Fight Against Capone
Ness' influence to take a stand against corruption was his mother, who "was overly attentive and very important to him. She was devoutly religious and instilled a unwavering sense of honesty in him" (Caitlin Hamilton).
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''I couldn't be corrupted... I wasn't born to sell out; I wasn't built that way. The pay wasn't good, but I wasn't forced to go on the job, I was happy to go on the job. There weren't many of my kind in the department in that era, and I was proud of it.'' - Albert Wolff (agent from Ness's team), Levingston Daily Sun, 1987.
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“At a time when Prohibition agents were notorious for taking bribes and payoffs, Ness and his men were soon nicknamed the “Untouchables” because of their honesty and integrity.” - Diane Yancey, Al Capone, 2003.
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Capone Attempts Bribery - Using the press
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Eliot Ness publicly takes a stand against corruption: "When they were settled, and while the newsreels were setting up their cameras, I told them of the attempted briberies. I related in detail how an emissary of Capone's had tried to buy me off for two thousand dollars a week and how Marty and Sam had thrown back their flying bribe. [...] It was a long, wearisome process but well worth the effort." - Eliot Ness & Oscar Fraley, The Untouchables, 1957.
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"Defiance of the type we had exhibited was unheard of in a racket-infested city where opposition was so consistently bought off or killed of. Our revelation of the bribes was a sensation." - Eliot Ness, The Untouchables, 1957
Leadership in Bureau
"Ness prepared an eighty-six page report documenting the corruption, which described findings on twenty crooked cops, including a deputy inspector, two captains, two lieutenants, and three sergeants. After an investigation, at least two hundred police officers were forced to resign" (Dirk Cameron Gibson, Clues from Killers: Serial Murders and Crime Scene Messages, 2004) because of Ness.
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Having a zero tolerance policy for corruption, "[Ness] devoted much of his effort to curtailing the city's embarrassing police corruption. Early indeed in his new career, he fired two veteran policemen, Joseph Dunne and Michael Corrigan, for drinking while on duty."
- Kenneth Tucker, Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions, 2012.
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"Ness, because of his reputation, was approached to direct an investigation of police department corruption... he forced two hundred resignations and sent a dozen high officers to the state prison." - Oscar Fraley, The Untouchables, 1957
Eliot Ness had taken a stand against corruption through his fight against Capone and his work as a prohibitionist agent in Chicago. His actions restored confidence in American citizens that the police would protect them and not be sidetracked from their duty.