Playboy's History of Organized Crime Part IX: A Little Light on the Syndicate

Middle age is the time when men who have reached the pinnacles of their chosen professions begin to receive the public recognition, esteem and other rewards that accompany wealth and power. So it was in the late Forties and early Fifties for a small group of very wealthy businessmen, mainly Italian and Jewish, who, along with the 20th Century, had reached their middle years. They were the men who had helped create and who ruled a shadowy organization that had no formal title but was called, depending on who was doing the calling, the Syndicate, the Combination, the Mafia or any one of a dozen other names and whose influence on the entire nation was profound and malevolent. But that part of their lives was concealed as much as possible and rarely discussed, especially by those who had come to them often for help and had repaid past favors with public tributes. On the surface, at least, these were men who wielded great power in half a hundred industries and whose careers had been marked by unselfish labors for scores of charities and community betterment projects.

Thus, in 1949, a group of prominent Italian-American Catholics petitioned Pope Pius XII to award the title Knight of St. Gregory to a Brooklyn businessman who had done much to earn his community's gratitude. His name was Joseph Profaci. He had arrived in America as a poor boy from Sicily and had become the nation's leading importer of olive oil and tomato paste, majority owner of no fewer than 20 legitimate businesses, generous donor to every Catholic charity that approached him, benevolent employer of hundreds of fellow Italian-Americans. But Profaci was also--as an angry Brooklyn district attorney, Miles McDonald, insisted in a successful effort to block the papal knighthood--one of the nation's top racketeers, head of one of the major crime families in New York and long-time practitioner of the crafts of extortion and murder.

Thomas Lucchese, a quiet, conservative dress manufacturer who owned half a dozen factories in New York and Pennsylvania, was a tireless worker for charity in his spare time. When he called on his friends to buy tickets to dinners for favorite causes, a sellout was assured. At one such dinner, 22 New York State judges, presiding over courts at every level of the judicial system, sat at tables he sponsored. Some were so fond of Lucchese that they even tried to return the favors. His hotel bills in New York and on several trips to Washington were picked up by Armand Chamkalian, assistant to U. S. Attorney Myles Lane. But then, Lane himself and New York City police commissioner (and later a Federal judge) Thomas F. Murphy were close personal friends of the manufacturer, dropping by his home now and then for lunch or for cocktails. And another close friend, the late Congressman Vito Marcantonio, helped Lucchese realize a long-held dream: the appointment of his son to West Point, even though Lucchese was a political conservative and Marcantonio a radical, winning elections as the candidate of the American Labor Party. To these people, Lucchese was merely a very rich businessman who, as he often said, had held office in only one organization--the Knights of Columbus. What was ignored was Lucchese's real position--as the boss of another of New York's major crime families, as partner in the Garment District rackets from the early Thirties with Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and as a close friend of the exiled Syndicate ruler, Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

When the B'nai B'rith, the Zionist Organization of America and other Jewish organizations held fund-raising campaigns, among their most successful money raisers were two eminent Jewish businessman--the liquor-automotive-steel magnate from New Jersey, Abner Zwillman, and the liquor--real estate--television tycoon from Miami and New York, Meyer Lansky. Both, it was said, had done more than just raise money. In 1948, when the newborn state of Israel was battling for its life, they had used their influence to purchase stocks of weapons and to make sure that those arms were expeditiously loaded aboard ship in New York harbor, even though such activities were illegal. But then, Zwillman and Lansky had plenty of muscle along the waterfront. They were perhaps the most powerful Jewish racketeers in the country and Lansky, particularly, had emerged as the financial wizard of the organized underworld.

Perhaps the leading fund raiser for the Salvation Army in New York was the vice-chairman of its men's division, a quiet, retiring real-estate and investment specialist named Frank Costello. When the charity held its annual dinner at the Copacabana night club (owned, as it happened, by Costello and (continued on page 202)Light on the Syndicate(continued from page 142) another charity-conscious industrialist named Joe Adonis), Costello was selling tickets all over town, and most of his friends wore tuxedos to the $100-a-plate black-tie affair. Those friends included Hugo Rogers, Manhattan Borough president and leader of Tammany Hall; state-supreme-court justices Morris Eder, Samuel Di Falco, Anthony Di Giovanni, Thomas Aurelio; and many more from the worlds of politics and business. When Costello invited friends up to his Central Park West apartment or out to his summer place at Sands Point on Long Island for a quiet drink and some small talk, the guest list might include Rogers and other Tammany leaders, New York's deputy fire commissioner James Moran, even Mayor William O'Dwyer himself.

But then, who in New York had cultivated the power elite and had amassed power himself as had Costello? All of Tammany's leaders--from Christy Sullivan to Michael Kennedy, from Rogers to Carmine DeSapio to Frank Rosetti to Bert Stand--were beholden to him for favors done, for funds raised, for votes delivered. When there were appointments or nominations to be made, they turned to Costello for advice and approval, and for thanks.

"Good morning, Francesco," said Aurelio over the phone on the morning of August 23, 1943, only minutes after he had received the news that he would be the Democratic nominee for state-supreme-court justice. "How are you, and thanks for everything."

"Congratulations," Costello replied. "It went over perfect. When I tell you something is in the bag, you can rest assured."

"It was perfect," Aurelio said. "It was fine."

"Well, we will all have to get together and have dinner some night real soon."

"That would be fine," Aurelio said. "But right now I want to assure you of my loyalty for all you have done. It is unwaving."

Unfortunately, somebody was listening in. Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan had obtained a court-ordered wire tap on Costello's phone. When the transcript of that conversation was made public, the outcry resulted in disbarment proceedings against Aurelio. They failed; he remained on the ballot and went on to win election to the state supreme court in November and, thereafter, publicly demonstrated his continuing devotion to Costello by showing up at the racketeer's favorite charity dinners every year.

