Read Eliot Ness for Free Online Page B

differently four years later when Eliot was born, on April 19, 1902. * He would not have thought differently eighteen years after that, when Eliot, still with no experience of any other part of town, graduated from Christian Fenger High School. Giacosa hated most everything he saw in the city, with its “extraordinary number of sad and grieved persons,” but he thought the South Side was by far the worst. Smoke hung from the air there like drapery. The neighborhood streets, hemmed in by steel plants and ironworks, “seemed to smolder a vast unyielding conflagration,” the mammoth blast furnaces glowing orange and white throughout the night. Children on the way to school clumped through hard granules of soot that fell from the sky like hail, through a deadened landscape where not even “a ghost of the sun shines.”
    Eliot’s neighborhood, Kensington, started out as a railroad stop called Calumet Junction. The Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads met there in 1852 during the track-building boom that settled the West and made Chicago a central player in the country’s life. In the four decades that followed, immigrant Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, and Italians poured into the area. The nearby company town of Pullman, with its nine thousand worker-residents, banned saloons, so Kensington served the need, earning the nickname Bumtown. Eliot arrived on the scene in the wake of a catastrophic Pullman strike that had radicalized the area. Bumtown was where embittered unionists came to drink, shout about injustice, and fall down. (During his seven years with the railroad-car company, Jamie spent his evenings following these men from pub to pub.) During the World War, crowds in Kensington jeered as young men from the neighborhood marched off to boot camp, because the boys wore the same uniform as the federal soldiers who had beaten down strikers back in 1894. The kids of the far South Side were notoriously aggressive, innately mean. The area produced first-rate athletes in unusual numbers during the first half of the twentieth century, boys like Tony Zale (Gary, Indiana) and George Mikan (Joliet) and Dick Butkus (Roseland), boys who would do anything to win, to escape.
    Eliot didn’t seem to fit.He was a mama’s boy, the youngest—by far—of five children. His mother, Emma, a Norwegian immigrant like her husband, missed her three grown daughters, who had married and left the house, and so she coddled young Eliot. Unlike his older brother, Charles, Eliot grew into a soft, amiable, unthreatening personality. Well into his teens, he reveled in his mother’s attention, in being seen as a good boy. At the same time, he struggled with blue moods. He would come home from school and shut himself up in his room to hide his depression. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings. He hated being asked questions. He liked to keep to himself. His mother indulged this solitariness. “Although he has a store of wit, he’s very shy in using it,” his high school yearbook noted. He wasn’t a joiner. As an adolescent, he became a dedicated football fan (he followed the powerhouse University of Chicago Maroons), but even though he was a good athlete, he never tried out for a team. He played tennis, an individual pursuit, a sissified country-club sport. Still, the South Side’s influence ultimately proved every bit as powerful as Emma Ness’s. He spent hours hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall, day after day, until he was the best player at his school. After he landed a part-time job at aclothing store, he obsessively practiced his sales pitch in front of a mirror, determined to sell more suits than even the full-time staff. Whatever caught his interest, he became determined to win at it, to be the best. That’s the way it had always been for Eliot. That’s what Alexander Jamie was counting on now.

CHAPTER 3
    The Special Agents
    D on Kooken liked to be seen. It was the best way to be undercover: walk around town