Ness was seated with his back to the wall, as was his habit, and wore a. 38 revolver in a shoulder holster, which was not; a strange mixture of the diplomat and the adventurer, Ness only wore a gun when he felt it unavoidable.

He was director of public safety, the city official in charge of both the police and fire departments. Deep into his third year as the city's "top cop," Ness was still, at thirty-five, the youngest man in the nation to hold such a post.

Despite his age, Ness was a veteran of what the papers melodramatically termed his "personal war on crime." At twenty-six he had headed up the Prohibition Bureau's Chicago unit, a handful of Ness-picked men who with their baby-faced leader came to be known as the "Untouchables," thanks to a deserved reputation for withstanding bribes, threats, and political pressure. In his successful campaign to land Al Capone in jail, and in later efforts against the bootleg gangs of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, Eliot Ness earned a reputation for putting bad guys in the pen, while providing reporters with juicy headlines along the way.

In the last three years, in Cleveland, he had made his share of headlines for the men at this table, certainly, headlines that reached across the nation, due to the unceasing series of major criminal investigations this young executive had launched, made all the more newsworthy because that young executive often got out from behind his desk and into the fray.

First had come a no-holds-barred house-cleaning of the Cleveland P.D. that resulted in convictions and prison for six high-ranking crooked cops, followed by a wave of resignations from other panicking cops-on-the-take. Next the safety director had undertaken the search for the so-called "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," burning out the Hoovervilles where the mass murderer lived and preyed. Most recently Ness had taken on crooked labor racketeers, and the result was again convictions and prison for the perpetrators.