We all know the story of Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman whose Untouchables squad single-handedly took down Al Capone around 1930. Ever since, Ness has been a byword for straight-shooting probity — a man whose mother claimed that “he was so terribly good he never got a spanking,” and whom writer Daniel Stashower sums up as “a square-jawed hero who all but lassoed Capone from the back of a galloping horse.”
Too bad that’s mostly baloney, as Stashower shows us in his new book. Ness hogged a disproportionate share of the credit for collaring Capone, and behind the scenes he was a crude philanderer who even — gasp — drank during Prohibition. Arguably, the Capone gig wasn’t even Ness’s biggest case during his lifetime. That would be the Cleveland Torso Murders, one of the most brutal string of killings in American history — a case that nearly destroyed the Ness legend, not to mention the man himself.
The Cleveland killings are the subject of Stashower’s grisly book “American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper.” In 1934, beachcombers and schoolboys playing hooky started stumbling across mutilated bodies around the city. Several had been beheaded or behanded or had their genitals chopped off. Body parts turned up in dumps, cesspools, glens, even, disconcertingly, behind a butcher shop. Stashower showcases several such scenes in gripping detail, when innocent folks turned a corner and suddenly saw something they could never unsee.
The victims spanned pretty much every demographic category — Black, White, gay, straight, male, female — but all came from the lower strata of society: the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, supposed “perverts” and “deviants.” The lack of any connections among the victims forced the police to face the chilling possibility that the perpetrator, as Stashower writes, was “driven by some compulsive blood lust, a dark and unfathomable impulse toward murder for its own sake.”
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The detectives running the case were, to put it gently, incompetent. The best were dogged but dim, and got desperate enough to start harassing people in shantytowns and Hoovervilles, trying to bully them into confessions. The few times citizens came through with legitimate tips, the cops proceeded to pry open their private lives and arrest them on other charges, which prevented others from stepping forward. One poor suspect, a bricklayer, had six ribs broken during an interrogation and twice tried to hang himself in jail. He succeeded in killing himself a third time — possibly, Stashower hints, with help from the guards.
After the seventh headless body turned up, the city government brought Ness onto the case. He wasn’t the obvious choice: Despite his fame, he lacked practical detective skills and had other liabilities to boot. Ness was only in his 20s when he took on Capone in Chicago, and he found himself unemployed when Prohibition ended and high-profile law agencies (e.g., the FBI) shunned him as a glory-hog. He ended up getting hired as director of public safety in Cleveland, the bureaucrat in charge of the city’s police force. Some of Ness’s work in this role was admirable, like busting crooked precinct captains. Some was pathetic, like going after pinball parlors. But in September 1936, Ness was assigned to the Torso Killer case, to much local fanfare. Ness and the killer, in fact, were soon competing for headlines.
Seeking such publicity was, frankly, dumb of Ness. As Stashower explains: “The job of the Untouchables had been defined by a clear, highly visible target. Al Capone was the most famous man in the city at a time when Ness was entirely unknown, leaving the young agent free to move in the shadows. Now, the script had been flipped. Ness was the most famous man in the city, and his quarry [the killer] had the advantage of anonymity, able to strike seemingly at will.”
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Without spoiling too much, Ness did identify and interrogate a prime suspect despite this disadvantage, a sometime mental asylum patient who was the cousin of a local politician. In a classic cat-and-mouse game, he began sending Ness enigmatic postcards, tiptoeing around his misdeeds but never giving Ness anything to pin on him.
Ness did not react well to such frustration. It sounds strange to say in a book with so many gruesome bits, but in some ways the killings are a MacGuffin — the mere catalyst for the unraveling and downfall of the protagonist Ness. His drinking and philandering ramped up (he “screwed everything in a skirt,” one ex-wife complained). He also began pulling tasteless “jokes” like setting up dates between extremely tall women and extremely short men, just to laugh at them, or hiring people to shoot guns in nightclubs during staged scuffles, just to watch his friends sprint for the exits. Shockingly, the former Prohibition agent even got in a hit-and-run drunken-driving accident.
Most disgracefully, despite Ness being charged with cleaning up Cleveland’s police force, the Torso Killer case drove him to engage in the same shady tactics he’d been hired to root out. He once raided a homeless camp on the pretext of provoking confessions, then burned down the shanties when he didn’t get what he wanted. Some hero.
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I walked away from “American Demon” somewhat frustrated. That’s no knock on Stashower, who provides shrewd analysis and paints each scene with vivid, macabre details. You’ll sweat reading it. But don’t expect the tidy ending of a mystery novel. As in a classic noir detective story, we watch Ness fall apart, but there’s no redemption here. Sad to say, Ness peaked in his 20s, and Prohibition’s star G-man never recovered from the intoxicating effects of fame. He wasn’t untouchable after all.
Sam Keanis the author of five books, including “The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements.” His most recent book is “The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science.”
American Demon
Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper
By Daniel Stashower
Minotaur. 342 pp. $29.99
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