Connecting to an “Untouchable” Past
By Scott Leeson Sroka
“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
- T.S. Eliot
This is a story about getting to know a grandfather I never met, learning about his role in bringing down the most notorious gangster of the twentieth century, Al Capone, and unlocking a piece of Western New York history in the process. This journey has taken me across the country to California, back through Chicago, Indiana and Washington, DC, and finally back to West Seneca, the town in which I was raised.
Growing up in Western New York, I endured the legendary Blizzard of ’77. I watched the Buffalo Bills play in the Super Bowl each of my four years as a student at Canisius College and I spent many holidays in my father’s old neighborhood on Buffalo’s East Side: enjoying the Broadway Market, my grandmother’s homemade pierogis and Redlinski’s Holiday Blend Polish Sausage. My mother grew up in San Francisco, and East met West when she and my father became acquainted as graduate students at the University of Chicago. During my younger years, my maternal grandmother, affectionately referred to by her grandchildren as Granny, retired among the soft brown foothills of Sonoma. Most summers we would venture out west to spend a few weeks with Granny and take in the dry heat of northern California’s warm sun.
In 1987, when I was 15 years old, Granny, my mother and I went to see a new Kevin Costner film, The Untouchables, playing at the Sebastiani Theatre, Sonoma’s single-screen movie house in the town square. Costner played Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman who led a band of incorruptible federal agents to bring Al Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, to justice in Prohibition-era Chicago. My mother told me that my grandfather, Joe Leeson, was one of the real agents who worked under Ness. In response, I asked her the question that I am now often asked: “Which one of the guys in the movie was my grandfather?” Granny laughed and said the movie was mostly fiction. My mother said, “There were actually ten Untouchables, not four, and none of them were police officers because they were all corrupt. There wasn’t much truth to the movie, but the real story is much more interesting.”
In 1987, when I was 15 years old, Granny, my mother and I went to see a new Kevin Costner film, The Untouchables, playing at the Sebastiani Theatre, Sonoma’s single-screen movie house in the town square. Costner played Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman who led a band of incorruptible federal agents to bring Al Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, to justice in Prohibition-era Chicago. My mother told me that my grandfather, Joe Leeson, was one of the real agents who worked under Ness. In response, I asked her the question that I am now often asked: “Which one of the guys in the movie was my grandfather?” Granny laughed and said the movie was mostly fiction. My mother said, “There were actually ten Untouchables, not four, and none of them were police officers because they were all corrupt. There wasn’t much truth to the movie, but the real story is much more interesting.”
When the Volstead Act outlawed the production and sale of alcohol in 1920, it created a vacuum that was quickly filled by gangsters like Alphonse Capone. People were still thirsty for beer and liquor, and gangsters like Capone soon discovered that they could become very rich meeting that demand. Operating outside mainstream society, when disputes arose there was no recourse to the law, and rough justice was meted out through brutal violence. Local cops and politicians were often thoroughly corrupt and thus useless against this new organized form of crime.
When stray bullets started hitting innocent civilians on the street, however, the private sector stopped sending its business to Chicago. The federal government was called upon to act, and Eliot Ness was tasked with forming a special team of agents who could fight the Capone outfit’s stranglehold on Chicago. He picked nine agents from around the country, each possessing a particular law enforcement skill, and all of whom had reputations for honesty and incorruptibility. A Chicago newspaper dubbed them “the Untouchables” for their inability to be bought or bribed.
While not the only gang boss in Chicago to engage in the illegal liquor trade, Alphonse “Al” Capone was widely considered the most notorious, having taken out a number of his rivals during the city’s bloody gang wars of the 1920s.
Credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Untouchables were known for their spectacular raids on Capone’s breweries, which destroyed the machinery that made his beer and crippled his gang’s ability to make money. But first, they had to find where “Snorky,” as Capone was sometimes called, made his booze and how he distributed it to speakeasies for sale to eager customers.
