Eliot Ness: The Tielke Case
With fall suddenly turning over into winter, Eliot crouched behind a heap of metal debris in an industrial wasteland near East 65th and Central. He watched from a safe distance as Homer Tielke, an executive with the Crucible Steel Casting Co., pushed into the tall grass of an expansive abandoned lot. The man was nervous, that much was obvious. Tielke hired gardeners so he never would have to experience unfettered urban nature, and now here he was with soaked trouser cuffs and the rising panic that came with the conviction that bugs were crawling on you.
He would just have to keep reminding himself it was worth it. His father’s life was at stake. On October 4, 1937, Tielke had received a letter that instructed him to deliver $8,000 in small bills or his elderly father, Crucible’s president Maxwell Tielke, would be kidnapped and killed. The snatching of wealthy industrialists had been the crime du jour a few years earlier, when it had a warm-and-fuzzy Robin Hood feel to it. Most important, it was a neat, simple undertaking, with a limited number of variables involved. Any idiot could do it. Alvin Karpis, who’d slipped out of Eliot’s grasp during the Harvard raid, had seen his greatest success with this line of work. He and the Barker brothers had pulled down $100,000 for snatching William Hamm, a Minnesota brewer, in 1933. The following year, the Karpis-Barker gang grabbed Edward Bremer Jr., a Minnesota banker, which brought in another $200,000.
But that was then. Bruno Hauptmann’s execution in 1936 for the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s toddler son had rubbed a lot of the glamour off the kidnapping game. Karpis was caught the same year and now resided at Alcatraz with Al Capone. Fred and Ma Barker had been shot down by the feds the previous year.
Still, not everyone read the papers. Kidnappings continued to happen here and there. And some criminals thought asking for low-dollar amounts – like, say, $8,000 – would keep J. Edgar Hoover’s trigger-happy G-men away. They were right about that; Hoover only wanted the cases that would provide national headlines.
Two days after receiving a ransom letter, Homer Tielke drove up to an abandoned house in a working-class neighborhood, left a packet of money, and hurriedly drove off. He hadn’t told the police. But the money just sat there, untouched. Then a telephone call came in. New instructions. Tielke, confused and feeling out of his depth, decided to contact the safety director.
Now the businessman was making another drop, this time while being watched from every angle. A strong wind boxed his head. The weather seemed a lousy omen. He walked tenderly, warily, as if concerned that the snap of a twig would bring a hungry tribe of cannibals screaming toward him.
Then he disappeared.
Eliot stood up and peered into the brush. Another head, Bob Chamberlin’s, popped into view. Tielke had stumbled. A moment later the man was up again. He began walking in a circle, like a dog searching out the perfect place to relieve itself. Eliot eased back down into a squat. He turned to look at David Cowles, who was crouched behind him. The city’s scientific investigator picked at his thumb. Cowles had long, tapered fingers, the nails cut severely to allow a firm ledge of skin to protrude from underneath. They were the fingers of a card sharp. The beautiful digits didn’t fit with the rest of the man. Cowles was short, round, and bald, surely the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Oswald the Rabbit. He kept his gaze steady on the blundering Tielke.
Eliot rose again and began walking forward. Tielke was waving to the policemen. He had accidentally dropped the packet of money and now he couldn’t find it. Eliot, Chamberlin and Cowles began to kick and slap at the brush.
Eliot shook his head. “What are we going to do now?” he asked. Nobody had an answer. This should have been an easy case; the fact that the extortionist expected to collect eight thousand dollars without even bothering to kidnap the victim was a good sign that they were dealing with a third-rate criminal. But the prospective victim’s bumbling son was making a straightforward operation rather difficult. Eliot liked this kind of case. It offered work that he understood. There was no mysterious, magical evil to figure out – just normal human nature. There would be surveillance, maybe a chase, all ending with an intense interrogation and confession back at H.Q. Easy peasy. He’d happily put aside the torso serial-killer files and jumped into the investigation, driving out to Tielke’s sprawling home on the east side to interview the son. Except nothing was coming easily for Eliot right now. In the days that followed, Tielke and the authorities waited to hear from the extortionist again, but no call or letter came. Tielke’s father remained unmolested, so far.
