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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
N. Rodgers: Surprise, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Surprise to you, Nia. How are you this morning?
N. Rodgers: I'm really good except that you and I had been all like, we're going to wrap up the season, and it's going to be all chill. Then the Supreme Court started doing stuff, and things are happening in the world and the lower courts are doing stuff. Now we're like, man.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We can't be quite done yet.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm also feeling untouchable this morning.
N. Rodgers: Yes. Well done you for a good reference. Listeners, we are adding another stories behind the names with Mr. Elliott Ness. Yes. I in my brain imagine as Kevin Cost because I've seen that movie. Sean Connery could not be better than he is in that movie. He's so good. But.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, for me.
N. Rodgers: I know that Elliott Ness probably didn't actually look like Kevin Costner.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm old enough, Nia, to remember. See, I have two different conceptions of Elliott Ness as a fictional character. One is Kevin Costner from the aforementioned movie. Directed by Brian DiPalma and co starring and he was very excellent in the movie, Sean Connery. The only movie that Sean Connery won an Oscar award for. Did you know that?
N. Rodgers: I didn't realize that.
J. Aughenbaugh: But my other conception is Robert Stack from the Black and White TV show. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Looks a little more like Elliott Ness.
J. Aughenbaugh: Elliott Ness.
N. Rodgers: Actually looked. Just come and tell us it's too pretty. Elliott Ness, he was okay, handsome, but he wasn't like movie star something like.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Kevin Costner of today looks more like the Elliott Ness in real life.
N. Rodgers: Is a little weathered a little. Anybody who doesn't know that Robert Stack was one of the great character actors of his time.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He was never going to be a matinee. No, but man, he could act like his run off. He was really good.
J. Aughenbaugh: So if listeners haven't picked up on it, this episode is devoted to Elliott Ness. He was an American prohibition agent, known for his efforts to bring down the infamous gangster Al Capone, while enforcing prohibition in Chicago. he led a team that became known as the Untouchables. These were hand picked federal agents who were known for their incorruptibility. The title Untouchables refers to his memoir, which was published a few months after his death. Yes.
N. Rodgers: In good news, I'm going to foreshadow something here. He was not correct.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: Because sometimes people get a reputation. I'm incorruptible, and then turns out they were wildly corrupted.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He was not. Psyche on that, he actually does turn out to be a pretty decent human. He's got his problems, and we'll talk about those, but corruptibility is not one of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Elliott Ness was born in the Roseland section neighborhood of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, 1903. He was the youngest of five children born to Peter Ness, and Emma King. Both of his parents were Norwegian immigrants. They operated a bakery and their son was the classic second generation success story because after attending high school, he graduated from the University of Chicago, which at that time and even today, but back then, the University of Chicago was one of the top 10 universities in the United States. He graduated with a dual degree in political science and business administration.
N. Rodgers: Chicago's known for its business school, isn't it? Back then in the day.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the first half of the 20th century, their political science department was one of the best in the country. Yes.
N. Rodgers: No slouch in college?
J. Aughenbaugh: No slouch.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't one of the honor societies?
J. Aughenbaugh: Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
N. Rodgers: He did well in school.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which quite obviously.
N. Rodgers: It's a difficult school.
J. Aughenbaugh: School. Neither or I were ever considered for membership.
N. Rodgers: An SAE? No. I think they might have chuckled if I had lied.
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't think they were going to be offering me a bid. But when he got out of college, he first worked as an investigator for a retail credit company in Atlanta, and he was assigned the Chicago territory. Basically, his job Nia, was to do background investigations for people applying for credit.
N. Rodgers: He starts investigation at the very beginning of his career.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Early 20s.
N. Rodgers: He's learning these investigative techniques.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: How to find hidden money, how to find hidden debt.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, hidden debt.
N. Rodgers: If he's looking at credit information, he's looking for hidden debt that people haven't declared.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because he wants to know whether they're a good bet to get.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: To get credit.
J. Aughenbaugh: For our younger listeners or listeners who haven't had much experience in trying to get credit, when you buy anything on credit, the company basically wants to know that you are a safe or good risk. One of the ways they determine that is, do you have experience with getting and paying off credit debt.
