The Mafia Encyclopedia (69 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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Page 193
K
Kansas City Crime Family: See Five Iron Hen
Karpis, Alvin "Creepy" (19071979): Public enemy wooed by Mafia
By and large the members of the Mafia regard independent criminals and public enemies as far beneath them. An exception to this exclusion was public enemy Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. Al Capone held him in high regard, and on numerous occasions he tried to recruit Karpis as a gunner for the outfit. Karpis turned down all offers.
It was not that Karpis disliked Capone. He once told a writer that Capone was "a wonderful person ... a real man." Karpis pointed out that freelance gangsters often upset members of organized crime. They felt a fugitive bank robber and the like would generate heat that could affect their rackets, and so they frequently informed on them. And informing on independents allowed mob-ally cops to play hero. "That just wasn't in Al's nature," Karpis told Capone biographer John Kobler. "He always knew when we hit town and where we stayed, but he never tipped off the cops."
Karpis often espoused his reasons for refusing to join the Capones. He pointed out, "I'm a thief; I'm no hood." Capone, for one, understood Karpis's pride. The FBI's J. Edgar Hoover did not. When Karpis was finally apprehended in 1936 in New Orleans with Hoover on hand to personally take credit, the FBI boss constantly referred to him as a hood. Karpis lectured back:
You don't understand. I was offered a job as a hoodlum and I turned it down cold. A thief is anybody who gets out and works for bis living, like robbing a bank or breaking into a place and stealing stuff, or kidnapping somebody. He really gives some effort to it. A hoodlum is a pretty lousy sort of scum. He works for gangsters and bumps guys off after they bare been put on the spot. Why, after I'd made my rep, some of the Chicago Syndicate wanted me to work for them as a boodyou know, handle a machine gun. They offered me $250 a week and all the protection I needed. I was on the lam at the time and not able to work at my regular line. But I couldn't consider it. "I'm a thief," I said. "I'm no lousy hoodlum
."
Karpis was sent to Alcatraz, where he was to have a joyful reunion with Capone. Capone learned from him the latest about his own mob, particularly that one of Capone's favorite enforcers, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, had been murdered in what very much looked like a mob rubout. But Karpis noticed a vacant look on Capone's face. Sometimes when he was talking to him, Capone seemed neither to hear nor recognize him. It was the late stages of Capone's advanced syphilis playing hob with his central nervous system.
Karpis remained in Alcatraz long after Capone had been released from prison and died. Transferred from Alcatraz to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington in 1962, he was released on parole in 1969 and deported to Canada. He lived out his last years in retirement in Spain.
Kefauver Committee Hearings: Senate organized crime investigation
Back in 1950 and 1951, for week after week, the Kefauver Committee Hearings were the hottest show on
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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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on her. Hill also provided the action highlight of the hearings when, on leaving a session, she threw a right cross to the jaw of
New York Journal American
reporter Marjorie Farnsworth. Turning on the remaining horde of reporters and photographers, she shouted: "You goddamn bastards. I hope an atom bomb falls on all of you."
Frank Costello added to the drama in New York when he refused to be shown on television and threatened to walk out of the hearings. He finally testified under an agreement that his face would not be shown. Instead, the cameras focused in on his hands in what became known as the "hand ballet." Costello was examined on his wide criminal interestshis activities in casinos, slot machines and other forms of gambling in Lousiana; his connection with a harness racing track in which he received an annual fee for seeing that bookmakers did not do business on the premises; his power in New York politics, including the power to name a great many judges to the bench. He was asked why Tammany boss Hugo Rogers had once said, "If Costello wanted me, he would send for me," and said he was as baffled by the remark as the committee seemed to be.
Unfortunately for Costello the questions got sharper and tougher and finally he staged a famous walkout. Costello had lost his muscle as the Prime Minister of the Underworld under the committee's hammering. As much as politicians were noted for their love of mob money, they would be hesitant thereafter to deal with Costello. He faced a future of legal battles, including 18 months for contempt of Congress. And he later did another term for income tax evasion.
Costello was not, however, the chief casualty before the committee. Former New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer came out of the hearings as a national symbol of civic corruption. It became clear that during O'Dwyer's reignboth as mayor and earlier as district attorney in Brooklyn"Bill O" made regular accommodation with organized crime. The national Democratic organization became so embarrassed by O'Dwyer that he was forced to resign his mayoralty for the relative sanctuary of the ambassadorship to Mexico.
The committee produced overwhelming evidence of O'Dwyer's friendship with Joe Adonis and that he was a frequent visitor at Frank Costello's home. There was also sworn testimony that envelopes of money passed to O'Dwyer from leaders of city unions. O'Dwyer had only a hazy recollection of such matters. In its report the committee blasted O'Dwyer:
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.... 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
.
When the Kefauver investigation ended, the committee made a number of suggestions to tighten the law against the Mafia and other racketeers and crooked politicians. Although many of these suggestions were implemented, cynics held that after a few months it would be back to business as usual for the mob. But that did not happenat least not completely. Costello's power was broken. Adonis later agreed to deportation to avoid going to prison. Gambler Willie Moretti, who had supplied considerable comic relief at the hearings, was later executed by his associates who feared the loose tongue he exhibited would eventually entrap them.
The underworld was not destroyed. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was forced to take some face-saving steps to compensate for his stubborn inattention to organized crime, and, by the end of the decade, the publicity storm the Kefauver Committee had started had engulfed Hoover. He was forced to pit his agency in an all-out war against the Mafia and organized crimethe crime bodies he had for decades assured everyone did not even exist.
Kefauver himself was catapulted into national political prominence and the mail the senator and the committee received was copious and laudatory. "I was deeply moved by the quietly eloquent, almost Lincolnesque quality of your words," a New Orleans housewife wrote. A "lifelong Republican" from San Francisco decided ''I'd like the privilege and pleasure of voting for you for the next President of the United States." A wire from St. Louis read: ''I am a small time racketeer. ... Don't know nothing but think you are a swell guy."
Kefauver's fame won him a vice presidential nomination but he lost out in the Eisenhower landslide.
See also: "
Kefauveritis
."
"Kefauveritis": Mystery "ailment" of mobsters under probe
During the Kefauver Committee hearingsofficially, the Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commercerunning from May 10, 1950, to May 1, 1951, a strange malady suddenly struck crooks and

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