A BYTE OUT OF HISTORY
Elliot Ness and the FBI
01/03/07
It’s a question we get from time
to time: was Elliot Ness of “Untouchables” fame
an FBI special agent?
No, it’s entirely a myth:
Ness never served as one of our agents. But…he
did work for Director J. Edgar Hoover for
nearly six weeks. Confused? Here’s
the story—and it’s an interesting
one, involving the bootlegging days of
Prohibition.
It
begins in January 1920—86
years ago this month—when Prohibition
became the law of the land, thanks
to the 18th amendment to the Constitution
and congressional action banning the sale
and manufacture of alcohol. Enforcement
was given largely to the Treasury Department
and its Bureau of Internal Revenue,
with the Bureau of Investigation (our forerunner),
the Coast Guard, and several other agencies
playing only bit parts.
The law, of course, was hugely unpopular. Many
Americans were willing to break the law to
have a drink…and an entire criminal
industry of bootleggers rose up to meet the
nation’s seemingly unquenchable thirst.
Mobsters like Al
Capone
became rich and powerful from the illegal
profits and bought off many public officials
along the way—so much so that corruption
became nearly synonymous with prohibition
agents.
Elliott Ness entered the picture
in August 1926, when he was appointed
a prohibition agent in the Treasury Department. He handpicked
a small band of agents who later became
known as the “Untouchables” because
of their reputation for integrity. It’s
said that some of Ness’ agents actually
threw back the bribes offered by Capone’s
men.
In 1929, to stem the ongoing tide of corruption,
the Treasury’s Bureau of Prohibition
was transferred to the Department of Justice
yet stayed separate from Hoover’s Bureau
of Investigation. On June 10, 1933, President
Roosevelt ordered the creation of a “Division
of Investigation” that could consolidate
both “Bureaus” inside Justice.
Hoover argued against the merger, fearing
that combining his 340 carefully picked agents
with 1,200 prohibition agents would undercut
his hard fought reforms over the previous
decade. He suggested keeping the Bureau of
Prohibition a separate, parallel entity.
Hoover’s
argument prevailed, and the arrangement
began on July 1, 1930, with Hoover in charge
of both agencies. In December 1933, the
21st amendment repealed prohibition
for good, and the Bureau of Prohibition
was eventually disbanded. Ness had worked
under Hoover just over a month—from
July 1 until August 10, 1933, when he was named a senior prohibition investigator
in Cincinnati. He later became the Director
of Public Safety for the city of Cleveland.
Ness passed away in 1957 in Pennsylvania.
A footnote to the story. In
1933, Ness actually applied to become an
FBI agent but was turned down, in part over
salary differences and his strong ties to
the press.
If you want to read more about Ness and
the FBI, mostly during his stint in Cleveland,
take a look at our Freedom
of Information Act webpage on Elliot Ness.
And see our History
webpage and
Bytes
out of History
for more interesting stories from our past.
