Great-nephew of ‘Mysterious Mike’ wants to tell you about how his uncle helped take down Al Capone

At the government agency where Mike Malone worked for four decades until his death in 1960, people called him “Mysterious Mike.”

Only a few of them, tough-minded guys just like him, knew who he really was and what he did as an undercover agent for the Internal Revenue Service.

Mysterious Mike’s exploits will get much wider acclaim if his great-nephew, Marty Dolan, succeeds in his own mission. Armed with lots of information, Dolan, a Laguna Beach anesthesiologist, is building the case that Malone deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

After all, Malone was one of the guys who put Alphonse “Al” Capone behind bars.

Al Capone

ATTIC TREASURES

Decades after Malone’s death, Dolan began perusing what Malone had stored in boxes in the attic of his sister’s home in New Jersey. She was Dolan’s grandmother.

Official typewritten reports, handwritten notes, photographs and other documents tell the story of Malone’s lifelong work for IRS criminal intelligence, including a key role he played in the downfall of Capone, the world’s most famous gangster.

There was information, too, about Malone’s work on what in 1932 was dubbed the “Crime of the Century,” the kidnapping of hero aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby.

Dolan also learned about two other T-Men, or Treasury Men, whom his uncle worked with closely on those and other critical cases: Malone’s longtime boss, Elmer L. Irey, first chief of the intelligence unit at what was then the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and fellow agent Frank J. Wilson.

What Dolan saw launched him on a journey that led to where he is now – hunched over a laptop in his home high up Bluebird Canyon, putting together a packet of information to send off to the White House.

Dolan plans to ask President Barack Obama – or his successor if nothing happens before January – to award the Medal of Freedom to Malone, Irey and Wilson.

Semi-retired at 69, Dolan spends a good part of every day honing the pitch he expects to send off to Washington this month.

Dolan hopes the president will come to the same conclusion as he did: “These guys are fascinating.”

More than that, the three men are the real “Untouchables” who quite possibly saved the entire country from becoming a criminal enterprise, according to Dolan and others behind his effort.

Supporters include a former assistant secretary of the treasury and the Treasury Historical Association based in Washington, D.C. The popular Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas, officially known as the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, is also on board. The museum has an exhibit on the IRS team.

They all want to remind everybody that it was the T-Men – not the famed G-Men of J. Edgar Hoover – who did the hard, behind-the-scenes work of nabbing Capone, Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and dozens of other criminals and corrupt politicians.

The careers of Irey, Wilson and Malone may not have been the glamorous stuff of Hollywood, but they were unblemished, says Paul Camacho, a retired IRS special agent who lives in Nevada and sits on the board of the Mob Museum.

“They had no skeletons in their closets,” Camacho says. “You can have a moment of greatness, and we should recognize those heroes.

“But this was decades of greatness.”

THE TEAM

Elmer Irey

Irey, a mild-mannered-looking man who wore round spectacles, was considered one of the greatest detectives of his day.

He is credited with pioneering the sleuthing technique of following the money that put Capone, the notorious Prohibition-era bootlegger and racketeer, in prison for evading taxes on millions of dollars of unreported income.

Before he died in 1947, Irey wrote a book called “Tax Dodgers,” which told the inside story of his investigative team. It didn’t get much of an audience outside of those already familiar with Irey’s work.

“Who likes the IRS? Who wants to read an IRS story about bean counters?” Dolan says. “It just sort of died.”

Wilson, balding, steely-eyed and iron-jawed, went on to be named head of the U.S. Secret Service in 1937. He retired in 1947 and died at 83 in 1970.

“He was a stud, basically,” Dolan says of Wilson.

And Malone? He died at 67 of a brain aneurysm, still working for the IRS.

Of the three men, Dolan’s great-uncle took on the most dangerous assignments.

“Irey and Wilson, they had a man-crush on Malone,” Camacho says. “Malone was their inspiration.”

With his swarthy looks and facility with different languages, Malone could pass for Irish, Greek, Italian. His specialty: cozying up to gangsters.

Malone had multiple aliases, but mostly he went by Pat O’Rourke. Another was Mike Lepito, the name he used to infiltrate Capone’s inner circle, posing as a Philadelphia gangster who rented a room next to Capone’s bodyguard.

