The Outfit (37 page)

“Yes,” Tobey said. “I want to know why.”

“Then I’ll tell you why. Because I’m the best cocksucker in town.”
⁵

As UPI correspondent Harold Conrad described the scene: “Tobey all but swallowed his Bible.” After the private tete-a-tete, Hill exited the chamber and headed for the open hearing room, where she was met by a horde of flash-camera-toting reporters shoving microphones in her face. The ever unquotable Hill yelled, “Get your fucking cameras out of my face, you cheap fucking bastards! Get out of my fucking way! Don’t I have fucking police protection? I hope the fucking atomic bomb falls on every one of you!”

After a couple of hours of evasive public testimony by Hill, Kefauver announced that he had sealed Hill’s earlier private session, and that, in addition, no questions about what she had said could be asked of the committee. Soon after her dismissal, Hill caught a plane and went into globe-hopping exile, evading the clutches of Elmer Irey’s IRS, which had named her for massive tax evasion. During her fifteen-year odyssey, Hill continued to receive a cash pension from Epstein and the Outfit, which was said to total over $250,000.

The Legacy of the Kefauver Committee

After hearing eight hundred witnesses in fifteen cities, traveling more than fifty-two thousand miles and transcribing more than 11,500 pages of testimony, at a combined cost of $315,000, the Kefauver Committee hearings came to an end. And with eleven months of grueling investigation behind him, Kefauver stepped down, anxious to spend time with his children, who had layered their television with fingerprints attempting to “touch Daddy.” At the time, the chairman said, “I can’t go on. I have got to get some time to get home.” Senator Herbert O’Conor assumed the chairmanship, his chief assignment being the drafting of proposed legislation. Rudolph Halley had the onerous task of writing the committee’s final report, a monumental chore that ultimately resulted in his hospitalization for exhaustion.

For all his efforts to ensnare “the Mafia” and avoid upperworld corruption, Kefauver learned more about the latter than he desired. Kefauver knew that the Hollywood parole scandal, which he called an “abomination,” said more about the Truman administration than it did about the Mafia, but he shuddered at the thought of learning the truth of the matter. Kefauver likewise had to face that Florida’s Governor Warren and Sheriff Sullivan were happy to let the Outfit flourish in their state. In Illinois, Police Commissioner Prendergast, and Captains Gilbert and Harrison were “mobbed up,” not to mention sundry state’s attorneys and legislators. Upperworld crime appeared to eclipse the underworld variety. And Kefauver’s field investigators turned up the proof regularly:

• In Saratoga Springs, New York, Detective Walter Ahearn pretended not to be aware of the profligate bookmaking facilities in that gangster haven. “I never tried to find out certain things,” Ahearn testified. Kefauver later learned that Ahearn earned extra cash by moonlighting as the bookie’s vigorish courier, hauling the gilt from their handbooks and plush casinos to the bank. Saratoga’s police chief, Paddy Rox, also testified that he had no knowledge of illegal gambling in his district. In New York City, it was learned that former mayor William O’Dwyer had received a $10,000 bribe from a firemen’s union, had paid a visit to the apartment of Commission boss Frank Costello, and had refused to prosecute hitman-boss Albert Anastasia.

• In Miami, Lieutenant Phil Short was asked why he had not investigated the S & G bookies. He answered, “I’ve been an officer for better than twenty years, and I know what hot potatoes were.” Also in Florida, Tampa sheriff Hugh Culbreath candidly admitted to running a handbook operation out of his office.

• In Philadelphia, the local gang’s bagman admitted to paying out $152,000
per month
in “ice” (graft) to the city’s police department.