The power of Costello, Profaci, Lucchese, Lansky, Zwillman, Adonis and others at the top of the American underworld--so long the object of only frustrated shrugs from those municipal officials who professed any concern at all--had, however, begun to fascinate the junior Senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver. Early in 1950, the nation's capital was the scene of two gatherings held almost simultaneously, the American Conference of Mayors and the United States Attorneys Conference. Kefauver was invited to speak at both meetings, but mainly he listened. At the mayors' meeting, he heard De Lesseps Morrison of New Orleans, Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles and others express the despairing opinion that organized crime had become so pernicious in America's major cities that it was out of control and local authorities were powerless to do anything about it. But at the U. S. Attorneys Conference, Kefauver heard another story: that there was no serious organized-crime problem in the nation, that, indeed, there was no national organization, only a disparate collection of hoodlums who should present no problem to aggressive municipal authorities.

These conflicting views disturbed the Senator. Somebody had to be right and somebody wrong, and Kefauver happened to be in a position to find out who was which. He sponsored a resolution to create a Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, and when that committee was organized in May 1950, Kefauver was named chairman. The five-man panel also included Democrats Herbert R. O'Conor of Maryland and Lester C. Hunt of Wyoming, and Republicans Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire and Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin. It was a strange group to investigate organized crime. Not a single one of the Senators was from a major city or even from an essentially urban state, the places where the underworld operated most actively and with almost complete impunity. To cynics in Washington at the time, the composition of the Kelauver committee seemed a sure indication that its inquiry would be just another of those periodic and cursory Congressional probes, filled with a lot of bombast and very little substance.

Kefauver, however, intended otherwise. Despite his own proclivities for drinking and wenching, the lanky, drawling Tennessean saw himself as a staunch guardian of moral standards, especially when it came to those in the public realm. Behind an ingenuous manner he had an inquiring mind--some called him a Rhodes scholar in a coonskin cap--and he was resolute in his aim to expose the influence of the underworld on American life, both for his own edification and in the public interest (though he soon perceived that his committee also was the perfect vehicle in which to ride to higher office if he so desired, which he did).

But for Kefauver to succeed, he would have to break some new ground. He did not have--as, a decade later, the McClellan committee would have, in the person of Joe Valachi--a prime witness, an informer from the inside who would bare his breast and recite all the dreadful secrets of the Syndicate. But Kefauver had other things going for him; mainly, a staff that was determined to gather all the facts it could and to expose those who had concealed themselves for years behind a façade of respectability. Even had Kefauver so desired, there was no holding back such aggressive and ambitious lawyers and investigators as chief counsel Rudolph Halley or associate counsel Joseph Nellis. And President Harry Truman offered his help: he made the hitherto confidential income-tax returns of the racketeers available to the committee, a gift that opened a thousand avenues of search.

Perhaps even more important, though, was television. TV was just then reaching American homes in significant numbers, and the decision was made early to permit the cameras to focus on the hearings. The result was the most enthralling daily serial of the times, captivating and fascinating viewers as nothing out of Washington had ever done before and as only the Army-McCarthy and the Watergate hearings have done since.

In the 16 months of its existence, from May 1, 1950, to September 1, 1951, the committee heard more than 600 witnesses, from minor hoodlums to major racketeers to officials on every level of government. It took testimony in 14 cities--Washington, Tampa, Miami, New York, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco--and it put on public display the enduring link among crime, politics and business.

Wherever the committee went, the television cameras followed, and the Senators luxuriated in the glare of the hot lights and in the public adulation. They became instant stars, at least some of them. The unemotional and judicious manner of Kefauver brought him such an outpouring of acclaim that he nearly captured the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1952 despite the near-unanimous opposition of all the party bosses, from Truman on down, and he did succeed in winning the party's Vice-Presidential nomination four years later. His cool and judicious manner, so ideal in a committee chairman, was, however, disastrous in a political candidate; Kefauver was, perhaps, the dullest orator on the public platform in modern times.

The aging Senator Tobey, who wore a green eyeshade and a look of moral outrage at the stories he heard--such things just didn't happen in New Hampshire--became something of a national pet. His office was flooded with letters and telegrams from thousands of admiring Americans who agreed with his every sentiment, who applauded his characterization of the racketeers appearing before the committee as rats and vermin and who, as seemingly disregardful of the Constitution as Tobey, agreed with his feelings toward lawyers who represented gangsters: He asked Moses Polakoff, Lansky's attorney, "How did you become counsel for such a dirty rat as that? Aren't there some ethics in the legal profession?"

"Minorities and undesirables and persons with bad reputations are more entitled to the protection of the law than are the so-called honorable people," Polakoff replied in anger. "I don't have to apologize to you."

"I look upon you in amazement," Tobey said.

Then there was Rudy Halley. His pointed questions, delivered acidly in a high, lisping, nasal voice, seemed to entrance the witnesses, who appeared uncertain whether to be frightened, angered or amused. But baiting the underworld elite did not hurt Halley's ambitions. Though he failed in one try to become New York City mayor, he did win an election later as president of its city council, the city's second-highest office.

The witness side of the committee table had its bit players and stars, too, though the roles were anything but relished by those who were forced to play them. Indeed, many in the cast did their best to avoid making any entrance at all. When Joe Nellis arrived in Cleveland one day to pave the way for the committee's appearance and to hand out a fistful of subpoenas, the city's criminal hierarchy simply vanished. Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Louis Rothkopf, Sam Tucker, Samuel "Gameboy" Miller, John and George Angersola and others decided that Nellis' visit somehow coincided with their need to take vacations. Later, after warrants for their arrest had been issued, most wandered in and innocently explained that they had been unaware anyone wanted to talk to them. Then they sat in stony silence, or pleaded the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against self-incrimination, or voiced complete ignorance of all the committee wanted to talk about.

The same thing happened in Chicago. The usually omnipresent Charles and Rocco Fischetti, Murray "The Camel" Humphreys and Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik were nowhere to be found. Later, rather than go to jail, they, too, put on the masks of wronged innocents and sat at the witness table and denied everything or, as Guzik did, refused to answer because any replies might tend to "discriminate against me." Only Charley Fischetti avoided the questioning; before he could appear, he had a fatal heart attack.

