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stacker, a dangerous and physically draining job.) Now that Jamie had the position he’d always wanted, albeit on an interim basis, he was determined to prove that he belonged in the corner office. The disastrous Beatty and Adams shootings notwithstanding, he intended to lead an active, aggressive special agency unit.
    To that end, his first target as acting special agent in charge was a big one: Chicago Heights, the industrial town about thirty miles directly south of downtown Chicago that Lorenzo Juliano called home. Nearby Inland Steel, producing a million tons of ingots every year, promised the Heights economic stability, which helped bring one of the first major highways straight through town, giving the burg the nickname “The Crossroads of the Nation.” The highway also made it a perfect place for bootleggers. Jamie and other bureau muckety-mucks believed the town was central to the syndicate’s statewide operations. They had good reason to think so: a lot always seemed to be going down in this small workingman’s city of twenty-two thousand.The dry law, the
Tribune
declared, had “transformed the peaceful industrial community with its happy homes into a haven for a great alcohol cooking ring, a terrain of contention, locale of alky wars and a battle ground of bootleggers.” In 1926, the Heights’s preeminent liquor boss, the Sicilian gangster Philip Piazza, had been ostentatiously murdered in front of his café in the middle of the day. Since then, more than twenty men had been killed in the town’s “alky wars.” Another Sicilian, Joe Martino, president of the local branch of the Unione Sicilione, stepped forward after Piazza fell, but others also were in the mix. The Torrio gang had been taken over by Al Capone after rival bootleggers seriously wounded Torrio in a 1925 attack.The Outfit’s influence stretched across most of the metropolitan area, and that included the Heights. Still, much of the violence seemed to be spurred not by Martino or Capone but by the trigger- and bomb-happy Juliano, a dapper, chubby man with a sleek little mustache fit for a cinema comic.The police believed him to be responsible for at least eight murders, including the beating death of a paramour he suspected of being a double agent. But the blood continued to flow even after Juliano’s capture.Earlier in the year, gangsters had shot to death South Chicago Heightspolice chief Lester Gilbert, who had resisted bribery attempts and even seized some of the bootleggers’ trucks. No one had been arrested for the murder.
    Jamie decided he would break the Chicago Heights syndicate by taking out Martino and infusing the town’s bootlegging ranks with fears of turncoats. Of course, such a bold objective would require undercover work. It would require agents who knew the area, who understood the far South Side. His young brother-in-law, he recognized, fit the bill. The South Side was the city’s—the region’s—industrial heartland, its own world, cut off as if by an impassable moat from the glamorous bustle of downtown Chicago and the wild bohemia of the North Side.Instead of classical skyscrapers and elegant townhouses, the South Side offered “ungainly, picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses.” The noise—“a mighty clattering and reverberating of . . . echoes”—was ceaseless.
    This was Eliot Ness’s world; he grew up on the far South Side and identified as a Southsider, not a Chicagoan. The difference from the rest of the city—in attitude, in outlook, in experience—was unmistakable. On the far South Side, men came home from work singed and defeated, a retreating army. Everyone drank, the men so they could face another day, the women so they could face their husbands. “I would not want to live there for anything in the world,” the Italian playwright Giuseppe Giacosa wrote after visiting Chicago in 1898. He would not have thought