CHAPTER TEN
MARCH 16, 1951
NEW YORK CITY
6:30 P.M.
Virginia Hill pleads her innocence.
Television viewers all across America look on in fascination as the gangster moll testifies before a U.S. Senate Committee investigating organized crime. The testimony is a welcome break for a nation that has been consumed by paranoia over Communism and the atom bomb since the end of World War II six years ago. American troops are now waging war against the “Red menace” in Korea, and a Wisconsin senator named Joseph McCarthy is alleging that the U.S. government is rife with Communist sympathizers.
So just as the nation did in the 1930s, when celebrity gangsters allowed the public to temporarily forget the woes of the Great Depression, these “Kefauver hearings” now veil America’s fears of nuclear obliteration.
And no witness is more provocative than Virginia Hill.
Four years after the death of Bugsy Siegel, his mistress sits before the cameras in a cramped hearing room at the federal courthouse here in Foley Square. Now thirty-four and the mother of a newborn son, Hill is unafraid of lead counsel Rudolf Halley, a young attorney from Queens. Dressed in a $5,000 silver mink stole, silk gloves, and black dress with a plunging neckline, she feigns complete ignorance while deflecting his questions with ease.
“The men that I was around that gave me things were not gangsters or racketeers. The only time I ever got anything from them was going out and having fun and maybe a few presents,” she insists under oath. At stake is her very freedom. Investigators have concluded that Virginia Hill has never worked an honest day in her life, nor paid much in taxes. Yet her net worth is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. IRS investigators know that between 1942 and 1947, Hill spent more than $250,000 but showed earnings of just $16,000 per year. So, unless Hill can explain where this money came from, she could face a long prison sentence for tax evasion, as Al Capone once did.
“I never knew anything about their business,” Hill adds, speaking of her Mafia friends. “They didn’t tell me about their business. Why would they tell me? I didn’t care anything about their business in the first place. I don’t even understand it.”
“The reason I ask,” Halley parries, “is that you seem to have a great ability to handle financial affairs.”
“Who, me?”
“It just seems impossible,” the attorney continues, “that you did not know about Siegel’s associates at the Flamingo.”
“I didn’t ever go out,” Hill responds. “In the first place, I had hay fever. I was allergic to the cactus. Every time I went there I was sick.”
Hill then adds that she spent most of her time in Las Vegas relaxing in her hotel room. “Ben’s friends: I never even met them or was around them.”
The courtroom is packed with senators, investigators, and reporters. These hearings—named for Senator Estes Kefauver, the bookish, womanizing Tennessee legislator who leads the committee—have become America’s first national television phenomenon. Organized crime is no longer exclusively in big cities but has infiltrated small towns to such an extent that a group known as the American Municipal Association has petitioned the federal government to investigate the scourge.
Ironically, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is opposed to the Senate proceedings. He sees no need, claiming that organized crime is a “myth.” The director believes that independent racketeers are being mistaken for a national alliance of criminals. For this reason, he posits that local police departments are responsible for prosecuting such crimes. Instead of the Mafia, Hoover would prefer that America’s Senate investigations focus on combating the rising Communist threat. The bureau’s New York field office has four hundred agents assigned to finding “subversives,” as Communist sympathizers are known. But just four agents are assigned to organized crime. Similarly, Hoover keeps files containing detailed personal information about America’s most influential individuals but does not believe it necessary to authorize such investigations of Mafia leaders.
Joseph Nellis, assistant legal counsel for the Kefauver hearings, would later relate Hoover’s disavowal of organized crime. “We had a long series of meetings with him off the record, at which he told us, ‘We don’t know anything about the Mafia or the families in New York. We haven’t followed this.’ He told us what we were learning about the Mafia wasn’t true.”
Unable to rely on Hoover for assistance, the Kefauver Committee instead turns to the director’s rival, Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, for insight into the criminal underworld. Yet when two key Mafia witnesses are found murdered on the eve of giving testimony, Senator Kefauver reaches out to Hoover once more, desperately asking that the FBI provide security for future witnesses. “I regret to advise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not empowered to perform guard duties,” Hoover responds icily, further distancing himself from the landmark proceedings.
Yet within the FBI, there are some who question Hoover’s true motives. Some find it odd that the man who once pursued criminals with relentless ferocity, building the FBI’s reputation by arresting or killing America’s most notorious gangsters, now refuses to play even a small role in this very public investigation of organized crime.
A handful of agents suspect that the Mafia actually controls J. Edgar Hoover. When he takes the train north for a weekend in New York, the director regularly frequents the Stork Club, a Mafia haven. In Miami, Hoover prefers a seafood restaurant favored by Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and assistant Clive Tolson, circa 1939.
