Truman, of course, was concerned that the investigation would reveal his ties to the Pendergast machine in Kansas City. But his fears were allayed when McCarran agreed to allow vice president Barkley (a close friend of Anslinger’s deputy, George Cunningham) to name the other four members of the Committee. McCarran and Barkley then announced the formation of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Chaired by Estes Kefauver, its purpose was to expose the system that bound policemen, criminals, politicians, and businessmen to the detriment of American society.
Kefauver, however, immediately ran into opposition from FBI director, and avid racetrack better, J. Edgar Hoover. By investigating the gambling syndicate, Kefauver was destined to expose the underworld’s ties to several of Hoover’s Establishment patrons, so the FBI director refused to allow his agents to serve as investigators for the Committee. Hoover claimed that he was too busy saving the country from communists, and that it would be counterproductive for him to devote his Bureau’s resources to investigating what he deemed to be consensual crimes. Though ostensibly his superior, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath was unwilling to anger Hoover and backed his decision.
Without the support of the FBI, the Kefauver Committee had little chance of proving interstate criminal conspiracies; but it was already formed, and several senior politicians were deeply involved with the project. For a moment it appeared that Kefauver had committed political suicide, and then Harry Anslinger stepped out of the shadows with a solution that saved the day. At a 6 June 1950 executive session of the Kefauver Committee, Anslinger presented each member with a copy of the Mafia Book. And when the Senators saw that most of the people in its pages were of Italian extraction (or belonged to some other undesirable minority), often with union affiliations, they heaved a collective sigh of relief. Their Establishment benefactors did not drive trucks, unload ships, or wait on tables, and that overarching class distinction made it possible for them to agree to try to sell Anslinger’s proposition that the Mafia controlled crime in America, through the interstate distribution of drugs with the help of the Teamsters, and through international drug smuggling with the help of certain longshoremen.7
Anslinger further advanced his position by offering to make FBN agents available as expert witnesses in every city the Committee intended to visit as a way of compensating for the lack of FBI support. And he volunteered the services of his top gun, George White, who had given up his post as district supervisor in San Francisco in June and taken up residence in New York in anticipation of acquiring the district supervisor’s job Garland Williams had left that very same month. Awaiting what he felt was a certain appointment, White joined the Kefauver Committee’s staff as a full-time consultant, and proceeded to Kansas City to guide its investigators through the matrix of drug trafficking to the inner recesses of organized crime.
With FBN superagent George White setting the tone of the investigation, the Committee began to examine evidence (provided by the FBN and the IRS Intelligence Unit) of joint financial ventures involving drug traffickers, gamblers, and labor racketeers. As suggested by Anslinger, the Committee had only to present the evidence to the public to prove a conclusion it had already reached – that the Mafia was at the center of an international conspiracy (linked to communism) that controlled crime in America’s major cities. But there were unexpected consequences for Anslinger, and by trying to make that elaborate conspiracy case the Committee put the FBN on a collision course with the FBI and the CIA and changed the nature of the war on drugs forever.
THE KEFAUVER HEARINGS
At the start of the Kefauver Hearings in the summer of 1950, journalist Drew Pearson, quoting Anslinger, defined the Mafia as fifty men under Lucky Luciano, all but one (presumably Meyer Lansky) Italians. When critics said this was absurd, Anslinger provided a list of people he knew would prove his point. Topping the list, and billed as the Committee’s prime target at a public hearing to be held in New York City in early 1951, was Frank Costello, and by default – as the Committee’s chief counsel, Rudolph Halley, intended – Anslinger’s old foe from the Luciano Project, former Mayor William O’Dwyer.8
From start to finish, Anslinger and White set the tone of the Kefauver Hearings, and FBN agents were essential to the Committee’s ability to package and sell its product. At public hearings across the country, FBN agents explained how the Mafia was organized, how it laundered money, infiltrated legitimate businesses, and funded narcotics ventures through gambling profits. In July in Kansas City, FBN Agent Claude Follmer described Charles Binaggio – whom the Committee had scheduled as a witness, but who had been murdered three months earlier – as the city’s political boss and a certified Mafioso. Follmer tracked the Italian arm of the Pendergast machine through the drug syndicate’s erstwhile general manager, Nick Impostato, to New York’s Mangano and Profaci families. He explained how Kansas City received French heroin from Tampa, via Havana, and to dramatize the seriousness of the situation, he described Carl Caramussa’s murder.
