Eliot Ness: le mythe

Eliot Ness fut un véritable agent du FBI, un policier honnête qui a osé affronté les troupes d'Al Capone, mais son histoire est essentiellement connue grâce à l'oeuvre d'Oscar Fraley, The Untouchables, ainsi qu'à la série télévisée et au film de Brian De Palma. Les exploits réels et/ou présumés de Ness justifient-ils qu'on appose son nom sur un immeuble fédéral? Cet article particulièrement intéressant du Washington Post apporte un nouvel éclairage sur le policier, l'homme et le mythe.

 "The rat-a-tat Tommy-gun tale of its author, Eliot Ness, and his incorruptible men in the Prohibition Bureau battling Chicago gangster Al Capone, proved to be a hard-boiled gem. It sold more than a million copies. It spawned a famous television series and a Hollywood blockbuster. It lofted Ness into the American pantheon of crime-fighting icons. He was the real-life Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” the Depression’s Wyatt Earp — the square-jawed Hero Who Came to Save Us from the Bad Man in the Dark.

 Of course, it’s almost all fiction.

 Ness didn’t have much to do with Scarface’s 1931 tax-evasion prosecution. Whole gobs of the book were ginned up by a ghostwriter. Ness and his agents, hardly saints, boozed it up as much as anybody. Ken Burns, when completing his PBS series “Prohibition” in 2011, dismissed Ness as a “PR invention.”

 So when U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) recently announced plans to name the national headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives at 99 New York Ave. NE as the Eliot Ness ATF Building, catcalls spewed like moonshine from a busted still.

La suite:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/eliot-ness-and-al-capone-the-men-the-myths-and-the-bad-man-in-the-dark/2014/02/18/8223c47a-95aa-11e3-afce-3e7c922ef31e_story.html