(See Cover)
In a telephone booth in the lobby of Los Angeles' post office building, a thin, bright-eyed 17-year-old talked excitedly into the phone: "Gee, Mom, you shoulda seen it. Gangsters and crooks everywhere. They were telling Mr. Kefauver about murders and losing millions of dollars gambling. It was just like the movies . . . Just listen, Mom, the Senator's coming past right now . . ."
Tennessee's Estes Kefauver stopped. "I'll talk to your mom, son," he said. "I'm very glad to talk to you, Mom," he said into the phone. "And I enjoyed meeting your son Philip. He's a fine boy . . ."
Last week homely, rawboned Estes Kefauver, always eager to please, was trudging through California, doggedly intent on the trail of Big Crime. His gait was steady and a little flatfooted. His air was mildly astonished, as befitted a wary Tennessee mountain man inspecting the sinful sight of the big cities.
Before a massed bank of newspaper reporters and the peering snouts of television cameras, Kefauver had spent the afternoon listening, as a motley crew of mobsters admitted what they could not deny, chanted insolently when cornered: "I don't remember."
Debonair Al Smiley, ex-partner of Mobster "Bugsy" Siegel, inspected Kefauver contemptuously. He refused to explain why, after Siegel's untimely death, a Houston man had asked him to come down to Texas, and why Smiley had shuttled back & forth between Houston and the Beverly Club, the gambling casino near New Orleans controlled by New York's Frank Costello. Smiley's reward for these questionable services was "a small piece of property." What kind of property? "Well, it may have had a few oil wells on it/' said Al, and departed with curled lip.
Found: A Pattern. Estes Kefauver was used to such evasive replies and sullen reticence; they were the stock-in-trade of the nation's leading mystery men. But in grudging admissions and half-explanations under persistent questioning, by matching a piece here with another piece 2.000 miles away, Kefauver and his Senate Crime Investigating Committee had turned up a sinister pattern of organized crime in the U.S.
Last week, in an all-but-final report on ten months of sleuthing, the committee said: "The evidence demonstrates quite clearly that organized crime today is not limited to any single community of any single state, but occurs all over the country." Big Crime's big men know each other, deal with each other, meet frequently, "and on occasion do each other's dirty work when a competitor must be eliminated, an informer silenced, or a victim persuaded."
What the committee found most shocking was "the extent of official corruption and connivance in facilitating and promoting organized crime." In every big city top mobsters remain "immune from prosecution and punishment." The committee found cops bribed, political leaders bought or pressured, sheriffs indifferent or even encouraging, well-meaning officials made helpless by others who worked hand-in-glove with crime. "At the local level, this committee received evidence of corruption of law-enforcement officers and connivance with criminal gangs in practically every city in which it held hearings."