of Florida, and chief economic adviser in 1944 to Sen. Kilgore (D) of
West Virginia. Webber bore down on his Senate contacts from a rent-free
office in the Library of Congress. How he got it free nobody knows.
For two years Webber held a job as “legislative correspondent” on
Capitol Hill for the Federation for World Government. Records in the
office of the secretary of the Senate show Webber was not registered as
a lobbyist for the federation and the organization is not registered
to conduct a lobby. In addition to his arduous efforts to defeat the
anti-Communist measure and his work for the federation, Webber was a
demon, worked for votes for passage of the fair employment practices
bill.
Webber was transferred by the World Government Federation from
Washington to New York “to do research.” The shift was for “political
reasons.”
He is an errand boy for the Lawyers Guild, which the House Un-American
Activities Committee cited as a “front” organization. It has also
been active in another “cause” sponsored by Webber--the drive for an
investigation of the F.B.I.
In 1947, Webber, a Ph.D., conducted a class in political philosophy
at the King Smith school, where the democratic form of government was
smeared to GI and other students.
A reporter attended Webber’s class on May 27, 1947, when Senator
Pepper was a guest. A woman student referred to J. Edgar Hoover as the
American Gestapo head and declared the Catholic church was leading a
crusade for war.
A woman in the audience, a secretary to a Republican Senator from the
Midwest, jumped up and shouted, “Thank God for the F.B.I.”
Webber was arrested in Charlottesville, Va., for distributing Communist
Party literature. Police records show he paid a forfeit rather than
fight the case.
He was at one time a research director for the CIO Political Action
Committee in Washington and in 1948 was a paid director in charge of
activities of the leftist Progressive party in 11 southern states.
Another who lobbies against anti-Communist bills, and is openly so
registered, is former Democratic Congressman Jerry J. O’Connell, of
Montana.
Utilizing his privileges of the floor, as an ex-Representative,
O’Connell strides into the House and Senate while they are in session,
and delivers advice, orders and inspiration to left-wing Congressmen,
and threats to others.
When the Senate was debating the Communist control bill in an all night
session last September, O’Connell took up a station at the Senate door
with a reporter from the Daily Worker, and without any pretense of
disguise, dictated the unsuccessful opposition’s floor strategy.
But listen to the hue and cry when a manufacturer’s lobbyist buys a
Coca Cola for a Congressman.
Being a government lobbyist can produce desirable advantages,
especially for a Marshall Plan press agent.
A survey reveals that the Economic Cooperation Administration
information office has been giving several of its employes free
visits to Europe and the Middle East. Robert Mullen, director of ECA
information, toured Europe. He mapped a $7,500 ’round-the-world trip,
but postponed a visit to the Orient when the bullets began to fly.
Mullen sent an heiress to the J. P. Morgan banking fortune to London
for a convention of clubwomen--to get new propaganda material on the
Marshall plan to influence American clubwomen. He sent an inexperienced
youth, hired as a “picture expert,” to Paris and London, to see the
sights and get new pictures for propaganda purposes here.
Though ECA has 73 American press employes in Paris alone, and 56 in
16 other Marshall Plan missions in Europe, plus 222 Europeans on
these staffs, ECA sent a former woman reporter to Paris to get “human
interest” stories for a clubwoman propaganda pamphlet.
The ECA press information office in Paris has a chief who gets about
$20,000 a year in salary and expense money, has highly paid former
reporters on his staff, but the ECA here sent a man from Washington to
show a group of editors about Europe. Several others went to Europe on
similar assignments.
Mullen has 48 on his Washington staff, drawing a total of $280,000
a year. Among these are the Morgan heiress, an ex-bullfighter, the
daughter of a symphony conductor and a score of graduates from defunct
war agencies. He separated a noted Negro Air Force pilot, who achieved
some success as an author, from his Washington staff and dispatched him
to Formosa at $15,000 a year to direct Marshall plan press information
there.
The American press agents for ECA will draw $673,000 in salaries this
year.
Congress gets around sporadically to investigating the lobbying “evil.”
