In New York City 75 years ago this week, a very strange thing happened. For a few days, it seemed as if big parts of the city ground to a halt.
Today, we'd call it a "viral moment." But in March of 1951, it was a brand new phenomenon: People everywhere, at least those lucky enough to have access to a television set, stopped what they were doing to watch a news story – live – as it was unfolding.
Jack Gould, the television critic for The New York Times, described a city "under a hypnotic spell." Wives, he wrote, "have left the housework undone and husbands have slipped away from their jobs to watch."
The subject of all this excitement was an unlikely one: Congressional hearings. Hours and hours of them. What made it all so fascinating was the topic: Organized crime. Gangsters. Or, as Americans were learning right there on TV, something called "the Mafia."
Crooked contracts, bribery, illegal gambling, shady characters; the Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, as it was officially known, called hundreds of witnesses in 1950 and 1951 as it examined widespread concerns about violent crime and political corruption linked to organized mobs in major cities.
Among the high profile figures who testified were Joe Adonis, Mickey Cohen, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, and Anthony "Tough Tony" Anastasio.
The star witness of the New York City hearings the week of March 12, 1951, was Frank Costello – head of the Luciano crime family and the most powerful mobster in the United States.
The televised hearings fueled an obsession in American popular culture with gangsters and the Mafia in the 1950s that continues today, and marked the emergence of television as a powerful force in American life.
"This was one of the first big moments of everybody watching the same thing at the same time, which would come to define so much of the second half of the 20th century," says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. "It was live, so there was a sense that we were watching this stuff together in a ritual, as a community."
Years later, Walter Cronkite of CBS tried to explain what had made the whole thing so captivating. The hearings, he said in a 1958 documentary, "provided millions with their first behind the scenes glimpse of the underworld."
Most people, he noted, "had never seen a gangster, except in a gangster movie."
In the Senate investigation that featured public hearings in 14 cities, Americans saw plenty of them.
Watching "hoodlums squirm"
The investigation was the brainchild of Estes Kefauver, the Democratic junior senator from Tennessee.
Little known outside his home state, Kefauver had become alarmed by accounts in the newspapers of organized crime and political corruption in many big cities. The revelations, he wrote, "highlighted the desperate need for learning the real facts about crime in America."
Kefauver was also ambitious – a hungry politician looking for an issue he could ride to national prominence.
Without television, though, his investigation, like many other Senate committees, might quickly have been forgotten.
Until, about halfway through its 14-city schedule, the traveling road show reached New Orleans in January 1951. There, writes historian Ron Garay, a local television station offered to put the hearings on TV, and the enthusiastic response from viewers surprised everyone.
After New Orleans, things got really strange as the hearings moved to Detroit, where thousands of letters and phone calls poured into the local stations. An estimated 90% of the city's televisions were tuned in, according to Broadcasting/Telecasting, a radio and television magazine, as people stopped their normal activities "to watch hoodlums squirm under the relentless questioning of the committee."
In St. Louis, the crowds watching in bars were reportedly larger than for the World Series four months earlier.
The Los Angeles hearings in February sent shivers through the film industry, said the Associated Press, because "people stayed home and watched their TV sets instead of going to the movies."
The goal of the investigation was to explore – and expose – connections between political leaders and organized crime. As a steady stream of "underworld figures" was called to testify, the tough questions from the Senators and staff, and the confrontational, often antagonistic response from the witnesses, gave the hearings the excitement of a courtroom drama.
"You could actually see guys with names like 'Melonhead' and 'Nucky' and all of this," says Thompson, and "most of them lived up to the reputations we've seen in movies."
The excitement reached its peak in mid-March as the committee headed back east. As Edward R. Murrow of CBS put it, "this week, after successful stops in Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, the committee rolled into New York for the big show."
Five of the seven New York stations aired the hearings live, and new coaxial cables had linked up 21 other cities in the east and Midwest so that millions more could watch. Outside the courthouse, hundreds lined up hoping to get a coveted seat inside.
As Chief Counsel Rudolph Halley hammered away at underworld figures day after day, his fan mail ran into the thousands.
Among the highlights of the New York hearings was the testimony of former New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer. The committee grilled him about his associations over many years with Frank Costello and other figures, including Joe Adonis, a longtime New York mob figure.
One of the most dramatic moments came when Sen. Charles Tobey, Republican of New Hampshire, questioned O'Dwyer about a meeting with Costello:
Tobey: "When you went to see him, you were conscious of the fact that he was a gangster, weren't you?"
O'Dwyer: "I was conscious of the fact that he had a reputation for being an outstanding bookmaker."
Tobey: "Did you hear him referred to as the Prime Minister of the Underworld?"
