The Kefauver committeemen rolled into the nation's largest city last week for the big finale to their investigation of organized crime in the U.S. Before they were done, they had made the legendary Frank Costello squirm in view of millions of television watchers, and provided titillating evidence that unobtrusive Frank Costello was just what they had claimed —the boss of one of the nation's two big crime syndicates (TIME, March 12). They had also charted some tortuous trails that led straight out of Costello's underworld and wound up in ex-Mayor William O'Dwyer's anteroom.
The dignified law chambers of Foley Square had never seen anything like it—even during the dramatic trials of Alger Hiss or the Communist Party hierarchy. Curious spectators stood for hours in pushing lines for seats to the small upstairs room, finally forced the committee to move down, to a big third-floor courtroom. There flashbulbs flared like heat lightning through the forest of television and newsreel cameras. From the judge's bench, mild-mannered Estes Kefauver presided with a firm hand, as Chief Counsel Rudolph Halley, an able, professionally annoying examiner, hammered at the unhappy witnesses. At Kefauver's right sat Maryland's judicial-mannered Herbert O'Conor, Wyoming's Lester Hunt and New Hampshire's pious old Charles W. Tobey, no lawyer, who glared with Yankee outrage at uneasy officials and sullen thugs, burst out at intervals to denounce the sinners, once with such eloquence that he moved himself to tears.
The Groundwork. Counsel Halley had carefully laid the groundwork for his case against Frank Costello. First he called in a grey, glib Manhattan lawyer named George Morton Levy, who runs Long Island's Roosevelt Raceway (harness horses). Witness Levy admitted unabashedly that he regularly played golf with Costello, Bookmaker Frank Erickson and an internal revenue agent named Schoenbaum, and under Halley's persistent prodding, told a tale of Costello, the Boss of Bookies. Levy testified that in 1946 the New York racing commissioner threatened to revoke the track's license if he did not get rid of the bookmakers who were operating there. Levy instantly thought of his golfing friend Costello, and hired him to keep gamblers away from the track. He paid him $15,000 a year for four years. Overnight, the bookmakers magically disappeared.
Then a garrulous, emaciated Republican politician named Charles Lipsky, who announced himself as a good friend of O'Dwyer's, added some illuminating details about Costello the Boss Politician.
Demanded Chief Counsel Rudolph Halley: "Based on your years of experience in politics in this city, did you believe it was necessary to get Costello's backing for your candidate?" Said Lipsky: "I did that. That's why I went to see him."
Two secondary villains—Joe Adonis, a sleek and handsomely sullen hood, and burly Bookmaker Frank Erickson—glowered briefly at the committee, answered no important questions, and departed, Adonis to his comfortable home in New Jersey, Erickson to his jail cell, where he is serving two years for bookmaking. The stage was set for the leading heavy of the piece.