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“What did you say to Ness about giving him money for protection?” Malsie asked.

“I told him that I would take care of him,” Nowicki said. “He shook his head and didn’t answer.”

In Nowicki’s account, Ness speaks carefully. He never asks for or takes any money. It may be that he had no intention of protecting the still, but he certainly leaves the impression he’s on board. And there is no record of his reporting the approach. If Nowicki’s story is true, then Ness, who made sure all of Chicago knew he turned away the Capone gang’s bribes, was less righteous when a political connection asked for an illegal favor.

The exact consequences of Nowicki’s account are impossible to establish. A supervisor questioned Ness about it, but his answers—along with any other documents from 1930 to 1933—are missing from his file at the National Personnel Records Center. (Many famous employees’ files were stripped by souvenir hunters or rogue researchers decades ago, an archivist told me.) Nor are they in the FBI’s Ness file or Nowicki’s case file. Malsie believed Lewis’ aide was fired, according to the FBI file. But court records contain no indication that anyone

was indicted or tried in the matter.

A month after the raid on Kulak’s still, Ness was transferred to Cincinnati. That could have been a routine reshuffling as the Prohibition Bureau shrank—or it could have been exile for a tainted agent.

That fall, the FBI file shows, Malsie relayed word of his interrogation and a report of Ness’ overheard phone call to the Division of Investigation, where the information quickly landed on Melvin Purvis’ desk. Soon Ness’ chances with Hoover were gone.

The rejection may have been a blessing in disguise. In 1934, Melvin Purvis led the law-enforcement teams that gunned down John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. Suddenly he was the most famous G-man in the country, so famous that some missteps in the hunt for Dillinger—spotty surveillance, bumbling informants—were overlooked. Hoover never forgave him for outshining the bureau. Over the next few months, he pulled his former favorite SAC off prominent investigations, assigned him to interview job applicants and sent him to staff an outdoor firing range in midwinter. When Chicago Times editor Louis Ruppel called the FBI to pass on a rumor that Purvis had gotten drunk at a party and brandished a gun, Hoover demanded an explanation from his agent. (“An unmitigated and unadulterated lie,” Purvis said.) In July 1935, he quit the bureau and traded on his fame to become a pitchman for Gillette razors and Dodge cars. Despite Hoover’s attempts to scuttle his career, Purvis also served with an Army war-crimes office during World War II and served as counsel to two U.S. Senate committees.

Ness, meanwhile, found his escape in Cleveland, where he was transferred by the Prohibition Bureau, renamed the Alcohol Tax Unit. The nation’s sixth-largest city was a correspondingly large den of vice—bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, union-led extortion rackets, all protected by paid-off police. Ness spent most of 1935 theatrically busting untaxed stills and caught the eye of Harold Burton, who became known as Cleveland’s “Boy Scout mayor” for his personal rectitude and opposition to organized crime. That December, Burton shocked Clevelanders by making Ness his public-safety director. The new head of the police and fire departments was only 33.

“Racketeering here is rampant,” Ness wrote to Vollmer, his former professor, after he started his new job. “Almost every business association in the city is paying some sort of tribute to a well-organized Sicilian gang here.” He asked for advice on modernizing Cleveland’s police force; Vollmer sent materials prepared for a new police academy started by the FBI.

In early 1936 Hoover warned his special agent in charge in Cleveland that Ness “was not very cordially disposed to the bureau” during his Chicago years (though the FBI’s Ness file contains no evidence to suggest that). But while the director was wary of Ness, he detested the Cleveland police: He believed a Cleveland cop’s tip had allowed the kidnapper Alvin Karpis, who was Public Enemy No. 1, to escape arrest.

In a contentious Senate budget hearing that April, Hoover was forced to make the humiliating admission that he had never personally arrested anyone. On May 1, after FBI agents found Karpis in New Orleans, the director flew down from Washington to join in on the collar, putting his name in headlines nationwide. A few days later, he went to Ohio and nabbed a Karpis crony in Toledo, then vowed to hunt down any locals who had harbored the Karpis gang, including police.

