Past midnight, on a Thursday night, in a black business district on Carnegie, not far from the east side market, Angelo Scarlise exited the alley next to the Elite Cabaret, wiping the blood off his hands with a hanky. The night was dark and cold and not a soul was on the street, but the Elite was open, and so was the restaurant next door, Pig Foot Heaven, out of which came smells so foul Angelo thought he might puke. A few other storefronts were open on these couple of blocks; several bars, a barbecue stand, and a barbershop-numbers drop, where the "hep cats" paid to get their kinky hair straightened ("conked") by a mixture of Vaseline and potash lye.
--Max Allen Collins, Murder By the Numbers (St. Martin's Press, 1993).
Murder By the Numbers was the last of four books Collins has written about Eliot Ness's time as safety director of Cleveland. The research Collins and associates put into this work eventually resulted in a work of nonfiction that I wrote about on Sept. 20th of this year and I must say I prefer Collins's pulp poetry to his rather dry nonfiction. Murder By the Numbers takes place in Cleveland in the thirties as Ness tries to undo the white takeover of the Black numbers game (also called "policy" because money was used for gambling instead of insurance). Cleveland was a very segregated city at the time and Ness had recruited and promoted Black policemen to work in the Negro neighborhoods. Ness was not interested in destroying the numbers business but was interested in stopping the violence caused by the whites who tried to take it over.
Collins does a terrific job in the genre of "true crime fiction," -- using real people and names in a detective story -- and vividly captures the details of the denizens, streets, criminals and police in 1930's Cleveland.
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