortgage payments; his father—a life-long Republican who'd always had a hardheaded you-get-what-you-earn/you-get-out-of-life-what-you-put-into-it philosophy—was accepting fifteen dollars a month from the county relief office.

  The Depression was, to Curry, some awful, arbitrary f
orce of nature, a disaster not unlike a tornado or flood or earthquake, leaving misery and hardship in its path. Survival had become the first order of business, finding and keeping a job the top priority.

  Curry felt lucky to have a job—he'd worked hard to get where he was with the department, but he knew he was mostly lucky. As a traffic cop he'd pulled several people, including a small child, from a burning car; Ness's predecessor in the safety director's chair had very badly needed a "brave, honest officer" (as the papers had embarrassingly put it) as a positive example. So Albert Curry was promoted to detective—youngest in the city—without having to buy his badge, a rarity at the time.

  If he questioned the wisdom of those with jobs going out on strike, in hard times, for better pay and working conditions, he understood their mistrust of company owners. At General Motors in Flint, Michigan, tycoons making half a million dollars a year had paid twenty cents an hour to the men on the line until, last year, sit-down strikes forced GM's surrender. With FDR back in the White House, sympathetic to the union cause, now was the time (some said) for the working man to take a stand. A wave of strikes had followed GM's capitulation, and what was happening at Corrigan-McKinney was part of that.

  Not long ago United States Steel, in order to avoid being struck, handed its workers a ten-percent wage in-crease, a forty-hour week, and union recognition. So-called "Little Steel," however, the independent steel mills of which Republic was one, wasn't about to give up so easily.

  Curry was pleased with the even-handed manner in which his chief had responded to the strike thus far— frustrating as it might be to the men on the line, Ness's no-firearms decision was, in Curry's opinion, correct.

  So why the gun in the shoulder holster?

  His mouth dry, Curry clutched the wheel, hoping he could do his job without compromising his sympathies for the strikers. Sympathies he dared not express out loud. . .

  Just after dark, when the crowds had abandoned the City Hall sidewalk for home and/or the plant picket line, Curry had driven Ness over to the Central Police Station at Twenty-first and Payne, where Ness had arranged to have a newsreel sent over by the Hearst people.

  Ness used a large conference room on the second floor to screen the newsreel for one hundred uniformed police, most of whom had already worked a shift today, but who at nine o'clock tonight would be replacing the detail that was working the Corrigan-McKinney gate now. Also present, at Ness's pointed request, was Chief Matowitz.

  There were stirrings among the men, who were of course less than pleased by the no-firearms directive, and when Ness stood before the assemblage, he said, "I over-heard a man saying that this was one hell of a time to be showing a training film. Well, gentlemen... this is one hell of a training film."

  He nodded to Chamberlin, in back, who was manning the projector, and to Curry, who dimmed the lights, having not the slightest damn idea what this was about.

  "Something happened on a field in South Chicago not long ago," Ness said quietly. "Not far from where I grew up."

  And now Curry knew what Ness was up to; so did a good many of the cops in the room, but none could be prepared for the scenes that followed.

  At first there was no sound other than the whirring of the sprocketed film, but then as images began to fill the screen, so did sound fill the room. It was raw footage, without any reporter doing voice-over; but no voice-over was needed.

  In the midst of an open field, a parade of strikers and sympathizers—men, women, and children—encounter a wall of police; heated words are exchanged by one of the cops and the spokesman of the marchers. Suddenly the sound of gunfire rips the afternoon, and a dozen men in the front ranks of the strikers are cut down like weeds. Revolvers in hand, the police charge into the strikers; tear-gas grenades sail into the crowd, nightsticks fly.

  Most of the crowd flees; a few strikers who lag behind are beaten senseless by police, sometimes two or three cops working over one striker, the manner of these public servants chillingly businesslike. A girl, not more than five feet tall, weighing perhaps one hundred pounds, is clubbed from behind by a nightstick. She staggers until thoughtful police jostle her into a paddy wagon, blood streaking her face like grotesquely smeared makeup.

  For six minutes a symphony of swinging nightsticks, blasting revolvers, bleeding strikers, is played out, until, finally, the newsreel runs its course and the film flaps in the projector, like the wagging tail of a dog, anxious to please.

  When the lights came up, Ness stood before them expressionless, the room bathed in silence.

  "Ten strikers killed," Ness said finally. "By cops. No dead women or children thank God, but as many people—women and children among them—as are present here were hospitalized for injuries . . . including twenty-three policemen."

  No one in the room needed to be told that the newsreel's strike had occurred at a Republic Steel mill.

  "And that, gentlemen," Ness said, with hard eyes and a humorless smile, "explains why you're going on duty unarmed, tonight."

  A hand was raised midway back.

