The Untouchables (1959)/The Night They Shot Santa Claus

The Night They Shot Santa Claus
Season 4, Episode 1
Airdate	September 25, 1962
Production Number	5118-90
Written by	Mort Thaw
Directed by	Alex March
Produced by	Alvin Cooperman
← 3x28 The Monkey Wrench	4x02 → The Cooker in the Sky
The Untouchables (1959) — Season Four

This article about an episode needs to be expanded with more information. Please help out by editing it.

The Night They Shot Santa Claus is the first episode of the fourth season of The Untouchables, and the eighty-ninth episode overall.

Starring: Robert Stack (Eliot Ness)

Co-Starring: Ruth White (Bertha Levinson)

and Russell Collins (Mr. Hodges)

with Guest Star: Nita Talbot (Renee Grayson)

Featuring: Paul Picerni (Lee Hobson), Nicholas Georgiade (Enrico Rossi), Abel Fernandez (Bill Youngfellow), Steve London (Jack Rossman), Curt Conway (Lieut. Clay), Edward Asner (Jimmy Canada), Ben Astar (Warczek), Isabel Jewell (Sophie), John Duke (Brikka), Murvyn Vye (Mike Volny), Grace Lee Whitney (Penny), K.L. Smith (Art Tenney)

Narrated by: Walter Winchell

Plot Overview

The Untouchables investigate when Hap Levinson, an old friend of Eliot Ness who had just portrayed Santa Claus to deliver presents to children at an orphanage on Christmas Eve, is brutally gunned down and killed outside the orphanage afterward in a drive-by shooting by gangsters, with several of the orphans witnessing the murder from the orphanage windows. While looking into the case, Ness learns that Levinson had been the resident comedian and front man for a speakeasy run by local mobster Mike Volny, as well as keeping a drug-addicted mistress on the side. The Untouchables soon find out that Levinson had been a witness (one of several) to a murder at Volny's club and Volny is having those witnesses eliminated to keep them from talking to the police.

After Levinson's mistress, a woman named Renee Grayson, is shot in another Volny-ordered hit and another witness, Jimmy Canada, reportedly hangs himself in his jail cell shortly after telling Ness all he knows about the murder in the club, Ness goes to Volny's club and captures the mobster, who had been in hiding while the killings of the witnesses took place, to take him in on murder charges, but the cocky Volny brags that he will never face consequences for the killings. In the narrator voiceover at the end, it is revealed that Volny, as he predicted, was acquitted on all charges against him in two murder trials due to no witnesses coming forward to testify against him - made possible only because he had all witnesses against him eliminated and with all of them gone, prosecutors could not prove he had committed the crimes he was charged with.