Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (20 page)

As a respite from serious mobster meetings and Commission business, Bonanno, Mangano, Profaci, and Gagliano enjoyed one another’s company at purely social events, each hosting parties featuring gargantuan home-cooked meals. Frequent rendezvous took place at Mangano’s horse farm on Long Island, where he personally prepared multicourse dinners of fish, veal, filet mignon, and pasta, which were washed down with numerous bottles of wine.
Bonanno wrote that a typical meal with Mangano and Profaci was highlighted by the Sicilian custom of toasting each other in rhyming couplets.

Bonanno cited a “witty” example of one of his favorite toasts:

These fraternal meals symbolized the serene prosperity that prevailed midway through the twentieth century for the bosses within their own families and with their fellow godfathers. The next decades, however, would not be so carefree.

“Wake Up, America!”

T
wo freshman senators wanted the prize. It would be an enviable plum: investigating organized crime.

The competitors were Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Both were groping in 1950 for the politically hot issue that would get them national headlines. Simultaneously they struck upon the idea of a coast-to-coast examination of the strength and political influence of organized crime. The impetus came largely from complaints by civic crime commissions and mayors that illegal gambling and interstate crime were soaring without interference from the federal government. Since Kefauver’s party, the Democrats, controlled the Senate, he outmaneuvered the Republican McCarthy for appointment as chairman of a special subcommittee to investigate interstate “gambling and racketeering activities.”

As a consolation, McCarthy found another provocative subject: probing Communist influence in the government. McCarthy’s unscrupulous investigative methods and exaggerated claims of Communist infiltration brought him worldwide attention, far greater than Kefauver received. His ruthless distortions, unethical tactics, and browbeating of witnesses earned his methods an eternal unflattering eponym, “McCarthyism.”

At the outset, little was expected of an organized-crime inquiry led by Estes
Kefauver, an unlikely provincial crusader from Tennessee. He was a relatively inexperienced legislator, best known for campaigning in his home state with a massive grin and wearing a coonskin cap perched absurdly on his head. Nevertheless, the investigation and Kefauver’s decision to concentrate on gambling was opposed by the Democratic administration of President Harry Truman. Northern Democratic leaders feared that the committee’s conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans would focus mainly on big-city Democratic machines, the party’s bedrock.

Kefauver’s staff got no help from the administration or from Hoover’s FBI. Echoing Hoover’s sentiments, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath thundered that federal investigation would be wasteful because there was no evidence that a “national crime syndicate” existed. Local remedies were the best solution for combating illegal gambling, the attorney general declared, signifying the White House’s animosity.

On the local level, most police departments offered little help to Kefauver’s congressional investigation. Undaunted, Kefauver and his staff pressed on, aided by Anslinger’s narcotics bureau, Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, several other state prosecutors, and private municipal crime commissions in Chicago and New Orleans. Ralph Salerno, who became a New York Police Department Mafia expert, and ten other New York detectives were ordered to quickly assemble the sparse intelligence files they possessed on the city’s mafiosi. “The Police Commissioner knew that Kefauver was coming to town and he wanted to be prepared to answer questions and not look foolish,” Salerno recalled. “It turned out that no other city police department kept any files on mobsters. These cities would get some old-timer cop to talk with Kefauver’s people but they had no records, no solid information.”

From May 1950 to May 1951, the subcommittee, formally titled the “Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce,” held public hearings in fourteen cities. Overall, the committee called more than six hundred witnesses but its proceedings got generally lackluster attention until it arrived in New York for nine days of climatic sessions in March 1951.

In New York, the subcommittee and the Mafia discovered the power of the new television medium. The three major networks then in existence, ABC, CBS, and NBC, televised the hearings live in a rare coast-to-coast hookup. The parade of shady characters, bookies, pimps, politicians, and slippery lawyers on TV screens captivated the nation, becoming television’s first live spectacular
public event, drawing an unprecedented audience of between 20 and 30 million viewers daily.

The highlight of the event was the appearance of Frank Costello. Other important Mafia leaders—Tommy Lucchese, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia—and lesser lights subpoenaed by the committee relied on the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination to clam up and get out of the TV glare quickly. Not Costello. Even though he was the nation’s most important underworld figure and his ties to Tammany Hall had been previously exposed, Costello agreed to enter the lion’s den and testify. He apparently wanted to escape the onus of being automatically tarred as an underworld generalissimo like the witnesses who used the Fifth Amendment as a refuge. And he believed he had the wits to deflect harsh questioning and maintain for his reputable friends the myth that he was a businessman.

Costello made one demand that the committee accepted: the TV cameras could not show his face. During his three grueling days of testimony, the cameras focused on his hands, with close-ups of his cuticles, his fingers drumming on the table, and his hands clasping and unclasping. The eerie combination of Costello’s hands and his accented, gravel-crunching voice cast him in a more sinister and mysterious role than showing his face on television. His hands became the frightening symbol of an otherwise unseen criminal empire. One television comedian devised a skit in which Costello’s unattached hands ran the gamut of emotions—surprise, innocence, anguish—and finally, in fury, they strangled Estes Kefauver.

The television audience was unaware of the medical reason for the intimidating sounds that emerged from their sets. Costello’s vocal chords had been damaged in an unsuccessful operation to remove throat polyps, resulting in a hard-edged, unnatural timbre. In the movie
The Godfather
, Marlon Brando, who played the title role of a first-generation Mafia autocrat, is said to have imitated Costello’s voice and cadence from his televised jousting with the committee.