  Ness nodded, and the cop, a young one, stood, saying, "Sir—surely you expect us to defend ourselves."

  "You will have nightsticks, and some of you will have tear gas. Use these sparingly, if at all. The only weapon in your arsenal I want you to use unsparingly is good judgment."

  They had filed out soberly. Matowitz waited and said something to Ness—something conciliatory, apparently, as it was followed by the two men shaking hands and ex-changing warm if weary smiles.

  Ness, Chamberlin, and Curry had left the police station around ten; Curry suggested to his chief that he take another car, rather than the easily recognized EN-1 sedan, but Ness said being noticed was part of the exercise.

  Curry caught Broadway just south of the Central Station, trading the bustle and neon glow of the downtown for the desolate gloom of the industrial Flats, the bottomland area that was home to the twisting Cuyahoga River as well as steel mills, warehouses, and factories. For several blocks Broadway traced the edge of the bluff overlooking the Flats; then, suddenly, the street took a sharp right and dropped straight down, as if a trapdoor under the city had given way.

  Soon they were driving through an ill-lit area of small factories and warehouses; and after Broadway—a well-paved, well-maintained street—bottomed out, the side street Dille, not so well-paved or maintained, cut away.

  "Park along here," Ness said while they were still on Broadway, the smokestacks of the steel mill well in sight, smudging the black sky with gray smoke; a block or so down was the Dille intersection. At least several hundred strikers were gathered at the intersection, in the minimal glow of two lamp posts, blocking the way, banners and placards and flags in hand; cars were parked along Broadway, but not many. Most of these people had been brought in by truck or bus; others came on foot.

  Ness, his natty brown suit looking freshly pressed despite the long day its wearer had put in, got out of the sedan and stood, keeping watch. Curry and Chamberlin got out as well; the sound of the strikers milling about was constant, like restless waves crashing up onto a beach, and screeches and crashes and metallic whines—like calls from strange birds circling that beach—drifted from the crippled but still functioning steel mill.

  The mill was in a pocket of the Flats; to one side was the bluff, while on the other, the rocky, debris-strewn landscape was shared by train tracks and the winding, oily Cuyahoga and rotting, half-collapsed docks. An acrid, sooty smell mingled with the Cuyahoga's sickly bouquet. This was a clear if dark night made foggy by the mill's towering smokestacks.

  Around a quarter till eleven, close to shift change, cars and several buses bearing nonstrikers began to make their way down Broadway to the turnoff; Ness stood out in the street a block and a half away, watching the activity, as the rumble of strikers' discontent rose into a roar, shouts and curses hurled like bricks at the vehicles.

  But no literal bricks, Curry noted.

  And the vehicles, though moving l
ike a child through wet sand, did make it through the clogged intersection. The protesters made their point, but did not completely block passage.

  Relief etched a thin smile on Ness's lips; and Curry traded Chamberlin a raised eyebrow for a shrug. Perhaps this was as ugly as it would get tonight. Perhaps the worst was over. Eight in the hospital was bad enough, but it was hardly ten dead and one hundred hospitalized, the aftermath of that recent afternoon in a field in South Chicago.

  Then the steam whistle blew for shift change, as loud and piercing as Gabriel's horn, and just as unsettling, only it wasn't heralding good news: When it let up, there was a momentary silence followed by angry shouts, followed just as quickly by overlapping screams of pain, of fear.

  A lot of them.

  Ness jumped behind the wheel of the sedan and Chamberlin and Curry hopped in, all three men squeezing in front like Oakies in a pickup truck.

  Chamberlin grinned nervously at Ness as they approached the intersection where panic had turned the gathered strikers into a mob, and said, "Are you still convinced announcing ourselves with your goddamned license plate is a swell idea?"

  A brick bounced off the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass.

  "Wonder what Capone did with his car," Ness said with a remote smile, the sedan crawling steadily through the human blockade, an ever-changing array of angry faces passing before them through the webbed glass.

  "Capone?" Curry asked, surprised he could get the word out from around the heart stuck in his throat.

  "Bulletproof glass an inch thick," Ness said, hunkering over the wheel. "Armor-plated Cadillac. Don't think the city would spring for the thirty grand, though."

  The road cut sharply to the right, across the front of the looming mill, the landscape opening onto a virtual battlefield. Night near the well-lighted, smoky plant was like a murky day. At first it looked like strikers were fighting each other; cops were circulating, as best they could, attempting to break up fist fights, pulling people off of each other. The bluecoats were not, Curry was relieved to see (at least judging by what he could see), taking part in the melee. Bricks were flying, billy clubs slashing, fists punching, even gun butts swinging, but cops weren't doing it. Two mounted officers were so boxed in by the throng, it was all the men could do to keep their wildly neighing horses from rearing up, let alone exercise any sort of crowd control.