Eliot Ness occupies a heroic place in the popular imagination. With bravery, honesty, and blazing tommy guns, he single-handedly brought down Al Capone.
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In 1934, at the age of 30, Ness left Chicago after being assigned to the Treasury Department’s “alcohol tax unit” for southwestern Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, an area known as the “moonshine mountains.” A year later he was named the Director of Public Safety in Cleveland, where he exposed massive corruption and ties to organized crime in the police and fire departments. Ness ran for mayor of Cleveland in 1947 but was defeated by an almost two-to-one margin. Then came a remarkable decline. He lost his position as board chairman of the Diebold Safe & Lock Company and was forced to take a low-end sales job. Over the years he held down a variety of other jobs, including bookstore clerk and traveling salesman for a frozen-food company. Eventually he and his third wife settled in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, where he worked for a struggling start-up that had developed a method of watermarking checks for security purposes. He died of a heart attack in 1957 at age 54, deep in debt and a heavy drinker. His widow couldn’t afford to bury him, and his ashes were stored in a garage in northern Ohio for the next 40 years.
The publishers he approached were interested, he says, but with a catch. “My agent told me the major publishers insisted on greater drama. They wanted the raids on Capone’s breweries to be more exciting–maybe a little gunfire here or there.” Ness had never once fired his gun in the line of duty. “They also wanted the breakups of Eliot’s first two marriages to be more eventful–maybe a little infidelity and a fight or two thrown in for dramatic effect.”
Now Heimel would like to discard the myth. “Eliot deserves it,” he says. “He became famous for the wrong reasons. Today he’s thought of as a glory hound or a fabricator. But a series of significant accomplishments has been lost–Ness fought for the public good through police work, and he was very effective. In that sense, The Untouchables is a true story.”
