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| Eliot Ness |
Ever since Eliot Ness first published The Untouchables in 1957, the
public has fallen in love with the adventures of this authentic American hero. His book
was a runaway best seller because it was the exciting true story of a brave and honest
lawman pitted against the country's most successful gangster, Al Capone. The television
series that followed in the 1950's and the Kevin Costner movie in 1987 built fancifully on
the same theme. Then again in 1993, the television series has been remade for yet another
generation to watch Eliot Ness battle it out again with the Capone Mob.
Every school child knows what Eliot Ness did for two years in Chicago, but what
happened to him afterwards when Al Capone went to jail? Almost nobody knows. Does that
mean the young hero retired to a quiet life?
Not by a long shot! With a new group of "Untouchables," Eliot Ness went right
on fighting the mob for another decade: staging daring raids on bootleggers and illegal
gambling joints, catching criminals with his bare hands, and generally putting organized
crime on the run. After Capone, he broadened his crusade to include labor racketeers,
crooked cops and the country's most vicious serial killer, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury
Run.
So why didn't Eliot Ness write about his adventures after Chicago? Actually, he had
planned to do just that, but he died of a heart attack just before the publishing of The
Untouchables.
This story is the result of hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of research
to capture events never before published. All the events contained in this story are
substantively correct, although the exact dialogue, remembered from interviews taken
decades after the event, may only be approximate.
Ness's career in law enforcement continued for a decade beyond the Capone years, a
decade in which his very considerable talents flowered. At the age of 33 in Cleveland, he
faced the challenge of his career when he took over the corrupt and incompetent police
force in a city that had become a haven for gangsters.
Never one to sit behind a desk and administrate, Eliot took to the street with a new
group of trusted confidants, mostly undercover investigators and reporters, until he
cleaned up the police force and put the mob chieftains behind bars.
Drawing on his master's degree in criminology, he turned the miserable Cleveland police
force into one of the most modern, efficient and respected departments in the world. Crime
in the city dropped 38 percent after he was on the job just a couple of years!
Eliot Ness was so much more than just the courageous guy who battered down the door of
Capone's biggest brewery. It's time the American public knew about the rest of his
accomplishments, which are at once exciting, inspiring and long lasting.
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