Frank Costello, the highly effective New York crime determine, sits patiently throughout testimony earlier than the Kefauver Senate investigating committee in 1951.
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In New York Metropolis 75 years in the past this week, a really unusual factor occurred. For a number of days, it appeared as if massive components of the town floor to a halt.
Immediately, we might name it a “viral second.” However in March of 1951, it was a model new phenomenon: Individuals in every single place, no less than these fortunate sufficient to have entry to a tv set, stopped what they had been doing to look at a information story – reside – because it was unfolding.
Jack Gould, the tv critic for The New York Instances, described a metropolis “beneath a hypnotic spell.” Wives, he wrote, “have left the home tasks undone and husbands have slipped away from their jobs to look at.”
The topic of all this pleasure was an unlikely one: Congressional hearings. Hours and hours of them. What made all of it so fascinating was the subject: Organized crime. Gangsters. Or, as People had been studying proper there on TV, one thing known as “the Mafia.”
Crooked contracts, bribery, unlawful playing, shady characters; the Particular Committee to Examine Crime in Interstate Commerce, because it was formally identified, known as a whole lot of witnesses in 1950 and 1951 because it examined widespread issues about violent crime and political corruption linked to organized mobs in main cities.
Among the many excessive profile figures who testified had been Joe Adonis, Mickey Cohen, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, and Anthony “Powerful Tony” Anastasio.
The star witness of the New York Metropolis hearings the week of March 12, 1951, was Frank Costello – head of the Luciano crime household and essentially the most highly effective mobster in the USA.
The televised hearings fueled an obsession in American fashionable tradition with gangsters and the Mafia within the Nineteen Fifties that continues in the present day, and marked the emergence of tv as a strong power in American life.
“This was one of many first massive moments of all people watching the identical factor on the similar time, which might come to outline a lot of the second half of the twentieth century,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of tv and fashionable tradition at Syracuse College. “It was reside, so there was a way that we had been watching these items collectively in a ritual, as a group.”
Years later, Walter Cronkite of CBS tried to clarify what had made the entire thing so charming. The hearings, he stated in a 1958 documentary, “offered tens of millions with their first behind the scenes glimpse of the underworld.”
Most individuals, he famous, “had by no means seen a gangster, besides in a gangster film.”
Within the Senate investigation that featured public hearings in 14 cities, People noticed loads of them.
Watching “hoodlums squirm”
The investigation was the brainchild of Estes Kefauver, the Democratic junior senator from Tennessee.
Little identified exterior his dwelling state, Kefauver had grow to be alarmed by accounts within the newspapers of organized crime and political corruption in lots of massive cities. The revelations, he wrote, “highlighted the determined want for studying the actual information about crime in America.”
Kefauver was additionally formidable – a hungry politician on the lookout for a problem he may trip to nationwide prominence.
U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, in an interview, November, 1951.
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With out tv, although, his investigation, like many different Senate committees, would possibly shortly have been forgotten.
Till, about midway by way of its 14-city schedule, the touring street present reached New Orleans in January 1951. There, writes historian Ron Garay, an area tv station supplied to place the hearings on TV, and the enthusiastic response from viewers stunned everybody.
After New Orleans, issues acquired actually unusual because the hearings moved to Detroit, the place 1000’s of letters and cellphone calls poured into the native stations. An estimated 90% of the town’s televisions had been tuned in, in line with Broadcasting/Telecasting, a radio and tv journal, as individuals stopped their regular actions “to look at hoodlums squirm beneath the relentless questioning of the committee.”
In St. Louis, the crowds watching in bars had been reportedly bigger than for the World Sequence 4 months earlier.
The Los Angeles hearings in February despatched shivers by way of the movie trade, stated the Related Press, as a result of “individuals stayed dwelling and watched their TV units as an alternative of going to the flicks.”
The objective of the investigation was to discover – and expose – connections between political leaders and arranged crime. As a gradual stream of “underworld figures” was known as to testify, the powerful questions from the Senators and workers, and the confrontational, usually antagonistic response from the witnesses, gave the hearings the thrill of a courtroom drama.
