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Spotlight on Saratoga Springs. While Costello considered the consequences of his walkout, the committee turned its spotlight briefly on Saratoga Springs, just 30 miles from Governor Tom Dewey's capital at Albany. Saratoga Detective Walter Ahearn gulped, squirmed, and like to have swallowed his gum under Senator Tobey's outraged questioning, as he admitted that he regularly escorted the night's cash from the downtown bank to two gambling clubs. He got $10 a day for this service, he said, from the Piping Rock Club (where Costello used to own a piece) and $50 a week from the Arrowhead Inn, where Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis and Detroit's Lefty Clark run the tables.
Superintendent of State Police John A. Gafmey admitted that he had bottled up a report on Saratoga's wide-open gambling, but pleaded it was contrary to policy to take action in cities. Tobey exploded like a rusty pinwheel. "You did nothing. You were a cipher, a zero!" he roared. "If I were the governor of this state, I would give you just five minutes to get out of the place or I would kick you out." Mumbled Gaffney humbly: "I am glad you aren't the governor."
The Story of Virginia Hill. Counsel Halley had one more diversion before he went back to the main theme. In flung Virginia Hill, queen of the gangsters' molls. She was soignee in a platinum mink stole and picture hat. She was also cursing the photographers. "Make them stop doing that; I'll throw something at them in a minute," she told Kefauver angrily. Then, while the Senators listened breathlessly, Virginia told her simple tale of how a 17-year-old waitress from Alabama met a friend of big-time bookies named Joe Epstein, and started along the road to fame and riches.
Virginia, who is now 34 and married to a Sun Valley ski instructor, admitted knowing just about every nobleman in Big Crime's hierarchy—Joe Adonis, Costello, Meyer Lansky, Charles Fischetti. But she didn't admit much more. Lolling negligently at the witness table, Virginia explained her unlimited income in short bursts of Alabama drawl: "I went with fellows. Like a lot of girls they got, giving me things and bought me everything I want . . . Whatever I ever had, outside of betting the horses, was given me."
With no apparent embarrassment, she explained her breakup with her longtime friend Ben ("Bugsy") Siegel, who was killed in the house he had rented for her in Beverly Hills. "I had a big fight with him because I hit a girl in the Flamingo and he told me I wasn't a lady ... I had been drinking and I left, and I went to Paris when I was mad."