Although he testified, Costello refused to answer hostile questions and skirted others. The only light moment and spectator laughter came when a senator, noting Costello’s reputed illegal gambling operations, asked what he had done for America in return for the riches he had accumulated. “Paid my tax,” Costello countered.

The committee hearings wrote finus to William O’Dwyer’s political career by reexamining Costello’s political influence with Democrats in New York’s
Tammany Hall and City Hall. O’Dwyer, the candidate who had solicited Costello’s support at the infamous 1942 cocktail party, had already resigned as mayor in 1950 and had been appointed by President Truman as ambassador to Mexico. “My country needs me,” said O’Dwyer, disingenuously explaining his abrupt departure. The actual reason was a brewing graft scandal involving his administration and widespread police protection for bookies and other gamblers.

In a tense exchange with committee curmudgeon Senator Charles W. Tobey, O’Dwyer conceded that he had coveted Costello’s endorsement and financial contributions.

“What has he got?” Tobey, a New Hampshire Republican, asked, referring to Costello’s political influence. “What kind of appeal does he have? What is it?”

O’Dwyer, after a long pause, replied, “It doesn’t matter whether it is a banker, a businessman, or a gangster, his pocketbook is always attractive.”

Before the public hearings ended, several senators saw interrelated threats from “the syndicates,” and the nation’s Cold War with the Soviet Union and the ongoing Korean War. “The two great enemies within our ranks, the criminals and the Communists, often work hand in hand,” Senator Tobey warned. “Wake up, America!”

Based on its whirlwind investigation, the committee concluded that the Mafia was a reality, that it was aided by widespread political and police corruption, and that its two major territories were New York and Chicago. More ominously, according to the senators, the gangsters’ strength stemmed from an alien conspiracy.

“There is a sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia operating throughout the country with ties in other nations in the opinion of the committee,” the panel summarized in a final report. “The Mafia is a loose-knit organization specializing in the sale and distribution of narcotics, the conduct of various gambling enterprises, prostitution, and other rackets based on extortion and violence.”

The findings marked a breakthrough in that a federal body for the first time publicly identified the Mafia as a group alive and flourishing in America. But since the committee lacked specific evidence of crimes, the FBI and most law-enforcement agencies minimized the committee’s declarations as unsubstantiated generalities, and failed to pursue the leads that surfaced at the hearings. Congress also disregarded the committee’s work, declining to pass any meaningful legislation that might hamper organized crime.

Despite its efforts, in retrospect the committee unmasked little of the Mob’s
vast holdings, was less than half right about its size and influence, and overlooked numerous Mafia bosses. In New York, its investigators failed to pinpoint or call as witnesses three major godfathers: Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, and Gaetano Gagliano.

The biggest casualty of the Congressional investigation was Frank Costello, the only don intrepid enough to testify. His sidestepping answers about his net worth resulted in a Contempt of Congress conviction and a fifteen-month prison sentence.

Costello’s TV appearance and revived notoriety galvanized the Internal Revenue Service, the Mafia’s chronic nemesis, to form a task force to scrutinize his tax returns. Remembering Al Capone’s downfall, Costello had been careful about concealing his actual wealth. But he was trapped by his wife’s jealousy. Whenever she discovered her husband’s dalliance with a mistress, Mrs. Costello went on a spending binge. An 1RS audit found that over a six-year span, she had spent $570,000, a spree that was unjustified by Costello’s reported income for those years or by withdrawals from his legitimate holdings and investments. He was convicted of tax evasion and was imprisoned for eleven months before the conviction was overturned on appeal.

Even behind bars, Costello had little difficulty running his crime family and transmitting orders from prison through trusted intermediaries.

While the Kefauver committee was unaware of many authentic Mafia barons, it plopped Meyer Lansky in the center ring and magnified his importance. Lansky used the Fifth Amendment as a shield when called to testify but, along with Costello, he was severely damaged. Lansky had largely avoided scrutiny before the hearings, but he became one of the committee’s prime targets. Disclosures about his gambling background and criminal pals forced disgraced local authorities to close his illegal “carpet joint” casinos in Florida’s Broward County and in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York. He pleaded guilty to gambling charges in Saratoga, where he was jailed for three months and fined $2,500.

Describing Lansky erroneously as one of the principal organized-crime leaders in New York and on the East Coast, an unrestrained Kefauver denounced him as one of the “rats” and the “scum behind a national crime syndicate.” The committee’s limelight mistakenly elevated Lansky from his true role as a wealthy but junior partner with the Cosa Nostra into the position of a
Mafia financial Goliath. Until his death at age eighty in 1983, Lansky was relentlessly pursued by law-enforcement agencies, although never convicted of a federal felony.

As he had hoped, Kefauver emerged from the hearings a political somebody. The national exposure also brought him rebukes and criticism. Questions were raised as to why he had steered away from underworld gambling fiefs in Memphis in his home state, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in Nevada, and in states whose senators were on the subcommittee. Reporters digging into Kefauver’s personal life pounced on a seemingly hypocritical element: the sanctimonious, anti-gambling reformer got free passes and other perks on his frequent visits to racetracks.

Kefauver’s sudden national fame enabled him to throw his coonskin into the 1952 contest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. His investigation, however, had antagonized Harry Truman and the big-city political bosses, who gave the nomination to Adlai E. Stevenson. Four years later, Kefauver, on better terms with the party’s bigwigs, ran unsuccessfully for vice president when Stevenson lost for a second time to incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower.