Director.
During the war, Eliot headed up the government’s efforts to control venereal disease on military bases; but he never held a law enforcement position again. He and Ev divorced in 1945. He married a third time, in 1946, and ran, unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in ’47, spending the rest of his life trying, without luck, to make it in the world of business, often playing on his reputation as a famed gangbuster.
In May, 1957, Eliot Ness collapsed in his kitchen shortly after he had arrived home from the liquor store, where he had bought a bottle of Scotch.
He died with less than a thousand dollars to his name-I kicked in several hundred bucks on the funeral, wishing his wife had taken out some damn burial insurance on him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case in the career of Eliot Ness.
SCREWBALL
Not long ago Miami Beach had been a sixteen-hundred-acre stretch of jungle sandbar thick with mangroves and scrub palmetto, inhabited by wild birds, mosquitoes and snakes. Less than thirty years later, the wilderness had given way to plush hotels, high-rent apartment houses and lavish homes, with manicured terraces and swimming pools, facing a beach littered brightly with cabanas and sun umbrellas.
That didn’t mean the place wasn’t still infested with snakes, birds and bugs-just that it was now the human variety.
It was May 22, 1941, and dead; winter season was mid-December through April, and the summer’s onslaught of tourists was a few weeks away. At the moment, the majority of restaurants and nightclubs in Miami Beach were shuttered, and the handful of the latter still doing business were the ones with gaming rooms. Even in off-season, gambling made it pay for a club to keep its doors open.
The glitzy showroom of Chez Clifton had been patterned on (though was about a third the size of) the Chez Paree back home in Chicago, with a similarly set up backroom gambling casino called (in both instances) the Gold Key Club. But where the Chez Paree was home to bigname stars and orchestras-Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Ted Lewis, Martha Raye-the Chez Clifton’s headliner was invariably its namesake: Pete Clifton.
A near ringer for Zeppo, the “normal” Marx Brother, Clifton was tall, dark and horsily handsome, his slicked-back, parted-at-the side hair as black as his tie and tux. He was at the microphone, leaning on it like a jokester Sinatra, the orchestra behind him, accompanying him occasionally on song parodies, the drummer providing the requisite rimshots, the boys laughing heartily at gags they’d heard over and over, prompting the audience.
Not that the audience needed help: the crowd thought Clifton was a scream. And, for a Thursday night, it was a good crowd, too.
“Hear about the gu that bought his wife a bicycle?” he asked innocently. “Now she’s peddling it all over town.”
They howled at that.
“Hear about the sleepy bride?…. She couldn’t stay away awake for a second.”
Laughter all around me, I was settled in at a table for two-by myself-listening to one dirty joke after another. Clifton had always worked blue, back when I knew him; he’d been the opening act at the Colony Club showroom on Rush Street-a mob joint fronted by Nicky Dean, a crony of Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti.
But tonight, every gag was filthy.
“Hear about the girl whose boyfriend didn’t have any furniture? She was floored.”
People were crying at this rapier wit. But not everybody liked it. The guy Clifton was fronting for, in particular.
“Nate,” Frank Nitti had said to me earlier that afternoon, “I need you to deliver a message to your old pal Pete Clifton.”
In the blue shade of an umbrella at a small white metal table, buttery sun reflecting off the shimmer of cool blue water, Nitti and I were sitting by the pool at Nitti’s Di Lido Island estate, his palatial digs looming around us, rambling white stucco buildings with green-tile roofs behind bougainvillea-covered walls.
Eyes a mystery behind sunglasses, Nitti wore a blue-and-red Hawaiian print shirt, white slacks and sandals, a surprisingly small figure, his handsome oval face flecked with occasional scars, his slicked back black hair touched with gray and immaculately trimmed. I was the one who looked like a gangster, in my brown suit and darker brown fedora, having just arrived from Chicago, Nitti’s driver picking me up at the railroad station.
“I wouldn’t call Clifton an ‘old pal,’ Mr. Nitti.”
“How many times I gotta tell ya, call me, ‘Frank’? After what we been through together?”
I didn’t like the thought of having been through anything “together” with Frank Nitti. But the truth was, fate and circumstance had on several key occasions brought Chicago’s most powerful gangster leader into the path of a certain lowly Loop private detective-though, I wasn’t as lowly as I used to be. The A-1 Agency had a suite of offices now, and I had two experienced ops and a pretty blonde secretary under me-or anyway, the ops were under me; the secretary wasn’t interested.
But when Frank Nitti asked the President of the A-1 to hop a train to Miami Beach and come visit, Nathan Heller hopped and visited-the blow softened by the three hundred dollar retainer check Nitti’s man Louis Campagna had delivered to my Van Buren Street office.
“I understand you two boys used to go out with showgirls and strippers, time to time,” Nitti said, lighting up a Cuban cigar smaller than a billy club.
“Clifton was a cocky, good-looking guy, and the toast of Rush Street. The girls liked him. I liked the spillover.”
Nitti nodded, waving out his match. “He’s still a good-looking guy. And he’s still cocky. Ever wonder how he managed to open up his own club?”
“Never bothered wondering. But I guess it is a little unusual.”
“Yeah. He ain’t famous. He ain’t on the radio.”
“Not with
Nitti blew a smoke ring; an eyebrow arched. “Oh, you remember that? How blue he works.”
I shrugged. “It was kind of a gimmick, Frank-clean-cut kid, looks like a matinee idol. Kind of a funny, startling contrast with his off-color material.”
“Well, that’s what I want you to talk to him about.”
“Afraid I don’t follow, Frank….”
“He’s workin’ too blue. Too goddamn fuckin’ filthy.”
I winced. Part of it was the sun reflecting off the surface of the pool; most of it was confusion. Why the hell did Frank Nitti give a damn if some two-bit comic was telling dirty jokes?
“That foulmouth is attracting the wrong kind of attention,” Nitti was saying. “The blue noses are gettin’ up in arms. Ministers are givin’ sermons, columnists are frownin’ in print. There’s this ‘Citizens Committee for Clean Entertainment.’ Puttin’ political pressure on. Jesus Christ! The place’ll get raided-shut down.”
I hadn’t been to Chez Clifton yet, though I assumed it was running gambling, wide-open, and was already on the cops’ no-raid list. But if anti-smut reformers made an issue out of Clifton’s immoral monologues, the boys in blue would
“What’s your interest in this, Frank?”
Nitti’s smile was mostly a sneer. “Clifton’s got a club ’cause he’s got a silent partner.”
“You mean…
It was understood that Nitti, Capone and other Chicago mobsters with homes in Miami Beach would not
