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With her long acquaintance with all these racketeers, didn't she ever hear about their businesses? When they talked business, she left the room, she said. At Siegel's Flamingo Club in Las Vegas, "lots of time, people didn't even know I was there. I was upstairs in my room. I didn't even go out. I was allergic to cactus." thing?" "You just asked didn't Halley. want to know any Said Virginia: "No, sir, I didn't want to know anything about anybody." With that, she shrugged her mink stole higher on her shoulders, ran a gauntlet of photographers, paused to shout, "You god dam bastards, I hope an atom bomb falls on all of you." Near the door she slapped a woman reporter for good measure. Even for Ginny it was quite an exit. The senators, a bit flustered, had learned exactly nothing about her suspected role as bank courier for the overlords of U.S. crime.
Of Rackets & Politics. Halley turned back to the shadowy connections between New York's politicos and New Yorks bosses of crime. Costello had walked out before the Senators could grill him on his relations to Tammany politics. But they could explore Tammany politicians and the men around Mayor O'Dwyer for traces of the underworld's power. While O'Dwyer himself flew into-town from the embassy in Mexico to testify, the committee hus tled a whole covey of O'Dwyer's political friends and underlings onstage.
An assistant state's attorney general testified that he had often seen O'Dwyer in Joe Adonis' Brooklyn restaurant in the '30s, along with other politicians; he thought it might have been O'Dwyer who introduced him to Adonis. A county pros ecutor estimated that police protection in Brooklyn amounted to about $250,000 a bookmakers.
Moron, the Right Bower. But the key man was big, beefy James J. Moran, a jaunty, florid, Irish-politician type. Once a court clerk, Moran had long been Wil liam O'Dwyer's political right bower. As O'Dwyer rose, so did Moran. When O'Dwyer became mayor, he made Moran first deputy fire commissioner and let it be known that all things political were to be "cleared with Jim Moran." As a last act, the departing mayor had appointed him to his lifetime $15,000-a-year job as a city water commissioner.
Moran was bluff and confident. He testified readily that he arranged a meeting for O'Dwyer with Costello in 1942 or 1043 O'Dwyer was in the Army at the time and was investigating a rumor that Costello was "mixed up with some people who were making trouble for the Army at Wright Field." Moran knew just how to get hold of Costello; he called Michael Kennedy, then leader of Tammany Hall.
Two weeks later, O'Dwyer went to Costello's apartment with Moran and stayed an hour. Moran did not know what they talked about.
Moran & the Policy King. After that, Moran met Costello often in restaurants and as Costello had testified, frequently dropped in for a drink at his apartment.
Did Moran know a racketeer called Louis Weber, onetime policy king of Brooklyn? He did. Weber had been "around politics" for years, he explained.