by Gus Russo
4. In one protocol Capone was repeatedly injected with a form of malaria, the theory being that by inducing high fevers, the syphilis bug might die from heat. He later became one of the earliest recipients of the powerful new antibiotic penicillin.
5. Apropos of Capone’s life, the multitude of flower arrangements were carted off to hospitals and orphanages in Chicago’s poorest sectors, while the Outfit went back to the office to again consider the business of paroling Al’s most trusted proteges.
6. A federal investigator described the extravaganza for a congressional committee thus: “This wedding breakfast and reception, which has been facetiously referred to as De Lucia’s “coming out” party, was held on January 24, 1948 . . . and has been unexcelled for gaiety, splendor, and lavishness by few if any of the parties staged by the first families of Chicago.”
7. In his closing statement, Hoffman wrote, ’There is no evidence in the record that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which, because of an executive order and because of the instructions of the Department of Justice, refused to make available to the committee information presumably in its possession, in any way assisted the committee or its investigators . . . The Department of Justice . . . gave the committee no assistance whatsoever.’
8. Truman also shocked many when he pardoned “Ice Pick” Danny Motto, a New York labor thug convicted of murder and racketeering. The Justice Department had scheduled Motto’s deportation, but Truman intervened at the last moment.
9. Among the Rosselli-produced pics were T-Men, Canon City, and He Walked by Night. Years before his incarceration, Rosselli allegedly worked with his boss at Eagle Lion, Brynie Foy, in producing the B movie Roger Touhy, Gangster, which was released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1944; the film’s legal adviser was none other than Sidney Korshak.
10. Although the author knows the names and specifics of the case, it would serve no purpose to divulge them, especially since both the complainant and the alleged perpetrator are still alive.
11. Accardo’s intercession may indeed have saved the Stevensons’ relationship. Many years later, Mrs. Stevenson buried her husband after fifty years of marriage.
12.
“Senator Cow Fever”
Hits Chicago
Although its members’ personal lives were in transition, the Outfit’s business affairs proceeded uninterrupted. Bookmaking and jukebox operations continued to fill the gang’s treasury, and the Accardo regime even had a bootlegging resurgence, shipping booze to dry states such as Kansas and Curly’s adopted home of Oklahoma. But by far the most dramatic example of the gang’s expansionism was the move it made on bookmaking in southern Florida in the late 1940s.
Since the days of Al Capone’s Palm Island estate purchase, the Outfit had maintained a presence in the Sunshine State. Under the watchful eye of their racetrack boss, Johnny Patton, the gangsters controlled four of Florida’s premier dog tracks. With the local bookmakers subscribing to the Outfit’s Continental Wire Service, it was no secret to the Chicago gang which Miami bookies were the most successful. Towering over the competition was a Miami bookmaking consortium called the S & G syndicate (for “Stop and Go”), which supplied its services to hundreds of resort hotels. Observers placed S & G’s annual gross at an astounding $40 million, with the five partners taking home $2 million in profits. At this point, the Chicago bosses were only realizing approximately $100,000 in profit from each of their Florida dog track operations. It was only a matter of time before Joe Accardo charged his troops with the takeover of S & G.
The prime soldiers entrusted with the S & G coup were Johnny Patton and Harry “the Muscle” Russell. Like Patton, Russell was a Chicago native who, years earlier, had himself been muscled into a bookmaking partnership with Accardo (see chapter 8). Fronting for Patton was a former bookkeeper, William H. Johnston, from the owners’ barns at the gang’s Sportsman’s Park track in Illinois. In another elegant Outfit plan, the gang chose to enlist the Florida governor’s office to force the S & G partners to their knees. All they had to do was guarantee that their candidate prevailed in the 1948 gubernatorial contest. The man picked for the job, Fuller Warren, was a friend of Russell’s and a frequent visitor at the gang’s Miami Beach Kennel Club. Using Johnston as a conduit, the Outfit pumped $100,000 into Warren’s campaign, helping to ensure his eventual victory. All told, Johnston convinced friends to contribute $404,000 to the campaign, fully half of the budget. Within days of his 1949 inauguration, Warren appointed another Russell friend, William O. “Bing” Crosby, as his special investigator. Crosby was so close to “the boys” that he visited their Miami Beach Kennel Club four times per week. Given a list by Russell of the addresses of the S & G bookmaking facilities, Crosby directed Miami sheriff Kelly (who had been spotted by the FBI in conferences with Accardo, Humphreys, and Guzik) to begin raiding the dozens of establishments. Adding the coup de grace, Joe Accardo simultaneously cut off the wire service from the besieged S & G. When the bookmaking consortium tried to siphon the critical information from other Florida operations, Accardo scuttled the wire service to the entire state. S & G was now forced to suspend operations; when it reopened two weeks later, it had a new partner, Harry Russell.
