Mighty Interesting Visit

Senator Kefauver's big eight-day show in New York had only about an hour to run one afternoon last week, but it was really only half over. In one fast slam-bang finish, the scenery collapsed, the players' masks were yanked off, and there, in full view of fascinated millions watching through TV screens, stood the skeleton of corruption, deceit and bribery in the world's greatest city.

Until that last hour, the audience had begun to worry. Would the good fellows from the sticks ever really show up all those tough, wily city slickers in time for a smash ending? Even the Senators themselves--Tennessee's Estes Kefauver, New Hampshire's Charles Tobey, Maryland's Herbert O'Conor, Wyoming's Lester Hunt --had seemed a little unsure.

Coincidences. Gangsters paraded to the witness stand, but they were about as garrulous as Harpo Marx. Politicians gossiped about each other like a roomful of society cats, but gave no sharp picture of corruption.

Ambassador William O'Dwyer, the politics-toughened ex-mayor of New York, even tried to turn the tables on the committee. He implied that he had evidence linking pious Senator Tobey with tainted campaign money (TIME, March 26). "I have it in my pocket and I will show it only to Senator Tobey," he said darkly.

Cagily, Estes Kefauver called O'Dwyer's bluff, made him hand over the "evidence" and then read it into the record. It was just a perfunctory bread & butter note from Tobey to a legitimate campaign contributor. The Senator's inexhaustible supply of indignation and tears boiled over. "I have lived long years and God has been good to me," cried Tobey from behind the green eyeshade he had clamped on his long, gleaming forehead. "I am a poor man and always will be. But there is one thing I am. I am a free man . . ." Tobey wept a bit, the jampack audience at Foley Square burst into applause, O'Dwyer stared moodily at the floor, and the Kefauver investigation returned to the business at hand.

Untiring, acid-tongued Rudolph Halley, the committee's chief counsel and inquisitor, began digging into the ex-mayor's past. There was O'Dwyer's story that his only business with Gangster Frank Costello had been a visit to Costello's apartment in 1942 in the course of an investigation O'Dwyer was conducting as an Army officer. Why did the leader of Tammany Hall and other important New York political figures happen to be there at the same time? O'Dwyer had no idea--it was just coincidence.

Compromises. O'Dwyer conceded that there probably had been large-scale gambling in New York when he was mayor, and that it could not have existed in any large scale "without police protection." Suspended between forced patience and weary exasperation, the ex-mayor explained: "The man in City Hall who is dealing with . . . all the things that go to run a city of 8,000,000 [cannot] follow these details around . . ."

The committee examined the mayor's appointments. He had, O'Dwyer admitted, named friends or proteges of Frank Costello to a city marshal's job and a judgeship; one of his deputy hospital commissioners was a brother-in-law of Gangster Willie Moretti (although O'Dwyer said he did not know that at the time); Fire Commissioner Frank Quayle was a friend of Super-Hood Joe Adonis, and the mayor knew it when he named him. "There are things you have to do politically if you want to get cooperation," he protested.

Matter-of-factly, owlish Rudolph Halley turned to a less titillating line of questioning. Did O'Dwyer know one John P. Crane, president of the Uniformed Firemen's Association? Yes, O'Dwyer knew Crane.

Q. Did he, during the year 1949, visit you at Gracie Mansion [residence of New York mayors]? A. Possible.

Q. Did he ever come alone? A. I never recall him coming alone.

Q. Do you know whether Crane ever made any campaign contributions? A. I don't know.

Q. Did he ever make any through you? A. He did not.

Citizenship. As innocently as he had entered it, Lawyer Halley left that subject. Not long afterwards, Ambassador O'Dwyer's two-day stand came to an end. The hearings' other star, Big-Shot Gambler Frank Costello, returned to the stage. After croaking that he was in no state to talk and walking out on the committee, Costello changed his mind. His high-pitched voice had improved (it now sounded midway between the speaking voice of Eddie Cantor and the death rattle of a seagull). He was willing to talk, at least to the extent of saying "I don't recall," or "Refreshen my memory, please."