It is whispered by a few agents that Lansky and other underworld leaders have photographs of Hoover in compromising situations with Clyde Tolson, a top man at the FBI who has been the director’s constant companion for almost twenty years. The two are so close that they allegedly have been seen surreptitiously holding hands when they believe no one is looking. It is customary for Hoover’s limousine to pick up Tolson at his apartment each morning so the two men can ride to work together. The lifelong bachelors also vacation with each other and eat dinner together five nights a week. All the while, Hoover is prosecuting homosexuals on morals charges, as well as keeping those secret personal files on the lives of powerful politicians and even presidents—among them Senator Kefauver. The man from Tennessee is known for his heavy drinking, eager acceptance of bribes, and a habit of using House and Senate committee furniture as spontaneous sex locations.1
FBI agents also know that J. Edgar Hoover surreptitiously meets with Frank Costello in Central Park during visits to Manhattan. The subjects of the conversations are unknown, but it is common knowledge that Hoover has a fondness for gambling on horse races—albeit in small dollar amounts. Sports betting is illegal in Washington, D.C., meaning that the nation’s chief law enforcement officer breaks the law to fuel this passion. Some agents believe the Mafia uses this vice of the director’s to keep him from investigating their activities. “Hoover will never know how many races I had to fix for those lousy ten-dollar bets,” Costello will later admit.
To be fair, J. Edgar Hoover’s interactions with Mafia figures are not all that unusual for law enforcement officials. Before his death, Bugsy Siegel secretly met with federal agents in Los Angeles to share details about the criminal activities of his enemies. But due to Hoover’s denials about organized crime, the FBI field office in L.A. is not allowed to take action. Instead, agents pass information about the Mafia to local police. And unlike the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department has no doubt that organized crime exists—so much so that the LAPD has formed a small, elite unit dedicated to destroying the city’s Mob element.
The Gangster Squad, as it is called, was originally formed in 1946 as a response to criminals from back East coming west to shake down local restaurants. The owners of famous L.A. eateries like Mocambo and Brown Derby were being forced to pay 25 percent of their income to these “tourists”—or else.
Carrying tommy guns, smoking cigars, and prowling Los Angeles in old Ford automobiles with holes in the floorboards, squad members are all physically powerful men who played sports and/or fought in World War II. Their specialty is cornering a suspected gangster and “strongly suggesting” he leave and never come back.
The Squad is effective, using wiretaps, break-ins, and physical beatings to intimidate the “bad guys.”
Officer Jack O’Mara, one of the original eight men chosen for this duty, remembers a typical tactic. “We would have a little heart to heart talk with them. Emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland. And we leaned on them a little, you know what I mean? Up in the Hollywood Hills, off Coldwater Canyon, anywhere up there. And it’s dark at night.”
O’Mara continued: “We would kind of put a gun to their ear and say, ‘you want to sneeze? Do you feel a sneeze coming on? A loud sneeze?’”
Like the Los Angeles Police Department, the American public is completely convinced that organized crime is real, but the public is entertained by the spectacle.
“The week of March 12, 1951, will occupy a special place in history,” reports a cover story in Life magazine. “People had suddenly gone indoors into living rooms, taverns, and clubrooms, auditoriums, and back offices. There, in eerie half-light, looking at millions of small frosty screens, people sat as if charmed. Never before had the attention of the nation been riveted so completely on a single matter …
“Dishes stood in sinks, babies went unfed, business sagged and department stores emptied while the hearings were on.”
Public fascination with the covert workings of the Mafia has never been more intense: schools across the country are dismissing students from class to watch the televised proceedings, and here in New York, Broadway shows are playing to near-empty theaters. As they have been for decades, Americans are fascinated with the underworld, eager to make celebrities and even heroes of men who steal and kill for a living. Now, the movie newsreels that once highlighted criminal escapades are being replaced by live broadcasts on television.
The hearings are so popular that Senator Kefauver will win an Emmy Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He will also choose to run for president in 1952. It will be Kefauver’s defeat of President Harry Truman in the New Hampshire primary that convinces Truman to pull out of the race.
But the hearings in his name are not a complete triumph for the senator. During the committee’s stop in Chicago he meets privately with Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak. Rather than agree to offer testimony, Korshak presents the married forty-seven-year-old Kefauver with photographs showing the senator at the Drake Hotel, sharing a bed with two young women. From this moment on, even as he runs for president, Kefauver is a captive of the Mob.2
Sidney R. Korshak, attorney for the Englander mattress company, tells Senate investigators that his firm reimbursed management consultant Nathan Shefferman for $2,800, after Shefferman paid for observing and checking plant employees. Washington, D.C., October 1957.
Of course, Virginia Hill is not alone in offering testimony. For the past year, the Kefauver Committee has heard evidence in fourteen cities and called more than six hundred witnesses. In fact, the investigation was supposed to end in February 1951, but the hearings are so popular that the American public inundated Congress with letters demanding that the televised programs continue. Thus the addition of New York City as the final stop.
Other gangsters subpoenaed to speak here at the federal courthouse include Frank Costello, who now runs the Luciano crime family. Despite Lucky Luciano’s permanent absence, the mobster shows respect by not changing the family’s name to his own. Now, the public not only sees how stylishly a suspected Mafioso dresses and the precision with which he combs his hair, but Americans also hear an Italian-accented speaking voice made raspy by a botched operation for polyps on his vocal cords. Costello adds to the theater by refusing to acknowledge the existence of La Cosa Nostra.
