Washington Confidential 25 – Mortimer · Library Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 25Part 2 · WHO’S WHO IN MOBOCRACY
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 25
Part 2 · WHO’S WHO IN MOBOCRACY
MortimerEnglish
For two books and for the hundreds of newspaper stories we have done on American gangsters and their maze of intertwining organization we got enough to be publicly proclaimed America’s top experts in the field.
We have been offered lectures and speaking engagements before bodies of bankers, merchants, criminologists, police conventions and on radio programs. But we have saved some new names and some newly-discovered secrets for this book, because a “confidential” without that factor would be regarded as a gold brick; and because our publisher knows us and trusts us and hasn’t the rabbit in him that the owners of other media display, when they say:
“But you just can’t publish that kind of stuff. You’ll get us all killed!”
One magazine which paid for the rights to do a digest of Chicago Confidential weakened and, instead, did a piece speculating on our chances of surviving our tenure on the bestseller lists!
We have our own ways of getting this material, which so many think is so dangerous. It comes from many sources, all confidential. Some of it is right from the racketeers, themselves, for they have vendettas and jealousies and hatreds on which they don’t dare to act in the open. The widow of a murdered hoodlum drove hundreds of miles and met us in a car in Central Park and gave us the tale of who rubbed him out and why. This was a woman who had told the cops and the prosecutors that she knew nothing, had no idea how her husband made a living, had never met any one who was even “shady.”
Here and there a person who has been shaken down or shaken out, and thus knows a small angle which may be valuable as a tip-off on one or two people and authentic tactics gets to us and spills.
We don’t believe all we hear. But facts mesh up and patterns form and truths evolve.
We have sketched for you the process whereby the pennies, dimes and dollars of the numbers-players, horse-bettors, hookers and junkies are harvested in Washington and funneled to the satraps who live in penthouses and mansions in New York, Chicago, Beverly Hills and Rome. They are big industry, our biggest. And while the principals hide in their drawing-rooms even if they pass through Washington, to or from Florida, they must maintain here high-powered lawyers, tax experts who study and report every decision of the Treasury, lobbyists, press agents and spies. Many of the vast legal businesses into which they channel their cash have branch stores and offices here. The Syndicate is an international conspiracy, as potent as that other international conspiracy, Communism, and as dirty and dangerous, with its great wealth and the same policy--to conquer everything and take over everything, with no scruples as to how.
This gigantic money trust has assets of billions, exceeding the combined wealth of Morgan, Rockefeller and all the Wall Street freebooters of old.
It owns, through legitimate sources of trade, incalculable commercial, residential, hotel and investment real estate, surpassing the holdings of insurance companies. Through its purchase of stocks and bonds it controls some and is attempting to control other transportation companies, as well as railroads, hotel chains, distilleries and breweries, department stores and chain stores, clothing and dress manufacturers, steel and iron works, franchised automobile distributors, trans-Atlantic steamship lines, a movie producer, a radio chain, a big-league ball team, phonograph recording companies, insurance corporations, banks, theatres, night clubs, laundries, oil wells; it has been buying into even newspapers. This is only a condensed catalog of its dishonest interests in once-honest enterprises.
A thief is always a thief. These modern pirates could not go straight. As soon as they dip their sticky hands into something legitimate, it goes crooked.
One of their favorite tactics is to buy in the open market enough stock of a company, to create a nuisance value. They organize a minority stockholders’ committee and dig up proxies. They have no real intention of trying to get control, but some time before the stockholders’ meeting, they approach the management and offer to sell at a premium, usually three or four times above the market listing. This is cold blackmail.
Another tactic, employed when they secure control of a transportation company, is to use their political connections to get a fare raise. That enhances the stock on the market, then they unload.
They buy into some companies to get enough stock to rig the price, a felony. In at least one instance with which we are familiar, the underworld put a representative in as an officer of a transportation company. He then sold company stock short on the securities exchanges. This is a violation of SEC law. When a complaint was made by other stockholders to the SEC, the man they talked to shrugged his shoulders and said, “Forget it. They have a fix.”