Costello insisted that he was not interested in politics, had never cast a vote in his life. But didn't he know an awful lot of politicians? Well, yes, he admitted; in fact, he was on close to very close terms with Tammany Hall leaders in ten of the city's 16 Districts. Of course, explained Costello, he never discussed politics with the politicians. "I'll eat with them and drink with them," he said. "If they do talk about politics, I don't pay no attention to them."

It was also coincidental that the list of Costello's acquaintances in the underworld read like a gangland Who's Who--the late Al Capone and most of Al's present-day heirs in Chicago, the exiled Lucky Luciano of dope and prostitution fame, Racketeer Adonis. Doggedly, Costello refused to tell what he was worth, admitting only to about $230,000 worth, including about $40,000 in pin money locked up in a little safe in his Central Park West penthouse.

Tobey broke in: "What did you ever do for your country as a good citizen?" It was a tough and not necessarily fair question. Frank Costello thought hard. "Paid my taxes," he finally piped.

The committee dismissed Frank Costello with a dissatisfied air. It had possibly trapped him into a charge or two of perjury and contempt of Congress, and it set off a lot of loose talk about deporting him to Italy, where he was born Francesco Castiglia in 1891. (Attorney General J. Howard McGrath expressed the opinion that there was no way under the law to deport Costello. Senator Kefauver was not so sure; he asked Immigration authorities to investigate the possibility.) But it had learned little more than everyone knew before of Frank Costello's shadowy role in the underworld and the upper levels of Tammany.

Curtain. The show was all but over. The committee had one more witness, a big, roughly handsome fireman named John P. Crane. Crane, president of the New York local firemen's union, had earlier refused to tell the committee anything about $135,000 he had spent from the union's treasury. But he had talked in full before a Manhattan grand jury at the insistence of District Attorney Frank Hogan, and now with Crane's secret grand-jury testimony in hand, the committee got him to talk.

He was asked about his dealings with James J. Moran, the burly, florid politician who had been at O'Dwyer's side through much of his political career, and, during O'Dwyer's term in City Hall, had risen to become first deputy fire commissioner. Moran had already told the committee under oath that the only money he ever got from Crane was $500 in payment for tickets to a dinner.

In his next few sentences, John Crane touched off the bangup ending the audience had been waiting for. Once, Crane testified, after Commissioner Moran had said he was a poor man, Crane gave him $5,000 from the firemen's treasury. That was not all. On seven later occasions, Crane made gifts of $5,000 and $10,000 in cash to Moran--a total of $55,000 in all "to promote the good will of Mr. Moran on behalf of the firemen." (Crane also contributed $3,500 to Governor Thomas E. Dewey's Oregon primary campaign, in gratitude for Dewey's signing of legislation beneficial to New York firemen.)

Moran, Crane went on, helped him patch up a bitter feud with Mayor O'Dwyer over firemen's salary demands, and as a result, he later met O'Dwyer and made a date to see the mayor alone at Gracie Mansion.

Q. Where did you see him? A. On the porch at Gracie Mansion.

Q. Will you tell the committee what transpired. A. I told the mayor at that time that I had promised him the support of the firemen, and I offered him some evidence of that support on the occasion--in the form of $10,000.

Q. Was it loose or in a package? A. I had it in an envelope.

Q. Did he say anything? A. He thanked me. He didn't look in the envelope or anything else.

The drama called for only a brief curtain speech, and Crimehunter Kefauver gave it. "I am not going to . . . pass judgment on the conflicting testimony that has been given before this committee . . ." he said. "One testified one way; the other testified the other way. These matters are under investigation by the grand juries in Brooklyn and Manhattan."

With that, the Senators from the sticks packed up their 11,258 pages of what the city slickers said, and left town. It had been a mighty interesting visit.

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