The Untouchables

History Through Film

Mr. Clark

Capone • By late 1928, Al “Scarface” Capone was one of the most flamboyant and successful criminals in the country.

The Law• The newly-

elected President Hoover was determined to end the career of Al Capone.

President Hoover

The Law• Hoover charged

Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, with putting an end to the Capone Mob.

Secretary of Treasury Mellon

Crime• The federal

government had two areas to attack Capone: income tax evasion and violations of the Volstead Act which enforced Prohibition.

Crime

• Capone had not filed an income tax return for years.

Capone • the Sullivan decision: a criminal could not claim that income from illegal activities was exempt from income taxes on the grounds that reporting the illegal income was self-incriminating.

Capone• IRS began building

their case against Capone by proving that Scarface’s net worth and net expenditures were more than his income in the years in which Capone had not filed any income tax statements.

The Law • U.S. District Attorney George E. Johnson had the job of closing down Capone’s enormous bootlegging operations and prosecuting him for thousands of Volstead infractions.

•Ness was one of the very few agents who earned a reputation for honesty.

Eliot Ness

•Ness given the task of assembling and leading the team to go after Capone’s breweries and hard liquor operations.

Eliot Ness

•Ness always a man of very strong ideals; committed to seeing Capone and all crooked cops and officials who helped Capone go to jail.

Eliot Ness

Liquor • Scarface had at least 20 breweries in operation. Each brewery put out about 100 barrels of beer a day.

• weekly sales volume in excess of a million and a half dollars

Initially Ness selected about 50 men, narrowed down to just 9:

1. Marty Lahart: an Irish sports and fitness enthusiast

2. Sam Seager: a tough, once been a Sing Sing death row guard

3. Barney Cloonan: a giant muscular, black-haired Irishman

4. Lyle Chapman: a brilliant problem solver and investigator;

ex- Colgate University football player

5. Tom Friel: a former state trooper from Pennsylvania

6. Joe Leeson: a legend when it came to tailing someone in a car

7. Paul Robsky: a short, telephone expertise, extraordinary courage

8. Mike King: special talent for absorbing and analyzing facts

9. Bill Gardner: Indian; an enormous ex-pro football player

In its first six months of operation, Ness had closed down some 19 distilleries and key breweries, worth an estimated $1,000,000.

Capone• Capone smart

enough to understand that killing off these federal agents could bring him more trouble

Capone• Scarface fully

believed that every man had his price, so his next move was to have one of his men offer Ness $2,000 a week.

• Avg. agent makes $2800 a year

Ness explained why it was so important that he and his men could not be bought: "Possibly it wasn’t too important for the world to know that we couldn’t be bought, but I did want Al Capone and every gangster in the city to realize that there were still a few law enforcement agents who couldn’t be swerved from their duty.”

The story was carried by newspapers all over the country, one of which coined the name

"The Untouchables” for Ness’ group.

Capone

• Capone had just been put in jail May 16, 1929, for carrying a pistol in Miami.

Capone

• For almost a year, his brother Ralph would carry out Scarface’s orders from prison.

Ness narrowly escaped death several times

1. Hit and run

2. Dynamite under hood

3. Drive by shooting

4. Break-in

TragedyFrank Basile, Ness’s friend and sometime assistant,

was found brutally murdered. Ness’s reaction gives some insight into his character: "Lying there was a lifeless husk which had been Frank Basile! I had expected it, I suppose, and in the course of my career I had often witnessed the ravages of violent death. You think, eventually, that nothing can disturb you and that your nerves are impregnable. Yet, looking down at that familiar face, I realized that death is something to which we never become calloused."

• On June 5, 1931, the grand jury met again and returned an indictment against Capone with twenty-two counts of tax evasion totaling over $200,000.

• A week later, a third indictment was returned on the evidence provided by Ness and his team.

• Capone and 68 members of his gang were charged with some 5,000 separate violations of the Volstead Act, some of them going back to 1922.

• Capone was facing a possible 34 years in jail if the government completely won its case.

• Late Saturday night, October 17, 1931, the jury completed its deliberation and found Capone guilty of some counts, but not all counts of tax evasion.

Judgment

• Judge Wilkerson sentenced Capone for eleven years, $50,000 in fines and court costs of another $30,000. Bail was denied

Alcatraz Prison

Alcatraz Prison

The End • The work of "The Untouchables" was done and Eliot Ness got a promotion out of it.

• He was made Chief Investigator of Prohibition Forces for the entire Chicago division.

• Al Capone, already infected with syphilis, deteriorated mentally and physically.

• As he neared the end of his prison term, the most powerful criminal in America had been reduced to a near vegetable.