ELIOT NESS

The true story of Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman who led the Untouchables, took on Al Capone, and saved a city’s soul.

When Al Capone was finally sent to prison on 1931, much of the credit fell to 28-year-old Prohibition Agent Eliot Ness, the unlikely leader of the Untouchables squad. Thanks to Eliot’s memoir, The Untouchables, and the classic film it inspired, the story of how a few honest men sank America’s most notorious mobster has become legend. However, Capone was just the beginning of a legacy about which very little is known. Perry’s book follows Eliot Ness through his days in Chicago and into his forgotten second act. As the public safety director of Cleveland, Ness achieved his greatest success: purging the city of corruption so deep that the mob and the police were often one and the same. And it is here, too, that he faced one of his greatest challenges: a brutal, mysterious serial killer known as the Torso Murderer who terrorized the city for years. ELIOT NESS presents the first complete picture of the real Eliot Ness, a man both fearless and shockingly shy, an inexperienced mamma’s boy who somehow inspired courage, honesty, and loyalty in men twice his age, and a person who believed unwaveringly in the integrity of law and the basic good of his fellow Americans. Douglas Perry is the author of The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago. He is also the co-author of The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has appeared in such publications as the Chicago Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News, and The Oregonian.