The Hit Parade

"The faces will be different," said Arkansas' John McClellan as he gaveled his Senate labor-racketeering committee into session last week, but "the basic, underlying methods of operation will be greatly similar." McClellan expected to prove during a four-week investigation of the nation's $2 billion-a-year coin-machine industry that: 1) organized thugs are successfully moving in on big-city coin-machine operations, especially in the jukebox business and in pinball games; 2) principal tool of the thugs is the corrupt labor union, endowed with all the protection extended by law to legitimate labor. Said McClellan: "The ease with which some of these unions were created --not only locals but entire internationals . . . has no relation to the legitimate labor objectives."

The faces were different, all right, as Committee Counsel Robert Kennedy called three men accused of being big-city pinball kingpins. But, as Kennedy expected, answers were the same: gruff Fifth Amendment monotones were rattled off by hard-eyed John Vitale of St. Louis, Michael Genovese of Pittsburgh, and Frank Zito of Springfield, Ill. Protested Zito with heavy accent: "I recline to answer." But other witnesses were more inclined. Among them:

P: Milton J. Hammergren, retired general sales manager of the Wurlitzer Co., testified that he had used underworld contacts in such cities as New York and Chicago to sell Wurlitzer's jukeboxes, had become accustomed to reports of gang beatings and killings as "liabilities of the business." Wurlitzer officials denied all, and Indiana's Republican Senator Homer Capehart, who held the Wurlitzer sales-manager job before Hammergren, called the testimony "dirty pool" on Democrat Kennedy's part.

P: Albert S. Denver, president of Music Operators of New York, testified that his association of 160 jukebox operators is gradually being driven out of business, in two years has lost 1,631 "cream" locations to the rival Associated Amusement Machine Operators of New York, whose Teamster bosses, declared Counsel Kennedy, are "successors to Murder Inc."

P: Onetime A.A.M.O.N.Y. Employee Eli Kasper testified that a group of ex-convicts, in order to carry out the association's picketing, got a union charter as Local 19 of the Federal Service Workers Union; later became Local 266 of the Teamsters International and as Teamsters could stop truck deliveries.

P: Abraham Gilbert, onetime vice president of a local of a repairmen and electrical workers union, said that coin-machine employees make "very good wages" and need no union. Actually, said he, the operators' association needed the union to scare competitors away with picketing. For that reason the association paid dues and union expenses.

Toward week's end the Senate committee threw light on one of the major mysteries of organized crime. Fifteen months -ago, in the upstate New York town of 'Apalachin (pronounced apple-achin'), state troopers rushed the plush hillside home of Beer Distributor Joseph Barbara, flushed a national Who's Who of 65 top gangsters (including Committee Witnesses Vitale, Genovese and Zito). All 65 insisted they came to pay sick calls on the ailing Barbara, and some have since gone to jail rather than hint at the meeting's real purpose. Last week New York City Police Lieut. Thomas Mooney gave a partial explanation. The meeting, said he, was a drumhead court-martial for Brooklyn Hoodlum Carmine Lombardozzi, who had committed unexplained indiscretions in the same New York jukebox jungle the committee was investigating. Lombardozzi, before the cops arrived, was found guilty, fined $10,000. Asked McClellan: "Where did the $10,000 go?" Answered Mooney with a rueful smile: "If we knew that answer, we'd have the whole story of Apalachin."

After the first week's hearings, John McClellan's point about "basic, underlying methods" began to come clear. Reputable unions had kept out of most shady situations. Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters, papering up new locals as they rolled, rushed in. As hearings were scheduled for this week, no one was surprised to find that one of McClellan's first witnesses would be Teamster President James Riddle Hoffa himself.

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