CRIME: It Pays to Organize

(2 of 9)

Two Gangs & the Arbiter. Piecing together its evidence, the committee concluded that organized crime in the U.S. is Big Business, dominated by at least two major crime outfits:

¶The Capone syndicate. Headquarters: Chicago. Command and staff: the heirs of Al Capone—vulture-eyed Tony Accardo; dapper Charles Fischetti, Al Capone's cousin; Jake ("Greasy Thumb") Guzik. The Capone Syndicate's specialty: bookmaking. with a secondary interest in policy wheels.

¶The New York syndicate. Headquarters: Manhattan. The command: Frank Costello and his No. 1 man, swart Joe Doto, alias Joe Adonis. Its specialties: gambling casinos, slot machines, crap games.

Both syndicates have heavy interests, during the winter season, in Miami. Apparently, said the committee, "there is a gentleman's agreement . . . not to infringe on the activities of each other." The "adhesive" which holds the two syndicates together, the committee suggested, seriously if a little tentatively, is the Mafia. the Sicilian secret society specializing in bootlegging, narcotic smuggling and "Black Hand" extortion. Presiding over both syndicates as an arbitrator by remote control, said the committee, is Mafia Chief Charles ("Lucky"') Luciano in Italy.

To the average U.S. citizen, such a conelusion, presented as fact by a congressional committee, was at least sobering. In Italy, where Manhattan's onetime King of Prostitution takes his luxurious ease after his deportation in 1946, a Luciano lieutenant complained: "Any time anything happens anywhere, they turn the heat on us. Sure, Lucky and I played around with bootlegging and the numbers rackets—who didn't? But all that stuff about narcotics and vice rings is just a crock of baloney."

Chasing Crapshooters. There were others besides Lucky Luciano who had always thought Estes Kefauver's investigation was a crock of baloney. Fellow Democrats had viewed with some skepticism the first moves of the earnest, energetic do-gooding Senator from Tennessee. No trained investigator, he is a 47-year-old lawyer (Yale '27), a liberal Southerner who opposed filibusters on principle and advocated Atlantic Union, an industrious student who has written a book on modernizing Congress, a reformer whose chief accomplishment as a politician was his defeat of Memphis' Boss Ed Crump in getting himself elected.