The latest “crusade” was conducted by leftish Congressman Frank
Buchanan, who muddled the issue so much, no one knows what happened,
except that the National Association of Manufacturers emerged the
villain. Congressmen don’t hanker to expose lobbies, even if they’re on
the other side. When the investigation was first voted by the House,
Buchanan wanted to give the appropriation back, an unprecedented
departure where committee chairmen always yell for more. Buchanan tried
to handcuff the lawyers engaged to conduct the investigation, though
both were good Democrats and good Fair Dealers. But they were also
honest. Lou Little, of Pittsburgh, a co-counsel, quit broken-hearted.
Counsel Benedict Fitzgerald, of Greenfield, Mass., a whiz of a prober,
was not even allowed to write the report. Buchanan refused to swear
in some witnesses; if they lied it would not constitute perjury. When
counsel called attention to that, he angrily shut them up.
The real brains of the investigation into lobbying was Lucien Hilmer,
committee staff director. He is regarded as a left-wing lawyer. When
George Shaw Wheeler was fired from the government for consorting with
Communists, Hilmer appeared as his lawyer and beat the case. Two years
later, as an economist with the U. S. Army in Czechoslovakia, Wheeler
vindicated the Civil Service Commission when he moved in on Berlin Red
headquarters. He announced he was a Communist and always had been one.
Hilmer shares a law office with John F. Davis, who represented Alger
Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hilmer had
worked under Max Lowenthal on the old Wheeler Committee.
And did we remember to tell you that the Kansas City Chamber of
Commerce has an office on 16th St., across the road from the Russian
Embassy? Both pressure groups have displayed amazing influence in
Washington.
_INSIDE STUFF_: The law requiring lobbyists to register is used as a
racket by some. They advertise in trade papers: “Lobbyist, registered
with the Congress of the United States,” then sell prospective chumps
the idea they are “licensed” to lobby. Anybody may file his name and
set up his own “cause.”
24. RACKETS BY REMOTE CONTROL
Our newspaper confreres, in the main, were willing to be hospitable and
helpful when we galloped in and made no secret of our aims. We don’t
expect them to write our books. But they often give us tips, which
saves work.
The first question we asked was, “Who is the Washington Mafia boss?”
The invariable answer was that the local underworld was unaffiliated
with the national setup, free and independent, self-contained.
All our experience made us reject that picture. We had traced and
charted organized crime through the gang wars of Prohibition to this
day. We had charged and it was being substantiated that no city of
importance was left out of the clutches of the Mafia, with its brains
in New York and its powerhouse in Chicago. It was inconceivable that
a rich, large center on the Atlantic seaboard, almost a suburb of
Manhattan, could be bypassed. So we found out for ourselves. This is
the situation in Washington:
The National Syndicate, for reasons of prudence, has avoided first-hand
operations in the District. You find few important Sicilian names in
the police files. Vice, crime, gambling, narcotics and, to a smaller
extent, contraband liquor, are farmed out by franchise to a cohesive
local mob which deals with and pays tribute to national headquarters.
Despite tremendous influence, legal advice and guidance and the
constitutional immunity against self-incrimination, the Mafia has
an almost superstitious fear of Congressional committees. A city
administration can be bought or scared or rigged. But nobody can
capture 96 Senators and 435 Representatives. And any one of these is
one of the immediate bosses of Washington; and any one of these can
arise any day and demand a probe of anything. On the rare occasions
when important racketeers were dragged to Washington on subpena, with
all the assurances they got from many members beholden to them and
the shocking obeisance paid them openly, they wet their pants in the
witness chair.
Yet, these greedy gluttons can’t find it in their miserly souls to
declare it an open town, any more than they can force themselves to
pay honest income taxes, though they awaken in their silk pajamas
screaming, from nightmare dreams about Al Capone and Alcatraz.
District of Columbia is and was dominated by Emmitt Warring, Gary
Quinn, Sam Beard, the Sussman brothers and Attilio Acalotti. The chief
operation of these men is gambling, which will be traced in more detail
later. They staked out locations in Washington, worked together in
harmony, well aware that the capital would not go for Chicago-style
assassinations.
But the national Syndicate did not hesitate to work openly in the
adjoining Maryland suburbs, where the late Jimmy La Fontaine, who died
in bed at the age of 81 in 1949, was the local front man. Fontaine’s
rococo gambling casino, across the street from the District line, was
as far as the Mafia cared to go openly. His chief lieutenants were
Snags Lewis, Pete Gianaris and Mike Meyers. Snags has pleaded guilty to
a mild rap on a bargain which will take the heat off others.