Operators with such tremendous financial interests know their way around Washington. One of their chief sources of contact is through Democratic county, state and national committeemen, who are beholden for campaign contributions. Sometimes cash is handed over to sweeten the kitty. The committeemen and political bosses pass the orders along through their Congressmen in Washington, or, when the fix is important enough, directly to a specialist at such affairs right in the White House.
The Tammany and Flynn interests in New York and Jake Arvey’s tight Chicago combine are powers. The Rhode Island organization of Senator Pastore and Attorney General McGrath, the crooked Connecticut machine that made Senator Brien McMahon, and the Maryland organization, about which more later, get whatever they want. Senator Herbert O’Conor is the godfather of the Maryland outfit, and he is a member of the Kefauver Committee.
The Colorado machine handles the loot for the Mountain States. The errand-boy for the West Coast gamblers, dope runners and procurers is the California Democratic organization, of which at this writing, Jimmy Roosevelt is the chairman, but the mobsters don’t stick long with losers.
In Chicago Confidential we gave an outline of the organization and chain of command of the international underworld Syndicate.
The Mafia, an age-old institution, has existed in Sicily since before the beginning of written history. Sicily always has been, and to this day is, subject territory. It was owned by ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Imperial France, Italy and even Britain. The Sicilian peasants always worked for absentee owners.
In prehistoric times, the Mafia began as a patriotic terrorist society, somewhat like the Irish Republican Army. Venal leaders sold out, offered protection to some estates while they sacked others. They anticipated the protection racket by centuries.
The Mafia and the dread Black Hand are the same thing. The black hand was the sign over which the Mafia’s threats were delivered. During several thousand years it came about that almost every native of Sicily had to have some tie or connection with the Mafia. Some were members, others were relatives of members, or partners, hired killers and spies. Others did business with it; still others were the terrorized unattached who dared not refuse its bidding.
Sicilians vie with Cantonese as the most migrating people in the world. Sicily, like Canton, is overpopulated and poverty-ridden. Another, more important factor, appears to be that at every change of government, Mafistas were forced into flight and exile in droves. They settled and colonized all over the earth. There are huge Sicilian colonies spread around Europe, in England, South America, North Africa, the Orient and the United States.
Every Sicilian colony had a hard core of black-handers, who set up an invisible government and preyed first on the other colonizers. The various groups were in correspondence with each other, cooperated in business deals, provided places for other fugitives and expatriates.
The first great influx arrived in this country exactly a hundred years ago, about the time Napoleon 3rd extended his influence to Sicily. Thereafter, every ten or twenty years found other large groups on their way here, especially after such periods of uncertainty as the unification of Italy, World War I, the Mussolini ascendancy, and after World War II. From time to time the Italian government tried to wipe out the Mafia, and after each attempt thousands more came to wink and leer at the Statue of Liberty.
Though the Italian government never could exterminate the Mafia, it did wipe out similar terroristic societies on the mainland, such as the Camorra, of Naples. The members of these other secret societies who could escape fled to Sicily, where they were welcomed and integrated as brothers by the Mafistas.
Their overseas affiliates were absorbed by local Mafia units. This process took place also among outlawed Greek secret societies, and the dread Black Hand of Serbia, which was akin in purpose to Sicily’s Black Hand. Meanwhile, as Mafia bosses got fat and rich, they smuggled in new killers, many from Cuba and Puerto Rico.
The American Black Hand was content to operate exclusively in Italian circles for years. All Italians had to pay tribute, a tithe of their earnings, from the dollar-a-week of the corner bootblack to five thousand a night of Enrico Caruso. Failure to pay meant the Black Hand letter, and continued failure, death. Now the Mafia is smoother. It “owns” acts on a ten-per cent business deal. Frank Sinatra was discovered by Willie Moretti and is the pet of the Fischettis. He gave a gold cigarette case to Charlie Luciano, inscribed “To my friend.”