***
In January of 1938, the Tielke extortion case popped back up. The investigation had gone cold since the money-drop mishap three months before. The drop location the extortionist had chosen was relatively close to the Crucible Steel Casting plant, across from a small mechanical-parts concern that supplied the company. This was a good reason to believe their perpetrator worked at Crucible or one of its nearby partners. Always a proponent of using the scientific method in police work, Eliot decided to bring in “a handwriting man.”
Matowitz may have rolled his eyes when Eliot brought up the idea, but handwriting would provide the break in the case. Cutting out letters from magazines and newspapers to spell out your ransom demands wasn’t yet a common kidnapping trope; most body snatchers wrote out ransom notes just as they would pen a letter to their grandmothers. Which is exactly what the Tielke extortionist had done. And so more than two months after the botched stake out – bing! – the police scored a lead. The handwriting expert linked the ransom letter to a former employee’s signature in Crucible’s files. The suspect was a twenty-seven-year-old black man named Isaiah Thomas Edwards, known as Zeke. Further bolstering the handwriting evidence: Edwards was nowhere to be found. Eliot assigned Cowles and a black officer to stake out Edwards’s residence. (Cowles mindlessly referred to his new partner as “Nigger Jones.”) Jones, left mostly on his own, spent hour after hour sitting in a car across the street from the little house, but days went by without anyone coming or going. Finally, irritated at the lack of progress, Eliot ventured out to join the stakeout himself. Tall and lanky in his expensive double-breasted suit – and, of course, white – Eliot stood out. A white man and a black man sitting in a car together in a black part of town? The best-case scenario was a homosexual tryst. Somebody was going to call the cops – or, more likely, decide to bring some vigilante justice to bear. After conferring with Jones, Eliot walked to a police call box. Half an hour later, Cowles drove up in an unmarked police car. Cowles stepped out of the car, and he and Eliot crossed the street to Edwards’s house. They looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then Cowles slipped under the porch, searching for a way inside, perhaps through a vent under the house. There he found a letter from the man’s wife – the postman had apparently missed the slot and it had slipped through the slats. He climbed out from under the porch and tore the letter open. “When are you coming to get me?” it asked. It seemed she had gone down to her native North Carolina to bury her father. She didn’t want to make the trek back north on her own.
Eliot now read the letter, smiling. He gave it back to Cowles and told him to go find her. He wanted to see the case through himself, but he had to appear in court for the indictment of a mobster he’d been pursuing. So Cowles and another white officer, Detective Louis Oldag, would go to Durham. Eliot informed Cowles that he was in charge.
Cowles reveled in running his own case. He was usually stuck in the lab, asking how high when detectives swaggered in and told him to jump, but he had to give Eliot credit: the safety director never cared about the boundaries imposed by job titles.
It had been a long, hard road for Cowles to gain the respect of his peers, and he knew that it remained tenuous. He was the police department’s superintendent of criminal identification, but that just meant he was the weird guy with the beakers. He had joined the city’s rolls back in 1919 as an assistant city chemist in the health department. Barely out of his teens, he tested whatever was brought in. Food inspectors dropped canned tomatoes and buckets of butter on his desk. Garbage men brought in grease that was to be made into soap. When Prohibition enforcement heated up, he got his first real shot at police work. It became his job to determine if confiscated bootleg liquor was “fit for beverage purposes.” He found the best way to tell was to take a drink. Of course, he also could have asked the building’s janitors, who helped themselves to his samples every night – until he spiked a bottle of gin with a toxic phenol solution that made the tipplers violently ill. (A written reprimand probably would have put a stop to the janitorial drinking, but Cowles was the kind of man who insisted on killing a fly with a sledgehammer.) In time he learned how to do fingerprint analysis and led the push to have fingerprinting replace the outdated Bertillon booking-card method that relied on measurements of various “bony” parts of the body. This brought about a belated transfer to the police department, where Safety Director Ed Barry – “a hot potato, honest man but tough,” Cowles said – became his benefactor. He was sworn in as an officer in 1931.