• As he had in Truman’s Missouri, Kefauver also sidestepped the touchy subject of Louisiana corruption, which was intimately linked to the committee’s stated interest, gambling. Kefauver investigator Claude Follmer filed a report that spelled out how in the 1930s the mob had “made arrangements” with the governor’s office to allow New York’s Frank Costello to set up syndicated gambling in the Bayou State. Follmer’s report added that a U.S. congressman and a U.S. senator were also the recipients of Costello payoffs. Two years after the hearings, Aaron Kohn, head of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, released a damning report on Big Easy mayor deLesseps “Chep” Morrison. According to Kohn, Morrison’s initial 1946 campaign was financed largely by Carlos Marcello. In return, Marcello was allowed the city’s bookmaking franchise, which necessitated the use of the Outfit/CommissionAv’estern Union race wire. At the same time, New Orleans sheriff John Grosch stashed $150,000 in an attic strongbox according to his divorced wife’s testimony. The money, said Grosch’s ex, had been delivered to the home by well-known known local underworld figures. Jefferson Parish sheriff Frank “King” Clancy was found to have allowed gambling to flourish in the open. (When Clancy tried to change his ways after the hearings, a local newspaperman wrote: “Clancy is making a spectacle of himself by enforcing the law.”)

• Calling for Mayor Morrison’s resignation, Kohn gave voice to the topic too sensitive for the politically ambitious Kefauver: “Finding corruption in New Orleans was like making a virgin gold find when the nuggets were lying on the top of the ground.” But Kefauver was keenly aware of Morrison’s role as a powerful Southern Democrat, and as a likely delegate to the party’s upcoming national convention, where presidential aspirant Estes Kefauver would need all the friends he could get.

Upperworld criminals in politics and big business were fully aware that they had dodged a bullet. As an added bonus, the Kefauver Committee’s hearings riveted the public’s attention to the underworld, and away from the upperworld.
Mafia
was now a household word.
⁶

The legacy of the Kefauver Committee is decidedly mixed. On one hand, none of the committee’s nineteen legislative recommendations were enacted, in part stalled by the powerful chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Nevada senator Pat McCarran, widely perceived as an upperworld ally of gangs just now descending on Las Vegas. It was no secret that McCarran feared any legislation that might impact his home state’s cash cow, legalized gambling. In addition, the country’s infant television industry made urgent pleas to members of the committee, imploring them to drop most of their contempt citations. Many of the witnesses had objected to being forced to testify on national television, and it was feared that the gangsters might win massive civil judgments against the fledgling corporations if their cases were heard in the highest court.

On the other hand, the public reaction to the inquest initiated the formation of more than seventy local anticrime commissions. If nothing else, Kefauver gave the nation its first glimpse into the shadow economy of the underworld, and just a hint of its alter ego in the upperworld. The committee conservatively estimated that the annual illegal gambling take was $15-$20 billion. When Kefauver learned of those figures he asked: “This fifteen billion dollars is about two billion dollars more than the appropriation for our military establishment the last year, is it not?” It would take another decade before the interest generated by Kefauver’s probe translated into meaningful legislation, such as the Wire Act of 1960, which abolished the race wire once and for all, and the outlawing of interstate shipment of slot machines. But by then, of course, the Outfit had moved on to other lucrative opportunities.

In a 1951 interview for
Collier’s
magazine, Rudolph Halley openly admitted the committee’s failures with regard to penetrating the Outfit: “We knew that Chicago was the crime capital of America, the home of a nationwide crime organization. Yet we never translated our findings into live testimony as we did in other cities . . . We linked [the Outfit] to Florida through income-tax records, and we exposed the Guzik-Accardo invasion of the numbers rackets. But we never smashed behind that awfully thick wall that shields the Capone mob. We just skirted the edges.”

Halley lamented that he might have been more successful “if there had been two years” time instead of just eleven months, and if there had been a staff of two hundred investigators instead of just a dozen.’

For a time, Kefauver, a new folk hero, was the front-runner for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. With his coonskin cap on frequent display, he entered sixteen primaries, fourteen of which he won. But backroom party hacks, worried about his private indiscretions and his “disloyalty” to fellow party members caught up in his probe, held more power than the primary voters. Not only were many of his party embarrassed by his revelations, some, such as Chicago’s Senator Scott Lucas, the majority leader and Truman spokesman, saw their careers destroyed. Lucas, who lost his seat to Everett M. Dirksen, openly blamed Kefauver for his defeat, due to his committee’s revelations regarding police corruption in Chicago. Florida’s Governor Fuller Warren, implicated by Kefauver’s bookmaking probe in the Sunshine State, worked tirelessly against Kefauver in the Florida primary.

