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!