Free Eliot Ness by Douglas Perry Page B

rising softly into the cold February air. An eyeball oozed on the slick concrete floor like a poached egg.
    The newspapers ran with the story for weeks, until the horror lodged deep in the city’s collective consciousness. “Can you imagine standing seven guys against the wall and running a machine gun and killing all of them?” said one Chicagoan, who, like millions of others, greedily read every word printed about the slayings. “You’d have to be crazy, right? Got to be doped up, no matter what kind of enemies they are.”The St. Valentine’sDay Massacre, as the killings came to be called, “was the worst thing that ever happened to Chicago as far as racketeering went.” After years of winks and chuckles about the gang wars, public opinion had finally turned. Wives worried endlessly about their husbands’ safety downtown during the day. Mothers kept their children from public playgrounds. Fear gripped every social stratum in the city. The violence, agreed the newspapers and politicians and everyone else, had to stop. Enough was enough. Even gangsters from other locales gaped at what was happening in the Second City.New York’s Lucky Luciano, after a visit, called Chicago “a real goddam crazy place. Nobody’s safe in the street.”
    The public’s obsession with the Valentine’s Day murders, which everyone assumed Capone had ordered, meant life became harder for George Johnson. Johnson had been pursuing a tax-fraud case against Capone from almost the day he took the oath as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Tax fraud wasn’t an exciting course of action, but it looked like a promising one—at least to Johnson. U.S. Attorney General William Mitchell wasn’t convinced. From Mitchell’s vantage point in Washington, Johnson had been futzing around with tax statements for a couple of years now and had nothing meaningful to show for it, while Capone was lining people up against walls and mowing them down. So he sent backup to Chicago in the form of U.S. Assistant Attorney General William Froelich. Johnson suddenly realized his job might be on the line.He wrote a long, defensive reply to Mitchell, insisting “that I am quite able to do this.” He knew income-tax charges worked against gangsters. He was convinced it was the best way to get Capone. After all, the tax laws had already been used to nail Al’s brother Ralph and Al’s bagman Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, both convicted of tax evasion. But Johnson took Mitchell’s hint: a tax case, no matter how promising, was no longer good enough.As the Internal Revenue agents working the case wrote: “Alphonse Capone is, without a doubt, the best advertised and most talked of gangster in the United States today. . . . [He] has been mentioned in connection with practically every major crime committed in Chicago within the last few years.” Capone, in short, had become a PR problem.President Hoover, and so Attorney General Mitchell, wouldn’t be satisfied with a mere conviction. They wanted to make an example of Capone.

CHAPTER 6
    Good-Hearted Al
    J ohnson understood the challenge he faced.
    Golding had been a disaster, but Johnson, like Willebrandt, wasn’t willing to walk away from the special agency squad.Willebrandt had once said she refused to believe that “out of our one hundred and twenty million population . . . it is impossible to find four thousand men in the United States who cannot be bought.” Johnson wasn’t sure about four thousand, but he knew there were indeed men out there who couldn’t be bought: he was one of them. He became determined to find some of the others.
    Johnson had listened to Willebrandt’s discourses on Prohibition enforcement over the years. He had approved of many of her proposals, such as specialized training for dry agents and the transfer of the Prohibition Bureau from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department, both of which had eventually come to pass. By the fall of 1930, however,