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The Big Crime bosses seem to patronize the same lawyers and tax accountants. Learning from Capone's unhappy experience, they meticulously file income-tax returns, but the sources of income are merely labeled "self-speculations," "special services," "sundry sources." Tony Accardo had listed $60,000 as "miscellaneous." The Treasury would accept such an accounting from no honest citizen, Kefauver pointed out. Why weren't these itemized? One attorney, mopping his brow nervously, quavered: "You don't ask these men questions."
"To Get Away." 1951's mobster has also moved in on legitimate enterprise. Cleveland's Morris Kleinman and Lou Rothkopf each own an apartment house; Anthony Milano, who exchanges frequent phone calls with Los Angeles' Mickey Cohen, has a loan company and an import firm. Moe Dalitz and three other ex-bootleggers own a substantial share of the Detroit Steel Corp. Across the country, mobsters specialize in service industries—liquor distributors, vending-machine companies—where a bit of muscle, tastefully displayed, may help get customers.
New York's Joe Adonis owns a big piece of the conveying company which, by ICC licensing regulations, holds an effective monopoly on the delivery of cars from the Ford assembly plant at Edgewater, N.J. into the New York area.* Costello owns oil leases and, in the past, owned some big chunks of Wall Street real estate. Philadelphia's "Nig" Rosen owns two dressmaking companies.
If Kefauver's only finding was that some questionable characters had made money out of gambling, few U.S. citizens could work up much moral indignation. Most could discern little moral distinction between plunging on the commodity market or a slot machine, between betting at a legal parimutuel window or at a handbook. Furthermore, the only people gang-men seem to shoot these days are other gangmen. But every citizen could get alarmed over the inevitable result of their drive to power and riches. Equipped with inexhaustible supplies of fresh green cash, they have used it unstintingly to buy immunity from the rule of law, and to corrupt the men who are sworn to uphold it.
Only the Best. The mobs' high-level executives have only scorn for the petty thieves, the park muggers, the petty embezzlers, the maverick holdup men who fill the nation's jails. The crime bosses do not g.o to jail; their boys seldom do. There is always a bondsman ready to spring them, and their money buys the highest-priced legal talent.
Over the years, the mobs' money has bought the men who do the arresting, sometimes even the men who do the judging. Armed with income-tax reports made available to them by President Truman himself, the committee grilled every sheriff and police executive they could find. It was not a pretty showing.