By Jessica Kenley 

Coudersport, Pa. — The door to the Eliot Ness Museum opens quietly, but inside, the past is anything but still.

Before the tour even begins, Stephen Green is already talking—mid-thought, mid-story, mid-passion. He moves quickly, not rushed but energized, as if every artifact in the room is waiting its turn to speak.

Spend an hour with Green, and it becomes clear: this museum is not just something he built. It is something he lives.

A Life That Found Its Purpose

Green didn’t set out to build a museum. He wasn’t looking for a legacy project or a second career. At first, he just needed space.

“I was only looking for a place to store the three vehicles,” he says, gesturing toward the front windows, where vintage cars now sit like silent witnesses to another era. “But I put them in the windows to dress up the sidewalk… and I got carried away.”

He leased the building in 2019. He filled it piece by piece. He incorporated it as a nonprofit. And in 2022, when the future of the museum felt uncertain, he made a decision that would define just how much it meant to him.

“I bought these buildings to save the museum,” he says.

Walking Through a Story

A tour with Green does not follow a straight line. It loops and circles, jumps decades, doubles back, and surges forward again—because that’s how he experiences the history.

He doesn’t recite facts. He relives them.

One moment, he’s describing the rise of Al Capone and the chaos of Prohibition-era Chicago. The next, he’s pointing out a detail in the building itself—a former Ford dealership, once alive with engines and motion. 

Upstairs, the building has six apartments, each named after persons of the prohibition era–except one is named the John Rigas Suite. 

“Who doesn’t love John Rigas?” says Green with a laugh. 

Green moves on, saying that Lucille Ball grew up in Jamestown, New York, and then mentions that there is the Desi Arnaz/Lucille Ball Museum there, where the National Comedy Center is. 

And it was Desilu Studios and their combined Hollywood operation who bought the rights to the book The Untouchables, and produced the TV show The Untouchables in 1959, starring Robert Stack, who played Eliot Ness.

Green gets a faraway look in his eyes when he says, “He will always be Eliot Ness to me. That show came out in 1959, and I was seven…that show transformed television.”

“Because I can tell you, in 1959, TVs were new technology, they’re black and white. They had the antennas on them, the rabbit ears…We’re twisting foil on them to get better reception,” Green laughs.

He continues, “This show comes on, and it starts with maybe one of the best narrators of all time, a guy named Walter Winchell.”

Green explains that the show started like a WWII documentary, with Winchell narrating to set the stage, “Then it would change to a drama scene, like Robert Stack being Eliot Ness in his office–”calm, cool, collected, talking to his guys…”

“Then it would switch to a scene of violence, with, you know, mobsters driving down the street with Tommy Guns and then blowing up buildings and crashing, and–”

At this time in history, everything else on TV, Green mentions, is “stuff like, ‘Father Knows Best,” and ‘Leave It to Beaver,” pointing out the contrast between the mundane to the exciting Ness adventures and foibles.

“Even Gunsmoke was pretty tame,” he said, and then described the explosive popularity of The Untouchables show. 

“The TV show was so popular, it was syndicated worldwide. Books were written–written in different languages, comic books…” he trails off, lost in thought.

Why Here

It’s a question Green has answered countless times, but he still leans into it with intensity.

Why Coudersport?

“People think it’s because he died here,” he says. “But that’s not why.”

He shakes his head.

“He could have died anywhere.”

Instead, Green leads the way across the room, past exhibits and photographs, toward a story that he clearly believes is the heart of everything.

Green mentions that a man named Joe Phelps, one of Ness’s buddies, Ness had told Phelps about his exploits with Capone in Chicago. 

Phelps knew a guy named Oscar Fraley, a sports writer and “wannabe author,” says Green, and he said to Fraley, “He looked him right in the eye, he said, ‘There’s a story here.’”

So that’s what Fraley did. He started coming to Coudersport and interviewing Ness, and he stayed at the Crittenden Hotel. 

And from that collaboration came The Untouchables—the book that would carry Ness’s name across the world.

“It was right here,” Green says, his voice rising slightly. “Right here in Coudersport, where the story—and the fame—of Eliot Ness was born.”

It’s a point he returns to again and again, not out of habit, but conviction.

“That’s why the Museum is here,” he says. “That’s the reason.”

The Man Behind the Myth

Green doesn’t just admire Ness—he defends him.

He pushes back gently against the Hollywood versions, the simplified narratives, the myths that have grown over time.

He talks about the television series starring Robert Stack, about the film portrayal by Kevin Costner in the late ‘80s, about the way storytelling can both illuminate and distort.

“[Kevin Costner] was good, but he was no Robert Stack,” Green says with firmness.

Green went on–”DeNiro played Capone, he probably did the best job ever playing Capone of anybody…right? Sean Connery was there…” he trails off.

Green moves on to Ed Szymanik, who, he says is “omnipresent” here, and “our most awesome law man.” 

Szymanik is part of the present day museum cast. Green continued, “Ed portrays the mysterious Mike Malone. He was the character portrayed by Sean Connery in the movie, okay?” 

He then gives props to Szymanik’s daughter, Lori Szymanik-Oliver, who plays Viola O’Banion, one of the “gorgeous” flappers, according to Green. 

“She was Dean O’Banion’s wife, a rival gangster to Al Capone…Some things got embellished,” he says. “But the core of it—it’s true.”