Recent developments in New York again demonstrate how this works. A $4,000-a-year city fireman, an Italian who had changed his name, testified he was operating a $200,000 talent agency, which, in theatrical parlance, “stole” acts from other agencies. Two were “thefted” from agent Lou Perry: Alan Dale, another Italian who is the hottest crooning find of the year, and Toni Arden. The fireman, whose name is Gerry Purcell, booked these two and another, Terri Stevens, into the Copacabana, where all three “clicked” and started their climbs to fame.
In Chicago Confidential, we described how Big Jim Colosimo, then the local Mafia leader, set up the organization which under Al Capone and Johnny Torrio, was able to drive out of Chicago all the competing non-Italian and sectional mobs. Prohibition made them fabulously rich and potent.
The same thing happened in New York. While Colosimo was the head of the Chicago chapter, Lupo “the Wolf” Saietta headed the New York branch. After he went to prison, Joe “The Boss” Masseria took over, after a lot of mayhem.
They began to call the Mafia the Unione Siciliano then. At times it tried to pretend it was a respectable Italian-American benevolent society. Joe “The Boss” reigned at the top of the Unione for nine years, until he was murdered in 1931. His chief lieutenants were “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello. When Masseria was killed they moved in.
The Irish and Jewish mobs were being driven to the wall. The same thing happened in every important city. By the middle 1930s, the Unione Siciliano was dominant in every racket. Wherever there were non-Italians left, the only way they could do business was to accept the overlordship of the Mafia. If they were good boys they were allowed to come in and get rich. If they tried any monkey-business, they were assassinated, like Bugsy Siegel, or turned over to the law, like Lepke and Gurrah.
No one knows whether the top Italian hoodlums like Capone, Luciano and Costello took over the Mafia, or whether the Mafia took them over. That is an academic conjecture, as they are now one and the same thing, with the worldwide facilities of the Unione Siciliano the nucleus on which all organized vice, crime and corruption, not only in the United States but all over the world, has been built.
In Chicago Confidential, we stated in passing that since the exile of Luciano in Italy the American “president” or executive head of the Unione Siciliano is Frank Costello, and the vice-president is Capone’s cousin, Charles Fischetti, in Chicago.
The worldwide Mafia is composed of a supreme head in Palermo, Sicily, a Grand Council consisting of high-ranking executives, subordinate officers, and a global membership.
Luciano, following his deportation in 1947, has been installed as the Supreme Head of the International Mafia. Members are divided into two distinct groups, inner circle and outer circle. The latter includes members of ordinary rank and standards. The former consists of those who command wealth, influence or proven underworld power. Membership in this group is kept at a minimum, since it derives a major portion of all proceeds from its general diverse illegal enterprises.
Members of the elite few are almost invariably, through ancestry or direct birth, from Palermo and its adjoining areas. A very few non-Italians have been taken into the ruling circle. According to the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, American members of the Mafia are necessarily members of the over-all group, which therefore has continued to include former American gangsters who left the U.S. by deportation or voluntary flight. Prominently mentioned among these are John Schillochi (International List 298); Dominic Petrelli (International List 259); and Nicola Gentile (International List 133), all of whom were in Italy when last heard of, though informants tell us they have since been seen around New York again.
Other important members of the Mafia, such as Francisco Paolo Coppola and Sylvestro Carrolla, found their way to Mexico, where they took over the local Mafia. Other lesser figures represent the fearsome fraternity in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, France, and England.
The Bureau of Narcotics has compiled what is believed to be the only master list of the inner circle of the Mafia. It is based on documentary evidence in the form of address books, papers, interstate telephone calls, police records, screened informants, etc. During the recent Kefauver Committee hearings, Commissioner Anslinger supplied the document under oath to the committee. Extracts from this list are printed in the back of the book.