N. Rodgers: How much of it have you not paid off that you still owe?
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: What is your likely monthly payment? Because let us say, for example, that Aughie wants to buy a new car.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: He goes into the Lamborghini office and he says, I'm having a mid life crisis, and I'd like a Lamborghini, please, in candy apple red with a black interior. They say, sir, we would love to sell you a Lamborghini. We're going to need to run a credit check on you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They find out he's a college professor.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which I assure you does not pay well enough to get a Lamborghini.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: Because the payment on the Lamborghini is probably a couple thousand a month.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Easily.
N. Rodgers: If not more.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He'd have to pay the insurance and he'd have to pay all the things that go along with owning a car. The repair bill on a Lamborghini is terrifying.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They would look at him and they would go, Sir, directly across the street is the Kia dealership, where you might consider that you might be better suited. Because they have to look at your overall credit in order to figure out. If you, by the way, have borrowed a huge amount in student loans, that is going to affect whether you're going to be able to get a house note or whether you're going to be able to get a car note because $80,000, $90,000, $100,000 in student loans is considered quite a bit of debt.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He's doing that thing. He's that guy .
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. While he's doing this work, he takes a couple of graduate courses, one of which was a graduate course in criminology taught by the then widely noted, respected criminologist, August Vollmer, I just like saying his name, August Vollmer. Vollmer was the chief of the Berkeley Police Department and was noted for his ideas about professionalizing law enforcement. I want you to take up.
N. Rodgers: It's until this time, law enforcement is a very hit or miss as to whether somebody is going to be professional or not. Sometimes it's two guys you grab off the street, stick into a uniform and say walk around here and bust some heads and make sure people are nice to each other.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's what they do. They're just this side of being a thug.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Up to people who are professional and very detailed and very careful and everything else. There's a really wide range in law enforcement. One could argue that there is still a wide range in law enforcement in terms of professional abilities. But an argument for another day.
J. Aughenbaugh: At the time recall, listeners we did an episode about Olmstead, from the Infamous Supreme Court case. He was a cop, rose the ranks, but could not resist the temptations of bootlegging. This is the same time frame. Ness does this for a couple of years where he's running background checks for people asking for credit. His brother in law, Alexander Jamie, was an agent for the Bureau of Investigation, who influenced Ness to enter law enforcement. Ness joined the Treasury Department in 1926 and got assigned to the rather large Bureau of Prohibition in Chicago. The Bureau of Investigation is the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.
N. Rodgers: He's a Fed.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's a Fed. He's doing this for about three or four years when the US attorney for the Chicago Crime Commission, Frank Loch asked President Herbert Hoover to take down Al Capone. Al Capone was one of the leading, if not the leading gangster in Chicago.
N. Rodgers: Al Capone was violent.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: One of the things if you recall about Olmstead, was that he didn't hurt people when he was bootlegging. He made, in fact, he made a specific rule that his guys were not to carry guns. They were not to hurt people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Al Capone is the exact opposite of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He will hurt you for breathing funny.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We get the Valentine's massacre under Al Capone, we get all kinds of stuff under Al Capone. Al Capone is a violent, violent man. That's part of why they want him to be brought down. It's not just the money and the liquor. It's the violence.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Now, at the same time, the Bureau for Internal Revenue was also investigating Capone and his various associates for income tax evasion. The Attorney General in the Hoover administration, William Mitchell, decided to send a small team of prohibition agents to target illegal breweries and supply routes for Capone because they wanted to gather evidence to support charges per the Volstead Act. The official title is the National Prohibition Act. The Volstead Act was the law passed by Congress to implement prohibition. Basically, they were coming up with a two pronged investigation. One, they wanted as Nia just pointed out, listeners, they wanted Capone and his violence to end. But they also recognized if Capone was doing this amount of bootlegging. He wasn't.
N. Rodgers: He was clearly evading taxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's not reporting this on his income taxes.
N. Rodgers: Part of this is Capone had evaded a lot of charges by having other people go down for him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: There had been a lot of criminal invest Don't think that, by the way, that the cops were doing nothing, like, we didn't care about Al Capone. They cared, but they couldn't quite get him. He was very good at subordinates taking, he was early Mafia. He's the idea of, you don't get the done, you get the guy on the street. You get?
J. Aughenbaugh: The way most mob organizations quickly organized at the turn of the 20th century, was that you had layers in between the Don or the head of the criminal organization and those who actually were engaged in the daily criminal activities. You had layers. That way, if anybody got arrested in the language of law enforcement pinched, it would be impossible to go ahead and make those connections. The other thing is.
N. Rodgers: You could go up one level, maybe two, but you were never going to get.
J. Aughenbaugh: To the top. The other thing that always made it difficult to get Al Capone was that Capone and this is where we're going to bring this back to Elliott Ness folks. Capone, had bribed law enforcement in Chicago. He always.
N. Rodgers: He owns law enforcement.
J. Aughenbaugh: He always knew when the raids were going to occur.
J. Aughenbaugh: He would actually make strategic decisions. We will give them this.
N. Rodgers: This much and these number of guys so that they will leave the rest of us alone and we can go on and do our thing. Sacrificial lambs, as it were.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's why you needed a guy who was untouchable. It's why you need a guy like Elliott Ness, who is not going to be bought off.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. US Attorney George Johnson, who was the Chicago prosecutor who was trying to pull together with this case, chose then 27-year-old Elliott Ness to lead a small squad. Now, Ness claimed in his book that he came up with the idea of this incorruptible federal force and called it the Secret Six, because there was only six of them. The logic was, if we made the squad too big, this would lead to Capone being able to again-
N. Rodgers: Get one off.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The smaller the group, the more likely that they will keep each other on this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Does eventually grow, doesn't it, to 10?
J. Aughenbaugh: Ten.
N. Rodgers: But it stays small. That's a very small group of people to run an operation like what you're talking about, to try to bring down somebody as big as Al Capone.
J. Aughenbaugh: Starting in March of 1931, and within six months, Ness's agents had destroyed bootlegger operations worth an estimated half a million dollars. In today's money, that would be close to $10 million.
N. Rodgers: That's got to be annoying for Capone.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, in particular, it also led to an additional two million dollars in lost income to Capone, which really upset him.
N. Rodgers: Because that's like $40 million today. This is in six months.
J. Aughenbaugh: Six months.
N. Rodgers: Who's making $40 million in six months? Capone and Bezos are comparable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then the raids ultimately, according to scholars, cost Capone in excess of nine million dollars back then, which would be $178 million in today's money.
N. Rodgers: Great.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, the main source of information for the raids back to Olmstead, extensive wiretapping. As the untouchables are doing these raids and they're costing Capone, a whole bunch of money, a member of Capone's gang reached out to Ness and said to him, you will get $2,000 a week, which in today's money would be about $36,000 a week.
N. Rodgers: $36,000 a week.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. If he ignored the bootlegging activities. Ness refused the bribe.
N. Rodgers: That is $1,872,000 a year.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Holy cow. Ness is like, no, I'm good.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is what led to an opinion editorial writer, Charles Schwartz of the Chicago Daily News to begin to refer to Ness and his small unit as the untouchables.
N. Rodgers: I'll tell you, Aughie, that would be tough for me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: If somebody offered me $36,000 a week just to look the other way, I would have to sit with myself for quite a while before I could say no to that because that's a lot of money. That could have set Ness up for life, very different kind of life. But if your whole reputation is that you can't be bought, then the instant you're bought, you're done.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The US Attorney for Chicago indicted Capone for over 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act.
N. Rodgers: I love that. Here's your summons. Here's your summons. Here's your next summons. Here's your next summons. Five thousand of them would have to be delivered in a truck of some kind. I love it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. If it was in just one file, just imagine how large that file was.
N. Rodgers: This cabinet is Al Capone. Not this file. Not even this drawer, but this cabinet.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. It's one of those file cabinets that actually are arrayed across an entire back wall of an office.
N. Rodgers: On what I achieved.
J. Aughenbaugh: How many thugs are in that file cabinet? Just one. That's the Capone cabinet.
N. Rodgers: I can't even believe.
J. Aughenbaugh: The federal judge who got assigned the case actually prevented the indictment from coming to trial because he said that there were some questions about the wiretaps and some of the witnesses that were relied upon for the bulk of the 5,000 count indictment. However, he did let the income tax evasion case go to trial.