For the sake of appearances, S 6v G noted in its books that Russell had merely bought into the partnership for $20,000. However, a congressional investigation located records showing that at the same time Russell entered into the conspiracy, S & G paid Joe Accardo, who now leased a ranch-style home on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, the coincidental sum of exactly $20,000 to purchase his yacht, the Clari-Jo. There was another curious coincidence: as soon as S &c G reopened with its new partners, Warren and Crosby abruptly halted their raids on the consortium, and William Johnston and his friends received a major share of Florida’s contracts for road-building materials. A 1949 Florida grand jury concluded the following about S 6v G’s bookmaking transactions: “There appeared to be little effort to curb them, although they were being carried out right under the eyes of the police.”
Although the vast profits accrued from the race wire were well-known, few in authority seemed interested, and even fewer desired to do anything about it. Most politicians were keenly aware of the upperworld and underworld alliance that had buttressed this fragile house of cards. For his part, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had accurately deduced that the collusion went so deep and was so vaporous that securing convictions would prove futile. And Hoover prided himself on always “getting his man.” Therefore, the boss remained focused on bank robbers and Communists. One pol naively believed he could walk the fine line between investigating gambling crime and sparing his fellow legislators (not to mention his president, Harry Truman). He also relished the bright national spotlight that would naturally fall on him, hopefully boosting his own White House aspirations. Although Estes Kefauver’s investigation would prove a short-term irritant to the Outfit, it would be years before its revelations produced any real effect on the fortunes of the Empire of Crime.
The Kefauver Hearings
In 1950, while the Outfit was sinking its teeth into the Florida bookmaking bonanza, forty-seven-year-old Estes Kefauver was the freshman U.S. senator from Tennessee. His physical and moral stature, seen as grave but honorable, gained him the accolade “Lincolnesque.” Kefauver came from a religious Southern Baptist family, the grandson of a Madisonville preacher. In 1939, after years as a practicing attorney, Kefauver was sent to Congress on a reform platform. During that contest, his political opponent in Tennessee, machine boss Ed Crump, called him a pet coon. The gibe only inspired Estes Kefauver to don a coonskin cap on the campaign trail. It became a favorite trademark.
Not long after his ascendancy to the Senate in 1949, Kefauver became intrigued with organized crime, a topic thus far assiduously avoided in any legislature. The new senator decided that when the time was right, he would introduce a bill aimed at penetrating the murky world of interstate gambling crime. He would not have long to wait. An organization of big-city mayor
s called the American Municipal Association held a 1949 conference on syndicated crime in Cleveland. One year later, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath held a national conference on organized crime in D.C, attended by district attorneys, mayors, and police. After Truman addressed the gathering’s opening session, the press coverage increased, leading to a public outcry. The nation began to believe itself a helpless victim of an evil conspiracy, and it demanded action. In January 1950, after calling the race wire “Public Enemy No. One,” Kefauver finally introduced Senate Resolution 202, which called for a Senate investigation into interstate gambling. Many observers perceived the motion as an attempt to bolster his national visibility. One of Kefauver’s best friends from Knoxville, Jack Doughty, called the proposal “the most opportunistic thing Kef ever did.” But the first-term senator was savvy enough to know that the inherent drama in such a proceeding could propel him into the national consciousness faster than any other of his freshman-class peers. For his part, Kefauver noted that his interest in organized crime had honest roots, dating back to days as a congressman assigned to examine judicial corruption. In that probe, Kefauver had worked closely with committee investigator Boris Kostelanetz, who later prosecuted the Outfit in the Hollywood extortion case.