White bolstered Follmer’s case for the existence of a Mafia by tying Mangano warlord Joe Adonis to Frank Costello. White also produced documents linking gambling czar Frank Erickson to the Democratic Party, legal gambling establishments, and politicians in Florida, thus paving the way for the Committee’s hearings in the Sunshine State. There, Adonis, Erickson, and Lansky were shown to have invested mob money in hotels, real estate ventures, and illegal bookmaking enterprises. Santo Trafficante in Tampa was linked to fourteen murders over twenty years, including the June 1950 murder of James Lumia, another potential witness the Committee intended to hear from. Tampa’s police chief told the Committee that the Mafia had a standard operating procedure for murder, which included the importation of hired killers from out of town, and setting up patsies to take the fall.
Hearings in New Orleans identified drug trafficker Carlos Marcello as the main cog in southern interstate crime. FBN Agent Thomas E. McGuire (a veteran of the Rothstein investigation, known for his glen-plaid suits and Kelly green handkerchiefs), linked Marcello to Trafficante and Costello, as well as to the political opponents of Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs.
But the most sensational revelation came from White when he claimed to have a “pipe line” to the “inner circle” of four Mafia bosses (in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Chicago), “who passed on murder requests from the underworld and occasionally commissioned a Mafia enforcement ring to do the killing.”9 The murders of Binaggio and Lumia, both of whom were scheduled to testify before the Committee, were interpreted by the Committee as proof positive of the Mafia hit team’s existence, and of the Mafia itself.
Then, in late September 1950, as the Committee approached Chicago, the hit team struck closer to home, assassinating former Chicago police captain William Drury just days before he was scheduled to give public testimony before the Committee. Drury’s testimony would surely have been explosive. In 1947 he had arrested three suspects in the murder of James Ragen and had publicly linked them to Mafia chief Tony Accardo, manager of Chicago’s narcotics and prostitution rackets. George White had been the FBN’s district supervisor in Chicago during the Ragen investigation and while serving in that position had established a link between Cook County Sheriff Dan Gilbert (known locally as “the richest sheriff in America”), the Mafia, and Democratic politicians. White was certain that Drury was murdered precisely because he was going to expose this link. Impulsively, in a reckless attempt to trump Drury’s assassins, White leaked Drury’s preliminary testimony, which had been taken at a secret hearing, to the press. The result, Lait and Mortimer commented, served only to rub “Democratic dirt on the record.”10
White had achieved his goal of exposing the underworld’s accommodation with Chicago’s Establishment, but at a high price. The ensuing scandal cost Illinois’s Democratic Senator Scott Lucas the November 1950 elections, and out of spite, while serving out his term as a lame-duck Senator, Lucas would deny Kefauver’s request for ar
rest warrants for Chicago Mafiosi Tony Accardo and Charlie Fischetti. In addition, White was forced off the Committee and, to everyone’s disappointment, the Kefauver Committee’s final report contained none of his promised revelations about the Mafia’s inner circle.
Last but not least, Kefauver asked the FBI to investigate Drury’s murder, but “Hoover found no jurisdiction for his agency in the case.”11
These setbacks, however, were forgotten in January, when Kefauver held hearings in New Jersey and successfully issued indictments against Joe Adonis and Willie Moretti. Adonis, pleading “no defense” in May 1951, received a two-year prison sentence and, after a long legal battle, was deported to Italy in January 1956. As a direct result of the Kefauver Hearings, some two dozen Mafia aliens and naturalized citizens were likewise deported.
“Crazy Willie” Moretti was less fortunate. At a public hearing held on 13 December 1950, he told the Committee, “Yeah, sure, I know George White for a long time. George is a swell fellow.”12 While not exactly admitting he was White’s pipeline, Moretti had confessed to having a big mouth, and was summarily murdered on 4 October 1951 at Joe’s Elbow Room in Palisades, New Jersey.
