That would be a joke, considering the state of Cleveland's infamous police force. The boys in blue, not to mention the plainclothes dicks, had helped make Ness' job as a fed damn near impossible whenever he worked within Cleveland city limits. How he'd like a crack at those venal sons of bitches.
Eliot Ness walked out into an afternoon that was turning into evening, though the difference was indiscernible. He tugged at his fedora, keeping his face out of the chill wind, not realizing that he had just raided his last still.
CHAPTER 2
On the northern edge of downtown Cleveland, a whisper away from Lake Erie, two buildings faced each other like granite reflections: the Courthouse and the City Hall. Between them was an expansive park, a continuation of the Mall, that 104-acre tract of land around which various public buildings gathered like pompous old men. The greenery was brown at the moment, except for the occasional fir, with patches of snow littering the expanse of lawn. On this afternoon the imposing structures were lost in the fog like everything and everybody else in the city; they were ghosts of the boom that had followed the Great War, fading stone memories of a Cleveland with a future.
Harold Burton, mayor of Cleveland for just over a month, stood at a tall, wide window in an office that struck him as damn near decadent, and looked out at his gloomy city. He was not a naive man, and the gloom did get to him. But he felt nonetheless that the town could be turned around.
Many years ago as a Harvard law student, he'd been inspired by what he'd read of Tom L. Johnson, the Mayor of Cleveland just after the turn of the century. Johnson was a man of money who waged war against the privileged class, a mayor whose four terms became the embodiment of progressive government in America. Young Harold Burton had decided Cleveland would be a fine place to establish a law practice, and besides, it was where his girlfriend Selma came from. A picture of Selma and their four children was on his desk nearby.