Then there were some who, surprisingly, were never called, even though they were on the committee's list of potentially important witnesses and their names kept coming up in the questioning of their friends and associates. Tommy Lucchese, for one, was ignored, and nobody later could figure out why. When Vito Genovese learned that he might be forced to sit under those bright lights, he took himself off for a long vacation in the Caribbean sun until the hearings ended; nobody ever went looking for him. But Nellis did talk to Genovese's estranged wife, Anna, who told him she hadn't seen the gang boss since Christmas, when he had arrived at her home with a present and said that he would be out of touch for a while. During his absence, he told her to use whatever money she needed from the "steel box in a safe in our house. I have a key. There's a pile of money in it and a bunch of papers. ... It comes from his gambling and the rackets and the bums he runs around with." Then Anna told Nellis, "I know what he's doing, too, running them numbers and morphine and whatnot." It was a tantalizing bit, but as far as the committee knew, Genovese was then only a second-level hoodlum, and it went after bigger fish.

Even without Genovese, Lucchese and, until they turned up, the rulers of Cleveland, Chicago and other cities, the committee had plenty of big names and big scandals with which to make headlines and shock the public. At one time or another, the television cameras were focused on Costello, Adonis, Lansky, Zwillman, Willie Moretti, Albert Anastasia, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Frank Erickson, Paul "The Waiter" Ricca, Tony Accardo, Phil Kastel, Mickey Cohen and many others. Not that most of them had anything to say. Flanked by their high-priced lawyers, they volunteered nothing, professed innocence, answered few questions and, for the most part, painfully recited from rote or from written cards their refusal to answer on grounds of possible self-incrimination.

Their appearance, though, was all the committee really wanted. It had no illusions that it would obtain any useful colloquy from the Syndicate's chieftains. They were merely the vehicle for Halley, Nellis and the Senators to put what had been uncovered on the record, usually with a long recitation of facts prefaced or concluded with "Isn't that so?" There seemed no other way to detail the corrupting influence of organized crime on American society.

It mattered little that Zwillman, when he finally came out of hiding to testify, constantly invoked the Fifth Amendment or answered a few questions with disarming innocence and ignorance. The questions themselves told the public that he, along with Joseph Reinfeld, had been among the founders of Browne-Vintners after Prohibition, owning 50 percent of the liquor-importing firm, and that Zwillman had made a fortune when it was sold in 1940 to Seagrams for $7,500,000; that he was associated, as well, with Reinfeld Importers, Ltd., exclusive distributor and importer of Gordon's Gin. Haig & Haig Scotch and Piper Heirsieck champagne; that he owned many legitimate companies in such businesses as cigarette-vending and laundry machines; that he had a General Motors truck franchise that could secure contracts with New Jersey municipalities even though his bids were consistently higher than competitors'. Even more disturbing to the uncommunicative Zwillman, though, were the revelations about his political power in New Jersey, from his close friendships with the bosses of Jersey City and Newark to his influence on state politics. During the 1946 gubernatorial campaign, for instance, the Republican governor, Harold G. Hoffman, personally solicited Zwillman's support, and in 1949, Zwillman offered $300,000 to the Democratic candidate Elmer Wene if Wene would let him name the state's attorney general (the offer was declined).

Like so many others, Zwillman had initially evaded service of the committee's subpoenas and his friends in the underworld were confident that when he did appear, Longy would maintain silence. Not so with Zwillman's longtime partner and a major Syndicate leader, Willie Moretti. By 1950, Moretti was suffering from advanced paresis, a souvenir of his youthful gambols that left him with syphilis, which he never had treated. There were increasing periods when his mind wandered, when he was overly garrulous and indiscreet. Among his friends there was a growing fear that should he sit before the Kefauver committee, he might, in his ramblings, say things better left unsaid. Every effort was made to keep Moretti and the committee from ever coming together; he was sick and under doctor's care; he was on vacation; he was unavailable because of business emergencies. Such tactics did not keep the committee from pressing and eventually Moretti had no choice but to show up.

Moretti turned out to be a garrulous witness indeed--hard to turn off. But while his words flowed freely, there was little substance to them. Certainly he knew almost every leading racketeer in the nation. But he didn't know them as racketeers. They were "well-charactered men" and he had run into them at the race tracks. It was, after all, only natural that men of substance should gravitate together. He himself was a successful businessman, proprietor of several going concerns, including U. S. Linen Supply in New Jersey. Rackets? "Everything is a racket today ... everybody has a racket of their own." Mobs? "People are mobs that make six percent more on the dollar than anybody else does." Political influence? "I never made no contributions--only my voice."

Like any good show, the Kefauver traveling circus began slowly, in medium-sized and large cities around the nation, and built to a climax in New York, with appetites whetted for really big disclosures. But what had emerged from the hearings in the hinterlands was no less important, or, to many, less shocking.

In Ohio, for instance, the Syndicate, led by Dalitz and his friends, seemed impervious to periodic cleanups. When their control over Cleveland was threatened in the early Forties by a reform combination of Public Safety Director Eliot Ness, prosecutor F. T. Cullitan and judge Frank Lausche, Dalitz and his partners simply moved their gambling operations across the city lines out into the counties. When Lausche moved into the Statehouse as governor and attempted to crack down on the gangsters all over Ohio, they jumped across the state line into northern Kentucky. "In the Ohio-Kentucky communities in which wide-open gambling has been carried on by the Syndicate and local hoodlums," the committee found, "officials are strangely afflicted with the inability to see the obvious, a disease which seems to strike law-enforcement officials in wide-open communities everywhere. The police chief of Newport, Kentucky, was probably the only adult in the city who did not know that there were wide-open gambling houses in his community. ... The casinos were so unconcerned with the possibility of interference with their operations that they advertised openly in the Cincinnati papers." When the Kefauver committee arrived, the casinos temporarily shuttered. But the Beverly Hills Club, for one, also passed out fliers announcing that it would reopen for business as usual the day after the committee was expected to pass into history.

