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.
Now let’s gander the Kefauver Committee.
26. TERROR FROM TENNESSEE
The House and the Senate have unlimited power and initiative in one function only--they can investigate anything.
No President can veto a resolution for an investigation or by law curb its activities or its scope. Theoretically, the purpose is to acquire facts on which to base future legislation. Some of the mightiest of our historical moves have sprung from such inquiries. Giants have risen in the course of them. Harry Truman would probably have remained an obscure little nonentity were it not that he became chairman of a comparatively inconsequential Senate body which got to asking questions.
One of the surest ways to grab public attention is for a legislator to propose a resolution for a special investigation. If it passes it is not submitted to a standing committee, but its author is by established custom chosen as its chairman.
This is the story of a special Senatorial investigating committee. In many ways it is typical of such things under the Fair Deal, where politics can strangle this last independent prerogative of Congress.
The central character of this tale is Estes Kefauver, who sprung a Senate motion to investigate crime. Your authors have a personal property right in this venture. For Senator Kefauver had read _Chicago Confidential_, and what he found there made his hair stand on end. This is no conjecture. His resolution was prompted by what we had discovered and published.
He was sincere, impulsive and ambitious--if you can call a yen to be Vice-President an ambition. He is our friend, and as such we wish him well and, as Americans who know a little more than most of their fellow-citizens about what is going on, we cheered the possibilities of an untrammeled turning of the turf that would show up officially any important portion of the staggering facts for which we risked our lives.
Kefauver began bravely. He realized that he had lightning bolts in both hands; that he not only could become one of the foremost men of his time, but that he could accomplish priceless service to his country. With the infinite power that was his, he could expose and perhaps destroy the Syndicate and the Mafia which rules it, and save us from the creeping, leaping conspiracy of criminals which already in many elements of our life has superseded constituted government.
But he wants to be Vice-President.
At this writing, he is 47; Barkley is 73. Political wisdom would dictate that the second man on the next national Democratic ticket should come from a border state. Kefauver is from Tennessee. He became a headliner when he licked boss Ed Crump. He is of Dutch-American stock and a Protestant.
He has four years more on his Senate term and could be re-elected. But for a national nomination one needs a majority of the delegates at a convention. Delegates are party men, designated by the party.
He had no more than taken his first bold steps when the party went to work on him. No Democrat can fight the Mafia and get anything from most Democrats except obstruction. They are so intimately and intricately interwoven with the underworld plunderworld through all political strata that they must protect it.
Kefauver was too naive to foresee this. He comes from one of the few states where there is no gangsterism except in picayune city and county affairs, and in those the Republicans share the chicken-feed rewards. Kefauver campaigned in a coonskin cap and unhorsed the Memphis machine, which had no great state-wide strength from within and no tie-ups to bring it help from without. But the explosion that followed when his bill passed rocked the whole national party.
Kefauver, in his innocence, had read our book of disclosures, but like thousands of others, he failed to grasp the significance of the political forces which have become integrated with the system, without which it could not have spread, and to which it has contributed and does contribute incalculable money, leadership and votes. It was inconceivable to him that mayors and governors he knew and many of the statesmanlike Senators with whom he mingled, could be beholden to, not to say slaves of, swarthy, sinister men, many of them ex-convicts, who traffic in bodies of women, making and supplying dope-fiends, dealing in extortion, smuggling, bootlegging, hijacking, bribing and murdering in the principal cities and states of the union; that these hyenas were a controlling influence in nominations and elections; that they owned vast commercial and industrial enterprises, labor unions, even some newspapers, and that their pirate hands gripped the steering wheels of enormous financial fleets.
He read it. But he couldn’t believe it. And what he did believe of it he couldn’t digest.
Now he finds himself in the middle of a giant whitewash. He is the chump whose good name is used to shield the key figures of the Mafia and obfuscate their tie-up with the big city Democratic machines. He does not admit it publicly but he is heartbroken.
Senate Republicans, seeking an issue, jumped in to support the proposed investigation. Kefauver’s bill at once became a hot potato the Democrats couldn’t drop.
Dave Niles, Bill Boyle, J. Howard McGrath, and Scott Lucas huddled. They found it was too late to sidetrack the proposed investigation; it had to go on, but with “sensible” safeguards. Suggestions that the probe be transferred to other committees were waved aside as impractical; it was necessary to have a front for this and Kefauver was perfect for the job. He is a man of personal honesty, with no embarrassing machine or underworld connections.