“You possibly can really see guys with the names like ‘Melonhead’ and ‘Nucky’ and all of this,” says Thompson, and “most of them lived as much as the reputations we have seen in motion pictures.”
The thrill reached its peak in mid-March because the committee headed again east. As Edward R. Murrow of CBS put it, “this week, after profitable stops in Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, the committee rolled into New York for the massive present.”
5 of the seven New York stations aired the hearings reside, and new coaxial cables had linked up 21 different cities within the east and Midwest in order that tens of millions extra may watch. Outdoors the courthouse, a whole lot lined up hoping to get a coveted seat inside.
The packed scene in New York Metropolis as star witness Frank Costello (at witness desk, proper background, leaning ahead) testified. Subsequent to Costello is his lawyer, George Wolf. On the committee desk are (left to proper): Rudolph Halley, chief counsel for the committee; Sen. Charles Tobey (R-N.H.); Sen. Herbert O’Conor (D-Md.); and Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.), the committee chairman.
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As Chief Counsel Rudolph Halley hammered away at underworld figures day after day, his fan mail bumped into the 1000’s.
Among the many highlights of the New York hearings was the testimony of former New York Metropolis Mayor William O’Dwyer. The committee grilled him about his associations over a few years with Frank Costello and different figures, together with Joe Adonis, a longtime New York mob determine.
Probably the most dramatic moments got here when Sen. Charles Tobey, Republican of New Hampshire, questioned O’Dwyer a few assembly with Costello:
Tobey: “While you went to see him, you had been aware of the truth that he was a gangster, weren’t you?”
O’Dwyer: “I used to be aware of the truth that he had a status for being an impressive bookmaker.”
Tobey: “Did you hear him known as the Prime Minister of the Underworld?”
O’Dwyer: “That point I didn’t.”
A dose of Hollywood glamor – and far of the humor – within the hearings got here as Virginia Hill Hauser – the previous girlfriend of the late mobster “Bugsy” Siegel – sat down for her testimony. Because the Chicago Tribune‘s reporter put it, “Virginia burst into the tv floodlight glare of the crowded listening to room in a platinum mink stole.”
Sporting a mink stole, Virginia Hill Hauser testified earlier than the Kefauver committee. She confronted questions on her monetary dealings with a number of key crime figures.
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In a departure from the various witnesses who had refused to reply questions, Hauser responded eagerly, with vivid, spicy, and infrequently humorous solutions.
She advised how Siegel (who was assassinated in her Beverly Hills dwelling in 1947 whereas she was away) and others had given her cash and supported her lavish events and playing on horse races. Below questioning, although, she stated she was utterly in the dead of night concerning the actions of the lads who’d given it to her.
“The lads who gave me issues weren’t gangsters or racketeers,” she stated. “We went out and had numerous enjoyable collectively, and so they gave me numerous presents. They gave me a home in Florida.”
Whereas Hauser patiently answered the committee’s questions, she bristled on the media frenzy that had begun to encompass the hearings.
Because the flash bulbs popped round her through the listening to, Hill at one level advised Kefauver, “I hate these individuals,” and the senator requested the photographers to again off. “You do not know what I’ve been by way of with these bums,” Hill advised him.
As she left the listening to room, Hill reduce unfastened on the reporters and photographers following her: “I hope the atom bomb falls on each one in every of you.” On the elevator, she known as one reporter a “soiled bum,” punched a feminine reporter within the jaw, and kicked a photographer who had crouched down together with his digicam to get angle.
After Hill’s riveting look, the dramatic climax of the New York hearings got here with the appearances of Frank Costello, essentially the most highly effective gangster within the nation and the inheritor to the unlawful playing empire and New York crime household as soon as managed by Charles “Fortunate” Luciano.
Costello at one level refused to testify in entrance of the tv cameras, and a deal was labored out the place his face wouldn’t be proven. As an alternative, tv cameras zoomed in on Costello’s palms throughout his testimony, and tens of millions of viewers watched in fascination as he fiddled together with his watch, or a glass of water, wrung his palms nervously, or tore a bit of paper into shreds.
