Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero by Perry Douglas

Author:Perry, Douglas [Perry, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

***

Once he’d pulled himself together, Harwood turned his attention to winning on appeal. Just days after the conviction, he hired private investigators and technical experts. He wanted to show that Cleveland’s safety director had framed him and the other seven officers.

Without informing his lawyer, the newly convicted former policeman offered two women $100 each to lure the prosecution’s most damning witnesses into a trap. The women, Mrs. Marie Murray and Mrs. May Green, agreed to the plan—and decided not to tell their husbands, who worked for Harwood at the Green Derby. Murray and Green were young and sexy, with pointy breasts and fat, bloodred lips, but they were new to femme fatale duty. Only one of the witnesses, Casper Korce, took the bait. The former bootlegger, who had testified against Harwood at trial and against others during grand-jury proceedings, followed the ladies to a swank West Side apartment that had been wired for sound. Murray and Green got Korce liquored up and unbuttoned, and began to press him about how much he “got out of the cases.” Korce thought he was getting the celebrity treatment, seeing as his name had been in all the papers, but the good times abruptly ended when his dirty talk proved a turnoff. “I was offered $2,500 to testify for Harwood instead of against him,” Korce said. The mood ruined, the women handed him his hat and sent him on his way.

Harwood tried again, paying the women another $100 each to invite Korce around a second time and press him harder to “open up” about the safety director. Korce again gave in to the women’s winks and smiles; once in the apartment, he yammered on about his bootlegging days and how Ness and Fritchey had interviewed him for hours about his relationships with police officers. But the women couldn’t get him to cough up anything incriminating on Eliot or the reporter. Korce, no doubt turning blue from frustration, found himself pushed out the door again. Harwood was even more frustrated. He told Murray she would have to testify that she’d heard Korce say that Ness had paid him $3,200. The woman, though afraid Harwood would tell her husband about her participation in the seduction plot, refused. She would rather have her husband mad at her than Eliot Ness.

After Harwood’s conviction, it was Deputy Inspector Burns’s turn in March. The trial was a carbon copy of Harwood’s, including a handful of repeat witnesses. The bootleggers assigned the same litany of abuses to Burns that they had to Harwood; some of Burns’s colleagues on the police force, meanwhile, took the stand to insist the defendant was a stand-up guy, as honest as they come. As the jury filed out of the room to begin deliberations, the fifty-five-year-old Burns, a “tall, husky, handsome man” and a popular officer in the department, approached Eliot and stuck out his hand. “I just want you to know that, no matter what happens, there are no hard feelings,” he said. “I know there was nothing personal in your activities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.