Eliot Ness by Douglas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

on an even keel around him, never too high or too low. Eliot learned early to hold back his feelings, to express himself only in reasonable tones. This could be stressful. While in grade school he began a lifelong habit of biting his fingernails, gnawing away whenever he faced a decision or a school exam.
    Eliot’s nervousness, his inclination to bottle up his feelings, no doubt made Albert Nabers attractive as a colleague and friend. Albert was loud. He was larger than life. Eliot viewed him as the brother he never had, one close to his own age and who shared his interests. (Eliot’s brother, Charles, was more than a decade older than him, his three sisters older still.) They might not have talked about it over dinner at the Ness home, but the two young federal agents relished their work. It was no moral crusade for them, as it had been for the dry movement’s founders; they weren’t concerned withthe rightness or wrongness of an after-work beer. But the call proved no less powerful. They had the sense they were doing something important. Neither man understood what exactly that something was—not yet, anyway—but for now, the objective was almost beside the point. What mattered was that
they
mattered.
    At least they thought they did, and working an undercover operation with Don Kooken surely helped that perception. After a few minutes of sipping their drinks and pretending to chitchat at the Cozy Corners, the agents looked up to find Giannini coming toward them, a big smile thumbtacked to his face.Kooken took charge of the conversation, and he impressed Eliot with the way he charmed the Italian with his “slow, quiet, Indiana drawl.” Soon enough, Giannini passed over $250. The four men clinked glasses, drank, laughed. The gangster seemed pleased with himself. He already had “things pretty well arranged with the police and Prohibition Department,” Giannini said, but he admitted this was a real coup.Eliot couldn’t help but swell with pride. “We, of course, were the Special Agents,” he would report.
    The dry agents left the saloon a bit tipsy and feeling good about themselves, but they knew this successful meeting was only the beginning. No one—certainly not Jamie—cared about nailing small fry like Johnny Giannini.The bureau wanted to build a conspiracy case, “which would include corrupt police, city officials, and perhaps Prohibition agents.” Which meant the three agents had to prove to the syndicate that they deserved to make
real
money, that they had ambition. A couple of nights after the bonhomie at the Cozy Corners, Kooken took Eliot and Albert on a tour of the Heights.Their chauffeur was Frank Basile, a smiley twenty-seven-year-old who had been a member of a “Kensington cooking gang” before getting busted on Volstead violations.Basile, who spoke fluent Italian, had turned government informer to stay out of jail, and now he worked for the Chicago Prohibition office for $5 a day and expenses. He and Eliot, both from Kensington and the same age, knew each other from the neighborhood. They quickly became close; Eliot considered him all but a fellow agent.
    Basile drove the men up and down the Heights’s outer streets, and it didn’t take long before first one and then another car fell in behind them. The next night, the dry agents slowly toured another part of town, and again two sedans mimicked their pace and their every turn. Both nights they ended up at the Cozy Corners for some drinks. It was a fine place to be—a haven for bootleggers from all over the region who used thesparkling new highway that cut through the small city. “They would leave their cars with the bartender, and the cars would be driven away by members of the Chicago Heights alcohol mob,” Eliot would relate later. “The drivers from out of town would stay at the bar, drinking, or avail themselves of what the brothel located on the second and third floors had to offer.”
    Eliot did not admit to availing himself of the