The most famous television scenes of the Kefauver
hearings were shots of Frank Costello's hands.
The underworld's "prime minister" refused to allow his
face to appear on camera.
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television. Many Americans did not then own TV sets, but accommodating retailers put sets in their windows and piped the sound outside so that crowds of pedestrians could view the media phenomenon.
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The Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commercemore simply known as the Kefauver Committeewas the first of many probes into crime to command such public attention. Thanks to television it became probably the most important probe ever of organized crime in America. Scores of crime figures and politicians came under the camera's scrutiny as the hearings went on the road, hitting one city after another.
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The committee, headed by Democrat Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, included fellow Democrats Lester C. Hunt of Wyoming and Herbert O'Conor of Maryland and Republicans Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin and Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire. Paraded before them by chief counsel Rudolph Halley were more than 600 witnesses, from minor hoodlums to major racketeers to public servants, from policemen to mayors and governors. The hearings made the phrase "taking the Fifth" part of the American vernacular, as dozens of witnesses invoked the constitutional right against selfincrimination, not always in the most eloquent of ways. Gambler Frank Erickson took the Fifth "on the grounds it might intend to criminate me" and Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik of the Chicago Outfit didn't want his replies to "discriminate against me.'' (Guzik appeared without a lawyer and said he'd learned all about the Fifth by watching television.) Probably no congressional prober effectively frustrated the ''I Refuse to Answer" legions as well as Kefauver. In his soft-spoken way he just kept asking questions without browbeating witnesses until they usually became so mesmerized that they started giving answers, often despite coaching they had received from high-priced lawyers.
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The committee's televised sessions were hypnotic. In Chicago, viewers were treated to the confession of Captain Dan Gilbert, chief investigator for the state's attorney's office in Cook County and often described as "the world's richest cop," that his office had not raided a single Chicago bookie joint in over a decade. He ascribed his personal wealth to playing the stock market and betting on sports events and elections. He assured the committee he won $10,500 in 1948 betting that Truman would beat Dewey. In New Jersey the committee ferreted out millionaire mobster and fixer Longy Zwillman, from whom former Republican Governor Harold G. Hoffman had personally solicited support in 1946. In 1949, in the interests apparently of good government, Zwillman offered the Democratic candidate for governor, Elmer Wene, $300,000, and all he asked in return was the right to pick the state's attorney general. Wene rejected the offer and lost.
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In Louisiana, which Kefauver described as "Fantasia in law enforcement," the probe turned up county sheriffs and other lawmen who said they had not cracked down on gambling on the grounds of a fair employment practices rule. They said thousands of people, many old and underprivileged, would lose their jobs in the illegal casinos. It was probably only fair that these officers would concern themselves about the income of others considering how well they were doing themselves. The New Orleans chief of detectives, laboring at $186 a month in salary, managed to build a safe-deposit nest egg of about $150,000.
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In Detroit, the committee dug up information that mob figures like Joe Adonis and Anthony D'Anna had hold of important business concessions with the Ford Motor Company in spite of their well-known crime backgrounds. The panel determined that a meeting was held between D'Anna and Harry Bennett, at the time Henry Ford's chief aide, at Bennett's request "to instruct him [D'Anna] 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."
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In New York City, Virginia Hill, the lady friend of a number of top mobsters and reputed bagwoman for the mob, provided comic relief by denying any knowledge of the mobsters' business. They just all pushed money
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