Even before the Mafia had organized the entire American underworld, it had strong communication lines into Washington. These were first built up during Prohibition, when the boys passed money back to the capital for their own protection. They also made liberal contributions to the campaign funds of dry Congressmen, without whose votes, for whatever cause, the racket was worthless. During the insane days of Prohibition, the underworld began the process of undermining the honesty and probity of federal officials, which has since been carried to an extreme.
Until the 18th Amendment, law-breakers feared Uncle Whiskers. There were few federal criminal laws. Most criminals didn’t want to tangle with Washington. Only nuts got themselves mixed up with the postal inspectors or the Secret Service. After the wholesale bribery and corruption of the 1920s, all respect for national law enforcement had gone into the ashcan.
Now, due largely to the example of the F.B.I., the Bureau of Narcotics and the Treasury Intelligence, the public’s faith in federal law-enforcement and investigative agencies has been revived, but the prosecuting and judicial ends have never come back. Most felons would rather be arrested by federal than state or city cops, because they know they can make a better deal with the prosecutors, and if everything fails, federal sentences are light and the prisons are soft.
Before the underworld was completely organized, Washington was a “neutral” city, where mob meetings and conventions were held. In such cities the delegates must not pack guns. Rough stuff is out by common consent. Other such open cities are Saratoga, Hot Springs, Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Miami. These were and are important resort centers, and are kept neutral because machine-gunning might scare tourists away. Washington was no-man’s-land for obvious reasons; they knew tommy-guns wouldn’t be tolerated in the Capitol’s shadow.
Commissioner Anslinger recalls such a gangster convention in the Shoreham Hotel, two decades ago. The Commissioner dropped into the Blue Room for dinner and saw Luciano, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Frank Nitti, “the Enforcer” of the Chicago mob, Izzie Bernstein of Detroit’s Purple Gang, and three other hoods, each with a bejeweled blonde. They were registered at the Shoreham under assumed names and spent a week there holding meetings.
When Anslinger lamped the boys, he went to the lobby and had Lucky called out. Luciano was offended, beefed about the interruption of his party. He said, “You can’t do anything to me. We got Constitutional rights. We’re only sight-seeing.”
Anslinger said, “That’s all you’d better do,” then glancing at the blondes, he added, “remember the Mann Act.”
A few weeks later, Jack McGurn was knocked off. It developed that this meeting was called for his trial. He had been getting out of line. So he was summoned from Chicago to meet his peers from the other cities.
The organized underworld’s influence in official Washington is incalculable. Its direct ties, even to the top, are so firm that in many instances even a political revolution will not dislodge them. They succeeded in doing that which the Communists failed to do; they infiltrated and took over the government. They are the true subversives, though that never comes out in Congress.
The Mafia’s power is built around these factors:
1) The underworld’s ownership of and contributions to local political machines. The mob has no politics or ideology. It pays liberally to both sides, so it will have a friend in court no matter who wins. Even the former American Labor Party Congressman, Vito Marcantonio, was on intimate terms with Mafia hoodlums, accepted campaign contributions from them, associated with and fronted for their racketeers in New York and in Washington, and welcomed them into his American Labor Party. He appointed the son of the infamous “Three Finger Brown” Luchese to West Point in 1946. Luchese was and is his contact in Tammany Hall.
2) The Mafia’s huge cache of currency, hidden in private safe deposit vaults and in banks throughout the world. Its earnings from illicit sources are so great, and come in so fast, the boys cannot invest it fast enough. They must hide most of the money because they failed to pay income tax on the major portion of it. It is no exaggeration to say they have billions of dollars in U.S. bills. With this bankroll they can bribe at will, elect many officials, and swing public opinion to incredible degrees.
3) The Syndicate’s interests in countless large legitimate businesses and industries give it a responsible, respectable voice in Washington through trade associations, lobbyists, law firms, banks, Congressmen who would do a favor for a local businessman but would not be seen dead with a gangster, and a considerable segment of the press, daily and periodical, and the radio.
4) The hoodlums’ tie-up with some labor, which came about when unions needed sluggers, or when tough guys muscled in to grab union treasurers, or used them as part of their extortion rackets. Lobbyists representing the unions are feared and toadied to.
