4) The hoodlums’ tie-up with some labor, which came about when unions needed sluggers, or when tough guys muscled in to grab union treasurers, or used them as part of their extortion rackets. Lobbyists representing the unions are feared and toadied to.
5) The Italian voting bloc now controls some of the largest cities in the country. It is the largest single unit in New York, where all three candidates for mayor in 1950 were Italians. Too many of their men in office have ties to the Mafia. They can count on the votes of their countrymen in nominations and elections. The mass votes of Italians are bartered back and forth and usually can be delivered, by Black Hand threats in Italian neighborhoods, by appeal to blood relationship and national pride, or through the pages of powerful Italian language newspapers.
During his recent campaign, New York’s Mayor Impellitteri charged that Gene Pope, publisher of Il Progresso Italiano-Americano, the biggest Italian daily in the country, was an intimate of Frank Costello. We have seen them dining together on intimate terms.
No book could comprehensively cover the mob’s facets in Washington, but here are a few, at random:
The President’s military aide and poker pal, Major General Harry Vaughan, has associated with Frank Costello. They were brought together through his stooge, the convict John Maragon, who was a pal of the late Bill Helis, Greek millionaire and partner in Costello’s New York and Louisiana enterprises—as well as in a Scotch distillery.
Joe Adonis, New York mobster and lieutenant of Costello, had financial dealings with Harold F. Ambrose, former special assistant to the Postmaster General. Ambrose pleaded guilty to charges of operating a $600,000 fraudulent stamp-selling scheme. Adonis was questioned by the D.C. grand jury, but refused to talk, after which the United States had amnesia about his connection with the case. Ambrose is related to Democratic Senator O’Mahoney. His failure to go to trial protected his underworld associates.
Attorney General McGrath, who may be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice before this appears in print, was a Senator from Rhode Island and an important member of Rhode Island’s Democratic machine. That outfit has tight ties with the underworld. Within days after McGrath was pushed upstairs to the Attorney Generalship, to make way for Bill Boyle as Democratic National Chairman, McGrath made a trip to New York City. There he or his double had dinner at the Copacabana night club with Joe Nunan, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and Julie Podell, manager of the cafe. It has been frequently charged in New York that Costello has an interest in the corporation. The late Mayor La Guardia ordered police to cancel the club’s license if Podell, long an associate of Costello, was ever found on its premises again. Podell, while giddy, told one of your reporters that Costello had advanced $50,000 to open the club.
At the time of the dinner party there, the Copa was a possible defendant in a tax-action growing out of an investigation into the charges that it was owned by Costello. Since then, Podell was in Hot Springs with Costello and several other mobsters from all parts of the country, in an annual convention. McGrath has since stated there is no organized crime or vice in the country.
Former Attorney General Tom Clark, now a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was closely associated with attorneys who represented underworld figures. There were no major underworld prosecutions during his term of office. A Congressional investigation elicited the startling information that Clark’s boyhood pal, Maury Hughes, a Dallas attorney, was retained by five members of the old Capone mob, who had been convicted of extorting millions from the movie industry, to induce the federal authorities to nol-pros outstanding indictments against them and secure premature paroles.
Hughes, with other lawyers close to the administration, worked this feat of legal legerdemain. While these pages were being written, the same Maury Hughes secretly succeeded in keeping Alan Smiley, a notorious West Coast gangster who had been ordered deported, in the country. Smiley was Bugsy Siegel’s buddy, and was seated next to him on a love-seat in Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills mansion when Siegel was ambushed and assassinated, in the only spot in the room visible to the torpedoes hidden outside, in bushes.