Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [61]
Only by understanding how ATF evolved from a tax-collection agency to the nation’s sole firearms cop can one come to understand the complex relationship between the bureau and the firearms industry, and why no federal entity saw a need to examine Guns Unlimited’s role in the arming of Nicholas Elliot.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms became the nation’s enforcer of federal firearms laws largely by default. ATF traces its roots as far back as 1791, when Congress imposed the first federal tax on distilled spirits, an act that promptly led to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Congress periodically repealed and levied alcohol taxes until 1862, when it created the Office of Internal Revenue and made the tax a formal, permanent part of the government’s income. The office deployed three agents to enforce the law.
On January 16, 1919, the Treasury Department became far more deeply involved in law enforcement when Nebraska cast the last vote necessary to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages. The national Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act for Minnesota congressman Andrew J. Volstead, placed responsibility for enforcing the amendment with the commissioner of Internal Revenue because of the department’s prior role as collector of alcohol taxes and enforcer of violations of the alcohol tax laws.
The amendment may have crimped the supply of booze, but it did nothing to diminish America’s thirst. Underworld entrepreneurs throughout the country sought to satisfy demand by building illegal distilleries and saloons. The amendment guaranteed them a large clientele: while it outlawed the production and distribution of booze, it allowed consumers to own, drink, and even buy alcoholic beverages without penalty. Gangs fought each other for control of the underground distilleries and distribution networks and paid a substantial portion of their profits to local officials and police to help protect their interests.
What ATF neglects to tell in its fact sheets and its biographic handout on Eliot Ness is that agents of Treasury’s Prohibition Unit were themselves notoriously corrupt. They received abysmally low salaries, which Robert J. Schoenberg, author of the 1992 biography Mr. Capone, called an “invitation to corruption.” The agents’ behavior heartened the leaders of Chicago’s Prohibition gangs, who found they exhibited, as Schoenberg puts it, “an almost Chicagoan capacity for corruption.”
Eliot Ness urged his supervisors to let him establish a special unit of young agents not yet “bent” by mob money and influence, and in September of 1929 he founded a squad the newspapers would soon begin calling The Untouchables, for their apparent resistance to corruption. Far from shooting it out with bootleggers and walking up mean streets cradling a tommy gun, Ness and his squad used painstaking investigative techniques to pursue the Chicago gangsters, chief among them Alphonse Capone, also known as Scarface. One of their coups was to place a wiretap in a nightclub operated by Al Capone’s brother Raffalo, more commonly known as Ralph.
Like the Wild West heroes who came before him, Ness was largely responsible for his own legend. In a 1957 book called The Untouchables, which became the basis for the TV series starring Robert Stack, Ness played up the dangers of pursuing Al Capone, even though in fact Capone and other gangsters had an overwhelming respect for the damage they would do to their own interests if they ever killed a federal agent. Indeed, Schoenberg writes, Capone explicitly warned his men not to shoot it out with Treasury agents—just to get away, if possible.
The real hero in the pursuit of Al Capone, according to Schoenberg, was an “investigative accountant” named Frank Wilson, an Internal Revenue agent who would later become head of the U.S. Secret Service,