5) The Italian voting bloc now controls some of the largest cities in the country. It is the largest single unit in New York, where all three candidates for mayor in 1950 were Italians. Too many of their men in office have ties to the Mafia. They can count on the votes of their countrymen in nominations and elections. The mass votes of Italians are bartered back and forth and usually can be delivered, by Black Hand threats in Italian neighborhoods, by appeal to blood relationship and national pride, or through the pages of powerful Italian language newspapers.
During his recent campaign, New York’s Mayor Impellitteri charged that Gene Pope, publisher of Il Progresso Italiano-Americano, the biggest Italian daily in the country, was an intimate of Frank Costello. We have seen them dining together on intimate terms.
No book could comprehensively cover the mob’s facets in Washington, but here are a few, at random:
The President’s military aide and poker pal, Major General Harry Vaughan, has associated with Frank Costello. They were brought together through his stooge, the convict John Maragon, who was a pal of the late Bill Helis, Greek millionaire and partner in Costello’s New York and Louisiana enterprises--as well as in a Scotch distillery.
Joe Adonis, New York mobster and lieutenant of Costello, had financial dealings with Harold F. Ambrose, former special assistant to the Postmaster General. Ambrose pleaded guilty to charges of operating a $600,000 fraudulent stamp-selling scheme. Adonis was questioned by the D.C. grand jury, but refused to talk, after which the United States had amnesia about his connection with the case. Ambrose is related to Democratic Senator O’Mahoney. His failure to go to trial protected his underworld associates.
Attorney General McGrath, who may be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice before this appears in print, was a Senator from Rhode Island and an important member of Rhode Island’s Democratic machine. That outfit has tight ties with the underworld. Within days after McGrath was pushed upstairs to the Attorney Generalship, to make way for Bill Boyle as Democratic National Chairman, McGrath made a trip to New York City. There he or his double had dinner at the Copacabana night club with Joe Nunan, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and Julie Podell, manager of the cafe. It has been frequently charged in New York that Costello has an interest in the corporation. The late Mayor La Guardia ordered police to cancel the club’s license if Podell, long an associate of Costello, was ever found on its premises again. Podell, while giddy, told one of your reporters that Costello had advanced $50,000 to open the club.
At the time of the dinner party there, the Copa was a possible defendant in a tax-action growing out of an investigation into the charges that it was owned by Costello. Since then, Podell was in Hot Springs with Costello and several other mobsters from all parts of the country, in an annual convention. McGrath has since stated there is no organized crime or vice in the country.
Former Attorney General Tom Clark, now a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was closely associated with attorneys who represented underworld figures. There were no major underworld prosecutions during his term of office. A Congressional investigation elicited the startling information that Clark’s boyhood pal, Maury Hughes, a Dallas attorney, was retained by five members of the old Capone mob, who had been convicted of extorting millions from the movie industry, to induce the federal authorities to nol-pros outstanding indictments against them and secure premature paroles.
Hughes, with other lawyers close to the administration, worked this feat of legal legerdemain. While these pages were being written, the same Maury Hughes secretly succeeded in keeping Alan Smiley, a notorious West Coast gangster who had been ordered deported, in the country. Smiley was Bugsy Siegel’s buddy, and was seated next to him on a love-seat in Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills mansion when Siegel was ambushed and assassinated, in the only spot in the room visible to the torpedoes hidden outside, in bushes.
Until recently, Smiley had been passing himself off as an oil broker and real estate man in Houston, Texas, where he lived with his wife, a former movie starlet, in Glen McCarthy’s swank Shamrock Hotel. Smiley took up with a Texas oilman, Lenoire Josey, who liked to gamble. Smiley said he liked that, too. He knew some good places.