The picture turned probably the most highly effective symbols of the hearings, burned into the recollections of many individuals for years to return. And one way or the other it made his testimony much more dramatic as viewers listened to Costello’s repeated solutions of “I do not know,” “I do not bear in mind,” and “I have never acquired the least thought.”
Among the many many memorable moments in his testimony was this alternate with Sen. Charles Tobey.
Annoyed with Costello’s evasive solutions, Tobey requested requested him what contributions, since changing into a citizen of the USA greater than 20 years earlier and changing into rich because of this, he had made in return:
Tobey: “Have you ever ever supplied your service to any battle effort of this nation?”
Costello: “No.”
Tobey: “Taking into account all that you’ve got gained and acquired in wealth, what have you ever ever performed in your nation as citizen?”
Costello: “I do not know what you imply by that.”
Tobey: “You need to have in your thoughts some issues that you’ve got performed, that may communicate to your conduct as an American citizen. In that case, what are they?”
Costello paused for a second, pondering, after which answered, to widespread laughter from these within the listening to room: “Paid my tax.”
Twice, Costello acquired up and walked out of the hearings, and was later sentenced to 18 months in jail for contempt of Congress.
When the entire thing was over, an estimated 30 million individuals had tuned in. Kefauver wrapped up the committee’s work later that 12 months, with an in depth report back to the Senate.
However ever since, the query concerning the hearings has been, as Walter Cronkite put it years later:
“Had been they a terrific name to motion to stamp out crime, or had been they merely a giant leisure binge for the American public.”
Kefauver concluded that the hearings had revealed what he known as an “outlaw government-within-a-government which, we realized, exists in the USA.”
Whereas there have been some modest legislative accomplishments, Robert Thompson says essentially the most enduring legacy of the Kefauver hearings wouldn’t come from Washington, however from Hollywood and in fashionable tradition.
“This was actually the primary actual documentary on the Mafia and it was very influential within the motion pictures that got here after,” he says.
In listening to rooms throughout the USA, one alleged gangster after one other advised the Senators that, no, they weren’t members of one thing known as “the Mafia,” and in reality that they had by no means heard of such a factor.
In Washington, D.C., it was Salvatore Moretti, a longtime New Jersey gambler,who would later be murdered in jail months after testifying earlier than the Kefauver committee:
Halley: “Are you aware what the Mafia is?”
Moretti: “What?”
Halley: “The Mafia? M-a-f-i-a?”
Moretti: “I’m sorry, I do not know what you are speaking about.”
Halley: “You by no means heard that phrase earlier than in your life?”
Moretti: “No sir; I didn’t.”
Initially, Kefauver needed to clarify to reporters easy methods to pronounce the phrase – was it MAY-fee-uh? Muh-FEE-uh?
Afterwards, Thompson says, a slew of gangster motion pictures and TV reveals within the Nineteen Fifties embedded the phrase within the American lexicon.
The fascination reached new heights in 1969, with Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. After which in 1972, when Francis Ford Coppola immortalized it in movies.
Twenty years after the New York hearings, Marlon Brando studied Frank Costello’s raspy, wheezing testimony for his portrayal of Vito Corleone.
After which, in 1999, got here The Sopranos. The long-running HBO drama, Thompson says, “is so aware of this heritage, so aware of the place it comes from.” He cites a scene within the present’s first season, the place the mobster Tony Soprano’s daughter asks him, “Are you within the Mafia?”
Echoing these witnesses earlier than the Senate committee a half-century earlier, he responds, “Am I within the what?”
“No matter you need to name it, organized crime?”
In fact not, says the crime boss performed by James Gandolfini. “I am within the waste administration enterprise. Everyone instantly assumes you are mobbed up.”
The hyperlink again to 1951, Thompson says, is inescapable. “That reply he gave his daughter may have come proper out of, and virtually did come proper out of, the Kefauver hearings.”
This story was edited and produced by Lauren Migaki and Elissa Nadworny, with manufacturing assist from Kadin Mills.
