Eliot Ness
April 19th, 1903, Elliot Ness, was born. Peter and Emma Ness a middle class Norwegian family were living in Chicago. Eliot was the youngest of five children. Mr. Ness had Eliot help him out with his wholesale bakery business when he was younger. Later on Eliot became interested in law when his brother-in-law, Alexander, who was an agent for the Justice Department taught him how to shoot a gun. Eliot then attended the University of Chicago where he got his degree in business and law. Upon graduation he choose to become a retail credit investigator while at night he went back to the university to take classes on criminology. By 1927, after a year of night school, Ness got a job with the treasury department in Chicago. Shortly after Ness got his huge break. U.S. District Attorney, George E. Johnson, had the job of closing down Capone's bootlegging operations and prosecuting him for thousands of Volstead infractions. Finding honest men amongst the corruption Prohibition Bureau was no easy task for Mr. Johnson. Ness was one of the very few agents who had earned a reputation for reliability and honesty. Through the recommendations of his brother-in-law, who was an elite law enforcement officer, Eliot was
Over the next months Ness and his team closed down brewery after brewery each time confiscating expensive equipment, barrels, vats, and trucks of all kinds. In the first six months of their operation they had closed down nineteen distilleries and key breweries worth an estimated $1,000,000. However, Capone fully believed that every man had his price so his next move was to have one of his men offer Ness $2,000 a week. With this in mind Ness wanted to use this event to make a point publicly. He gathered all of the news media for a press conference on Capone's failed bribery attempts. Ness explained his rationale: "Possibly it wasn't too important for the world to know that we couldn't be bought, but I did want Al Capone and every gangster in the city to realize that there were still a few law enforcement agents who couldn't be swerved from their duty". The story was carried by newspapers all over the country, one of which named the team "The Untouchables". Ness then ordered all of Capone's seized trucks to be gathered and buffed. At eleven o'clock in the morning, the trucks came to Capone's Hotel headquarters. Moving very slowly they passed a bunch of Capone's gangsters outside the hotel. Ness could see the fury in Capone as he watched him on his balcony. This was a big day for Ness and his team. "What we had done this day," he told people later, "was enrage the bloodiest mob in criminal history...We had hurled the defiance of "The Untouchables" into their teeth; they surely knew by now that we were prepared to fight to the finish." Ness and his group of untouchables secured evidence the helped send Capone to jail for income tax evasion. During these years in Chicago, Ness was in the spotlight but after Capone went to jail he almost vanished from the public. He didn't stop fighting crime.
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Approximate Word count = 1221
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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