He and Josey went to Sam Maceo’s ornate casino, the Balinese Room, in Galveston. Then they went to the Mounds Club, in Cleveland. After that they went to the Flamingo, in Las Vegas. A trip to Phil Kastel’s (and Costello’s) beautiful Beverly, outside New Orleans, followed. When Josey counted up he had lost $500,000. Smiley “admitted to being a big loser, too.” If so, he got some back, because he owns a bit of stock in the Flamingo.
While these lines were being written, the California Crime Commission, headed by Admiral William H. Standley, Retired, castigated government aides for their ties with criminals. He said the relationship between the underworld elements and certain officials “must of necessity make it embarrassing for Federal officials to undertake prosecutions.”
A specific example was Sam Termini, described as a godson of the late Charlie Binaggio, who would have had to earn $900,000 income last year to be able to afford the cash payments made on his mansion in San Mateo County. He paid income tax on no such sum.
It cited the case of Dorothy A. McCreedy as a specific example of tieups between criminals and government officials, stating:
“The McCreedy woman is a convicted madame, a major figure in the prostitution racket in California for years and operator of two large whore-houses in Honolulu.”
She was reported to the Income Tax Bureau as a suspected evader, but “she is also a partner in a business called Safety Step Sales Co., and one of her partners is Ernest M. Schino, chief field deputy in the Office of the Collector of Internal Revenue.”
They tell a spicy story about Dorothy, whom we know well--personally, not professionally. When F. D. Roosevelt made his first trip to Hawaii, the Secret Service failed to send ahead a black open touring-car of expensive make, familiar and standard for the President on open display. Honolulu was winnowed. Only one such car was found in the Territory. It was owned by Dorothy, who used to drive her gals through town, to show them off, for promotion.
Dorothy pridefully lent the car. Everyone in Honolulu recognized it on sight, but the President didn’t know that. He flashed his historic grin, waved his hat, but couldn’t understand why the cheers were accompanied by an obbligato of guffaws.
It was charged, and never refuted in the 1950 campaign, by both Governor Dewey and Mayor Impellitteri that Ed Flynn, New York political boss and intimate of the late President Roosevelt, is Frank Costello’s contact in New York State. Flynn, who has, and retained after the debacle, the national patronage in the state, used it frequently to procure appointments in high places, including the federal district bench, the New York State Supreme Court and some prosecutors, of men known to be friendly to associates of Costello. His defeated choice for governor of New York, former Congressman Walter J. Lynch, of the Bronx, had, while he was in Congress, introduced a “sleeper” which would have permitted the underworld kings, notorious for such frauds, to evade prison sentences for tax delinquency.
A report, in the possession of the Los Angeles Police Department, which we have seen, states that Flynn or someone who looked remarkably like him--with Frank Costello, Phil Kastel and others--was in Mexico City in December, 1948. Costello was in conferences that contemplated taking over the Mexican National Lottery. The group was partied by A. C. Blumenthal, expatriate New York showman.
Lynch, like his boss Ed Flynn, was a never-deviating New Deal-Fair Deal Democrat. He never voted against an administration measure. In the last Congress there was a mighty affinity between New Dealers and crooked dealers. For instance, former Senator Lucas, of Illinois, the majority leader, was beholden to the Nash-Kelly-Arvey machine. Appointments of shady figures to federal positions in Illinois cleared through him, the senior Senator, as all must.
Left-wing Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, is a pal of ex-convict Charles Ward, millionaire calendar printer. Ward has many ties with the underworld all over the country, and was one of the financial backers of Anna Roosevelt’s attempt to start a daily newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. This was once he was outsmarted in a money deal. As is not unknown in the Roosevelt tradition, he got one cent on the dollar back. Bill O’Dwyer said he found a direct tie between Ward and Brooklyn’s Murder, Inc.
Under such auspices, the underworld is establishing a firm grip on Minnesota. Its attempt to take over the Minneapolis and St. Paul traction systems is a part of the general picture across the land and was exposed by Lait last summer in his Daily Mirror column. It resulted in the indictment of one of the mobsters, Kid Cann, so called because of his many incarcerations.