Green talks about Chicago in 1919, where, “all of a sudden, overnight, alcohol is illegal,” when Prohibition passed.

Al Capone, at the time, of course, “was ingenious enough to start bootlegging booze immediately, and selling it on the black market, making money hand over fist. He pretty much launched and invented organized crime in this country. He’s getting so rich and other rival gangsters start coming up. Everyone wants a piece of the action…Bugs Moran, who is in an Irish gang, and Capone is Italian.”

Green explains that ethnicity defines the gangs, and “that’s how we settled our cities, Italian gangs, Irish gangs, Slavic gangs, Jewish gangs, and then they all start expanding into racketeering, gambling, prostitution…and then they’re fighting over territories, and they even start extorting the little guy.”

While the violence escalated in Chicago, Green says, people were “getting fed up with it,” which put pressure on the U.S. Treasury Department Prohibition Bureau, where Ness worked, and was the agency that was responsible for enforcing Prohibition. 

That agency ultimately evolved into what is today’s ATF, the U.S Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Ness is ATF’s legacy, and ATF is Ness’s Legacy.

In Chicago, there was the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” where the rival gangs were being so violent that some of Al Capone’s thugs, “He had them dress up as cops and lure some of Bugs Moran’s gang into a remote Lincoln Park Garage in Chicago, and then they mowed them down with shotguns and Tommy Guns.”

It was where Ness and his men, “deservedly, early on, they got the nickname, The Untouchables.”

This was because Capone couldn’t bribe Ness. He could bribe “judges, cops, politicians,” Green ticks them off his fingers while he talks, “he has so much cash, yeah, but he couldn’t get Ness.”

“He was the perfect cop,” Green says. “Honest, fair, relentless, unbiased, humble.”

Ness never got Capone for any of the murders he committed, but he did get him, “with a little help from the IRS,” for tax evasion in 1931, when he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

After Ness took down Capone, he had been blocked from working for the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover, who started the FBI, because Ness was “too honest,” according to Green.

Then comes Cleveland.

In 1935, Prohibition had just ended. “Prohibition went on for 14 years–can you imagine 14 years of booze being illegal?” Green says.

“He turned that whole city around,” Green says, stopping for a moment as if to let the weight of that settle. “From the worst, most dangerous, most corrupt city…to one of the safest.”

“That blows me away,” Greens says, “The guy was in his 30s.”

He looks around the museum, as though the walls themselves might agree.

“That’s a bigger deal than taking down one mobster.”

Green talks about how Ness was one of the first persons to deploy squad cars with radios in the 1930s, which “took the cops off being a beat cop, put them in a buddy system, made them safer…a whole quantum leap in effectiveness…because they used to have to go to a pole with a phone…he’s the model for law enforcement.”

One of the negative things about Cleveland for Ness, who was then the Public Safety Director, was that there was a serial killer there, nicknamed “The Mad Butcher,” or “The Torso Killer,” who was a former surgeon. 

“A world-famous case,” Green says, that has still today never closed, “But Ness knew who this guy was, but he could never get him because he was politically connected to a rival.”

Green explains that Ness had the guy in an interrogation room with a lie detector machine, with the actual man who invented the machine administering the test, which was “brand new technology in the 1930s.”

Of course, the polygraph results could not be used in court, so when the killer found that out, he then “taunted” Ness with details that only the killer would know.

A Museum That Breathes

At the Eliot Ness Museum, lights glow softly over exhibits. Old film clips flicker in a small theater. A recreated crime scene sits just dim enough to let imagination fill in the edges.

Each piece has been placed, considered, explained.

Green knows where everything came from. He knows who contributed it. He knows the story behind it—and he wants you to know it too.

Green also praised the museum’s many volunteers, without whom the museum wouldn’t exist and could not operate, he says.

Keeping the Story Alive

Green doesn’t just wait for people to come to the museum—he brings the museum to them with Ed Syzmanik, who he jokes is a “walking photo op.”

Through presentations at assisted living facilities, community groups, and rotary clubs, he shares the story of Ness with audiences who remember, or are hearing it for the first time.

“You know the comic strip Dick Tracy?” Green asks. “That comic strip was modeled after Eliot Ness.”

Green also mentions A. Brad Schwartz and his mentor, Max Allan Collins. Schwartz is, Green says, “the most renowned and authoritative author on the subject of Eliot Ness and Al Capone.” 

Green sells signed copies of his books.

This August 22nd, the museum will mark Eliot Ness Day, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Ness’s first day with the Prohibition Bureau in 1926.

“That’s the day that launched his career,” Green says. “America’s greatest crime fighter.”

A Place That Feels Personal

By the end of the visit, it no longer feels like a museum in the traditional sense.

It feels like someone’s life, laid out in rooms.

Not just the life of Eliot Ness—but the life of the man who refused to let that story fade.

And as he steps away—already thinking about the next story, the next detail, the next visitor—it becomes clear that this place will keep evolving, as long as he’s there to guide it.

Because for Stephen Green, this isn’t just history.

It’s purpose.

“I just love the story,” he says, with a distant, starry-eyed look.

To learn more or donate to the Eliot Ness Museum, please go to eliotnessmuseum.org, or visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/p/Eliot-Ness-Museum-100057186410468/

Or you can contact Stephen Green at (607) 423-6902 or email him at stephenagreen1952@gmail.com

The Eliot Ness Museum is located on Main Street at the red light in Coudersport, PA.