Other bad guys whom the IRS team got the goods on included Dutch Schultz in New York, Daily Racing Form owner Moses “Moe” Annenberg, and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson in New Jersey, the inspiration for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.”

THE LONER

Irey, Wilson and Malone patiently gained the trust of Charles Lindbergh, persuading him to let them record the serial numbers of the gold certificates used to pay the kidnapper’s ransom demand of $50,000.

Two years after the little boy’s body was found in May 1932, Hauptmann used a $10 certificate at a gas station, leading to his arrest.

Camacho believes Lindbergh bonded with Irey and Malone because of their empathy. The two men also had lost young children – Irey’s 3-year-old middle son and Malone’s only child, a daughter who was 3 1/2.

His daughter’s death broke up Malone’s marriage – although he and his wife never divorced – and crystallized his hallmark risk-taking lifestyle.

“He became a nomad,” Dolan says, “and didn’t care much about losing his life.”

At the time of his death, Malone was renting a room at the St. Paul Athletic Club in Minnesota – a solitary man to the end.

Yet, he could show deep kindness, Camacho says, relating how Malone brought food and money to a Chicago widow with three children one Christmas Eve and arranged for them to travel to California to rebuild their lives.

Dolan says his uncle never attended family events – weddings or funerals. When he did come around, he was good at parlor tricks, such as pulling a coin out of a youngster’s ear.

There had been whispers, and some drunken ramblings from one relative, that his work had something to do with Capone, Dolan says. But mostly, even with family, Malone lived up to his IRS nickname.

Dolan remembers the Mysterious Mike who’d stop by unannounced at the Jersey City home of Dolan’s grandmother in the late 1950s. Malone always would be fully dressed in suit, tie, white shirt and undershirt, topcoat and hat.

There were times when Malone sat tight-lipped as the action-packed TV series “The Untouchables” kept a young Dolan glued to the tube, following the exploits of Eliot Ness, the famed Bureau of Investigation (later FBI) special agent.

“He sat there and never said a word,” Dolan says in a Jersey-accented voice that rises in amazement at his uncle’s restraint.

After his death, Malone’s belongings traveled from attic to attic – passed along from Dolan’s grandmother to his mother to his sister, who parceled out some of the boxes to Dolan. Those boxes stayed intact, Dolan says.

“Nobody ever looked inside.”

THE MEDAL

Marty Dolan of Laguna Beach holds up a picture of his uncle, Michael Malone

Dolan, who moved to Orange County in 1974, made a half-hearted computer search of Malone in the early ’90s but found little online.

In 2011, the movie “J. Edgar,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover, made Dolan think of his great uncle again and those “whispers” about Capone.

Dolan couldn’t believe his eyes this time when he Googled “Mike Malone” and “all this stuff came up” on a more robust internet.

Dolan went to the boxes. After poring over Malone’s documents, he began reaching out to let others know what he’d found.

“What he has is epic,” Camacho says.

It’s anybody’s guess whether Dolan can make a successful case for a Presidential Medal of Freedom to be awarded to Irey, Wilson and Malone. The honor has been bestowed on individuals that include athletes, artists, scientists, politicians, educators, entertainers – even comedians.

“Obviously the president doesn’t get this directly from Marty on his desk,” says Thomas O’Malley, chairman of the Treasury Historical Association, who wrote a letter of support to Obama on behalf of his organization.

“There’s a bunch of fingers that touch it and apparently a formal board reviews it.”

But Irey, Wilson and Malone are unsung national heroes, O’Malley says.

Malone’s singular – and lonely – dedication particularly impresses O’Malley, who remembers watching a short-lived TV series called “Treasury Men in Action” as a boy in the 1950s. His dad worked for the IRS, and O’Malley retired in 1994 from the Treasury Department after 25 years, rising to a director’s level.

“Talk about a public service and sacrifice to the nation,” O’Malley says of Malone. “That is incomprehensible to me that anybody could have a life like that.”

Contact the writer: 714-796-7793 or twalker@ocregister.com Twitter: @TellTheresa