Secret Six

The Secret Six was a name given (by James Doherty of The Chicago Tribune) to six influential businessmen in Chicago who organized the business community against Al Capone. Formation The event that triggered the formation of the Secret Six was the shooting of a building contractor's superintendent, Philip Meagher, on February 5, 1930 at the construction site of the Lying-In Hospital (later part of the University of Chicago Hospitals) at 59th and Maryland Avenue. The superintendent's employer, Harrison Barnard, went to the Chicago Association of Commerce (CAC), now the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, demanding action. The CAC's president, Colonel Robert Isham Randolph, shortly after announced that he was the spokesman of a committee formed to prevent and punish crime. Randolph said the members of the committee did not want to reveal their names. When asked by Doherty how many there were, Randolph replied, "half a dozen." Eliot Ness gets his commission The Secret Six hired Alexander Jamie, who had been Chief Special Agent of the Department of Justice, as its chief investigator. He was the brother-in-law of Eliot Ness. Jamie influenced Randolph to speak with U.S. District Attorney, George Emmerson Q. Johnson, and through Johnson Eliot Ness got his special commission. Of the Secret Six, in his book, The Untouchables, Eliot Ness says this, "These six men were gambling with their lives, unarmed, to accomplish what three thousand police and three hundred prohibition agents had failed miserably to accomplish: The liquidation of a criminal combine which paid off in dollars to the greedy and death to the too-greedy or incorruptible."