What intrigued the Senators in Miami was the success of the S. & G. Syndicate: It had nearly a monopoly on bookmaking in that resort area, maintained bookie concessions at 200 hotels and grossed an estimated $30,000,000 to $40,000,000 a year, with a net profit of between $4,000,000 and $8,000,000. Once, S. & G. had been an independent concern, owned by five Miami-area bookies. In 1949, it suddenly acquired a sixth partner, Harry Russell, a longtime member of the Capone organization in Chicago. For his full partnership in the multimillion-dollar gambling empire, Russell paid $20,000--and, as chance would have it, within a couple of months, S. & G. bought a yacht from Accardo, head of the Capone Mob, for $20,000.

But then, the original five partners were in no position to quibble over such things, for just prior to Russell's appearance, S. & G. was having considerable trouble. When Fuller Warren took office as governor of Florida in January 1949, one of his first acts was to appoint W. O. Crosby as a special investigator. It happened that one of Crosby's closest friends was William H. Johnston, who owned race tracks in Chicago and Florida, was an old associate of the Chicago Mob and who had contributed $100,000 to Warren's election campaign. As special investigator, Crosby dropped in on Dade County sheriff Daniel P. Sullivan and asked for his cooperation in cleaning up the gambling in the Miami area. By that, he meant the gambling controlled by S. & G. Suddenly S. & G. suffered a series of raids on its bookies and, at the same time, was cut off from the Chicago Mob's Continental Press Service racing wire, without which it could not operate. Two weeks later, Russell bought his partnership in S. & G., the Syndicate bought Accardo's yacht, the raids stopped and the wire service was turned on again.

S. & G. boomed as never before and the underworld began to broaden its influence in the Miami area, moving in on resort hotels and other enterprises. Since wide-open gambling was obviously the key to the underworld's encroachments, a number of reform groups appealed to Sheriff Sullivan and to Sheriff Walter Clark of adjacent Broward County (which harbored Lansky and plush casinos like the Colonial Inn and the Greenacres Club) to do something. Both merely shrugged and explained how difficult that would be.

Indeed, it would have been difficult for them. As the Kefauver committee noted, "Sheriff Sullivan's assets increased during his five-year term from $2500, which was his net worth as given in a bank loan, to well over $70,000. ... His deputy, whose purchase of a new Cadillac in 1949 caused Sullivan a certain amount of uneasiness, retired after four years to a farm for which he paid $26,000, although his salary was never more than $4200 a year. Both Sullivan and his deputy distrusted banks and testified to keeping large amounts of cash in their homes in a tin box, an old fishing box or in a blanket. ... Sheriff Clark of Broward County made a very large fortune by participating in the profits of gambling ventures and as a partner in the Broward Novelty Company, which operated an illegal bolita and slot-machine business. The gross income of this company from 1945 to 1947 was more than $1,000,000."

Did such revelations accomplish anything? Sheriff Sullivan was investigated by a Miami grand jury and was suspended from duty. Governor Warren promptly reinstated him, though Sullivan resigned soon after. As for Warren himself, he flatly refused to testify before the committee, citing separation of powers and State rights.

But there was nothing unique about the Miami story. It was repeated with variations in almost every city the Senators visited. In Missouri, the committee learned about Charles Binaggio. Kansas City's gambling boss, and his Mafia friends Tony Gizzo (who owned the franchise to distribute Canadian Ace Beer) and Joe and Vince di Giovanni (who ran the city's liquor-dealers association and held exclusive franchises to distribute Schenley's, Seagrams and several other brands of liquor). They wanted Kansas City wide open and believed the best way to open it was to back the gubernatorial aspirations of Democrat Forrest Smith. When he won. Smith was unwilling to go as far as his underworld supporters hoped, and some of them blamed Binaggio. In April 1950, Binaggio was murdered along with another Syndicate strong man, Charles Gargotta--just two of 16 unsolved gangland murders in Kansas City during the period.

In Chicago, it was as if nothing had changed since the days of Scarface Al Capone and Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti, though now the Mob was run with a little bit more sophistication by Accardo, the Fischettis, Guzik, Ricca, Humphreys and an up-and-coming hoodlum named Sam "Mooney" Giancana. It was in Chicago that the national racing wire was centered, and it was there that almost all the nation's slot machines and other coin-operated devices were made. Policy and every other form of gambling flourished as though legal; only one policy operator had gone to jail in years, while a couple of others had been slapped on the wrist with $25 fines.

As elsewhere, the Mob in Chicago had it easy because it owned the police and the officeholders. "Certain members of the state legislature," the Kefauver committee concluded, "particularly those living in districts most heavily infested by racketeers, vote against legislation designed to curb gangster activities ... and associate freely with their gangster constituents." Police captain Dan Gilbert, chief investigator for the state's attorney's office in Cook County and also known as the world's richest cop, gave the committee his and, he implied, other policemen's views of the situation. Gilbert testified that he himself placed illegal bets with a well-known Chicago betting commissioner, explaining. "I have been a gambler at heart." He agreed that raids could be initiated by his office on bookies in the city, but admitted that this had not been done since 1939.

Tampa was ruled by Trafficante, who didn't like the police nosing around in his business--which included gambling, narcotics and other rackets. The city's history included dozens of gangland murders and bombings, but no one would have known it from the police files, which had a way of mysteriously disappearing. And when it came to gambling, no one ever got convicted. Perhaps Sheriff Hugh L. Culbreath was too busy elsewhere, for his net worth grew from $30,000 to more than $100,000 during his term in office.

In New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, the Senators kept stumbling across the names of Costello. Kastel and Marcello, the Tunisian-born (of Sicilian parents) ruler of the local Mafia. Together, they ran the slot machines that infested the state, the lavish casinos such as the Beverly Club in New Orleans, the pinballs, the wire service, everything--though Marcello, because his friends had certain compunctions, enjoyed a personal monopoly over narcotics. Of course, these men had a little help from their friends. One was Angelo Gemelli, a New Orleans cop assigned to check on pinball operators and arrest those who tried to pay him off. The committee learned that he also moonlighted as a member of the executive committee of the pinball association and received ten percent of everything he collected from members for dues, initiation fees and protection money.