Now, half a dozen years later, he was an expert in ballistics, for whatever that was worth. It was still a new field, pioneered by Colonel Calvin Goddard in Chicago during the Capone days. Detectives – and judges – remained suspicious of bullet-impact analysis and the matching of bullet markings to gun barrels. Cowles also had become interested in lie-detector technology, an even more derided burgeoning science, though one that also had piqued Eliot’s interest. Cowles now spent a significant part of his time as an instructor in the police department’s training school, which removed him even further from the police work he wanted to do.
So the Edwards case was one more way for Cowles to earn his bones, to be accepted by the detectives he admired and envied. When he and Oldag arrived in Durham, Cowles was too excited to wait for the morning. With darkness falling – not the best time to potentially surprise a wanted man on his home turf – they headed out to the woman’s family residence, which turned out to be on the edge of a sprawling, if somewhat ragged, antebellum plantation. They marched up to the main house. “Knocked on the door and said we were detectives,” Cowles reported. “They told us to go back home and come back in daylight.” The local property holders, it seemed, understood the basic tenets of police work better than Cowles.
Cowles and Oldag found rooms, got some sleep, and then headed back out to the plantation in the morning. This time, the property’s overseers directed them to the right house, a tiny collection of wooden boards near a gully. Oldag went around the back, while Cowles stepped up to the door, took a deep breath, and knocked.
When the door opened, he gaped. “She was the most beautiful colored woman I ever saw,” he remembered more than forty years later. Edwards’s wife was light-skinned and tall. Eyes the color of a stiff drink. Surrounding her stark round face was an expansive umbrella of puffy black hair. Cowles had never seen hair like this before. In a couple of decades, Mrs. Isaiah Edwards’s afro would be a subversive political statement to men like David Cowles. In 1938, it was simply the siren call of the sexually forbidden.
Cowles stepped into the house. He didn’t need a search warrant to enter a colored woman’s home. He didn’t need permission to do whatever he wanted to do in this little shack. They were alone. And Cowles, insecure about his policeman’s bona fides, liked to play rough.
But that wasn’t how he handled it this time. He sat with the woman and asked when she last saw her husband. She didn’t answer. She asked why he wanted Zeke. She did her best to bluff him. Cowles recalled, “She said it can’t be important, ’cause you’re from the North and not Southern boys” – which probably meant she didn’t think she had to worry that they were going to string Zeke up from the nearest tree.
Cowles tried to make eye contact; he told her soothingly that he couldn’t tell her why they wanted him, they just wanted him. The beautiful young woman was having none of it. “She kept asking me what we wanted Zeke for,” Cowles reported. “I kept stalling and telling her I couldn’t tell.” His inexperience with this kind of thing was showing, and Oldag, who’d joined them in the house, was little help. Cowles had made it clear that it was his case and he would handle it. He finally decided to lie.
“All right, but don’t get mad at me,” he said. “A murder occurred in Cleveland in a house of prostitution. Zeke was in bed with a woman when that murder occurred.”
That did the trick. Anger flashed in the woman’s large, almond-shaped eyes, but she wasn’t angry at the messenger. If anything, she seemed relieved, as if the Cleveland detectives had confirmed a long-held suspicion. Her husband was in Baltimore, she said. She didn’t say anything more, and Cowles and Oldag went back to Cleveland empty-handed. Eliot and Cowles made plans for a trip to Baltimore, but they weren’t quick enough. A couple of days later, Zeke came for his wife in Durham, and she called the FBI on him. Edwards signed a confession on the spot, though Cowles wouldn’t get any of the credit. J. Edgar Hoover had told his agents that they should avoid working with Eliot Ness. The report about the case that landed on Hoover’s desk didn’t mention Cowles, the Cleveland police or Eliot.