The Senate membership was less than excited about Kefauver’s bill, delaying the impanelment of the committee until events forced its hand. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, stalled on the bill out of fear that any investigation might threaten the nest egg created by the upperworld and underworld in his Las Vegas gambling mecca. Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois also feared the consequences of a full-blown investigation in his thoroughly corrupt state, the home of the Outfit. The debate was resolved on April 6, 1950, when two Missouri gangsters with Outfit connections, Charles Binaggio and Charles Gargotta, were killed in Kansas City’s First Ward Democratic Headquarters, the seat of power that had launched President Truman’s career. After the killings, Congress could no longer disregard Kefauver’s request for the nation’s first major investigation of organized crime. Republicans such as Forrest C. Donnell of Truman’s home state of Missouri now backed the initiative, hoping the probe would uncover the truth about Truman’s shadow world. With the Senate torn between the public’s call for action and its own members’ political skeletons, the entire subject was touchy, a point proven by the floor vote, which tied at 35-35, with Vice President Alben Barkley breaking the stalemate. The new committee, comprised of Democrat Kefauver, two other Democrats, and two Republicans, was given a $150,000 budget and was named the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Gambling. Although the Republicans hoped that Kefauver’s interest in gambling would enlarge into a full-fledged probe of Democratic corruption, Kefauver would steadfastly attempt to tiptoe around that political land mine. At every turn, however, Kefauver would come face-to-face with the very upperworld chicanery he hoped to avoid.
Harry Truman likewise knew that the urban-focused investigation was likely to hurt him and his urban-based Democratic Party much more than the farm-belt Republicans. When Kefauver announced that the hearings in Kansas City would commence on September 28, prior to the 1950 off-year elections, Truman called him disloyal and began mocking him as “Senator Cow Fever.” Even after the hearings ended, Truman continued to vent. “When the time came for a report to the United States Senate, the ’great crime investigator’ took his report, copyrighted it, and sold it as a book over his own name,” Truman bellowed. “Talk about ethics - well, he has none.”
The bulk of the committee’s background research was delegated to Rudolph Halley, a thirty-seven-year-old attorney from New York with previous experience as a congressional investigator. Halley’s public persona was that of an expressionless, monotone-voiced litigator, and a legendary workaholic. The monumental task of memorizing thousands of government reports forced Halley to endure eighteen-to-twenty-hour workdays preparing for the investigation. When hearings started, Halley was known to pull forty-eight-hour cramming sessions prior to questioning a witness. With no time left to educate the senators, it fell to Halley to conduct most of the grilling.
As Kefauver began to take his own crash course in organized crime, Virgil Peterson of the Chicago Crime Commission became his guru, guiding the senator’s research and agenda. When Peterson eventually gave formal testimony, it lasted two days and filled eighty-nine tightly spaced pages of transcription. Kefauver also sought out the expertise of Harry Anslinger of the Bureau of Narcotics and Boris Kostelanetz, the federal attorney who had kindled Kefauver’s interest during the earlier House probe. In time, Kefauver bought into the idea of a mysterious Mafia, which he called “a secret international government-within-a-government.”