But, if you looked at it from the viewpoint of the Louisiana officeholders, it was really quite simple. As Jefferson County sheriff "King" Clancy put it, he didn't enforce the gambling laws in his parish because more than 1000 people, most of them old and underprivileged, were employed by the casinos there. A close-down would have thrown them out of work and cost the parish and the state a lot of welfare money. Beauregard Miller, the town marshal of Gretna, didn't enforce the law because "Without gambling, the town would be dead." Of course, such altruism did have its rewards. Both Clancy and Miller turned out to be very rich, as was the New Orleans chief of detectives, who somehow managed to sock away $150,000 in a safe-deposit box on a salary of $186 a month.

In Detroit, more fascinating than political corruption itself were some of the convoluted dealings between big business and the underworld. Ford Motor Company, for example, had made some strange alliances. In the East, the exclusive contract to transport Fords from the Edgewater, New Jersey, assembly plant had been awarded to the Automotive Conveying Company of New Jersey. Who controlled that company? Joe Adonis. And the contract to haul cars from the Detroit-area plants had been awarded to the E. & L. Transport Company. Who was the majority stockholder of E. & L.? Anthony D'Anna, longtime partner of Detroit's Mafia boss, Joe Massei. But then, D'Anna had been a good friend to Ford for years; in fact, since 1931, and a particularly good friend of Henry Ford's alter ego and chief of staff, Harry Bennett. The two had met when Bennett called D'Anna to his office, the Kefauver committee said (but could not prove), "to instruct him not to murder Joseph Tocco, who had a food concession at a Ford plant. ... Bennett entered into an agreement that D'Anna would refrain from murdering Tocco for five years in return for the Ford agency at Wyandotte. As a matter of record, Tocco was not murdered until seven years after this meeting. Also as a matter of record, D'Anna did become a 50 percent owner in the Ford agency at Wyandotte within a matter of weeks after the meeting." Subsequently, D'Anna bought into E. & L., which then got the Ford hauling contract. After Bennett left Ford's employ, even to the time of Kefauver's arrival, D'Anna retained that contract, just as Adonis retained his in the East.

Then there was Saratoga, the watering hole of New York society. For more than a quarter of a century, the spa had been as wide open during its racing season as any town in the country, filled with everything from back-room bust-out joints to lavish casinos catering to the high rollers who had not lost enough during a day at the track. Among the most famous: the Chicago Club, Delmonico's, Smith's Interlochen, Piping Rock, Arrowhead and Newman's Lake House. Among the proprietors: Adonis, Lansky, Costello, Luciano and Lefty Clark from Detroit. Though just up the road from Albany, where the most famous of racket busters, Thomas E. Dewey, occupied the governor's mansion, nobody had ever bothered the resort's gambling complex before Kefauver. Walter A'Hearn, a Saratoga detective, told the Senators that during his 19 years on the police force, he had never made a gambling arrest and, while a frequent visitor to many of the clubs, had never ventured farther than the dining rooms. If he had, he said, he was certain he would have been out of a job. But A'Hearn did not completely close his eyes to what was going on. During the height of the season, he and his partner, with the knowledge of police chief Patrick F. Rox, were paid ten dollars a night to escort cash from the casinos to the bank.

If the local police had done nothing, why, then, had the state police failed to intervene? That question was put to the superintendent of the New York state police, John A. Gaffney. Well, Gaffney explained, in 1947 he had authorized a survey of gambling in Saratoga and, after studying the results, had come to the conclusion, "This looks like a sizable operation." But, after all, "It's been going on for 25 years to my knowledge."

"In other words," Kefauver said to him, "you just knew you just weren't supposed to do anything about it."

That's right, Gaffney agreed, and then he added that when you get to be head of the state police, you're savvy enough to leave gambling in Saratoga strictly alone and say nothing about it to Governor Deweye Otherwise, he said, he would have ended up "out on the sidewalk."

Dewey himself refused to testify before the committee, would do no more than file formal statements through his counsel, though he did say that if the committee gave him enough advance notice, he might grant the Senators a few minutes in his private office. So the committee never heard from the governor about his view of Saratoga or other matters, such as his decision to release Luciano from prison. But the exposure of the Saratoga situation did force Dewey to act. The gamblers were ordered not to open for business during the summer of 1950 and they stayed closed--for a time, at least.

But the big show for Kefauver was still to come. That took place in New York, and at last the real stars took their turn on the stage: Virginia Hill, the underworld's sweetheart; Costello, the underworld's prime minister; William O'Dwyer, former New York City mayor, Ambassador to Mexico and the underworld's good friend.

Virginia Hill was both the sex symbol and the comic relief among all the heavies. She had left Alabama at 17, a girl with long legs, big bust, constantly changing hair style and a wiggle that said she must have been good in the bedroom. That she was. In the 16 years between her arrival in Chicago in time for the 1934 World's Fair and her trip to the Kefauver committee room, she acquired and discarded husbands and lovers like they were baubles from a five-and-dime. First there was Joe Epstein, big-time bookie and tax expert for the Capone Mob, and after him there were the Fischetti brothers, Accardo, Humphreys, Nitti, Gizzo, Marcello, Adonis, even Costello, until she found her true love in Benny "Bugsy" Siegel. By the time of Kefauver, though, Siegel was dead and Virginia had gone on to become the bride of an Austrian ski instructor named Hans Hauser.

But Virginia was more than just a good bedfellow to the Mob. Those she had slept with had entrusted some of the Organization's most cherished secrets to her, and they had used her, too, to pass on a great deal of the Mob's cash. But before the Senators, in a flowing black dress and floppy hat, she played the dumb Southern belle. "I never knew anything about their business," she insisted to Halley. "They didn't tell me about their business. Why would they tell me? I don't care anything about business in the first place. I don't even understand it. ... If they ever started to talk about anything, I left, because I didn't want to know." When Halley expressed some incredulity, Virginia shrugged, "Maybe it's impossible, but it's true."

