“…He might.”
“Then go out with a little class. Don’t be just another gangland slaying. Don’t be the Judas that made Annabel Drury’s life even more miserable.”
“What about my kids? You’re a father.”
“You sold them out a long time ago, Tim. Anyway, you want them to remember you as a tortured soul, or a crooked cop? Up to you.”
He swallowed again. “Cold. So cold….”
Was he talking about me, or the temperature?
His eyes seemed woozy, suddenly. “You think I’m a piece of shit, don’t you?”
“What does that matter?”
“You’re worse than I am.”
“Maybe.”
He looked at me, then he looked at the pearl-handled gun. Me, gun, me, gun, me, gun, me, gun….
He picked it up, careful not to aim it my way. He held it in his palm and looked down at it.
“Father forgive me,” he said. “Forgive my sins.”
And he lifted the revolver to his temple and squeezed the trigger. The echo was like a thunder crack in the room; blood and brains and bone matter splattered the empty china hutch, and he tumbled off the chair, sideways, onto the floor, somewhat on his back, his empty eyes staring up at me.
“Good choice,” I said.
And I went out and got my coat and hat, walked unseen into the chill night—the drizzle had let up—and strolled across the woods to my Olds.
From May 1, 1950, to September 1, 1951, the Kefauver Committee heard over six hundred witnesses, racking up close to twelve thousand pages of testimony from minor hoods to major mob figures as well as government officials on every level. The senator’s circus traveled to fourteen cities and put on public display, for the first time in any significant manner, the ongoing connection between crime, politics, and business.
The last stop on the Kefauver tour was the big one: New York, with the entire hearing televised. Notorious mob courier Virginia Hill—who, once upon a time, Charley Fischetti had introduced to Ben “Bugsy” Siegel—brought some sex into the midst of the violence; and former NYC mayor William O’Dwyer generated some genuine pathos, a crime-busting former D.A. brought down by corruption. The real star, however, was Frank Costello, the east coast’s elder statesman among racketeers.
Or anyway, his hands became stars. Costello refused to be photographed, and the TV cameras focused on his nervous hands—tapping, rapping, clenching, unclenching, fingering cigarettes—accompanied by his whispery, raspy off-camera voice. He fudged, he fidgeted, he hedged, he refused to produce material, he stormed out, and of course refused to answer many of the questions on grounds of self-incrimination. Cited for contempt, sentenced to eighteen months, indicted and convicted for income tax evasion, Costello was a major mobster clearly brought down by the Crime Committee.
The Kefauver Committee turned out scores of recommendations, some commendable, others ridiculous. Of nineteen bills proposed by the committee, one—the Wagering Stamp Act— passed…and proved unenforceable. Of forty-five contempt citations to uncooperative witnesses, only three convictions resulted, the courts generally backing up the mobsters’ fifth amendment rights.
On the other hand, the national race wire racket— Continental Press—was forced to shut down in 1952. And the hearings pressured the Immigration Service and IRS into prosecuting hundreds of mobsters during the next eight years. Even J. Edgar Hoover had to admit the existence of the Mafia. Convictions and deportations led to mob warfare, as various individuals and factions fought for control.
And in 1952, Estes Kefauver ran for president, his fame as a gangbuster helping him accumulate the largest number of committed delegates at the Democratic National Convention. But the party regulars—including Harry Truman, who’d been tainted by corruption the committee uncovered—controlled the uncommitted delegates, and Kefauver was denied the nomination.
Kefauver did become Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate; the Demo duo lost to Eisenhower and Nixon, tried again in ’56, and lost again to Ike and Dick. The senator played out the remainder of his congressional career as a strong, independent, progressive voice in national government. He died of a heart attack in 1963.
Kefauver’s pit bull, Rudy Halley, used his fame on the Crime Committee to run as an independent and win a seat on—and eventually the presidency of—the New York City Council. He tried to be a reformer, without much success, and ran for mayor in 1953, losing as badly as Tubbo Gilbert had that sheriffs race. Oddly, Halley was associated with (legal) gambling interests toward the end of his short life; he died of pancreatitis in 1956. He was only forty-three.
The other counsel, George Robinson, who was from Maine, I lost track of.
The impact of Kefauver’s televised hearings was perhaps the first real demonstration of the power of television. This was not lost on Joe McCarthy, in his efforts to capitalize on the public’s paranoia fueled by the protracted war in Korea, and he convinced many Americans that Commies might be living next door or lurking under the bed. Ultimately the unforgiving tube brought McCarthy down, of course, revealing him in the Army hearings as a liar and a bully, and he died in disgrace, in 1957, in the same mental ward as his mentor, Jim Forrestal.
Columnist Drew Pearson’s muckraking style paved the way for modern investigative reporting, but his real heyday was the 1950s. He died of a heart attack in 1969. Even more than Pearson, Lee Mortimer’s successes were tied to the ’50s. Married five times—calling into question Sinatra’s insistence that Mortimer was homosexual—the
A heart attack took Rocco Fischetti, as well. He made peace with the Outfit, though his role was diminished; he maintained residences in Florida and in Skokie, Illinois. He told me once— we became, oddly enough, friendly again—that his sole ambition was not to die violently; he feared winding up shot to death in an alley, flung against garbage cans. He got his wish, dying a low-key death on a visit to relatives in Long Island, New York, in July 1964.