© 2014 by Douglas Perry
He would just have to keep reminding himself it was worth it. His father’s life was at stake. On October 4, 1937, Tielke had received a letter that instructed him to deliver $8,000 in small bills or his elderly father, Crucible’s president Maxwell Tielke, would be kidnapped and killed. The snatching of wealthy industrialists had been the crime du jour a few years earlier, when it had a warm-and-fuzzy Robin Hood feel to it. Most important, it was a neat, simple undertaking, with a limited number of variables involved. Any idiot could do it. Alvin Karpis, who’d slipped out of Eliot’s grasp during the Harvard raid, had seen his greatest success with this line of work. He and the Barker brothers had pulled down $100,000 for snatching William Hamm, a Minnesota brewer, in 1933. The following year, the Karpis-Barker gang grabbed Edward Bremer Jr., a Minnesota banker, which brought in another $200,000.
But that was then. Bruno Hauptmann’s execution in 1936 for the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s toddler son had rubbed a lot of the glamour off the kidnapping game. Karpis was caught the same year and now resided at Alcatraz with Al Capone. Fred and Ma Barker had been shot down by the feds the previous year.
Still, not everyone read the papers. Kidnappings continued to happen here and there. And some criminals thought asking for low-dollar amounts – like, say, $8,000 – would keep J. Edgar Hoover’s trigger-happy G-men away. They were right about that; Hoover only wanted the cases that would provide national headlines.
Two days after receiving a ransom letter, Homer Tielke drove up to an abandoned house in a working-class neighborhood, left a packet of money, and hurriedly drove off. He hadn’t told the police. But the money just sat there, untouched. Then a telephone call came in. New instructions. Tielke, confused and feeling out of his depth, decided to contact the safety director.
Now the businessman was making another drop, this time while being watched from every angle. A strong wind boxed his head. The weather seemed a lousy omen. He walked tenderly, warily, as if concerned that the snap of a twig would bring a hungry tribe of cannibals screaming toward him.
Then he disappeared.
Eliot stood up and peered into the brush. Another head, Bob Chamberlin’s, popped into view. Tielke had stumbled. A moment later the man was up again. He began walking in a circle, like a dog searching out the perfect place to relieve itself. Eliot eased back down into a squat. He turned to look at David Cowles, who was crouched behind him. The city’s scientific investigator picked at his thumb. Cowles had long, tapered fingers, the nails cut severely to allow a firm ledge of skin to protrude from underneath. They were the fingers of a card sharp. The beautiful digits didn’t fit with the rest of the man. Cowles was short, round, and bald, surely the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Oswald the Rabbit. He kept his gaze steady on the blundering Tielke.
Eliot rose again and began walking forward. Tielke was waving to the policemen. He had accidentally dropped the packet of money and now he couldn’t find it. Eliot, Chamberlin and Cowles began to kick and slap at the brush.
Eliot shook his head. “What are we going to do now?” he asked. Nobody had an answer. This should have been an easy case; the fact that the extortionist expected to collect eight thousand dollars without even bothering to kidnap the victim was a good sign that they were dealing with a third-rate criminal. But the prospective victim’s bumbling son was making a straightforward operation rather difficult. Eliot liked this kind of case. It offered work that he understood. There was no mysterious, magical evil to figure out – just normal human nature. There would be surveillance, maybe a chase, all ending with an intense interrogation and confession back at H.Q. Easy peasy. He’d happily put aside the torso serial-killer files and jumped into the investigation, driving out to Tielke’s sprawling home on the east side to interview the son. Except nothing was coming easily for Eliot right now. In the days that followed, Tielke and the authorities waited to hear from the extortionist again, but no call or letter came. Tielke’s father remained unmolested, so far.