THE GRAND FINALE
By early 1951, the Kefauver Committee had determined that “the vice squad” pattern “gave control of vice payments to a few officials and demoralized law enforcement in general.”13 It concluded that local law enforcement managed local crime – “that local law enforcement officials, as the brokers between the law and reality, were more important in setting policy than the gamblers”14 – and that the federal government could not stop it. As a result a campaign to discredit Kefauver was quickly mounted, and up popped allegations that he had skimmed over Mafia activities in Texas on behalf of oilman H. L. Hunt, and in Louisiana on behalf of Congressman Boggs.15 Drew Pearson even claimed that Chicago mobster Tony Accardo exerted influence in the White House through Truman’s aide, General Harry Vaughan.16
By the time the Kefauver circus pulled into Grand Central Station in March 1951, the nation’s nascent television audience was glued to its seats, waiting for the next bombshell. The New York hearings did not disappoint, and featured an appearance by Virginia Hill, the curvaceous mob courier and former mistress of Joe Adonis and Bugsy Siegel. Hill’s contemptuous testimony was followed by a stern lecture by Rudolph Halley, the Committee’s chief counsel, on the links between former New York Mayor William O’Dwyer and Frank Costello.
Next to appear before the Committee was the eminent O’Dwyer himself. In 1949 he’d won a second mayoral term, but resigned in June 1950 to accept an appointment as ambassador to Mexico. Summoned by Kefauver to explain his past associations, O’Dwyer, in a thinly veiled reference to the Luciano Project, told the Committee that Costello had helped him in his investigations for the Army during the war. Unapologetic and in ill health, he said that he favored legalized gambling and, referring to charges that Park Davis and Eli Lilly monopolized the gelatin capsule market to the detriment of the working class, he suggested that the Committee examine inside trading on Wall Street rather than people who enjoyed betting on popular sports, like horse racing.17
O’Dwyer’s unrepentant attitude didn’t help the Committee’s next witness, Frank Costello. While Halley systematically linked him to Luciano in Italy, Lansky in Las Vegas, Adonis in Florida, Fischetti in Chicago, dubious Texas oil deals, gambling joints in New Orleans, Tammany intrigues, and bookies everywhere, Costello fidgeted nervously, projecting consciousness of guilt before the TV cameras. As his coup de grâce, Halley played a tape in which the loquacious Willie Moretti referred to Costello as “chief.”18
Capping an FBN publicity campaign that had started in December 1946 – when Garland Williams branded him as the “absolute ruler” of the Mafia and its drug syndicate – Costello was jailed for contempt. While he was stewing in jail, IRS agents amassed enough evidence to convict Frank Costello of tax fraud, and the Mafia’s elegant prime minister was summarily incarcerated in the Atlanta Penitentiary.
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
The Kefauver Hearings were a boon for the FBN and enabled Anslinger to declare in May 1951 that heroin smuggling was America’s “greatest narcotics problem.”19 Deputy Commissioner George Cunningham pleaded in June that the FBN needed more agents to handle the problem, and the next day Congressman Charles Kersten introduced a bill authorizing 132 more agents. Riding on the momentum, Cunningham equated the rise in addiction with liberal judges, and Congressman Boggs immediately introduced legislation mandating longer sentences for drug offenders. The Senate approved the legislation in July, expanding the FBN’s powers, and authorizing money for scores of new agents. A wave of public support followed: the Women’s Federation called for a quarantine of all addicts; Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) called for the death penalty for peddlers who sold drugs to kids; and New York’s chief rabbi, W. F. Rosenblum, challenged the FBN to “go to the source,” meaning Israel’s foes, Egypt and Lebanon.20
The Hearings also put immense pressure on organized crime. Apart from the convictions of Costello and Adonis, indictments were issued for Lansky and several of his associates. Lucchese was forced into hiding. Vincent Mangano’s brother Phil was murdered in April 1951, and in what Lait and Mortimer called “an unrealistic coincidence,”21 Sam Maceo and Charlie Fischetti died within a week of one another in the summer of 1951, prior to their scheduled appearances before the Committee – which was chaired from May through July by Senator Herbert R. O’Conor (D-MD), with FBN Agent Charlie Siragusa as his chief investigator.