We have described the dope setup in the District, where local
wholesalers send to New York for supplies, so that the Mafia does
not have to deliver them in the capital. By a similar procedure,
the gamblers and other racketeers procure their wire service from
representatives of the big mob, across the border in Maryland. Snags
Lewis was the local wire service man.
When it came to such things as numbers, whoring, illicit liquor and
after-hour spots in the District, the local boys tried to hold on to as
much as they could. They didn’t want to divvy up with the Syndicate.
The big mob didn’t like that.
When the Mafia moves in, it gears its method to local situations. For
instance, Dallas, one of the last hold-outs, is being taken over at
this writing by strong-arm work and gunplay.
But when the beach-front bookmaking syndicate in Miami held out, it
was cut off from its wire service, then local cops did the gangsters’
work by raiding the recalcitrants, to make way for the Syndicate’s own
operators.
It was clear to Frank Costello in New York and Charlie Fischetti in
Chicago, the operating heads of the underworld, that gat-work would not
be tolerated in Washington. They knew the Metropolitan Police couldn’t
be counted on to cooperate, with J. Edgar Hoover on the grounds.
Few understand why the F.B.I. has not acted against the Mafia. Its
jurisdiction is circumscribed by Congress, and the black-handers have
been smart enough to keep out of fields in which Hoover may act.
The outside mobsters adopted a third procedure to tighten their hold on
the local underworld, one that had worked with great success in other
towns. It came through with flying colors in Washington. Last year
there was an epidemic of robberies of local underworld figures, and not
by accident or coincidence.
One victim was Emmitt Warring. Three men forced their way into his
home, at 3900 Macomb Street, and robbed it at gun-point. Insiders
say the amount of cash lifted from Warring’s safe was about $100,000.
Warring told newspapermen it was only $20,000. He refused to cooperate
with the police and would not admit or deny that the holdup had taken
place. In the same week, the same thugs held up Johnny Williams, a
numbers racket boss. Robert “Ryebread” Schulman and Theodore “Little
Joe” Scheve also were held up. Williams’ father-in-law is Dick Austin,
a numbers king in Atlantic City and Washington.
Chief of Police Barrett said, “I am alarmed by the crimes. We can’t
have this sort of thing going on here. Pretty soon somebody’s going to
get shot.” That was Scheve. But nobody got arrested. Then Washington
racketeers saw a great light. They made peace with the Big Mob, which
established its regency over the District, leaving the former operators
in as partners with nominal control.
George P. Harding, victim of the recent slaying in the Hideaway Club,
engineered the Warring robbery for the Mafia. Harding was born in Italy
and had a long and bloody career as a gunman and killer, before being
slain by his friend and associate, Joseph Nesline.
Nesline, who admitted the shooting, is a four-time loser. He told
police it was either “Harding or me.” His story was Harding had accused
him of running out with his share of the gravy in a gangster-operated
oil well deal in Texas, where Frank Costello and his boys are buying
heavily into leases and royalties. The dead man had been sitting with
George A. Clainos, white-slaver and member of the local Syndicate, who
passed him a gun.
The actual cause of the killing, which we are telling you confidential,
is that it was ordered from Mafia headquarters in Brooklyn, because
Harding, who knew too much, was an intemperate drinker and was talking
too much.
Harding had been warned “to be good or else” several months ago,
through word transmitted by Tony Ricci, alias Tony Goebels, who is the
message-center for the Unione Siciliano.
The formula of permitting local operators to retain management was
followed last year when the mob moved into Tampa and Jacksonville,
Florida, and was used also with much success in Newark, New Jersey,
where the non-Italian mob of Abner “Longy” Zwillman was absorbed into
the Mafia. The Cleveland branch, run chiefly by Jews and Irish, was
given the same modus operandi and absorbed.
The chain of command and remittance from the District to top
headquarters is through Prince Georges County, Maryland, where Gianaris
handles the numbers intake from the District and Lewis superintends
payments for horse wire service--which is utilized also as a clearing
house to transmit receipts from all other illegal activities, entered
on the books as payments for the services or as losses on bets.