***
In January of 1938, the Tielke extortion case popped back up. The investigation had gone cold since the money-drop mishap three months before. The drop location the extortionist had chosen was relatively close to the Crucible Steel Casting plant, across from a small mechanical-parts concern that supplied the company. This was a good reason to believe their perpetrator worked at Crucible or one of its nearby partners. Always a proponent of using the scientific method in police work, Eliot decided to bring in “a handwriting man.”
Matowitz may have rolled his eyes when Eliot brought up the idea, but handwriting would provide the break in the case. Cutting out letters from magazines and newspapers to spell out your ransom demands wasn’t yet a common kidnapping trope; most body snatchers wrote out ransom notes just as they would pen a letter to their grandmothers. Which is exactly what the Tielke extortionist had done. And so more than two months after the botched stake out – bing! – the police scored a lead. The handwriting expert linked the ransom letter to a former employee’s signature in Crucible’s files. The suspect was a twenty-seven-year-old black man named Isaiah Thomas Edwards, known as Zeke. Further bolstering the handwriting evidence: Edwards was nowhere to be found. Eliot assigned Cowles and a black officer to stake out Edwards’s residence. (Cowles mindlessly referred to his new partner as “Nigger Jones.”) Jones, left mostly on his own, spent hour after hour sitting in a car across the street from the little house, but days went by without anyone coming or going. Finally, irritated at the lack of progress, Eliot ventured out to join the stakeout himself. Tall and lanky in his expensive double-breasted suit – and, of course, white – Eliot stood out. A white man and a black man sitting in a car together in a black part of town? The best-case scenario was a homosexual tryst. Somebody was going to call the cops – or, more likely, decide to bring some vigilante justice to bear. After conferring with Jones, Eliot walked to a police call box. Half an hour later, Cowles drove up in an unmarked police car. Cowles stepped out of the car, and he and Eliot crossed the street to Edwards’s house. They looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then Cowles slipped under the porch, searching for a way inside, perhaps through a vent under the house. There he found a letter from the man’s wife – the postman had apparently missed the slot and it had slipped through the slats. He climbed out from under the porch and tore the letter open. “When are you coming to get me?” it asked. It seemed she had gone down to her native North Carolina to bury her father. She didn’t want to make the trek back north on her own.
Eliot now read the letter, smiling. He gave it back to Cowles and told him to go find her. He wanted to see the case through himself, but he had to appear in court for the indictment of a mobster he’d been pursuing. So Cowles and another white officer, Detective Louis Oldag, would go to Durham. Eliot informed Cowles that he was in charge.
Cowles reveled in running his own case. He was usually stuck in the lab, asking how high when detectives swaggered in and told him to jump, but he had to give Eliot credit: the safety director never cared about the boundaries imposed by job titles.
It had been a long, hard road for Cowles to gain the respect of his peers, and he knew that it remained tenuous. He was the police department’s superintendent of criminal identification, but that just meant he was the weird guy with the beakers. He had joined the city’s rolls back in 1919 as an assistant city chemist in the health department. Barely out of his teens, he tested whatever was brought in. Food inspectors dropped canned tomatoes and buckets of butter on his desk. Garbage men brought in grease that was to be made into soap. When Prohibition enforcement heated up, he got his first real shot at police work. It became his job to determine if confiscated bootleg liquor was “fit for beverage purposes.” He found the best way to tell was to take a drink. Of course, he also could have asked the building’s janitors, who helped themselves to his samples every night – until he spiked a bottle of gin with a toxic phenol solution that made the tipplers violently ill. (A written reprimand probably would have put a stop to the janitorial drinking, but Cowles was the kind of man who insisted on killing a fly with a sledgehammer.) In time he learned how to do fingerprint analysis and led the push to have fingerprinting replace the outdated Bertillon booking-card method that relied on measurements of various “bony” parts of the body. This brought about a belated transfer to the police department, where Safety Director Ed Barry – “a hot potato, honest man but tough,” Cowles said – became his benefactor. He was sworn in as an officer in 1931.