As Virginia left the committee hearings, she was surrounded by reporters and photographers who badgered her all the way out of the building. Suddenly she turned and threw a right cross to the jaw of New York Journal-American reporter Marjorie Farnsworth and screamed at the rest of the press, "You goddamn bastards. I hope an atom bomb falls on all of you."

With that, Virginia disappeared. For some years, she wandered Europe with her husband, so wary of the surveillance of American tax men that she rarely touched the horde Siegel had entrusted to her care in numbered Swiss accounts. Several times she attempted suicide; and then, in March 1966, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, lay down in the snow near Salzburg and died.

For Costello, the summons to appear before the Kefauver committee as its star witness was a shattering blow. He had spent years attempting to build an image as a kind of elder statesman--of what kind, he never specified--and public benefactor. He had learned to dress well and conservatively, to speak softly, to use his power sparingly. He had even gone to a psychiatrist and sought to mix with a better class of people. In the councils of the underworld, his had been the voice of moderation and caution, and his advice almost invariably had led to success and increased power. Now he faced publicity and disaster.

The publicity was partly his own doing. Fearful of national exposure, Costello wanted nobody to hear his words, was even more determined that if forced to speak, at least nobody outside the committee room should see his face. Citing his right to privacy under the Constitution, Costello refused to appear before the committee if the television cameras were present, threatened to walk out and not return, regardless of the consequences, unless the committee complied with that demand. It did, but only to the point of agreeing that his face should not be oncamera. The victory, then, was a pyrrhic one. His husky voice whispered into the microphones and across the nation while the cameras held tightly on his hands, which--nervously clenching and unclenching, rapping, tapping, toying with cigarettes--hypnotized viewers and brought Costello all the publicity and notoriety he had fought so hard to avoid.

Costello was one of the most uncooperative witnesses to appear. He would not produce demanded papers; he stormed out of the room when the questioning grew increasingly tough (and was cited for contempt of Congress); he sought refuge in the Fifth Amendment; he hedged, delayed, changed stories, dissimulated. He insisted he was only an honest businessman, owner of some land and buildings on Wall Street and elsewhere in Manhattan; onetime partner (with Adonis) in the Copacabana; investor in oil wells; partner, with two other businessmen named Adonis and Lansky, in the Consolidated Television Company and in another firm that made infrared broilers. Perhaps in the old days he had been a gambler, a slot-machine operator, a bootlegger, but those days were long in the past.

The committee's investigators, however, had learned much about Costello. Under the pointed questioning of Halley, he was forced to admit to some other major sources of income and positions of power. "He admits as much as he thinks he has to and does not hesitate to change his story to suit the occasion," the committee said. Senator Tobey called some of his testimony "the tale of the flying saucers." And Costello himself said that maybe he was boasting when he told some political friends at his home that he had a financial interest in the Scotch he was serving them and denied any connection with Whitely Distributors, the English company that made King's Ransom and other brands of Scotch.

The Costello hands, though, were most active and nervous when Halley began to fire at him some of the data gathered by the staff--Costello's 20 percent interest in the Beverly Club in New Orleans (in partnership with Lansky, Kastel and Marcello), plus a $1500 monthly salary for acting as talent scout and good-will ambassador; his 30 percent interest in Saratoga's Piping Rock Casino (with partners Lansky and Adonis); control of the Louisiana Mint Company, which ran the slot machines in that state, in partnership with Kastel; a $15,000-a-year stipend from the Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island, a major New York trotting track, partly owned by Costello's lawyer-friend George Morton Levy, for services rendered in keeping bookies away (that payment was terminated when the IRS disallowed it as a track business expense). Though Costello insisted that he had been out of the bookmaking racket for years, the committee had reasons to believe otherwise. There was, for example, his long and continuing friendship with George Uffner, a major New York bookie who listed a phone in his own name at Costello's home. And there were Costello's dealings with Frank Erickson, the East's leading bookmaker. Erickson had lent Costello money for business ventures, had given him investment advice on oil wells and had been Costello's weekly golf partner, along with Levy and a onetime IRS agent who had quit the Government job when his $200 investment in Levy's Roosevelt Raceway began to return $4000 a year in dividends.

Even more distressing to Costello was the detailing of his relationship with Tammany Hall. He was willing to admit that he knew most of the leaders well "and maybe they got a little confidence in me," But that was only natural, because he had lived in the city and in the same district for so many years. He had never voted, belonged to a political party nor made a political contribution, he said, and alter the debacle over the nomination of Judge Aurelio in 1943, "With me, they sort of curb their conversation, because they know I am against it, I don't want to hear about it no more." It was only a coincidence that a lot of his friends were constantly getting elected to office or being appointed to high positions. He had nothing to do with that kind of thing. And he had no idea why Tammany boss Hugo Rogers would say, "If Costello wanted me, he would send for me." And as for former mayor O'Dwyer, he knew him just as he knew a lot of people--he liked him, thought he had been a good mayor, but that was all.

When Costello walked out of the hearing room for the last time, he knew full well he could never return to the clandestine councils of the underworld Syndicate and continue to guide organized crime in the paths of moderation. The future would be one of constant legal battle. He was cited for contempt and sentenced to 18 months in prison, his first term since before World War One. On top of that, he was indicted and convicted for income-tax evasion and received another term. By the time his appeals were heard and his sentences were served, much of the Fifties would pass, the Organization would turn in a different direction and he would lose his position of leadership.

Perhaps the most tragic figure to appear before Kefauver, though, was O'Dwyer. Once he had been a crime-busting district attorney and a liberal mayor. Now he was a discredited man with a shattered reputation. His administration had been riddled with scandals and corruption; he had abruptly resigned from office less than a year after winning reelection, hoping to find distant sanctuary as the American Ambassador to Mexico. But the Kefauver committee exhumed his past. And so, perspiring heavily, mopping his red face continuously, he became a nervous, devious witness, trying to defend himself as best he could. His best was not very good and he left the hearing room a disgraced man.