Not everyone, however, attributed the timely deaths of Charles Fischetti and Sam Maceo, and the murders of James Lumia, Charles Binaggio, William Drury, Phil Mangano, and Willie Moretti – all prior to their testimony before the Kefauver Committee – to some mythical Mafia hit team conjured up by George White. Willie Moretti’s murder in October 1951 was especially troubling and prompted eccentric New Jersey millionaire Clendenin Ryan, the financier of Desmond Fitzgerald’s Committee of Five Million, to call it “a clear-cut case of murder to prevent testimony concerning gambling and corruption.”22
Perhaps Ryan doubted that Moretti’s murder was a Mafia hit. If not, was it committed by law enforcement officials, the people referred to by the Kefauver Committee as “the brokers between the law and reality,” those who had so much to lose by Moretti’s confessions? Or were organized crime’s new patrons in the US intelligence and security agencies weeding out troublesome Mafiosi? The master spies certainly had the capability; they even had their own hit team under Colonel Boris Pash, former counterintelligence chief of the Manhattan Project and George White’s colleague in the OSS Truth Drug program. As revealed in Senate hearings in 1976, Colonel Pash had joined the Office of Policy Coordination in March 1949, to manage a five-person unit that conducted assassinations for the State Department and the CIA.23
Is it possible that Pash’s hit team murdered Moretti, and perhaps other alumni of the Luciano Project, to prevent the Kefauver Committee from uncovering the Mafia’s ties to the espionage Establishment – to people like Kefauver’s close friend William Donovan, whose law firm provided the Committee with several staff members? Though not widely disseminated, this theory has a lot to recommend it: as Salvatore Vizzini – an FBN agent with solid CIA connections – says so succinctly, “Starting around 1947, a lot of Mafia hits weren’t.”
Be that as it may, the Mafia did some serious house cleaning after the Kefauver Hearings. After his brother Phil was murdered, and his biggest money-maker Joe Adonis was imprisoned, Vincent Mangano chose to retire and pass control of his family to Albert Anastasia. With Costello out of the picture, and Lucchese hounded by the FBN, Vito Genovese became more powerful than ever, and his caporegimes, Joey Rao and Mike Coppola, seized control of narcotics distribution in Harlem and the Bronx.
The Kefauver Hearings had negative consequences for everyone involved, not just the Mafia. Kefauver’s call for a National Crime Commission was squelched by J. Edgar Hoover, an
d while Kefauver was nominated as his party’s vice presidential candidate in 1952, the Democrats had become synonymous with crime and corruption, and the Hearings contributed mightily to their loss of the Senate and the presidency in the 1952 elections. After the Committee was disbanded, its files were transferred to the Commerce Department, where they gathered dust.
The Hearings did some damage to the FBN as well. Increased public attention to drug addiction engendered a perceived need for more governmental oversight, and in November 1951, Truman formed the Interdepartmental Narcotic Committee (INC) to coordinate all federal agencies in the new war on drugs. Though Anslinger chaired the INC, its representative from the Federal Security Agency, Oscar Ewing, publicly defined drug addiction as a health issue related to public access to doctors and medicine. Ewing admitted Black doctors, for the first time in history, to Washington, DC hospitals, and noting that Black children were not getting medicine, he called for comprehensive prepaid health coverage financed through social security. The AMA opposed him in this effort, as did his segregationist foes, with significant success.24
Ewing publicly advocated treatment as an alternative to Anslinger’s punitive approach, and although opposed by powerful forces, he was supported in this effort by Rufus King, the Chairman of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Organized Crime. King and the ABA opposed mandatory sentencing and launched a campaign opposing the Boggs Bill, stressing that the legislation was flawed because it failed to distinguish between addicts, first-time pot smokers, and Mafia distributors.
The Strength of the Wolf Page 13