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As his investigations progressed, many criticized his tendency to bugle off on any side trail in search of a headline, and his scattergun methods which seemed to flush many birds but drop few of them. Some, like Texas' Tom] Connally, dismissed the whole project as "chasing crap-shooters." And many professional crimebusters took a slightly amused view of the committee's melodramatic approach to the Mafia, a scapegoat dear to the hearts of Sunday-supplement writers and students of the devious Dr. Fu Manchu. But no one 'could charge Kefauver with pulling his shots on political grounds: his investigation into the unaccountable wealth of the Democrats' candidate for Cook County sheriff, Police Captain Dan ("Tubbo") Gilbert, unquestionably cost Majority Leader Scott Lucas the election. And by last week, Estes Kefauver's determined sleuthing had produced the most detailed portrait in a generation of the face of organized U.S. crime.
The New Bonanza. Time and circumstances, he found, had worked some major changes on the face of U.S. gangland. Big-scale prostitution, the big pre-World War I racket, had been spoiled by the Mann Act. Repeal had put an end to the era of bootleggers, gang war and magnificent funerals. The U.S.'s fast-buck boys had moved in on a bonanza which proved richer than their wildest dreams. The new bonanza: big-time gambling, organized on a big-time scale.
Gambling requires no fleets of trucks, cutting and bottling plants, secret garages, machine-gun battles with Coast Guard cutters or dumb cops on motorcycles. Gambling can be a pretty peaceful business and a man can keep the overhead down. Slot machines, punchboards, policy and numbers games, gambling casinos and bookmaking—the gangsters tried them all, made easy money on them all. Their customers range from the penny numbers players of the big-city slums to the big-money set who keep their change in century notes.
The take is staggering. An average slot machine, the committee estimated, clears $50 a week; a mobster who has placed 200 slots, a comparatively modest effort, can assure himself a gross of $5.000 a week. One of the eight big policy wheels in the Negro section of Chicago netted $1,000,000 a year. A gambling casino in New Jersey cleared $255,271 in a good year, one in Florida, $205,000. Tony Giz-zo, a mobster in Kansas City, admitted that his little newsstand handbook netted him more than $100,000 a year. In all, the committee estimated "conservatively," $20 billion changes hands every year in the U.S. in the big business of illegal gambling.