La Fontaine’s organization is kept together by Lewis and Meyers.
Charlie Ford, Washington lawyer, who appears frequently in this book as
counsel for gamblers, vice-hucksters and bottle-clubs, is the trustee
of La Fontaine’s fabulous estate. In this connection some complicated
bookkeeping is required.
It develops La Fontaine was only a front man. Eighty percent of his
holdings belonged to the Big Mob. His death brought intricate mixups,
and what was his and what was the Mob’s had not been identified in full
detail. The situation is similar to that which followed the slaying
of Edward J. O’Hare, Chicago mobster, who operated race tracks for
the Capone syndicate. The stock of Sportsman’s Park, Chicago, and the
Miami Beach Kennel Club was in his name. He left it to his heirs and
associates. It took years for the accounts to be straightened out, and
when they were, some money was paid over in the form of a “loan” to
Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, a close associate of the late Capone, who is
one of the ruling heads of the secret Grand Council of the Mafia.
The La Fontaine payoff to the top was made through Nig Rosen of
Philadelphia to Meyer Lansky of New York. Lansky is a tributary of
Frank Costello and a gambling partner of Joe Adonis. Nig Rosen is a
friend of Washington Police Chief Barrett.
La Fontaine was one of the most colorful men Washington ever saw. His
legendary career as a gentleman gambler spanned half a century. This
last of the gas-lit era gamblers was one of five children of a poultry
dealer. He was apprenticed to his father’s trade and might have carved
for himself a similar career, except for a fatal flaw in his make-up:
he could not bear to kill a chicken, nor could he stand the thought
of others killing chickens he had raised. He hid his favorites in his
father’s attic.
A three-cent strike Jimmy made on the old St. Louis lottery netted
him $12. With this he set up shop across the Potomac in Virginia. He
then went to work for the Heath brothers, old-time gambling combine. He
soon had his own card table and he prospered. Subsequently he opened
the Mohican Club, near Glen Echo, Maryland. Expanding, he purchased a
large tract in Prince Georges County and established “Jimmy’s Place.”
Around it he built a high green fence and within it men won and lost
fortunes. Women never got past the door and no man who couldn’t afford
to lose was ever admitted again. It was staffed by more than a hundred
carefully chosen attendants, all covered by social security. They made
regular contributions to a retirement fund.
The house limit was $200 on craps, $500 a card on blackjack, and $10 on
numbers, with no-limit games in private rooms for certain customers who
could stand a tough tap. “Jimmy’s” catered to as many as 2,000 gamblers
a night.
Oddly, La Fontaine never got out of the poultry business. His passion
was cock-fighting and he maintained a stable of 100 birds. Seeing
them killed in action did not affront him. He also made horse book
and traveled from track to track. La Fontaine bankrolled Tex Rickard,
the fabulous fight promoter, in his early days. After Rickard’s death
he formed a silent partnership with Herman Taylor, Philadelphia fight
promoter.
Jimmy served a jail term for income tax evasion and paid a fine of more
than $200,000. The Big Mob had long cast covetous eyes on La Fontaine,
who by now not only had his own profitable gambling enterprise on which
he himself admitted paying off $100,000 a year for local protection,
but he controlled also the entire underworld in the lush Maryland
counties adjoining the District. About 20 years ago, emissaries from
Philadelphia came down to muscle him out. One representative of Nig
Rosen, a gunman named Milsie Henry, was mysteriously murdered, for
which La Fontaine was loudly but not officially mentioned. The case
is still unsolved. Shortly thereafter, La Fontaine was kidnaped by
hoodlums from New York and Philadelphia. Before he was returned his
family had to come up with $40,000 “expense money.” And the Mafia was
declared in on his enterprises.
Most naïve Washingtonians believe the appointment of attorney Charlie
Ford as the trustee of his estate was a logical sequence, as Ford is
a gamblers’ lawyer. He testified before a house committee that he
represented many gamblers, some of whom were such powers that they
were unknown to the police or public as gamblers. He refused to divulge
their identities. One is a liquor dealer and another, a local jeweler.