The New Dealers have been kind to the underworld ever since their victorious election in 1932, after Costello and Jimmy Hines, with Ed Kelly, had successfully managed the convention fight in Chicago. While Frank Murphy was Attorney-General he saw to it that prosecuting attorneys laid off the boys. Internal Revenue agents prepared a tax case against Costello and Frank Erickson, but the U.S. Attorney was ordered to pigeonhole it.
Following Frank Erickson’s conviction in New York on gambling charges, District Attorney’s investigators seized his books and papers. Among them was a memo reading, “Phone Daddy Long Legs.”
The sleuths jumped on this. They figured it was a code or nickname for one of the mob aces. That is one of the toughest problems encountered by racket-busters, i.e., breaking down the aliases used by the kings of the underworld on their books and in their records.
The gumshoes rushed over to the Island and interviewed Erickson in his cell.
“Who is Daddy Long Legs?” they asked. “And what did you want to call him for?”
Erickson laughed uproariously. “Why shouldn’t I phone him?” he inquired. “After all, I’m related to him by marriage and he’s the Vice President.”
After the investigators had recovered from their shocks, this is what Erickson told them:
“An in-law of mine is an in-law of Barkley’s. Barkley visited me in my Long Island home. My grand-kids are crazy about him. They nicknamed him ‘Daddy Long Legs.’”
The story of the Binaggio killing in Kansas City, anticipated in Chicago Confidential, is recent, but the full background of the case has never been aired before.
President Truman is and was a loyal member of his county Democratic organization. And as such--a party man who never split his ticket--he was forced to go along, though unwillingly, when the Chicago hoodlums put Binaggio in as the leader.
When the President first went into politics, the Mafia was just one of the mobs. It had not organized the country. In the 1920s, most of the big city machines were owned by Irish bosses, who were tied up with the local Irish underworld gangs. Each city was independent of all other cities.
On the surface, the conviction of Tom Pendergast by U.S. Attorney Maurice Milligan was a smashing victory for law and order. But it was, at the same time, a greater victory for the Capone and Costello mob. There are high government cops--not friends of the administration, either--who have the wild idea that the only effect of Pendergast’s conviction was to permit Charley Fischetti’s ambassador to Kansas City, Tony Gizzo, to put in his own man, Binaggio, as county leader. Milligan’s brother Tuck was counsel for Joe de Luca, a Mafia boss and convicted dope smuggler, during and after his brother’s term as United States attorney. Milligan prosecuted few Sicilian hoodlums. T-men demanded 20 years for De Luca. Milligan’s office asked for only 3 for his brother’s client; he was sprung shortly thereafter and the stool pigeon who convicted him was murdered. We looked up the official record and that is so.
As new Democratic leader of the President’s home county, Binaggio had great influence. Naturally, the President wanted to carry his own state in local and federal elections, so he had to work through his home organization. The presence in it of people like Binaggio and Gizzo may have turned his stomach, but that was politics.
We have explained that the Big Mob does not operate directly in Washington on the street and sewer levels, such enterprises being franchised out to locals. The Syndicate does do business in the District in connection with its legitimate affairs and some of its larger sub-rosa undertakings. In the latter category are black-marketing, the sale and resale of government surplus, padding of war contracts, etc. The boys had an office in the Thomas Circle Building during World War II, in which they dished out war contracts. One day a man was killed there, but so great was their influence that no record was made on the police blotter. The newspapers still know nothing about it.
A couple of hotels in Washington are owned by interests known to be backed by underworld coin. Many chain stores owned by mob money have branches there. Money of “Lepke” Buchalter, executed head of Murder, Inc., is in Jarwood’s men’s clothing store, across the street from the Department of Justice. The history of this chain makes a human interest story.
When Lepke surrendered, to be turned over to J. Edgar Hoover, he understood the boys put in a “fix” so he would be tried on federal charges and not turned over to Brooklyn’s crusading District Attorney, Bill O’Dwyer, on the Murder, Inc., rap, which meant the chair in Sing Sing.
