One of the biggest myths in Chicago history relates to Eliot Ness, who is often credited with being the man who brought down notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone. Public perception of Ness is largely based on fictional accounts of his life and perpetrated by various television shows and movies based on Oscar Fraley’s book The Untouchables. The truth of the matter is that Ness faded into obscurity and poverty when he met Fraley, in a New York bar, and he was using what we often call a fish story to get attention.
Eliot Ness grew up on Chicago’s South Side, the youngest of five children. He was doted on by his mother, Emma, and his sisters, though he sought the attention of his father, who was often absent. According to Lawrence Bregman’s biography of Capone, Ness, who was a handsome, six foot tall man, received excessive female attention throughout his life. As his needs became more intimate, he searched for brides, settling on Edna Staley, who became his first wife in 1929.
None of his three marriages produced biological children for Eliot Ness, although he and his third wife adopted a son in 1948. Although he gained some fame in Chicago during the Capone days, he made a name for himself in Cleveland as the youngest security director . in the city. In 1938 his marriage to Edna ended in divorce. She filed on grounds of abandonment and extreme cruelty. Ness garnered negative publicity due to high-profile dating from him prior to the divorce announcement. He soon married Evaline McAndrews, who worked in Cleveland, although Ness claimed, according to her biography, that he met her on a train to Minneapolis.
Friends of Ness quoted in biographical accounts speak of him flirting while drinking and it has been speculated that this may have contributed to the ruination of their marriages. He divorced his second wife in 1945 after she left him and moved to New York citing gross negligence and extreme cruelty. Shortly after the divorce was final, he married his third wife, Betty Anderson.
Ness ran for mayor of Cleveland in 1947, but was soundly defeated. At the time, he was a heavy drinker and spent much of his time in bars reminiscing about his life and his mistakes. It was at this time that people started talking about Al Capone.
What started as a way for Ness to draw attention to himself in women’s bars ended up in a book written by Oscar Fraley. Fraley was a reporter for the Associated Press and believed Ness, who now cast himself in the starring role of taking down Capone. Fraley persuaded Ness, who was destitute at the time, to sell the story on him, giving him more embellishments to sell the story.
Ness died six months before the book The Untouchables was published. The television series starring Robert Stack came out two years later and shocked the members of his crew who were still alive. Most likely those who were most surprised by the book and the series were his first two wives, whom Ness never mentioned to Fraley and who were cut out of his life in his autobiography, The Untouchables.
None of the evidence Ness presented brought down Al Capone. Frank Wilson, a Treasury Department accountant, was the man who went through the books and caught the gangster with tax evasion. The myth of Eliot Ness, who, according to his biography, often violated the Volstead Act while it was in effect, as a paragon of virtue, is likely the result of what began as a pick-up line in bars from a man who still needed the female attention. despite the fact that his good looks had faded and he had settled into middle age.