And while Kefauver continued to memorize the hoodlum hierarchy, his president and vice president made a May 1950 trip to Chicago to address the National Democratic Party Conference, a three-day event held at Chicago Stadium. On the way to President Truman’s late-night address to the conventioneers, the president and vice president were feted with a torchlight parade by some of the luminaries Kefauver was reading about. The key organizers of the parade were two notorious committeemen from the infamous “bloody Twenty-fourth Ward,” Peter Fosco and Arthur X. Elrod. Fosco was an admitted close friend of Paul Ricca’s who would eventually lose his ward post when it was revealed that one of his underlings had played Joe Bulger’s courier for the moneys raised in the Hollywood extortion case paroles. He was also a dominant figure in the Building Laborers’ Union, where he manipulated the city’s labor force with the likes of Curly Humphreys and Sid Korshak. Arthur Elrod, who acted as chauffeur for Sid Korshak’s friend Vice President Barkley in the motorcade, had gained notoriety for, among other things, turning out absurd Democratic electoral pluralities in the precinct where he was captain. In 1944, his Twenty-fourth Ward used Outfit muscle to turn out the widest margin of victory of any ward in the entire country for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket: 29,533 for FDR to 2,204 for Dewey. In 1948, when Truman ran for president, Elrod’s precinct gave Truman a 300-1 victory. When Truman appeared at a party in Chicago after the election, Elrod presented him with the precinct tally sheet displaying the ludicrous totals. Truman jokingly asked Elrod, “Who was the one?” To which Elrod replied, “I don’t know, I’m still looking for him.”
When the first official “Kefauver Committee” hearings commenced in Miami, Outfit bosses made themselves scarce, hoping to avoid subpoenas. Joe took his family to Mexico, accompanied by Charles Fischetti, while Curly holed up in Oklahoma. A subpoena sent to Harry “the Muscle” Russell, the gang’s Florida representative, likewise received no response. Reporters covering the committee jokingly wrote about the bouts of “Kefauveritis” spreading across the land. Pressing ahead in Miami, the committee settled for whoever was available, a decision that brought it face-to-face with the hoods’ upperworld partners. Although Kefauver’s goal was to expose “Mafia”-type gambling, he was now forced to address official corruption. In south Florida, investigators learned that the sheriff of Dade County (Miami), Smiling Jimmy Sullivan, had been accepting bribes for years from the wire operators. Although Sullivan’s annual salary averaged $9,500, his assets purchased in five years were valued at more than $65,000. When Sullivan’s subsequent indictment was dismissed on a technicality, Governor Fuller Warren, whom Johnny Patton and the Outfit had done so much to elect, reinstated him as sheriff. The Miami Daily News called Warren’s act “lousy, stinking - and obvious.”
After Miami, the committee’s executive staff spent the summer of 1950 taking depositions in Washington, New York, and Missouri, home of President Truman. In Missouri, the committee walked on eggshells attempting to avoid the Truman-Pendergast controversy, choosing instead to focus on the Kansas City wire operation, which was tame in comparison to the machine corruption that had sponsored the president’s career. A possible subconscious tone may have been set by the fact that Rudolph Halley, the committee’s chief in
vestigator, had been friends with Truman since 1941, when he had served as the then senator’s chief investigator on the Truman Committee, which had looked into the awarding of defense contracts. When the Kefauver Committee wound up its Missouri foray, it was roundly lambasted for its timidity by the local press.
While his advance investigative staff went to school in Chicago, Kefauver and his fellow senators brought Paul Ricca, Louis Campagna, and Charles Gioe to Washington to hear some preliminary testimony. Since these men were in regular contact with their parole officers, they were easier to subpoena than Accardo, Humphreys, and the others. The questions revolved around whom they associated with, what they did for a living, and what property they owned. The trio successfully parried with their inquisitors and revealed little or nothing of their gambling activities, except to say that they had legally won most of their savings at the track. Their responses set a new standard for vagueness, leaving the officials visibly frustrated.
September 19, 1950, should be memorialized in legal annals as the day the Outfit set jurisprudence on its ear, establishing a key precedent for all who would follow them into a congressional grilling. The setting was the Senate Office Building, where the Kefauver Committee gathered at 2:45 P.M. to take the long-sought subpoenaed testimony of Harry “the Muscle” Russell.
Soon after Russell’s requisite swearing in, dumbfounded senators and their counsels received a taste of what Chicagoans had been experiencing for years: the brilliance of Curly Humphreys. It is commonly accepted that Humphreys, acting as the gang’s legal adviser, instructed his pupils to hide behind the shield of the Fifth Amendment, much as he had done eleven years earlier in the bartenders’ union trial. Although the tactic was now used routinely in criminal courts, it had never been tested in Congress.