This brings us to the South Side of Chicago in April 1931. Joe Leeson and his Untouchable partner, Maurice “Sam” Seager, were looking out the window of a rooming house behind Colosimo’s, a hive of underworld activity for years located on South Wabash Avenue. Leeson grew up on an Indiana farm and served on a Navy destroyer in World War I. Back home, he worked as an engineer, repairing giant train locomotives with an acetylene blow torch. After signing up to be a Prohibition agent in Detroit, he used his skills with the blow torch to bust up the stills and brewing equipment of the Purple Gang. Eliot Ness tapped Leeson for his ability to tail suspects in an automobile without detection. Sam Seager began his career as a chiropractor in Buffalo, where he lived on Bailey Avenue. He later became a prison guard at Sing-Sing before joining the Prohibition Bureau’s Chicago office. In December 1930, Seager wrote home to his family in Western New York:
“Untouchables” Joe Leeson (left) and Maurice “Sam” Seager (right)
Credit: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
We see our share of blood and broken bones every day, and that serves to relieve the monotony of life somewhat. We have three Cadillac cars equipped with the police radio, are armor-plated and bulletproof glass all around, carry one machine gun and three sawed-off shot guns in each one, besides a goodly supply of small arms, grenades, gas, and other tools; taken all-in-all it bids fair to be an interesting winter.
Now, the two agents were staking out the notorious speakeasy to find out how it obtained its steady flow of beer. In the dead of night, a truck pulled up behind Colosimo’s and loaded up with empty barrels. Leeson and Seager tailed the truck to an old factory at 38th Street and Shields Avenue (now a parking lot for the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field) on the South Side. As Leeson reported to Ness that day, “We were afraid somebody might spot us and they might break off operations, so later on . . . we rented a run-down room right up the street where we [could] watch it without being seen.”
Gang boss “Big Jim” Colosimo opened this restaurant and speakeasy on Chicago’s South Wabash Street prior to being gunned down in the lobby in 1920. The restaurant continued to be a haven for those who picked up where Big Jim left off.
Credit: Private Collection
The agents waited patiently until Seager couldn’t stand the lack of activity. Unshaven and donning some old clothes to look like a vagrant, Seager climbed on the roof behind the plant and looked down through a skylight. He saw about a dozen men cleaning out the beer barrels that had been delivered by the truck. Leeson and Seager would have to maintain their stakeout until the barrels moved on to their next stop. They followed the trucks carrying the barrels only a few blocks each night to avoid being spotted. Eventually, they were led to a big garage on South Cicero Avenue, the transport escorted by an entourage wearing the trademark pearl gray fedoras of the Capone gang.
Leeson and Seager laid low in a vacant lot across from the garage, watching for further action. In the early hours of the morning, the garage lit up and the convoy again began to move. It turned out this building was only a way station in the process. As the two agents methodically followed, the vehicles wound a circuitous route to a larger warehouse on South Cicero, just a few blocks from the previous garage. The Untouchables established another stakeout in another vacant lot and watched as trucks loaded with empty barrels went in, exiting later filled with liquid loads. After monitoring this for several days, Ness was convinced they had found their first major brewery.
In the pre-dawn hours of March 25, 1931, the agents, including Leeson and Seager, pulled up a short distance from the suspected brewery. When the preordained time arrived, the Untouchables sprang into action. Men in two cars blocked the exits while other agents scaled up to the roof. As others tried to enter through the front, they found the double doors would not budge. The lawmen drove a truck my grandfather had fitted with a large snowplow-like bumper, using it as a battering ram to smash through the entryway.
The Chicago Herald and Examiner reported on Ness’ Untouchables raid on the Cicero brewery in March 1931. This creased page is part of a scrapbook kept by Sam Seager and now in the possession of the Seager family.
Credit: Author’s photograph
To their dismay, what they found on the other side was a large empty room. As Ness looked closer, he quickly realized that this was an arrangement made to fool intruders into thinking it was a vacant garage. The back wall had been painted black, and he was convinced that the actual brewery lay behind it, so he ordered his driver to hit the gas once more. The truck lurched forward, knocking the façade to the floor. Stunned gangsters stared as the truck came crashing through, and Ness barked, “Hold it! This is a federal raid!” After Ness’ men broke up the barrels and brewing equipment, sending a river of frothy liquid over the factory floor, the cost to Capone was $100,000 in confiscated equipment, vehicles and product. This first major raid left Capone without a brewery that could pump out 100 barrels of beer in a day.
While the Untouchables were tearing apart the machinery of Capone’s operation, agents from the Bureau of Internal Revenue, led by Frank Wilson, were pouring over Snorky’s financial records. Wilson was also from Buffalo, where he attended Lafayette High School. In 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition, 13-year-old Wilson watched as a mob tried to snatch the killer, Leon Czolgosz, from the custody of the local police. As officers secreted their prisoner away from the mob disguised in a police uniform, Wilson was inspired to pursue a life in law enforcement.