N. Rodgers: Do you think that the judge was bought off?
J. Aughenbaugh: In the reports that I read, there is some evidence, but they could never find any.
N. Rodgers: If you were going to offer Ness that, surely you'd offer the judge something comparable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But on October 31st, 1931, Nia, Capone was convicted, get this, on only three of 22 counts of income tax evasion.
N. Rodgers: He managed to get the jury to not believe.
J. Aughenbaugh: The other 19.
N. Rodgers: Nineteen counts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But he got sentenced to prison for 11 years. He lost appeals, and in 1932, Ness and a few other agents escorted him to Cook County Jail in Chicago, where then he was flown to the Atlanta federal penitentiary. This was, according to numerous accounts, the only time Ness and Al Capone met in person. It's the only time.
N. Rodgers: I think it's interesting that Al Capone served 11 years considering how much money he made and you know he didn't serve hard time. You know that he had all the luxuries. Because at the time, rich people in jail could get special food. They could get all kinds of special treatment. Which means, maybe that was just the cost of doing business for him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. You think about the number of lives that Capone either ended because of the violence associated with his organization.
N. Rodgers: Or destroyed because of alcohol.
J. Aughenbaugh: Alcohol. You're like, only 11 years, but that's what they got him on income tax evasion. Ness, parlays that success into being promoted the chief investigator for the Prohibition Bureau of Chicago. Near the end of prohibition, he is assigned as the alcohol tax agent, and by the way, this is a segue alert for an upcoming episode that we're going to do, to the Moonshine mountains of Southern Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Does that for a year, and then he gets transferred to Cleveland, Ohio. This is the next pivot point in Elliott Ness's career. In December of 1935, the mayor of Cleveland, Harold Burton, hires Ness as the city's safety director. This put him in charge of both the police and fire departments, and Ness, that crusader that he is, then set out to professionalize the police department. In particular, he was one of the first to go ahead and emphasize that if you allow small crimes to occur, then bigger crimes will become acceptable. It's what today is referred to as the Broken Windows philosophy.
N. Rodgers: If you allow kids to be juvenilely delinquent, they will grow into adults that are breaking and entering and doing all kinds of other things. You have to go after these sorts of lower level crimes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I do like that he declares war on the mob at this point in Cleveland. Not sure how much mob business there is in Cleveland, but there is at least some.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But unfortunately, for Ness, he was the director of public safety at the time, where there were a bunch of mob murders, known as the Cleveland Torso Murders. Though he had little oversight of the police department, it began to put a dent into his public image.
N. Rodgers: Because for three years, this goes on and he can't stop it.
J. Aughenbaugh: He can't stop it. Also at this time, Nia, he and his wife, Edna, divorced. He also did something really unfortunate. He ordered the city's large shanty town communities evacuated and then he had them burned. Because he said, the only way we're going to stop this is if we burn it to the ground and rebuild it.
N. Rodgers: Well, in the Cleveland Torso murders, if I recall correctly, it's somewhere around 12 or 14 victims. They all lived in poverty.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: There's some question as to whether it was mob or a serial killer. We don't know. But the idea was, if people don't live in poverty, then there won't be murders, so let's burn down these Shanty towns and force these folks to move on or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That logic, Nia, was the foundation of many urban area revitalization programs, which is the only way we're going to go ahead and get rid of this kind of crime; is if we go ahead and rebuild those neighborhoods so that people will want to go ahead and take ownership of them and not allow this kind of criminal behavior to exist, to become commonplace.
N. Rodgers: Which you're looking at is gentrification in the criminal aspect. But it doesn't work.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Because whoever's doing this killing is enjoying doing the killing or at least is something, so it doesn't manage to stop. But didn't he start to drink after his wife left? Is this about that time?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Basically, the late 1930s were not a good period of time for Elliott Ness, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. He gets divorced.