Ford has legal contacts with the topmost figures of the Mafia. When the
wife of Charlie Fischetti, one of the most powerful men in the national
underworld, the most powerful in Chicago, was subpoenaed before the
Kefauver Committee, Ford flew to Chicago to represent her, though the
Fischetti-Guzik gang has staffs of legal sharks who specialize in
outwitting the authorities.
Quite often there is legal jockeying following the death of important
gangsters like La Fontaine.
After Bugsy Siegel was slain in Beverly Hills, Morris Rosen showed up
from New York at Siegel’s ornate Flamingo and took over all of the
murdered man’s assets before his body was cold. They had never belonged
to him at all. They were Syndicate property. So was 80 per cent of La
Fontaine’s.
25. WHO’S WHO IN MOBOCRACY
For two books and for the hundreds of newspaper stories we have done on
American gangsters and their maze of intertwining organization we got
enough to be publicly proclaimed America’s top experts in the field.
We have been offered lectures and speaking engagements before bodies
of bankers, merchants, criminologists, police conventions and on radio
programs. But we have saved some new names and some newly-discovered
secrets for this book, because a “confidential” without that factor
would be regarded as a gold brick; and because our publisher knows us
and trusts us and hasn’t the rabbit in him that the owners of other
media display, when they say:
“But you just can’t publish that kind of stuff. You’ll get us all
killed!”
One magazine which paid for the rights to do a digest of _Chicago
Confidential_ weakened and, instead, did a piece speculating on our
chances of surviving our tenure on the bestseller lists!
We have our own ways of getting this material, which so many think is
so dangerous. It comes from many sources, all confidential. Some of it
is right from the racketeers, themselves, for they have vendettas and
jealousies and hatreds on which they don’t dare to act in the open. The
widow of a murdered hoodlum drove hundreds of miles and met us in a car
in Central Park and gave us the tale of who rubbed him out and why.
This was a woman who had told the cops and the prosecutors that she
knew nothing, had no idea how her husband made a living, had never met
any one who was even “shady.”
Here and there a person who has been shaken down or shaken out, and
thus knows a small angle which may be valuable as a tip-off on one or
two people and authentic tactics gets to us and spills.
We don’t believe all we hear. But facts mesh up and patterns form and
truths evolve.
We have sketched for you the process whereby the pennies, dimes and
dollars of the numbers-players, horse-bettors, hookers and junkies
are harvested in Washington and funneled to the satraps who live in
penthouses and mansions in New York, Chicago, Beverly Hills and Rome.
They are big industry, our biggest. And while the principals hide in
their drawing-rooms even if they pass through Washington, to or from
Florida, they must maintain here high-powered lawyers, tax experts
who study and report every decision of the Treasury, lobbyists, press
agents and spies. Many of the vast legal businesses into which they
channel their cash have branch stores and offices here. The Syndicate
is an international conspiracy, as potent as that other international
conspiracy, Communism, and as dirty and dangerous, with its great
wealth and the same policy--to conquer everything and take over
everything, with no scruples as to how.
This gigantic money trust has assets of billions, exceeding the
combined wealth of Morgan, Rockefeller and all the Wall Street
freebooters of old.
It owns, through legitimate sources of trade, incalculable commercial,
residential, hotel and investment real estate, surpassing the holdings
of insurance companies. Through its purchase of stocks and bonds
it controls some and is attempting to control other transportation
companies, as well as railroads, hotel chains, distilleries and
breweries, department stores and chain stores, clothing and dress
manufacturers, steel and iron works, franchised automobile
distributors, trans-Atlantic steamship lines, a movie producer, a
radio chain, a big-league ball team, phonograph recording companies,
insurance corporations, banks, theatres, night clubs, laundries,
oil wells; it has been buying into even newspapers. This is only a
condensed catalog of its dishonest interests in once-honest enterprises.
A thief is always a thief. These modern pirates could not go straight.
As soon as they dip their sticky hands into something legitimate, it
goes crooked.
One of their favorite tactics is to buy in the open market enough stock
of a company, to create a nuisance value. They organize a minority
stockholders’ committee and dig up proxies. They have no real intention
of trying to get control, but some time before the stockholders’
meeting, they approach the management and offer to sell at a premium,
usually three or four times above the market listing. This is cold
blackmail.