Actually, Burton would have been greatly surprised if Ness hadn't been at least a touch arrogant. The young man's record was impressive, to understate the case. Ness had been just twenty-six when he was recruited by the Justice Department to head up a special independent Prohibition Unit in Chicago that was designed as part of a two-pronged federal effort, born in the White House, to put public enemy/public embarrassment Al Capone away. While the other prong, a crack IRS team, worked to build a tax case, Ness and his raiders hit Capone's breweries, confiscated trucks and equipment, and made numerous arrests. This distracted Capone, dented his bank account, and disrupted his business practices by limiting the amount of payoff money available, without which countless crooked cops-both local and federal-had gone off the take.

The ten men in Ness' unit, handpicked by himself after poring over hundreds of government records, were widely respected as that rarity among big-city cops in this damn Depression: they couldn't be bribed. These "untouchables," as the Chicago papers had dubbed them in the aftermath of Capone's fall, routinely turned down bribes, at times being offered weekly payoffs damn near as large as their yearly salaries.

After Capone's conviction, Ness was appointed Chief Investigator of Prohibition Forces in Chicago, a post he held down till mid-1933, when he transferred from the Justice Department to the Treasury and became a "rev-enooer," closing down hundreds of hillbilly stills in the moonshine mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. In August 1934 he became Chief Investigator of the Treasury Department's Alcohol Tax Unit in the northern district of Ohio, working out of Cleveland.

He'd attracted some publicity in Cleveland, though Burton had only been vaguely aware of Ness until two weeks before, when several newspaper reporters, including Sam Wild of the Plain Dealer and his city editor Phil Porter, began touting Ness. They knew Burton was shopping around for the right man to clean up the police department, and Ness-who was relatively new in Cleveland, and had no political ties or interests-seemed ideal for the job.