The Senators dug deeply into O'Dwyer's political career, and what emerged was a portrait of an ambitious man who did more than merely cut a few corners on his way up. O'Dwyer boasted to the committee of his successful prosecution of Murder, Inc. Noted the committee: "Of the men whom O'Dwyer identified as the Big Six [Adonis, Lan-sky, Siegel, Luciano, Zwillman and Moretti], all were friends or associates of Costello... . None of the top six were prosecuted or even touched in the investigation, with the exception of Bugsy Siegel, who was indicted in California and in whose case O'Dwyer refused to produce Abe Reles as a witness at the trial ... as a result, Siegel never was tried."

O'Dwyer insisted he was not to blame for that failure, nor for the failure to indict or prosecute Anastasia. The blame was that of subordinates to whom he entrusted such details, especially after he took a leave of absence to enter the Service during World War Two. But those subordinates were men appointed by O'Dwyer, men in whom he had complete faith. They included Frank Bals and James Moran.

A police captain, Bals had been chief investigator on O'Dwyer's Brooklyn district attorney's staff, the man responsible both for the protection of Murder, Inc., stool pigeon Abe Reles and for the investigation into his death--which Bals perfunctorily labeled an accident. So convinced was O'Dwyer of Bals's honesty and efficiency that as mayor he appointed Bals the city's seventh deputy police commissioner. With a staff of 12, Bals's assignment was to gather information about gambling and corruption in the police department. But, according to committee staff members. Bals told them (though he would later deny this) that his job was actually somewhat different. He and his men were really the bagmen for the police department, collecting from the gamblers and than dispersing the funds throughout police headquarters. Bals held the job just long enough to qualify for a pension of $6000 a year--$1000 more than he had ever earned as a working police captain.

Moran's association with O'Dwyer also dated from the old days in Brooklyn. Though he had absolutely no legal training, O'Dwyer had appointed him chief clerk in the district attorney's office, which gave Moran power to open and close investigations and initiate grand-jury hearings. And, as a kind of extra duty, he handled all of O'Dwyer's personal finances. Once O'Dwyer became mayor, he appointed Moran deputy fire commissioner and then, just before taking off to Mexico, made him a lifetime member of the Board of Water Supply, a job usually reserved for an engineer. As the committee noted, "This is the same Moran who was visited regularly in his office in the fire department by Louis Weber, a well-known policy racketeer ... to whom John Crane, president of the Uniformed Firemen's Association said he gave $55,000 of the funds of the association as a gift because it was necessary to do so in order to keep Moran's friendship ... who probably knows more than any other about New York graft." Moran was also the man who lied so blatantly before the Kefauver committee that he was convicted of perjury and packed off to prison for five years.

The committee's interest in O'Dwyer went deep and spread wide. The underworld controlled the New York docks and the Senators were puzzled as to why the mayor had never tried to clean up the area. O'Dwyer himself acknowledged, "There was never any doubt in my mind that Anastasia owned that waterfront."

The committee noted that O'Dwyer "could point to no accomplishments ... except the shifting around of police officials assigned to the docks."

When it came to investigating the stories of widespread police corruption, O'Dwyer's record was equally dismal. When his successor as Brooklyn D.A., Miles McDonald, had begun investigating payoffs to cops, O'Dwyer had characterized it as a witch-hunt, though he told the Kefauver committee that perhaps McDonald was right when he estimated the payoffs to average at least $250,000 a week. But, O'Dwyer maintained, he had vigorously investigated all such charges during his tenure in City Hall, and he pointed to the assignment of Bals and to an investigation by judge John J. Murtagh, then the city's commissioner of investigations.

What Bals did was obvious. As for Murtagh, he told the Senators that he had questioned every ranking police officer and 500 cops about their financial status, and while "I don't believe the cops are honest ... nothing turned up." In fact, he said, the only corruption he had been able to uncover had been something that existed while Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor.

Then there was the matter of O'Dwyer's friends--such as Costello, whose home O'Dwyer visited and where he ran into the ranking hierarchy of Tammany, as well as the prominent gambler and old acquaintance Irving Sherman. But, O'Dwyer explained, he had actually sought out Costello during the war to ask his help in driving gamblers off an Army base. He was, indeed, very surprised to see politicians and gamblers in the apartment. Had he done anything about that, the committee asked? No, O'Dwyer reluctantly admitted, even though he had spent years in office castigating various politicians for associating with gamblers. And, the committee continued, wasn't it true that O'Dwyer had actually filled his administration with men recommended by those very politicians and men who were very close to Costello? That was just a coincidence, the former mayor said; his appointments had nothing to do with Costello; he had made them because the men had "special knowledge of the subject," were the lesser of two evils or because "there are things you have to do politically if you want cooperation."

Despite all the evidence, O'Dwyer insisted that he and Costello were only casual acquaintances. The same could be said for Adonis; he remembered meeting him some years earlier, but it had been just a passing exchange, and it was just another coincidence that a number of his major appointees happened to be friends of Adonis'. (When questioned on the same subject, Adonis took sanctuary in the Fifth Amendment.) The relationship with Irving Sherman was not so easy to dismiss. He was an old friend and, through the years, a constant companion, a man who had often helped O'Dwyer in many ways. But, O'Dwyer said, he knew Sherman as a shirt manufacturer and those other witnesses must be mistaken in their testimony that they had seen him in Sherman's casino. Yes, he had heard that Sherman was a close friend of Costello's, Adonis', Lansky's and Siegel's, and might even have been a collector for Costello and Adonis, but he was sure that Sherman had never asked for a favor, had never asked him to go easy on the bookies.

Throughout his testimony, O'Dwyer's memory proved hazy or contradictory, especially when put against that of others. For example, he could not remember a meeting on the porch of Gracie Mansion with John Crane during which the political support of the firemen was offered to him. Crane testified to that meeting and said that he had given the mayor both verbal and concrete evidence of that support--a manila envelope containing $10,000 in cash, which O'Dwyer took with thanks.

