Oscar Fraley; Wrote ‘The Untouchables’

Oscar Fraley, the onetime sports reporter whose high-spirited chronicling of “The Untouchables” spawned a hugely successful TV series and two feature films, has died. He was 79.

Fraley died after stomach surgery Thursday night in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., his wife, Imogene, said Saturday.

Fraley, who wrote his book based on lengthy conversations with Eliot Ness, the federal gangbuster whose team sent Al Capone to prison, had been writing sports for United Press International when he met Ness in 1956.

Over what Fraley recalled as being several glasses of Scotch at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Ness began recounting his pursuit of Capone and other Prohibition-era mobsters.

“I said: ‘Why don’t you write a book?’ He said: ‘You’re a writer. You write it,’ ” Fraley said in an interview later.

Fraley completed the book about the colorful Treasury Department agent and his colleagues in 1957. He titled it “The Untouchables,” a sobriquet placed on the gangbusters by a Chicago newspaper.

Fraley said in interviews over the years that in October, 1957, he took the proofs to Ness’ home in Coudersport, Pa.

“He read them all. Then he went out to the kitchen to get a drink of water and fell over dead,” Fraley said.

Ness had died of a heart attack. Fraley’s book went on to sell 1.5 million copies.

In 1959, “Desilu Playhouse” produced a two-part semi-documentary based on the Ness-Fraley collaboration and from it sprang the initial TV episode of “The Untouchables” that year.

The documentary also became the basis for the first of the “Untouchables” feature films, released as “The Scarface Mob” in 1962 and starring Robert Stack as Ness. Stack had portrayed Ness on TV.

In 1987, Kevin Costner brought Ness back to life in the Brian DePalma movie “The Untouchables,” which earned an Academy Award for Sean Connery as a streetwise cop who played off of Costner’s naivete.

The television series, which ran until 1963, was a favorite with viewers but not with several special-interest groups.

Parent-Teacher Assns. railed at its violence (two or three shootouts a show), Italian Americans were unhappy with so many of the characters bearing Italian names, and modern historians delighted in pointing out that many of the episodes featured Stack emptying his machine gun at crime lords of the late 1930s, long after Eliot Ness had retired.

Finally, the producers appended a disclaimer to each episode that portions of “The Untouchables” had been fictionalized.

Fraley, who also wrote books about Jimmy Hoffa and the mysterious 1930 disappearance of New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, was born in Philadelphia and raised in Woodsbury, N.J.

He worked for UPI from 1940 to 1965, covering four Olympics and writing a column, “Today’s Sports Parade.”