Now, half a dozen years later, he was an expert in ballistics, for whatever that was worth. It was still a new field, pioneered by Colonel Calvin Goddard in Chicago during the Capone days. Detectives – and judges – remained suspicious of bullet-impact analysis and the matching of bullet markings to gun barrels. Cowles also had become interested in lie-detector technology, an even more derided burgeoning science, though one that also had piqued Eliot’s interest. Cowles now spent a significant part of his time as an instructor in the police department’s training school, which removed him even further from the police work he wanted to do.
So the Edwards case was one more way for Cowles to earn his bones, to be accepted by the detectives he admired and envied. When he and Oldag arrived in Durham, Cowles was too excited to wait for the morning. With darkness falling – not the best time to potentially surprise a wanted man on his home turf – they headed out to the woman’s family residence, which turned out to be on the edge of a sprawling, if somewhat ragged, antebellum plantation. They marched up to the main house. “Knocked on the door and said we were detectives,” Cowles reported. “They told us to go back home and come back in daylight.” The local property holders, it seemed, understood the basic tenets of police work better than Cowles.
Cowles and Oldag found rooms, got some sleep, and then headed back out to the plantation in the morning. This time, the property’s overseers directed them to the right house, a tiny collection of wooden boards near a gully. Oldag went around the back, while Cowles stepped up to the door, took a deep breath, and knocked.
When the door opened, he gaped. “She was the most beautiful colored woman I ever saw,” he remembered more than forty years later. Edwards’s wife was light-skinned and tall. Eyes the color of a stiff drink. Surrounding her stark round face was an expansive umbrella of puffy black hair. Cowles had never seen hair like this before. In a couple of decades, Mrs. Isaiah Edwards’s afro would be a subversive political statement to men like David Cowles. In 1938, it was simply the siren call of the sexually forbidden.
Cowles stepped into the house. He didn’t need a search warrant to enter a colored woman’s home. He didn’t need permission to do whatever he wanted to do in this little shack. They were alone. And Cowles, insecure about his policeman’s bona fides, liked to play rough.
But that wasn’t how he handled it this time. He sat with the woman and asked when she last saw her husband. She didn’t answer. She asked why he wanted Zeke. She did her best to bluff him. Cowles recalled, “She said it can’t be important, ’cause you’re from the North and not Southern boys” – which probably meant she didn’t think she had to worry that they were going to string Zeke up from the nearest tree.
Cowles tried to make eye contact; he told her soothingly that he couldn’t tell her why they wanted him, they just wanted him. The beautiful young woman was having none of it. “She kept asking me what we wanted Zeke for,” Cowles reported. “I kept stalling and telling her I couldn’t tell.” His inexperience with this kind of thing was showing, and Oldag, who’d joined them in the house, was little help. Cowles had made it clear that it was his case and he would handle it. He finally decided to lie.
“All right, but don’t get mad at me,” he said. “A murder occurred in Cleveland in a house of prostitution. Zeke was in bed with a woman when that murder occurred.”
That did the trick. Anger flashed in the woman’s large, almond-shaped eyes, but she wasn’t angry at the messenger. If anything, she seemed relieved, as if the Cleveland detectives had confirmed a long-held suspicion. Her husband was in Baltimore, she said. She didn’t say anything more, and Cowles and Oldag went back to Cleveland empty-handed. Eliot and Cowles made plans for a trip to Baltimore, but they weren’t quick enough. A couple of days later, Zeke came for his wife in Durham, and she called the FBI on him. Edwards signed a confession on the spot, though Cowles wouldn’t get any of the credit. J. Edgar Hoover had told his agents that they should avoid working with Eliot Ness. The report about the case that landed on Hoover’s desk didn’t mention Cowles, the Cleveland police or Eliot.
© 2014 by Douglas Perry
