transport problem.”
This very specific objective sounded easy enough to achieve, but despite all the money poured into police payoffs, the Outfit actually went to considerable trouble to hide its brewing work. The Mob used decoy buildings, trompe l’oeil techniques to conceal entire rooms, lookouts, and advance and trailing cars to secure deliveries. The syndicate frequently moved its heavy equipment among dozens of buildings across the city, and its beer trucks regularly changed their routes. Counterintuitively, little family stills, many of them under Capone’s control, were relatively easy to find; they were less professionally run, less secure, less mobile—and, more than ever, neighbors talked. The big breweries, the ones that pulled in the serious money and should have been difficult to hide, were much tougher to track down.
In its first weeks, the new special team focused on cultivating informants, surreptitiously following bootleggers, and figuring out where best to place phone wiretaps, a relatively new law-enforcement practice. Eliot’s life was changing fast—again. In the year and a half between the end of the Chicago Heights operation and the creation of the Capone squad, he had settled into a routine at the bureau, mostly tracking down small-time brewers in the suburban and rural areas outside Chicago.He’d even had time for a real personal life. Being so much younger than his siblings, he’dessentially been an only child growing up. He’d always been uneasy about sharing his physical and emotional space. But that finally had begun to change. He was in love. When they were alone together, he and Edna became comfortable opening up about their feelings. They began to trust not just each other but themselves. After several months of exclusive dating,they had married on August 9, 1929, in suburban Oak Glen and moved into a small apartment near Palmer Park on Chicago’s South Side. The rent was $65 a month. For the first time in his life Eliot was out from under his parents’ roof. And he found that he loved married life; he loved being the man of the house. He and his new bride spent almost all of their free time at home together, reading or listening to music or working on jigsaw puzzles. It was the happiest he had ever been. But now, a year after their marriage vows and with an astonishing career opportunity before him, the honeymoon was over. No longer was he on the periphery of the action at the bureau. He was right back in the middle of it. Eliot once again moved into an all-encompassing work mode. He went out to the shooting range every day, until he became the best shot in the office. He diligently made a list of every known gangster in the region, along with each man’s known haunts and associates. His address book filled up with killers. He worked late into the night and then got up early in the morning after just a couple hours of sleep. He discovered that the best way to find Capone’s breweries was to keep it simple: he and his men hung around outside speakeasies, all hours of the day and night. “We knew that regularity was necessary in their operation, and it wasn’t long before we learned of the special hauls on Fridays in preparation for Saturday speakeasy business,” Eliot would later tell a reporter. For a while, the squad tried following the trucks after their delivery, but that led nowhere useful. A truck would deliver beer, and the next day it would deliver office furniture. Then it might sit on the street for days. It turned out to be a better bet to stay with the booze.
The squad noticed that, as a tavern filled up on a busy weekend night and the place started rocking, bartenders would regularly heft empty beer barrels into the alley. “The first observation we made was that the barrels had to be used over and over again, and that if we could successfully follow a beer barrel from a speakeasy, we would wind up locating a Capone brewery,” Eliot noted. In February, Eliot
This very specific objective sounded easy enough to achieve, but despite all the money poured into police payoffs, the Outfit actually went to considerable trouble to hide its brewing work. The Mob used decoy buildings, trompe l’oeil techniques to conceal entire rooms, lookouts, and advance and trailing cars to secure deliveries. The syndicate frequently moved its heavy equipment among dozens of buildings across the city, and its beer trucks regularly changed their routes. Counterintuitively, little family stills, many of them under Capone’s control, were relatively easy to find; they were less professionally run, less secure, less mobile—and, more than ever, neighbors talked. The big breweries, the ones that pulled in the serious money and should have been difficult to hide, were much tougher to track down.
In its first weeks, the new special team focused on cultivating informants, surreptitiously following bootleggers, and figuring out where best to place phone wiretaps, a relatively new law-enforcement practice. Eliot’s life was changing fast—again. In the year and a half between the end of the Chicago Heights operation and the creation of the Capone squad, he had settled into a routine at the bureau, mostly tracking down small-time brewers in the suburban and rural areas outside Chicago.He’d even had time for a real personal life. Being so much younger than his siblings, he’dessentially been an only child growing up. He’d always been uneasy about sharing his physical and emotional space. But that finally had begun to change. He was in love. When they were alone together, he and Edna became comfortable opening up about their feelings. They began to trust not just each other but themselves. After several months of exclusive dating,they had married on August 9, 1929, in suburban Oak Glen and moved into a small apartment near Palmer Park on Chicago’s South Side. The rent was $65 a month. For the first time in his life Eliot was out from under his parents’ roof. And he found that he loved married life; he loved being the man of the house. He and his new bride spent almost all of their free time at home together, reading or listening to music or working on jigsaw puzzles. It was the happiest he had ever been. But now, a year after their marriage vows and with an astonishing career opportunity before him, the honeymoon was over. No longer was he on the periphery of the action at the bureau. He was right back in the middle of it. Eliot once again moved into an all-encompassing work mode. He went out to the shooting range every day, until he became the best shot in the office. He diligently made a list of every known gangster in the region, along with each man’s known haunts and associates. His address book filled up with killers. He worked late into the night and then got up early in the morning after just a couple hours of sleep. He discovered that the best way to find Capone’s breweries was to keep it simple: he and his men hung around outside speakeasies, all hours of the day and night. “We knew that regularity was necessary in their operation, and it wasn’t long before we learned of the special hauls on Fridays in preparation for Saturday speakeasy business,” Eliot would later tell a reporter. For a while, the squad tried following the trucks after their delivery, but that led nowhere useful. A truck would deliver beer, and the next day it would deliver office furniture. Then it might sit on the street for days. It turned out to be a better bet to stay with the booze.
The squad noticed that, as a tavern filled up on a busy weekend night and the place started rocking, bartenders would regularly heft empty beer barrels into the alley. “The first observation we made was that the barrels had to be used over and over again, and that if we could successfully follow a beer barrel from a speakeasy, we would wind up locating a Capone brewery,” Eliot noted. In February, Eliot
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