- Ness, Eliot
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born April 19, 1903, Chicagodied May 7, 1957, Coudersport, Pa.U.S. law-enforcement official.He was 26 years old when he was hired as a special agent of the U.S. Department of Justice to head its Chicago Prohibition bureau, with the express purpose of breaking up the bootlegging network of Al Capone. He formed a nine-man team of extremely dedicated and unbribable officers, "the Untouchables"; the evidence they collected helped send Capone to prison for income-tax evasion in 1931. After Prohibition was ended in 1933, Ness headed the alcohol-tax unit of the U.S. Treasury department (1933–35); he was later director of public safety in Cleveland (1935–41) and director of a division of the Federal Security Agency (1941–45).
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▪ American crime fighterborn April 19, 1903, Chicagodied May 7, 1957American crime fighter, head of a nine-man team of law officers called the “Untouchables,” who opposed Al Capone's (Capone, Al) underworld network in Chicago.A graduate of the University of Chicago, Ness was 26 when, in 1929, he was hired as a special agent of the U.S. Department of Justice to head the Prohibition bureau in Chicago, with the express purpose of investigating and harassing Al Capone. Because the men, all in their 20s, whom he hired to help him were extremely dedicated and unbribable, they were nicknamed the Untouchables. The public learned of them when big raids on breweries, speakeasies, and other places of outlawry attracted newspaper headlines (reporters being invited to the raids). The Untouchables' infiltration of the underworld secured evidence that helped send Capone to prison for income-tax evasion.Later, Ness was in charge of the alcohol-tax unit of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (1933–35) and then director of public safety in Cleveland, Ohio (1935–41). During World War II (1941–45), he was director of the Division of Social Protection of the Federal Security Agency in Washington, D.C. After the war he went into private business.* * *
Universalium. 2010.