But Hoover would have nothing to do with such a deal, and gave him up to New York State. Lepke was convicted of first-degree murder. He knew he had been railroaded by the Mafia, which had wanted to get rid of its Jewish partner. He threatened to blow the whistle, and was promised leniency if he would talk. His wife, an attractive brunette, went to see him in his cell and told him her life had been threatened, she would be croaked if he spilled. That was not so. Lepke loved her, so he went to the hot seat with his lips sealed to protect her.
Most of his illegal profits had been stashed away in secret safe deposit vaults. He told her where they were. While Lepke was in the death-chamber, his wife was often seen with Arthur Jawitz, a slick-looking young guy, who had attracted the attention of the Feds when they were looking for Lepke, whose bed he was keeping warm.
Shortly after Lepke’s electrocution, his widow married the black-haired young man, and set him up in the men’s clothing business. They changed their name to Jarwood. The underworld says Lepke left her $20,000,000 in U.S. currency. A former wife of Jawitz showed up, charged he had married Betty Buchalter bigamously. She said Betty was “keeping” Jawitz while her gangster husband was still alive.
After the Kefauver Committee quizzed Lou Wolfson, head of the Capital Transit Company, which owns the street-cars and buses in Washington, seeking gangster-ties, it went no further. There was no evidence. Wolfson, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, says he is a legitimate businessman. We have no knowledge to the contrary. But it was developed under oath at a Senatorial hearing that Wolfson and one William B. Johnston had, between them, raised a fund of half-a-million dollars for the campaign of Florida’s governor, Fuller Warren. Wolfson and Johnston each put $154,000 into this private, special campaign kitty, and were intimately associated during the campaign. Johnston is president of Sportsman’s Park racetrack in Chicago, and several dog-tracks in Florida, which were owned by the late Al Capone. Johnston makes frequent payments to Capone associates as “loans.” He admitted he had been associated with mob-owned enterprises.
Another witness, Leo J. Carroll, testified that it was general knowledge in 1948, that with the election of Governor Warren, one-third of whose campaign Wolfson financed, “the Mob would take over Florida.” It did.
A few months after Wolfson secured control of the Washington transit system, he was permitted to raise the fare to 15 cents a ride, on the plea of extreme poverty. Right after that, the company doubled its quarterly dividends from 50 cents to $1 a share. Company stock scored a sensational advance, reaching $39. When Wolfson landed control he bought 109,000 shares at $20.
Wolfson’s campaign to buy the local transit system was authorized by the ICC and the Securities Exchange after an adverse recommendation of the examiner and over opposition of minority stockholders. In less than ten months, the Wolfson group succeeded in dominating the board of directors and placing its own men in strategic executive spots, one of whom is Frank E. Weakly, president of the Wardman Park Hotel.
Now the SEC has granted Wolfson permission to sell some of his stock at the inflated price, which gives him the company and his money back. At this writing, he is negotiating to buy the Washington Redskins from George Marshall.
You can feel the presence of the mob in Washington. You can see evidence in many directions that it is there. John L. Laskey, immediate past president of the District Bar Association, resigned the chairmanship of its law enforcement committee because he had represented three witnesses called before the Senate Crime Investigating Committee in connection with Florida gambling. He was a former U.S. attorney.
When Frank Costello testified briefly last year before the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee investigating the transportation of slot-machines across state lines, the photo of a Senate attache calling a cab for him while Capitol policemen pushed nosy spectators away, was widely published. But what hasn’t been printed is that a table was reserved for him in advance in the Senators’ private dining-room in the Capitol, and while the great Costello dined with his staff of lawyers, a couple of U.S. Senators humbly waited for seats. The Senate dining-room is operated on a concession basis by the son-in-law of a Chicago vending-machine manufacturer.
It could be some of the Senators are on Costello’s payroll. The law firms of at least 40 Senators and Congressmen regularly represent the wire service and local gamblers in their home towns.
