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Biggest Enemy. The committee did not pretend that it could chart the workings of the organizations down to the last detail. But it was convinced that its probing had uncovered in Chicago one of the main springs of the whole nationwide crime net. Its name: the Continental Press Service.
Continental, said Estes Kefauver, is "Public Enemy No. i." It has a monopoly on the transmission of minute-by-minute information from local race tracks to bookies throughout the country. Through distributors which the committee branded dummies, it gets its news by wigwag or telephone from the tracks, flashes it by Western Union teletype throughout the country. It supplies last-minute news on track conditions, horses scratched, changes in jockeys, last-minute odds at the parimutuel windows. Big-time bookies must have it to lay off bets when a "hot" horse gets a dangerously high play, to get the results of a race 1,000 miles away in a matter of minutes, and to keep a winning customer on the hook for the next race. In effect, it takes betting out of the race track and makes it a nationwide operation at countless bookie outlets.
Dummies & the Mob. Ostensibly, Continental was bought by Arthur ("Mickey") McBride for his son Edward, now a law student in Miami University. But son Edward proved to know nothing about the business. Mickey McBride is the multimillionaire who owns the Cleveland Browns football team. But, said the committee, Continental. is not controlled by Mickey McBride, either. It is controlled by "the gangsters who constitute the Capone syndicate."
The mob muscled in by the simple method of eliminating the previous owner, James Ragen. In 1946, Ragen told police that if he was killed, the men responsible would be Tony Accardo, Jake Guzik, and Murray ("The Camel") Humphreys. Ragen was shot down in a noisy ambush on a South Side Chicago corner in 1946, then poisoned in his hospital bed when he showed signs of recovering from his wounds. "After his death," concluded the committee, "the mob took over and that was that."
The Tentacles. Through Continental, the Capone syndicate has a powerful grip on every big bookmaking operation in the country. The committee first picked up its far-flung tentacles in Miami. A man named Harry Russell suddenly appeared in Miami shortly after the 1948 election of Governor Fuller Warren. There he set about muscling into the S & G Syndicate, which did a $26 million-a-year business supplying Continental's racing wire news to its own bookies. Continental abruptly switched off S & G's service. After several days of futile resistance, S & G took in a new partner—Harry Russell.
The links to Chicago were not apparent at first. But the committee found some suspicious links to the governor's mansion in Tallahassee. A dog-track owner named William H. Johnston, whom the committee called "an associate of Capone mobsters," had contributed $100,000 to Governor Fuller Warren's campaign. Russell was a good friend of Johnston's, and his efforts to subdue S & G were greatly helped by the governor's special investigator, who obligingly raided S & G books pointed out by Russell. When Russell became an S & G partner, the investigator as obligingly withdrew from the scene.