J. Aughenbaugh: He gets divorced, then you have the Torso.
N. Rodgers: His case gets marginalized because they think they can do better with tax evasion than they can with.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, that happened much earlier.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Think about the late 1930s. He's now working in Cleveland. He's the director of public safety, which covers-
N. Rodgers: The Torso Murders. He's at the Torso Murder point of things, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. He gets divorced, the Torso Murders are happening. Mind you, this is the downside of flying high publicly. Because he's the director of public safety.
N. Rodgers: Your personal life falls apart.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. But I'm also talking about the fact that in addition to his personal life falling apart, he's the director of public safety, but he's not actually running the police department on a daily basis.
N. Rodgers: He's not the chief of police, he's not the chief of fire, he's above them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But then, apparently, he also had a drinking problem, and one night he had a car accident, driving drunk. There were no victims because of the accident, but then he tried to cover up the accident.
N. Rodgers: He didn't want to be seen as publicly drinking and driving, but that, in fact, is what he was doing. Forgive me, 1938 cars are not precision stop on a dime automobiles. There's no way that the car can make up for his shortcomings as a driver.
J. Aughenbaugh: The following year, 1939, he gets remarried. He and his wife in '42 moved to DC where he begins to work for the federal government, and for our listeners, particularly our non-American listeners, Washington, DC is not a standalone city or state. He was directed to fight the battle against prostitution in communities regarding military bases.
N. Rodgers: Because VD is rampant at this time. VD is a venereal disease. Is a thing that military is fighting, and in '42, the military is fighting it because it's getting ready to build up to potentially being part of World War II.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That lasted for a couple of years. Then he went into the corporate world.
N. Rodgers: He's not really a corporate guy, is he?
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: He's not particularly successful, I would imagine, because he's been a public servant his whole life.
J. Aughenbaugh: His second marriage ended. He then had a third marriage. He moved back to Cleveland in 1947, tried to run for mayor in Cleveland. That was unsuccessful.
N. Rodgers: His life is in the toilet. It's just slowly circling the drain.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. He started taking odd jobs. At one point, he was a bookstore clerk. At another point, he was a wholesaler of electronic parts. Then he tried to run a wholesale business for frozen hamburger patties. Yes.
N. Rodgers: He's for businesses.
J. Aughenbaugh: He then had a startup company called the Guarantee Paper Corporation, where they tried to come up with a new method of watermarking legal and official documents to prevent counterfeiting. Then he was offered a job in law enforcement in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. He's now drinking all the time. He's spending more time in bars instead of the office.
N. Rodgers: Is he that guy in the bar that's at the end of the bar that's saying, when I was young I brought down Al Capone? Is he that guy?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Pretty much.
N. Rodgers: That's sad.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that is sad. In the latter part of his life, he and a co-author, Oscar Fraley began to write the book that eventually became The Untouchables, and he actually died of a heart attack at 54-years-old before the book actually even got published.
N. Rodgers: He's mostly penniless at this point?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. To a point where a fan of his actually donated a plot of land near a cemetery in Cleveland just so his remains, he was cremated, could be honored.
N. Rodgers: Wow. That's so sad.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is sad. But as we started off this episode, mentioning Nia, because of the book, the book actually sold 1.5 million copies.
N. Rodgers: If he had lived to see it, he would have gotten pretty decent royalties from it. Although, at that point, he's drinking so much, that would have just been more time in bars.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, he would have drank away the profits. Let's face it.
N. Rodgers: I imagine, though his last wife got something.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because he did get married a third time, and he was survived by his third wife, Elisabeth Andersen Seaver, and an adopted son, Robert.
N. Rodgers: Maybe they got something from the book?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Now, as we pointed out, almost immediately, the book became the foundation for a popular TV series, starring Robert Stack as Ness, and it was narrated by Walter Winchell. Yes. For all the years that I watched that, I was just like, wait a minute, that was Walter Winchell?
N. Rodgers: Wasn't he a famous reporter?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, he was, yes.
N. Rodgers: I thought that was the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, every time we do this series, you and I end up finding out something we didn't know.
N. Rodgers: This is what I found out from your notes?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, there was an infamous parody of The Untouchables in the Bugs Bunny cartoon called The Unmentionables where Bugs plays elegant mess.
N. Rodgers: The Unmentionables at that time, were underwear.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Anybody who thinks that the Bugs Bunny cartoons don't have layers, they should go back and watch them. Many layers for children and for adults. Because kids wouldn't have gotten why that was funny, but adults would have?
