Max Collins - True Detective

He said, “See if you can’t get out Cincinnati way, one of these days.”

“Will do. Your folks are here. I imagine you’ll be getting back now and then.”

“I imagine.”

“Was it worth it, Eliot?”

“What?”

“Fighting the good fight. Putting Capone away. All that.”

“Putting Capone away was satisfying. Trouble is, nobody’s doing a damn thing about Nitti. The FBI’s busy running after outlaws like Dillinger, because the public sees what the likes of that breed does.”

“Then you figure Melvin Purvis’ll take care of Chicago while you’re gone.”

“That jerk! That pip-squeak doesn’t know his dick from a doughnut.”

Then Eliot realized I was baiting him and we both sat grinning at each other.

He said, “I stopped in downstairs and Barney wasn’t around.”

“He’s at his training camp in the Catskills. Canzoneri rematch is coming up in a few weeks.”

“Speaking of rematches, I wish I could be around to see the Lang trial.”

That was coming up in a few weeks, too.

“Won’t be much to it,” I said. “I don’t imagine much’ll come of it other than Lang and Miller getting good and kicked out of the department.” Both were on suspension at the moment.

“Well, just the same, I’d like to be there. Have you heard from Mary Ann lately?”

“She dropped me a card last week. She’s up for a part in a picture.”

“Hollywood must agree with her.”

“It’s the place for her.”

“I kind of... thought you were serious about her.”

“I was.”

“You doin’ okay, Nate?”

“I’m getting there.”

“You want to take a break? Those reports can wait, can’t they?”

“Got something in mind?”

Eliot stood. “Yeah. Let’s go downstairs. I want to buy you a drink.”

I saw Eliot only occasionally after that; but I kept track of him, and most of the others.

Eliot spent two years chasing moonshiners in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio; later he became public safety director of Cleveland, Ohio — at thirty-two, the youngest in the city’s history. During World War Two, he was the director of social protection for the Federal Security Agency — a fancy title meaning he was charged with combating venereal disease on U.S. military bases.

He did that from ’41 till ’45, and while he was waging a battle against VD, so was an old friend of his: Al Capone. Al did get out of Atlanta Penitentiary, but not as he hoped: he was transferred to Alcatraz, the “rock,” which had been especially designed to be “a place of confinement for the more dangerous, intractable criminals.” Syphilis began eating his brain away, and by ’39 he was out of Alcatraz, but he was already partially paralyzed, both in mind and body. By his death in ’47, at age forty-eight, VD had made him pretty much a vegetable.

As for Eliot, he went into private business, became president of a Pennsylvania paper company. Some of his friends — myself among them — urged him to put the story of his war against the Capone mob in writing. I guess he had enough of the old publicity-hound left in him to go along with it, because he wrote his autobiographical book, The Untouchables, which sparked the TV series that made his name a household word, and did the same for Capone, to a generation who hadn’t even heard of the Big Fellow.

But Eliot didn’t live to see any of that; he had just finished correcting the final galley proofs of his book when he died of a heart attack, in 1957. He was fifty-four.

On September 12, 1933, Barney took Canzoneri in the rematch, in New York, Canzoneri’s home turf. The speakeasy became the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge, and when Henry Armstrong defeated Barney for the title in ’38, Barney devoted himself to the club and to gambling, and wasn’t terribly successful at either. When World War Two came along, Barney joined the marines and fought at Guadalcanal, and got the Silver Star, a presidential citation, and malaria. The medics treated him for the latter with morphine, and, like more than a few GIs, Barney ended up an inadvertent addict. It’s still hard for me to think of Barney as a junkie, but that’s what he became — till he kicked it and went public with the story, winning the championship all over again. It finally took cancer (“the Big C,” he called it) to beat him, in ’67.

Frank Nitti had ten golden years — killing Cermak and getting away with it had given him power and credibility in the eyes of everybody from the high-hats to the hoods, the politicians to the harness bulls. Clearly this was not a gangster of the crudity of Capone, no hothead who would machine-gun a garageful of competitors and fill the headlines with blood and bad publicity. Nitti was an executive, a businessman; he, more than Capone, invented the modern corporate gangster.

And, like a lot of executives, he had stomach trouble: ulcers had developed in the wake of the attempt on his life by Sergeant Lang, and those wounds, though long since healed, had continued to give him pain, particularly the back wound. In 1943, faced with racketeering charges and certain imprisonment for his efforts with Campagna and others to extort big bucks from the movie industry, Nitti left his house in suburban Riverside and took a walk in the rain along some railroad tracks, about a block from Cermak Road (Twenty-second Street, renamed for the martyred mayor). His beloved wife, Anna, had died eighteen months before; he was fifty-eight. His stomach hurt him, and they say he just couldn’t face another long prison term. Two witnesses saw him shoot himself in the head. The date was March 19, just one day short of ten years since the day Joe Zangara said, “Push the button.” Nitti’s gravestone reads: “There is no life except by death.”

General Dawes died reading in his study, in 1951. He had given an interview shortly before, in which he told the reporters he had no interest in imparting any wisdom to the people through the mass media. He concluded with what might as well be his epitaph: “God give us common sense!”

Janey married a Republican county official from the suburbs. He rose to state senator, then finally to United States Representative — he was defeated for reelection after serving for many years, but was offered a post with the Nixon administration. He was a minor figure in the Watergate scandal and served eighteen months at a prison farm, during which time Janey divorced him and is now living alone in Evanston — their three children are grown. I understand she is seeing a local businessman, an ex-mayor of Evanston who owns condos.

My uncle Louis died in 1948 after a stroke. We never reconciled.

Walter Winchell’s sagging career was given one last boost when he was hired to do the voiceover narration for “The Untouchables” TV show.

George Raft made a movie in ’34 called Bolero, in which he finally got to do more dancing than acting. One of his co-stars was Sally Rand, who did a laundered version of her famous world’s fair fan dance. She flopped in the picture, and never had much of a movie career. She did her fan and bubble dances till her death a few years ago. Raft’s career faded by the 1950s, partially because of his insistence on playing only “good guy” roles — Humphrey Bogart built a career on Raft’s rejected “unsympathetic” parts, like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Raft’s personal associations with the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone’s brother John brought him public criticism, and toward the end of his show biz career, he acted as a shill for various mob casinos, from Havana to London. His most successful role in the last few years of his life was as a convict in an Alka Seltzer TV commercial, spoofing his image. He also gave a good performance weeping at his tax-evasion trial.