When the Republicans assembled in Chicago, two weeks before the Democrats, they made official corruption their major issue. The 1952 Democratic National Convention, also held in the Outfit’s Chicago, became the scene of bitter behind-the-scenes party bloodletting.
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When Truman arrived at the convention, he lobbied hard to wrest the nomination from Kefauver and deliver it to Illinois’ governor, Adlai Stevenson, who, like Truman before him, had absolutely no desire for the candidacy. The president sent one of his aides to order candidate Averell Harriman to withdraw and toss his votes to Stevenson, which the subservient Harriman did. “Had I not come to Chicago when I did,” Truman later wrote, “the squirrel-headed coonskin cap man . . . who has no sense of honor would have been the nominee.”

“Nobody’s on the Legit.” -Al Capone

For all his publicized concern about gambling, it became known after the hearings that Kefauver himself not only attended the races at tracks like Laurel, Pimlico, and Hot Springs, but also wagered on their outcome. In a private meeting during the hearings with Commission partner Meyer Lansky, the New York boss asked the chairman, “What’s so bad about gambling? You like it yourself. I know you’ve gambled a lot.” Kefauver replied, “That’s right, but I don’t want you people to control it.” Nobody’s fool, Lansky penetrated Kefauver’s righteous veneer and so informed his biographer years later: “I was convinced that he meant ’you Jews and Italians,’ and that infuriated me.”

There were more troubling dimensions to the Kefauver story. Although the Tennessee crusader was constantly broke, perhaps due to gambling, the local press learned that he had deposited $25,000 into his Chattanooga bank account on January 3,1951 - at the height of the committee’s hearings. The source of the windfall was never learned. Locals also found the timing of Kefauver’s committee resignation to be suspect; just weeks before the chairman’s departure, a Knoxville numbers boss and Kefauver campaign contributor named Herbert Brody was arrested. Although it was revealed that Brody had contributed $100 to Kefauver’s 1948 campaign, insiders whispered that he had actually chipped in $5,000.

In his autobiography, Bobby Baker, the infamous Washington influence peddler, described how he had delivered a briefcase stuffed with $25,000 in cash to a Kefauver aide in 1960. The money had originated with a Texas group hoping to acquire an NFL franchise, but who were opposed by Washington Redskins team owner George Marshall. After the money changed hands, Kefauver’s committee conveniently found that Marshall had been operating an illegal monopoly with his Washington Redskins Television Network, which televised their games throughout the South. That same year, the Dallas Cowboy franchise was awarded to a group headed by Texas oilman Clint Murchison, Jr.

After his death in 1963 at age sixty, it was learned that Kefauver had owned stock valued at $300,000 in drug companies that he had been charged with regulating in the Senate. His chief counsel and close friend from Tennessee, attorney Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., said at the time, “My God! What if a hostile newspaper had gotten ahold of that?”

In the year after the Kefauver Committee disbanded, the forty-six “contempt of Congress” citations it had issued were heard in court, with only three being upheld. In overturning one such charge, Judge Martin of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Humphreys and the Outfit had in fact outwitted the combined wisdom of the Senate’s gaggle of attorneys. “The committee threatened prosecution for contempt if [the witness] refused to answer, for perjury if he lied, and for gambling activities if he told the truth,” the court concluded. Judge Martin added that “to place a person not even on trial for a specified crime in such a predicament is not only not a manifestation of fair play, but it is in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment to our national Constitution.” And despite Halley’s constant promises that his questions could not implicate witnesses in a federal crime, the court believed otherwise. In the case of Joey Aiuppa’s citation, Judge Martin wrote in his opinion:

The motive of the committee and its examiners in calling Aiuppa as a witness was largely to connect him, by his own admission, with the operations of nefarious organizations engaged in criminal activities on a national scale . . . It is evident that most of the information sought to be elicited from Aiuppa concerning his activities was already in the hands of the committee . . . The courts of the United States could not emulate the committee’s example and maintain even a semblance of fair and dispassionate conduct of trials in criminal cases.