J. Aughenbaugh: Throwing some serious shade.
N. Rodgers: Then the 1987 film that I Love.
J. Aughenbaugh: Directed by Brian DiPalma and Robert DeNiro. We failed to mention this earlier on. Actually, he played Al Capone.
N. Rodgers: Plays the bad guy.
J. Aughenbaugh: DeNiro does what he often does for roles. He changes his body. He gained well over 55 pounds to take on the heft of Al Capone.
N. Rodgers: Al Capone is not a small man.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. Now, the other thing to note, and again, this is another thing I did not recognize. The main atrium of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives headquarters is named after Elliott Ness.
N. Rodgers: That's pretty cool. But he's still remembered respectfully and fondly by the groups that grew out of what he worked with.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, I perused easily Nia seven or eight biographies about Elliott Ness to do this particular podcast episode. Almost all of them said his book and the media portrayals of him overstate his role in fighting illegal alcohol sales during prohibition. But to a person, they all mentioned that the early part of his career, Elliott Ness was very responsible for professionalizing the FBI specifically in law enforcement generally in the United States. They all give him credit for that.
N. Rodgers: It wasn't as flashy. That's not as flashy, but that's a longer effect.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The flashy stuff is if you build in this level of you really should be as incorruptible as possible. You should strive for that professional demeanor and that professional way of it shouldn't be about how much you hate Al Capone. It's not about that.
J. Aughenbaugh: In fact, there's a law, there's evidence.
N. Rodgers: You build the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Methodically and specifically, so that you can hand the lawyers the best possible opportunity to convict. I'm sure you experienced this as a young man. Back in the day, when you go into the local pub or the local bar that was part of your town or the part of your town that you lived in, there was always one or two old guys who were living their glory days. They're, I was a quarterback in the high school football team and we won states, and they will tell those stories over and over, because in their minds, that's the pinnacle of their life achievement.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's like the story in Bruce Springsteen song Glory Days.
N. Rodgers: Glory Days.
J. Aughenbaugh: Born in the USA album, because the song starts with the narrator of the song leaving a bar, and coming into a bar with somebody he played high school baseball with. The guy immediately wants to go ahead and swap stories about their glory days as high school baseball players, and to your point, you frequently see this in small towns. I can tell you, well, I know this. When I went home for my grandmother's funeral a short time ago, I ran into some of the guys I went to high school with, and one night, we went out and had a couple of drinks, and all they kept on talking about was their glory days in high school. At one point, I went ahead and asked one of my high school friends, so what have you been doing since high school? I didn't mean to be a jerk about it, but I wanted to know what he had been doing in the subsequent decades afterwards. He really struggled with answering that question.
N. Rodgers: Well, if you're in a bar, would you rather tell the time you got Al Capone or the time that you professionalized your workforce?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Exactly.
N. Rodgers: You're going to tell Al Capone because it's more exciting for the listener. It's more interesting for you to tell. He didn't go around saying, I professionalized the FBI, even though that is his lasting.
J. Aughenbaugh: More long lasting part of his legacy.
N. Rodgers: Thanking his legacy.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's going to go ahead and say, I actually escorted him to the airport.
N. Rodgers: Then to prison. I helped bring down Al Capone. Not I made everybody better at doing their jobs. He's an interesting character. Thank you, Aughie. I think probably those stories get overblown because they are more exciting than the day to day work that gets done and that makes people's lives better because the people who are investigating them are more professional and are more likely to handle everything properly and appropriately.
J. Aughenbaugh: In many ways, Elliott Ness is the stereotypical American cautionary tale. We put people up on a pedal stool, and then we have this habit in the United States of wanting to take them down. After his early success.
N. Rodgers: He's in his late 20s when all that's going down.
J. Aughenbaugh: Where do you go from that?
N. Rodgers: The only place is down. The only way from here is down.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But I'm glad we did this episode because I found out a lot of stuff about one of the most important 20th century government officials, but also I felt sad about how the end of his life culminated. But anyways, thank you, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: I really enjoyed this episode.
N. Rodgers: Me too.