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. He was sixty.
I never told him, by the way, that I was the one who busted up his trains.
Frank Sinatra made his comeback, as you may have heard, and he continued to be friends with Joey Fischetti, who received at least an occasional fee as a “talent agent,” particularly for Sinatra’s dates in Miami Beach, including at the Fountainbleau Hotel, with which Joey was affiliated.
In early 1951, Sinatra was asked to provide the Kefauver Committee with an interview, and he complied — a top secret one, at four in the morning in a law office at Rockefeller Center. He told them nothing — a list of gangsters was read off to him, and he informed committee lawyer Joseph Nellis he knew them “to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to... Well, hell, you go into show business, you meet a lot of people.”
Perhaps because of my request to Pearson to apply gentle pressure, Kefauver accepted this private testimony and chose not to embarrass Frank by calling him as a hearing witness.
But Frank’s mob connections would dog his heels his entire life — five grand jury subpoenas, two IRS investigations, a congressional summons, and a subpoena from the New Jersey State Crime Commission would follow over the years. So would a Congressional Gold Medal, presented to him by President Clinton in 1997, the year before Sinatra’s death.