Wilson’s “revenuers,” as they were called, began building a case against Capone for income tax evasion. This was the first time the tax laws had been used in an attempt to bring a criminal indictment against a tax cheat. In the meantime, Ness’s agents, along with Chicago-based U.S. Attorney George E.Q. Johnson, were breaking new ground building a conspiracy case against Capone for violating the Prohibition laws.
Both investigations came to a head in June 1931, when Wilson’s team produced an indictment against Capone and his minions for income tax evasion. Two weeks later Ness’s efforts resulted in a 5,000-count conspiracy indictment against Capone for his bootlegging violations. As Prohibition’s time on the national stage was beginning to fade, Johnson brought the tax case to trial first. On October 17, 1931, Capone was convicted after trial of five counts of federal income tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years in prison.
While Capone began serving his time in Alcatraz and Prohibition vanished upon passage of the 21st Amendment, Ness, Leeson and Seager continued their federal careers as agents in the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tax Unit, or ATU. These lawmen did essentially the same work—conducting wiretapping investigations, busting up stills—as they did during Prohibition, but now they were targeting bootleggers who didn’t pay the taxes on their liquor. Ness went on to become the Public Safety Commissioner in Cleveland, where he successfully implemented innovative policing strategies and unsuccessfully ran for mayor.
Al Capone being led to Chicago’s Dearborn Station on his way to prison following his conviction. Eliot Ness is at far left.
Credit: Cleveland Public Library
Leeson’s investigative assignments sent him all around the country, living out of hotels with no place to truly call home. During a stay at headquarters in Washington, he went on a blind date with a legal secretary in the Treasury Department named Marie Eisele. Just as their romance began to blossom Leeson was transferred to Cincinnati, where he was appointed to run the ATU’s regional office.
But love couldn’t keep Joe and Marie apart for long. In July of 1941, Joe told his office he was going on vacation, and the couple met in Frederick, Maryland, where they were married in a quiet ceremony. The wedding was followed by a whirlwind honeymoon to New England and Niagara Falls. I have film footage of my grandparents strolling along the American side, the Falls in their full glory before the natural landscape was paved over in concrete. The newly-wed Leesons moved to Cincinnati, where my mother and aunt were born. Just three years later, my grandfather died of a heart attack while he was getting ready for work. Marie and her two daughters moved to San Francisco, where she continued working in the federal government.
Joe Leeson married Marie Eisele in July 1941. The couple went on a whirlwind honeymoon to New England and Niagara Falls before Joe returned to his duties.
Credit: Author’s collection
Eliot Ness’s career took a turn for the worse after failing at politics. He tried to make it in the private sector, but business was not his forte. He found himself, in his third marriage, working for a company that produced watermarked paper in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. It was there that he and sports writer Oscar Fraley began writing down his memories of the glory days in Chicago. Ness never got to see the published fruits of his labor or the Robert Stack television series that would make him famous once again. He died at age 54. Before he was buried in Cleveland, his remains were cremated at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.
Following his time in Chicago, Eliot Ness went on to serve as Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety. Though he was buried in Cleveland upon his death in 1957, he was first cremated at Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Credit: Cleveland Police Museum
In 2011, I was working in Washington as a federal prosecutor. My interest in the Untouchables was rekindled when Ken Burns took a swipe at Ness and his work while promoting his Prohibition documentary. He said Ness “had nothing to do with catching Al Capone.” I knew this wasn’t true, but I wanted to get the real story. With the help of an historian at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, I obtained the personnel files of each one of the Untouchables. Using leads found in these records and some research of my own, I began to seek out the descendants of Ness’s squad.
One group of relatives who reached out was the family of Sam Seager, from just outside Rochester. As I traveled to meet them and learn about our shared history, I found myself back where I started at home in Buffalo. We met for breakfast at a diner in Henrietta, sharing photos and stories of the adventures of Leeson and Seager, a reunion of sorts of the two Untouchables. I learned that Sam Seager was buried in St. Matthews Cemetery in West Seneca, just a few miles from the house in which I grew up. As we reminisced about the agents’ partnership and started a friendship of our own, the danger and excitement of the streets of Chicago were many miles and decades away. And yet, I had the sense that Leeson and Seager were somewhere together again, watching over our meeting and smiling with approval.
A Western New York Untouchable reunion—of sorts. The author (center) poses with descendants of his grandfather’s partner, Sam Seager: nephew Maurice Seager (second from left), great nephew Mike Seager (second from right) and son Ken Seager (far right).
Credit: Author’s collection
About the Author
Scott Leeson Sroka lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He served as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. for thirteen years and as counsel to U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was regional director in the Senator’s Buffalo office from 2000-2005.