When finally dismissed by the committee, O'Dwyer was a broken man. He went back to Mexico to serve for a little while longer as Ambassador and then, before his death, to fade into a kind of obscurity, his name a symbol of civic corruption, of the underworld's hold on the nation's largest city. In its characterization of him, the committee was scathing: "A single pattern of conduct emerges from O'Dwyer's official activities in regard to the gambling and waterfront rackets, murders and police corruption, from his days as district attorney through his term as mayor. No matter what the motivation of his choice, action or inaction, it often seemed to result favorably for men suspected of being high up in the rackets. ... The tendency to blame others for the ineffectualness of official efforts to curb the rackets and the ensuing corruption had also turned up very often at every stage of O'Dwyer's career. ... His actions impeded promising investigations. ... His defense of public officials who were derelict in their duties and his actions in investigations of corruption, and his failure to follow up concrete evidence of organized crime ... have contributed to the growth of organized crime, racketeering and gangsterism in New York City."

This was the climax. After O'Dwyer, though the committee sputtered along for a time, both the Senators and the nation had begun to lose interest. The United States was embroiled in a seemingly endless war in Korea and for many it was easier to work up a wrath over Communists killing American soldiers than it was over somebody booking bets down at the neighborhood candy store. And Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had begun waving around pieces of paper--"I hold here in my hand ..."--saying they were lists of Communists in high places. In the wake of the convictions of Alger Hiss, William Remington, the Rosenbergs and others, McCarthy played on the public fear of domestic radicals who might be next-door neighbors aiding the Communist cause. The rude men with Italian surnames who spoke in broken English and only ran gambling casinos, paid off the politicians (who could never be trusted anyway) and murdered one another were no longer so interesting or fearsome as the subversives lurking under every bed.

So national attention shifted. The Kefauver committee cranked out a fistful of recommendations, some exemplary, some dubious, some forgotten, some enacted into law--recommendations that included the organization of a racket squad in the Justice Department, strict Federal checks over gambling casinos and other forms of wagering, the outlawing of the use of communications media to transmit gambling information, restrictions on the interstate shipment of slot machines and similar equipment, increased penalties for the sale of narcotics, stepped-up efforts to deport gangsters. Then it passed into history.

Within months, the Syndicate was operating almost as though Kefauver and his fellow Senators had never existed. Almost, that is, for there were some (concluded on page 218)Light on the Syndicate(continued from page 214) changes. The public had been made aware of organized crime as never before, and though now diverted temporarily, Americans would never again be so ignorant or so passive. In the years ahead, a wave of reform would sweep through a number of cities and, while never killing the Organization, at least would cripple it.

And the Kefauver hearings led to convulsions within the underworld hierarchy. Costello would spend the next several years in and out of prison. The power of Adonis was squelched. For years, he had been one of the ruling circle, regent for some of Luciano's American interests and member of the Combination's board of directors able to summon the country's top gangsters to meetings in his back-room headquarters at Duke's Restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. But after Kefauver, public officials at all levels began to persecute and prosecute. Duke's was closed. The state of New Jersey indicted Adonis for violation of the state's gambling laws and built such a strong case that he pleaded guilty. In 1951, he went to prison for the first time in his life, receiving a two-year sentence and a $15,000 fine. That was just the beginning. New York also indicted him for gambling violations; contempt of Congress charges were lodged against him for his performance before the Kefauver committee: perjury charges and deportation actions were brought, on the ground that he had lied to several bodies by declaring that he had been born in Brooklyn rather than in a small town outside Naples; the Internal Revenue Service revealed that it was investigating him for income-tax violations. It was all too much. Faced with a choice between years in jail and deportation, Adonis left the country. Just after New Year's Day in 1956, he boarded the Italian luxury liner Conte Biancamano and set sail to join Luciano in Italian exile (though he would live in Milan, Luciano in Naples, and the two would rarely meet).

For Zwillman, the rackets and even legitimate businesses were pushed aside as the Government filed income-tax charges that he would be fighting the rest of his life. His old partner, Moretti, had troubles of his own. In the months following his appearance before the committee, Moretti's health continued to deteriorate and there were rumors, assiduously spread by Genovese in his struggle toward the top, that Moretti had gone completely around the bend. By late summer of 1951, under the prodding of Genovese. the Syndicate council reluctantly came to a decision: Moretti would have to go, both as a protection for the Syndicate and as a favor to him. On October fourth, Moretti left his New Jersey mansion for an early luncheon meeting at Joe's Elbow Room in Cliffside Park, the Mob hangout since the closing of Duke's. There, he joined four others. While the waitress was away getting menus, Moretti's friends pulled out pistols and shot him twice in the head, then calmly walked out of the restaurant. Like so many other gangland slayings, Moretti's was never solved. But, then, perhaps nobody wanted to solve it. As New Jersey racket buster Nelson Stamler remarked to a reporter as they stood over Moretti's body, "It was a good thing. Poetic justice, I'd call it."

In Brooklyn, Anastasia decided the time had come for him to take over the Mob of which he long had been under-boss. In April 1951, he moved directly, murdering both Philip and Vincent Mangano, the heads of the family since the Thirties. Phil's body turned up in a vacant lot; Vince's was never found. And Anastasia was confirmed as the family chief. Then Anastasia took a short vacation; he pleaded guilty to income-tax-evasion, was fined $20,000 and served ten months in jail.

Prison, in fact, loomed for many in the underworld hierarchy. Although the doors would actually close on very few, many of the bosses would spend the next few years doing their best to ensure freedom, for their appearances before the Kefauver committee had brought contempt citations against Accardo, Rocco Fischetti, Guzik, Humphreys, Kleinman, Erickson, Pete Licavoli, Joe Aiuppa, Marcello, Kastel and others. Lansky finally saw the inside of a jail; he was arrested as a gambler in New York in 1952, pleaded guilty and served 90 days. Then he departed for Florida, which became his permanent home. During the next several years, more and more of his time was spent building a gambling empire in the friendly climate of Batista's Cuba and out in Nevada.

One man, though, was ignored. Nobody was after him. The time was ripe for Genovese to make his final drive for absolute supremacy over organized crime in America.

This is the ninth in a series of articles on organized crime in the United States.