by Russo, Gus
On the morning of May 28, 1951, the Kefauver Committee sat on its raised dais, but it was Curly Humphreys, in rare form, who held court. Although Humphreys’ initial intention was to not answer any questions at all, he soon found he could not pass up the opportunity to match wits with his interrogators. Resorting to the Fifth only on occasion, the master negotiator, who appeared without counsel, preferred to verbally joust with his inquisitors.
After instructing the committee to send photographers out of the room, which they did, Curly politely requested that he be allowed to make an opening statement. For the first five minutes, the committee tried to change the subject, but Curly would hear none of it. “I would still like to get my statement into the record at this time . . . I have requested to make my statement when I first came into the room.” Then he advised, “It will save you time.” Like so many people before, the committee relented under Curly’s articulate purposefulness. Finally granted his demand, Humphreys politely responded, “Thank you.” He then quoted the Fifth Amendment to his questioners, again ending with “Thank you.” Curly then had a longer written statement placed in the record, elaborating on his privilege under the Constitution. At that point, one of the committee counsels unwisely challenged Humphreys on his understanding of the amendment.
“You understand that if we ask you questions, the answers of which will not tend to incriminate you, that you have to answer, and that the only questions you can refuse to answer are the ones which will tend to incriminate you?”
Curly cut him off. “Would you mind telling me your name, sir?”
Kefauver interjected, “This is Mr. Richard Moser, chief counsel for the committee.”
“Oh, I am sorry. I just like to know who I am talking to.” Humphreys then added, “Well, I don’t understand it that way.” Curly next turned self-effacing, saying, “Well, I’m not a lawyer here, and I would like to help this committee if I possibly could, but I don’t feel like I am amongst friends, just to be plainspoken.”
Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire naively believed he could cajole Humphreys by resorting to the “good cop” tactic: “Don’t you think, as a good citizen, that you ought to tell us all you know about the sordid characters of the underworld?” Curly deflected him with, “Do you doubt whether I am a good citizen or not?” After teasing the senators by answering their questions about his childhood, Curly started pleading the Fifth when asked about his business dealings. At this point Kefauver interjected, “You do understand in regard to all of these that you are directed to answer by the committee, and you still decline for the reasons you stated?”
Humphreys: “Yes, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much.”
In one of many droll exchanges, Humphreys refused to tell Senator Tobey whether he’d flown in from Chicago with Rocco Fischetti. Humphreys would only admit that he had arrived on the ten-o’clock Capitol Airlines flight from Chicago. A surprised Tobey said, “I was on that flight too.”
Humphreys: “You were? Well, we had a distinguished guest on it then, didn’t we?”
Tobey: “I can say that goes both ways. However, if I had seen you there, maybe we could have settled this all before we got in town.”
Humphreys: “Well, if I had seen you, Senator, I think I would have tried to get off.”
In another verbal joust, Humphreys denied having anything to do with the 1931 Fitchie kidnapping, explaining that the Milk Wagon Drivers’ Union boss had framed him in a fit of vengeance. “His revenge was caused by my being in the milk business,” Humphreys said, “and that was one way of getting me out of the milk business.” The probers were dubious, however, that the genteel man who now appeared before them was ever in the milk business. Tobey attempted to trip Humphreys up, asking, “Which side of a cow do you sit on to milk?” To which an unfazed Humphreys quipped back, “Well, I don’t know if I have ever gotten that low yet.”
When Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming started asking about Curly’s wife and daughter, Humphreys let him know he would have none of it:
Humphreys: “I don’t see where that has anything to do with this hearing.”
Hunt: “All you have to do is to say you refuse to answer.”
Humphreys: “Let’s start right now. I refuse.”
Hunt: “Do you want to tell me what year your daughter is in high school?”
Humphreys: “I will refuse to answer that, so long as you have suggested that.”
Hunt: “What is your daughter’s first name?”
Humphreys: “I don’t see where my daughter has anything to do with this hearing.”
Hunt: “It is not for you to pass on the type of questions I ask at all. If you don’t care to answer, just say so.”
Humphreys: “Would you like to have people asking questions about your family?”4
Hunt: “You are not questioning the senator; the senator is questioning you. You are the one who is the witness.”
Humphreys: “I realize that, but I still resent the line of questioning, Senator.”
Hunt: “You are going to be cited for contempt; I can tell you that.”
Humphreys: “I am sorry to hear that, sir.”
But the Welshman was not really worried, so certain was he of his interpretation of the Constitution. The set-to concluded with Curly’s asking Hunt, “Then you are under the impression that I am a criminal, is that it?” At this point, a frustrated Hunt threw Humphreys’ legal masterpiece back in his face: “I would refuse to answer the question because it might incriminate me. I have no further questions.” When Kefauver moved to stop the questioning, Humphreys made another demand. He wanted the committee to send a copy of its interim report to whichever court was to hear his contempt citation. This request reminded Kefauver of a similar request by Rocco Fischetti just moments before. It then dawned on Chairman Kefauver that Curly had been coaching the other witnesses. Curly readily admitted his tutelage of the gang. Unable to resist a bit of swagger, he added, “And you know, the longer you fellows work, the more we understand what our rights are.” Having totally disoriented the august body, Curly took his leave, but not before reminding them to forward their report to the courts. With that, Humphreys stood up and smiled courteously, saying, “Thank you very much.”
While Curly Humphreys’ testimony provided comic relief during the public hearings, the secret executive sessions were enlivened by the appearance of the Outfit’s feisty courier-spy, Virginia Hill. Just hours before her public testimony on March 15, 1951, the committee wisely chose to pre-interview the scorpion-tongued vixen behind closed doors during their New York road trip. According to Kefauver aide Ernie Mittler, Senator Tobey refused to drop the topic of Hill’s enormous surfeit of money. Like most other witnesses, Hill had been appropriately vague about her business with the Outfit, but when she had had enough of Tobey’s line of questioning, she knew exactly how to stop it dead in its tracks.
“But why would [Joe Epstein] give you all that money?” Tobey asked for the umpteenth time.
“You really want to know?” Hill teased.
“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.7 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.