The Untouchables

Rusty Heller is a nightclub performer who has her eyes set on a better life for herself which, in her case, means lots more money. She sets her eyes on mobster Charles 'Pop' Felcher who has his own ambitions: with the recent arrest of Al Capone on tax evasion charges, he sees himself taking over as the top mobster in Chicago. When Felcher shows little interest in her, she settles for his lawyer, Archie Grayson. Felcher eventually comes around but Rusty starts to play a dangerous game when she decides to make money off Felcher and the Capone mob by selling both of them.

Working in the New York area, Eliot Ness and his men are trying to trace an incoming shipment of narcotics. Some years before, mobster and nightclub owner Jack "Legs" Diamond spent time in Europe and he made a deal with a Greek crime family to buy $5 million worth of narcotics. Diamond is flamboyant and loves publicity but his partners, Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, want him to lay low for a while and they send him off to his cabin in the Catskills. 

When a small-time hoodlum is apparently killed by Eliot Ness during a raid, the man's teenage son, Nicky Bousso, tries to kill him. Ness realizes that Nicky is no hood and tries to be nice, but the kid is persistent. When ballistics confirm that the man was killed before the raid took place, Nicky thinks Ness is just making it up. Nicky gets a job cleaning cars at his father's former place of work, a taxi company owned by Gus Marco. 

Waxey Gordon is known as the beer baron of New York and he decides that the time has come to expand his territory. He sets his sights on the New Jersey side of the river and successfully eliminates his three competitors there, including mobster Bugs Donovan. Ness and his men are trying to bring Waxey down and are sure they have located his warehouse but every time they raid the place, the building is completely empty. 

Eliot Ness and his team have been successful in shutting most of the drug trafficking in Chicago. One exception is 'Little' Charlie Sebastino's operation. He has accumulated quite a stash over the years and doesn't need to import new supplies to keep his lucrative operation going. A drug overdose victim puts Ness onto Sebastino's distribution chain but he is puzzled when the gangster stops selling the stuff. Unbeknown to Ness, the Commission, chaired by Joe Genna, has ordered Sebastino to stop selling drugs.

Narcotics smuggler Dino Patrone returns to the United States after visiting the old country for several months. He brings his younger sister Carla with him as she plans on studying in the U.S. Little does Dino know that his boss Victor Bardo has ordered his best friend Willie Asher to kill him. Traveling on the train to Chicago, Dino meets an acquaintance, print and radio journalist Loren Hall. Dino soon meets his end and it falls to Hall, who reluctantly agrees to work with Eliot Ness, to help Carla Patrone after she is kidnapped by the mobsters.

The Purple Gang, led by Eddie Fletcher, specialize in small-time kidnapping focusing on minor mobster that can fetch them a few thousand dollars in a short period of time. They may have bitten off than they can chew when they grab Jan Tornek. He is ostensibly an antique shop owner in business with his brother-in-law Eric Vajda. In fact, he's a messenger for the Capone mob, regularly collecting shipments of narcotics. 

Having had three boyfriends killed in the last 18 months, Francie West has earned her nickname, the kiss of death girl. She is a blackjack dealer in Phil Corbin's speakeasy and has been dating a minor mobster in Lou Scalese organization named Whitey Barrows. Corbin has plans to move into the big time and with Whitey's help, hijacks four truckloads of liquor belonging to Scalese. Corbin kills Whitey when the job is done and Eliot Ness tries to get Francie to help him out on the case.

When mobster Larry Fay gets control of the dairy industry, the price goes up and the city is in an uproar. Milk normally sells for 10 cents a quart but has risen to 13 cents with 2 cents going directly into 's Fay's pocket. A commission of inquiry is set up to investigate the matter but Fay only cares about his profit and to the chagrin of at least one of his partners, pushes the price of milk ever higher. Fay owns a nightclub with partner Sally Kansas who isn't aware of Fay's illegal activities. 

Otto Frick is a drug dealer with a traveling group of distributors. Ness and his men trace his supply chain to a book shop whose owner regularly visits the German Consulate in New York. Ness soon realizes that the Nazis are supplying Frick and that one of its agents, Walter Messlinger, is the point of contact. What Ness doesn't yet realize is that Messlinger wants Frick's experience as a hood to start using Nazi strong-arm tactics against local citizens.

Following the Hillsdale Express train robbery in which a million dollars was stolen and a mail clerk was killed, 'Tough' Tommy Karpeles is convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Eliot Ness has been tasked by the Post Office to recover the missing million and he begins to think that Karpeles may be innocent. Information from a dying hood puts him on the trail of Karpeles' former associate Arnie 'The Wolf' Mendoza, now a supposedly reformed cinema owner living under the name of Albert Maris.

When Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion, he's sentenced to 11 years and sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Capone's farewell is something normally reserved for more honest citizens leading Eliot Ness to go to Washington and propose the construction of Alcatraz prison. In Atlanta, Capone has a pretty good thing going, including guards who make life pretty easy for him in exchange for cash. When it becomes apparent that he too will be transferred to the new prison, Capone uses a cell mate's knowledge of the railroad route to plan his escape. 

Having managed to secretly inform his men of the departure date of the train carrying him to Alcatraz, Al Capone continues to work om his escape. The plan is to free Capone when the train stops for 5 minutes in the northern California community of Cloverville. Capone's men arrive the day before the snatch and basically take over the town at gunpoint. Ness and his men are soon on to them however and manage to enter the town. Needless to say, Capone ends up in Alcatraz.

When Al Capone is imprisoned for tax evasion, he leaves his operation in the hands of two of his lieutenants: Mayer Wartel is responsible for the speakeasies and Carl Positan is left in charge of the breweries. Wartel however soon ensures that he is left as the only one in charge and is soon dubbed Capone's heir apparent. He's a severe hypochondriac and a chronic worrier so when he takes a dislike to the newspaper articles about him, he personally gets rid of the editor. 

With the imprisonment of Al Capone for tax evasion, Frank Nitti has taken over the operation of the organization but that isn't stopping others from trying to muscle their way in. Arnie Seeger in particular thinks he has the opportunity to create a national crime syndicate and partners with St. Louis mobster Joe Kulak to make it happen. They plan on inviting key mobsters from across the country to a conference in Chicago. Into this mix comes a recently released small-time criminal, Maxie Schram.

Kansas City boss Torrez runs a lucrative trade in deadly "Jamaica Ginger". When rivals try to move in on his operation, Torrez hires hit-men, but complications arise when one of the killers falls in love.

Augie "The Banker" Ciamino (played by Keenan Wynn) is a vicious and brutal bootlegger who has developed a seemingly foolproof way of manufacturing liquor. He has equipped over a hundred immigrant homes with small stills to actually make the stuff and a unique way of collecting the product. Not everyone in the immigrant community is participating in the illegal liquor-making operation and Ness visits a night class where adults learn English, and writes his phone number on the blackboard. 

Mobster Valentine Ferrar thinks he has the perfect way to steal $1,000,000 of the syndicate's money. When a passenger liner returning from Cuba catches fire off the New Jersey coast, he fakes his death and sends his underling to the Underground Court, the mob's court of law, to tell them he drowned. They are soon on his trail however so when he meets up with a kooky widow, Hannah Wagnall, they set off on what she calls a second honeymoon. What he doesn't realize is that Wagnall has her own plans and that she's gone on these second honeymoons before.

When gangster Nick Moses and another Chicago mobster threaten to go to war after Moses poaches customers in the other's territory, Frank Nitti - now the top mobster in Chicago after the recent incarceration of Al Capone for tax evasion - tells them to settle things amicably, or else. Moses pretends to make amends but actually arranges a hit on his rival, one that also leads to a young newspaper boy being shot. When Nitti tells him he's a dead man, Moses tries to make one last deal - in return for sparing his life, he will make sure Eliot Ness is killed.

For years the Federal government has been trying to find a way to chemically de-nature industrial alcohol, but the mob has always found a way to re-nature the substance. In Chicago, the chief supplier of alcohol to the mob is Wally Baltzer who employs a crew of chemists to ensure a smooth flow of the product. The latest government formula is proving hard to crack and one of Baltzer's chemists, the physically disabled Russell Shield, sees an opportunity to make a name and a small fortune for himself.

Lily Dallas is a highly intelligent ex-con who has a history of committing bank robberies. This time she and her husband George 'Blackie' Dallas, who is known for his deft use of a Tommy gun, kidnap a well known and very rich businessman Thomas B. Randall and demand $300,000 ransom. Mrs. Randall follows their instructions and doesn't contact the police until after she has paid the ransom so Ness puts out a rumor that all of the bills have been marked.

With the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the end in sight for prohibition, Frank Nitti and the Chicago mob have been shifting from alcohol to narcotics as their primary source of income. When their supply dries up, Nitti travels to New Orleans to meet with their supplier, Emile Bouchard, whose original shipment of drugs was hijacked but is expecting another any day. Nitti warns him that there better not be any foul-ups with this shipment but it soon becomes clear that Bouchard has plans of his own and is out to get a percentage of the mob's total income.