“I am in no condition to testify,” Costello tells Kefauver at one point.
“You refuse to testify further?”
“Am I a defendant in this courtroom?” Costello asks.
“No.”
“Then I am walking out,” Costello replies, then stands and leaves.
However, the hearings will prove damning to Costello. Eventually, he will be sent to prison for contempt of Congress.
Things will go much worse for Willie Moretti, a Mob underboss who chooses not to take the Fifth. Instead, Moretti, who believes he is not doing any harm, tells the Senate panel that certain “made men” socialized at a club named Duke’s. At the time it seems innocuous—but seven months later he will be shot in the face and killed while eating lunch in New Jersey.3
As flamboyant as Costello was, it is Virginia Hill who becomes an immediate sensation. Her feigned naïveté, fearless indifference to the maneuvering of the prosecutors, and an Alabama drawl that Kefauver will describe as a mixture of “southern poor white and Chicago gangster-ese” gives Ms. Hill a raw glamour that Americans find intriguing. She will only add to that spectacle when her testimony ends, covering her face as she pushes through a gauntlet of reporters screaming questions.
“Get your fucking cameras out of my face. Get out of my fucking way,” Hill commands.
But Marjorie Farnsworth, a writer for the New York Journal-American, does not listen. She blocks Hill’s path only to be smacked hard by a right hook to the face. New York Times reporter Lee Mortimer also receives a kick in the shins from Hill. That draws loud cheers from the crowd of spectators.
“I hope a fucking atom bomb falls on y’all,” she yells over her shoulder before being driven away from the courthouse.
As brazen as that behavior might be, particularly for a woman straining against the conventional gender mores of 1951, it is Virginia Hill’s comments in a closed executive session that will truly upend the investigation.
Hill is being questioned by Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, one of the committee’s five members. Reporters are present but there are no television cameras. Tobey is fascinated by Hill’s relationship with Joe Epstein and the other men who give her so much money.
“Why would they do it?” asks Tobey, trying to set a trap.
Hill dodges the question. Tobey tries again.
“Why would he give you all that money?” the senator asks, speaking about Epstein.
“You really want to know?” asks Hill.
“Yes. I want to know why,” Tobey replies.
The committee waits eagerly for Hill’s response. They sense a triumph.
“Then I’ll tell you why.”
Virginia Hill does not give quite the answer they expect.
“Because I’m the best damned cocksucker in town.”
Four hundred miles south of New York City, in Charlottesville, Virginia, an aspiring lawyer and his pregnant wife are fascinated by the Mafia hearings.
Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy discusses campaign matters with his brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, on July 10, 1960. The senator is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bobby Kennedy is twenty-five years old, an idealistic Irish-Catholic from Massachusetts who tends to be conservative in his political and moral thinking. He stands five feet, nine inches, weighs just 155 pounds, and has a reputation for ferocious tenacity. Among his powerful friends is Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, now growing famous by promoting a Communist witch hunt.4
Kennedy rarely drinks and does not smoke, nor does Ethel, his bride of less than one year. The couple lives in a three-bedroom home while he finishes law school at the University of Virginia. Both come from means, and Ethel laments that “this place could fit into the living room of one of our guest houses,” but the Kennedys are content with their temporary circumstance.
The house is usually a scene of chaos. Ethel does not cook and will not clean, so the kitchen and bedroom fall into disarray on those days when a maid is not present. The family pet, an English bulldog named Toby Belch, is not trained. Add those factors to the rigor of finishing school while awaiting the birth of a first child and it can be said that this time of Bobby Kennedy’s life is a period of discombobulation.
Kennedy agrees that the fight against organized crime should be “a national crusade, a great debating forum, an arouser of public opinion on the state of the nation’s morals,” in the words of Senator Kefauver. For Bobby has a puritan belief in right and wrong, and has chosen to become a lawyer so that he may use the law to root out criminal activities. After passing the bar, he expects to begin working for the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
However, with every passing revelation by the Kefauver Committee, Bobby Kennedy becomes more aware that his own family name might soon be dragged through the mud. In fact, his father is mentioned in passing as being linked to organized crime during the hearings, but no evidence is cited.
The truth is that Bobby Kennedy’s own lavish childhood was made possible by a father who chose to dwell in the shadows between right and wrong. The Kefauver hearings may center around Italian American criminal activity, but the Irish Joseph Kennedy is a multimillionaire who wields just as much power as any Mafia don. In his lifetime, the Kennedy family patriarch will found RKO Pictures, serve as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and work as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Kennedy also has his learning-disabled daughter lobotomized upon the advice of a trusted physician, is deeply anti-Semitic, and even admired the politics of Adolf Hitler. Mobster Frank Costello will state for the record that he and Joseph Kennedy had a business relationship shipping bootlegged whiskey during Prohibition. Once, when a hit was called on Kennedy in Detroit, it is allegedly Costello who intervened and saved his life.5
Despite the exploits of his high-profile father, Bobby Kennedy will choose a different path. Soon, he will become the leader of the anti-Mafia faction in the federal government.
And vicious criminals will hate him for it.