Ness promptly wrote him a letter offering to fire any Cleveland cop against whom the bureau had evidence. Hoover sent an FBI inspector to give Ness his regards. Ness said “he was a great admirer of you and the Bureau,” the inspector reported back to Hoover. “He and his department were ready and anxious to cooperate with you and the Bureau in every way possible.” When Ness visited Hoover a month later in Washington, the director agreed to admit a Cleveland police recruit to the FBI academy. It was the last favor he ever did Ness.

Over the next three years, Ness unmasked mob figures, crooked cops and union racketeers while modernizing Cleveland’s police, drawing national notice for instituting more rigorous training, merit-based promotions and two-way radios in police cars. Many Clevelanders saw him as a potential mayor. The FBI’s special agent in charge in Cleveland described him as “a very good friend of the bureau.”

In return, Hoover put him on a list of people who were not to be given FBI literature at a police chiefs convention.

Ness, separated from his wife in 1938, became known for drinking and dancing late into the night at downtown bars and clubs, but in the fall of 1939 he remarried; his new wife, Evaline, was a 28-year-old illustrator with a slim face and light, pretty eyes. Mayor Burton was re-elected, giving Ness a measure of job security just as his winning streak was fading. A serial killer nicknamed the Torso Murderer was still on the loose after slaying a dozen Clevelanders. A strike at the Fisher Body plant had degenerated into a riot. A couple of mobsters escaped arrest after a crooked police lieutenant tipped them off.

And Hoover was about to sandbag Ness over plans to protect Cleveland in wartime.

After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked police and sheriffs across the country to give the FBI any information they obtained about “espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, subversive activities and violations of the neutrality laws.” Hoover responded by reviving his radical-hunting General Intelligence Division, dormant since 1924.

At the same time, a confidential presidential directive authorized naval intelligence to investigate potential sabotage and espionage. Working with a reserve lieutenant with the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ness quietly convened a meeting of Cleveland industrialists. He told them he wanted to create a spy network in their factories, and he asked them to fund it through a sort of dues system. An FBI file on the network, also obtained through a FOIA request, notes that one of his investigators told a plant supervisor that the benefits of membership included “the good will of the Cleveland Police Department and police protection in the event of labor troubles.”

Ness briefed the FBI’s special agent in charge in Cleveland—who sent an alarmed letter to Washington. Hoover was appalled, by both the potential for interference and the appearance of extortion. “It looks more and more like either a labor-baiting move or a promotion racket—with a $50,000 budget,” he wrote in his spiky cursive across a memo in the file.

Rumors of Ness’ effort reached Cleveland’s labor leaders. Mistakenly believing the FBI was involved, they demanded an explanation from Attorney General Frank Murphy. Hoover immediately sent Murphy a memo saying Ness’ plan was “most repugnant to the bureau.” Someone—either in the bureau or in Murphy’s office—showed the memo to Cleveland CIO leader A.E. Stevenson, who went public with it.

“Mr. Hoover’s description of the plan was that it was ‘very repugnant’ to him,” Stevenson told the Cleveland Press, “a remark that hardly coincides with Mr. Ness’ declarations in the daily papers that he is working in close co-operation with the Federal Government.” (Ness did say that, but he was referring to the Office of Naval Intelligence.) Stevenson called for Burton to fire Ness. Burton declined, and Cleveland newspaper editors, who had attended the meetings about the spying plan, rose to Ness’ defense in editorials.

Blindsided, Ness called FBI headquarters and asked to talk to Hoover directly. Hoover refused to take his call.

“I’m in charge of the city,” Ness told the FBI’s special agent in charge in Cleveland, according to an FBI memo, “and I’m worried about [someone] blowing up the downtown section or blowing up some Standard Oil tanks, which are all along the river....If anything happens, I’ll collect the blame.”

Ness traveled to Washington and asked one of Hoover’s assistants why the FBI had disclosed confidential information about his work.

“I told Eliot Ness that the FBI had never shown anything to Stevenson,” the assistant wrote in a memo to Hoover. “He...wondered why the information concerning the Director’s attitude had been made available to an individual other than him....I informed Mr. Ness that he in effect was asking the Director to engage in a political controversy.”