Eliot Ness and the Untouchables are out to convict political boss Brian O'Malley and have two witnesses who will testify that he ordered a murder. O'Malley is an old-time politico who never seeks office himself but controls almost every party official that does. Ness's witnesses are living in a hotel under constant police protection but that doesn't stop O'Malley who manages to use a corrupt cop to kill one of them, George Davas. Ness' only remaining option is to find Davas' girlfriend, Julie Duvall, whom he learns was also a witness to O'Malley's orders.

When boxer Joey McGrath dies in the ring, the medical examiner reports no special circumstances and the Press put it down to a tragic accident. A lab technician in the ME's office informs Eliot Ness that the medical report was fixed and McGrath had a high level of morphine in his blood, suggesting he had been drugged before the bout. McGrath's manager Barney Jarreau is a straight arrow who wasn't involved in the fix but with the McGrath incident about to be reviewed, numbers racketeer Rudy Krasna decides to force Jarreau's hand to fix an upcoming championship fight.

Melanthos Moon is a San Francisco art and antique dealer who manages to hijack a large supply of the special paper used to print U.S. Currency. He then arranges to spring from Leavenworth prison master counterfeiter Hans Dreiser to engrave the plates to produce the money. Eliot Ness and the Untouchables are soon on to him having followed Moon's henchman Benny Joplin back to his Oakland, California home. With the phony money available, Moon then approaches Chicago mobster Frank Nitti with an offer of $100 million split 50/50 with Nitti distributing the cash.

Johnny Lubin has been on the make since he was a young kid. He quit school after grade 3 and by the age of 13 was paying off his truant officer $75 a week to leave him alone. Now 20, he own a string of speakeasies on the waterfront, including opium dens. He soon hooks up with George Dodd a toy manufacturer whose real name is Phil Melnick and is a supposedly reformed mobster. He has $2 million worth of opium to distribute and Lubin thinks he has just the way to get it into the hands of distributors.

Eliot Ness sets out to bring down Frank Makouris, who controls New York's Fulton Fish Market by intimidation and murder and who is responsible for the price of fish going up nearly 50%. Frank's boss, gangster Joe Kulak, tells Frank to lay low until Ness leaves, but Frank ramps up his terrorizing of the market, until Kulak is forced to throw a low-ranking hood to the feds as a sacrificial lamb in order to take the heat off himself. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out as planned.

Although Eliot Ness and the Untouchables managed to destroy the Underground Court, they have yet to make a dent against the Syndicate, which has re-grouped and continues to operate. They elect Nero Rankin to chair the national board of the syndicate, but the choice wasn't unanimous. He's also in poor health and that leads Sylvia Orkins, who loves Rankin and is convinced he will die or be killed, to approach Eliot Ness to do something, anything, to get him out of his new job.

After Al Capone is imprisoned for tax evasion, he leaves his Chicago operation in the hands of a governing council. There are two factions however, one headed by Frank Nitti and the other by Jake 'Greasy Thumb' Guzik, and they can't agree on anything. To resolve the deadlock, Capone asks his mentor, known only as Kafka, to return to the U.S.A. and take over the management of his organization. Kafka was deported 11 years previously and now lives in the Orient and Nitti and Guzik hire Alexander Stavro to ensure that Kafka entry is uneventful.

After Federal Agents destroy a large shipment of champagne there a void in the market. Bottle manufacturer Edmund Wald decides that perhaps the time has come to start filling the bottles he sells. He teams with a bootleg liquor distributor, Michel Viton, who has the contacts to sell the stuff to. He also gets his cheapskate uncle Barney Loomis, a legitimate restaurant owner, involved by getting him to lend him the up-front money he needs to the the illicit liquor operation underway. 

Nick Acropolis has created a vast network of bookies and is the king of the numbers racket in the greater Chicago area. His problems start when he discovers that Louis Manzak, his wife's brother and the manager of one his betting parlors, has skimmed $200,000 of the proceeds. Were it not for the family relationship, Nick would have had him killed but rather he gives Louis 48 hours to come with $50,000 as a down payment on what he owes. His sister lends him half of that amount but his attempt to borrow the rest from someone else leads to disaster.

Nate Kester is a burlesque theatre operator who decides to branch out into the lucrative brandy business. He is producing his own brandy, of very poor quality, and using a fancy French label to try and pass it off as de Bouverais cognac. He realizes that if his scheme is to work, he will have to ensure that the real stuff is unavailable for comparison to the rot gut he will be marketing. He manages to destroy the principal supplier of the real stuff but Etienne de Bouverais himself comes to Chicago to put a new wholesaler in place.