ELLIOT NESS: AFTER THE GLORY DAYS

In his book, “Elliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of An American Hero,” author –journalist Douglas Perry not only describes his glory days as a U.S. Treasury Department prohibition agent, but also his life of womanizing and alcoholism. Unfortunately, there was a seamier side to Ness than the one portrayed in the 1987 movie, “The Untouchables.”

From Mail Online:

With the repeal of Prohibition in December 1933, there was no longer a need for such a team and his subsequent success as head of police in Cleveland, Ohio — then the most lawless city in America after Chicago — was overshadowed by personal scandal.

Soon after their move to Cleveland in 1936, Edna [his first wife] began to suspect her husband was sleeping with other women. Two years later she divorced him.

By then he was drinking heavily, indulging in a fondness for Scotch which had developed when he was an undercover agent.

Ness took to visiting nightclubs, trawling for female company.

Then, he met the woman who would become his second wife, a married artist named Evaline McAndrew.

He could hardly have made a worse choice of partner. Like him, she enjoyed hard partying and she also had a penchant for skinny-dipping in the lake next to their home.

But their alcoholism took a disastrous turn when, one icy morning in 1942, after a long night drinking at a local hotel, their car skidded into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

Nobody was seriously hurt but Ness, fearful that he might lose his job, tried to get the accident hushed up. When his involvement was later revealed by a newspaper, he felt obliged to resign.

He would never work in law enforcement again.

He spent the rest of the war heading a campaign to reduce venereal disease among the military, giving lectures across the country, while risking his own sexual health by sleeping with waitresses and housewives he met along the way.

Like Edna before her, Evaline became aware of these infidelities but it was she who ended the marriage when, in 1944, she began a lesbian affair with a beautiful artist’s model.

Packing her fur coat, a champagne bucket and little else, she disappeared from his life.

It was left to Ness’s third wife Betty, a sculptress he married two years later, to support him through his last years as his alcoholism took a greater hold.

‘I would have two drinks and he’d have 22,’ recalled Jack Foyle, a drinking buddy at the time.

Towards the end of his life he had worked as a salesman for a paper company, begging embarrassed former contacts in Chicago and Cleveland to take his wares.

Ness died of a heart attack in 1957 and few newspapers ran an obituary. It was, after all, almost 30 years since he had become legendary as the man who took down Al Capone.