Curry had great admiration for Ness, who had in little more than a year made enormous strides toward cleaning up Cleveland's almost impossibly corrupt police department. Not to mention the safety director's record prior to coming to Cleveland, a record in law enforcement second to few in the nation, second to none when you considered his age.

A prohibition agent in Chicago, assigned to the Justice Department and later Treasury, Ness and his small, hand-picked squad-known in the press as the "untouchables," due to their resistance to bribes, threats, and politics-had been instrumental in strangling the Chicago mob financially. Raiding breweries, confiscating beer trucks, seizing records, Ness and his crew earned much of the credit for sending crime kingpin Al Capone on his long ride up the river. This was followed by Ness's war against moonshiners in the mountains (and mobsters in the cities) of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, which proved similarly successful and publicity-making, landing Ness the choice but precarious job of Cleveland's safety director.

Beyond this, Curry knew, Ness was at the forefront of modern thinking in police science and criminology, having trained at the University of Chicago under August Vollmer. With half a dozen successful crooked-cop prosecutions behind him, Ness was effecting his plan to update the force, switching over from foot patrol to patrol cars, reorganizing the traffic bureau, instituting a juvenile delinquency unit and much else.

But what impressed Curry most about Ness was not his forward thinking or administrative skills, but the tendency of the youthful safety director to get out from behind his desk and direct investigations personally. Curry was well aware that a certain amount of Ness's detective work and "derring-do" reflected the mayor's need for the former T-man to create favorable publicity-which was why the badly factionalized city council had managed to get behind this administration, where Ness's police and fire departments were concerned.