Hedges climbed down from the cab of the truck and his feet scuffed at the cinders on the floor.
"Let's find the basement," Ness said, and Hedges tagged along, an axe in his hands.
The axe carved open the basement door, and the two men headed downstairs, into another massive open area.
"Shit," Hedges said. "They've cleaned it out."
It was cold down there; their breath was smoking.
"Not quite," Ness said.
The stills had been dismantled and moved out, but their shadows remained in the cement; there had been six of them, each around four feet in diameter. A major setup. Doing some quick math, Ness figured that when they were up and rolling, they were turning out two thousand gallons daily, minimum.
A massive operation like this one could only have been pulled off with the collusion of Cleveland's celebratedly corrupt police force. Those sons of bitches made Chicago's bent cops look straight.
"Look at this," he said to Hedges. The smaller man came over as Ness pointed up to a galvanized iron pipe, a flume containing several electric blower fans. "We need to find out where this leads."
"There's a metal company next door," Hedges said. "Probably there."
"Makes sense," Ness said. "Smoke from the boilers and fumes from this distilling room could be passed off as coming from the metal works."
Ness prowled the basement further, discovered five workmen in the boiler room, all of them cowering near one of three massive boilers, several with tools in hand.
"What is this?" one of them said, shrinking back.
Ness laughed shortly, put his. 38 away. "A federal raid, but I wouldn't worry about it. You boys are dismantling these boilers, I take it?"
"Yeah," the spokesman said. He was a beefy guy with five o'clock shadow and close-set dark eyes. "We're with Acme Boiler and Welding. We been working all week, dismantling these three steam-boilers."
"Well, go on with your work," Ness said.
Hedges bristled. "Christ on a crutch! Are you kidding? Let's take 'em in for questioning."
"Dismantling a steam boiler is not a federal offense," Ness said. "Let's see what's going on upstairs."
Hedges shook his head in disgust as the men resumed their work, and the sound of clanging metal followed the pair upstairs, where the other raiders had found nothing to speak of. No suspects, no alcohol, no nothing.
A few minutes later, one of Ness' men did discover a six-inch water line that had been run across Sweeney Avenue to a railroad roundhouse, and connected with the city's water mains. Water for the operation of the distillery, then, had been heisted off the city of Cleveland. Probably with the complicity of city officials, Ness thought. Well, at least that goddamn Davis administration was past history now. Unfortunately, the city's tarnished coppers seemed to thrive no matter whose administration was in power.
"I scratched my initials on one of those boilers," Hedges told Ness. The heavy set little agent had ducked back downstairs for a while,
"Why did you do that?"
"It'll turn up again, when they set this big still back up someplace else in town, and I'll be able to identify it."
Ness shrugged. "Maybe."
"What do you mean, 'maybe'?"
"I think this operation may simply be shut down."
"Bullshit! We didn't move fast enough on this, and they got wind of our raid, and they're moving it!"
"Or maybe they're just out of business. Maybe they figure the risk isn't worth it."
"Don't talk stupid."
"It's over, Agent Hedges. Show's over. It's getting too late in the day to be a Prohibition agent-considering Prohibition's been over for, how many years now?"
"The Mayfield Road boys ain't gettin' out of the alcohol business," Hedges insisted. "There's still dough in it."
"You may be right," Ness said. He didn't want to argue the point.
And to a degree, Ness knew, Hedges probably was right. The illegal product was cheaper than legal, what with federal and state taxes added on. Bootlegging would continue.
But not like before. Not like Chicago. In both Chicago and more recently, in Cleveland, where the flow of liquor from Canada was the primary concern, there had been enough activity to keep the life of a "revenooer" lively. It had taken a long time after the advent of Repeal for a steady supply of good, legitimate liquor to reach the market, for the American liquor industry to gear back up and serve its public. The mob had been taking care of that public for a long time, and a transition period was to be expected.
That transition period was over. These days the Cleveland boys-the Mayfield Road mob-were moving into gambling and numbers and union racketeering. Just like the Capone outfit back home. To Ness, the huge, empty warehouse on Sweeney Avenue, and the remnants of the mammoth distillery that haunted it, were symbols of an era's end. And proof that the job that had once done him proud was now a force. It just wasn't about anything anymore.
He checked his watch. It was nearly four; he would have to get one of his raiders to give him a lift. He had a four-thirty meeting at City Hall with newly elected Mayor Burton, but he had no idea what it was about. Coordination between federal and local law enforcement perhaps.
That would be a joke, considering the state of Cleveland's infamous police force. The boys in blue, not to mention the plainclothes dicks, had helped make Ness' job as a fed damn near impossible whenever he worked within Cleveland city limits. How he'd like a crack at those venal sons of bitches.
Eliot Ness walked out into an afternoon that was turning into evening, though the difference was indiscernible. He tugged at his fedora, keeping his face out of the chill wind, not realizing that he had just raided his last still.
CHAPTER 2
On the northern edge of downtown Cleveland, a whisper away from Lake Erie, two buildings faced each other like granite reflections: the Courthouse and the City Hall. Between them was an expansive park, a continuation of the Mall, that 104-acre tract of land around which various public buildings gathered like pompous old men. The greenery was brown at the moment, except for the occasional fir, with patches of snow littering the expanse of lawn. On this afternoon the imposing structures were lost in the fog like everything and everybody else in the city; they were ghosts of the boom that had followed the Great War, fading stone memories of a Cleveland with a future.
Harold Burton, mayor of Cleveland for just over a month, stood at a tall, wide window in an office that struck him as damn near decadent, and looked out at his gloomy city. He was not a naive man, and the gloom did get to him. But he felt nonetheless that the town could be turned around.
Many years ago as a Harvard law student, he'd been inspired by what he'd read of Tom L. Johnson, the Mayor of Cleveland just after the turn of the century. Johnson was a man of money who waged war against the privileged class, a mayor whose four terms became the embodiment of progressive government in America. Young Harold Burton had decided Cleveland would be a fine place to establish a law practice, and besides, it was where his girlfriend Selma came from. A picture of Selma and their four children was on his desk nearby.
He went to that desk but did not sit. From a plain wooden box amid many papers and between two telephones, Burton withdrew a big black Havana cigar. He lit it and puffed at it with some gusto. He never felt more the mayor than when he was puffing one of his big black cigars.
Burton was just short of tall, a wedge-shaped, broad-browed man with short, prematurely white hair, a strong jaw and placid gray eyes above dark circles. He was forty-eight years old and looked every year of it. His brown suit was rumpled and the only natty thing about his apparel was the yellow-and-gold tie with the ruby stickpin (Selma's work).