O'Dwyer: "That time I did not."
A dose of Hollywood glamor – and much of the humor – in the hearings came as Virginia Hill Hauser – the former girlfriend of the late mobster "Bugsy" Siegel – sat down for her testimony. As the Chicago Tribune's reporter put it, "Virginia burst into the television floodlight glare of the crowded hearing room in a platinum mink stole."
In a departure from the many witnesses who had refused to answer questions, Hauser responded eagerly, with vivid, spicy, and often humorous answers.
She told how Siegel (who was assassinated in her Beverly Hills home in 1947 while she was away) and others had given her money and supported her lavish parties and gambling on horse races. Under questioning, though, she said she was completely in the dark about the activities of the men who'd given it to her.
"The men who gave me things were not gangsters or racketeers," she said. "We went out and had a lot of fun together, and they gave me a lot of presents. They gave me a house in Florida."
While Hauser patiently answered the committee's questions, she bristled at the media frenzy that by now surrounded the hearings.
As flash bulbs popped, Hill at one point told Kefauver, "I hate these people," and the senator asked the photographers to back off. "You don't know what I have been through with these bums," Hill told him.
As she left the hearing room, Hill cut loose on the journalists following her: "I hope the atom bomb falls on every one of you." She called one reporter a "dirty bum," punched a female reporter in the jaw, and kicked a photographer who had crouched down with his camera to get a good angle.
After Hill's riveting appearance, the dramatic climax of the New York hearings came with the appearances of Frank Costello, the most powerful gangster in the country and the heir to the illegal gambling empire and New York crime family once controlled by Charles "Lucky" Luciano.
Costello at one point refused to testify in front of the television cameras, and a deal was worked out where his face would not be shown. Instead, television cameras zoomed in on Costello's hands during his testimony, and millions of viewers watched in fascination as he fiddled with his watch, or a glass of water, wrung his hands nervously, or tore a piece of paper into shreds.
The image became one of the most powerful symbols of the hearings, burned into the memories of many people for years to come. And somehow it made his testimony even more dramatic as viewers listened to Costello's repeated answers of "I don't know," "I don't remember," and "I haven't got the least idea."
Among the many memorable moments in his testimony was this exchange with Sen. Charles Tobey.
Frustrated with Costello's evasive answers, Tobey asked asked him what contributions, since becoming a citizen of the United States more than 20 years earlier and becoming wealthy as a result, he had made in return:
Tobey: "Have you ever offered your service to any war effort of this country?"
Costello: "No."
Tobey: "Bearing in mind all that you have gained and received in wealth, what have you ever done for your country as a good citizen?"
Costello: "I don't know what you mean by that."
Tobey: "You must have in your mind some things that you've done, that can speak to your conduct as an American citizen. If so, what are they?"
Costello paused for a second, thinking, and then answered, to widespread laughter from those in the hearing room: "Paid my tax."
Twice, Costello got up and walked out of the hearings, and was later sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of Congress.
When the whole thing was over, an estimated 30 million people had tuned in. Kefauver wrapped up the committee's work later that year, with a detailed report to the Senate.
But ever since, the question about the hearings has been, as Walter Cronkite put it years later:
"Were they a great call to action to stamp out crime, or were they merely a big entertainment binge for the American public."
Kefauver concluded that the hearings had revealed what he called an "outlaw government-within-a-government which, we learned, exists in the United States."
While there were some modest legislative accomplishments, Robert Thompson says the most enduring legacy of the Kefauver hearings would not come from Washington, but from Hollywood and in popular culture.
"This was in fact the first real documentary on the Mafia and it was very influential in the movies that came after," he says.
In hearing rooms across the United States, one alleged gangster after another told the Senators that, no, they were not members of something called "the Mafia," and in fact they had never heard of such a thing.
In Washington, D.C., it was Salvatore Moretti, a longtime New Jersey gambler, who would be murdered in prison months after testifying in front of the Kefauver committee:
Halley: "Do you know what the Mafia is?"
Moretti: "What?"
Halley: "The Mafia? M-a-f-i-a?"
Moretti: "I am sorry, I don't know what you're talking about."
Halley: "You never heard that word before in your life?"
Moretti: "No sir; I did not."
At the beginning, Kefauver had to explain to reporters how to pronounce the word – was it MAY-fee-uh? Muh-FEE-uh?
Afterwards, Thompson says, a slew of gangster movies and TV shows in the 1950s embedded the word in the American lexicon.
The fascination reached new heights in 1969, with Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather. And then in 1972, when Francis Ford Coppola immortalized it in films.
Two decades after the New York hearings, Marlon Brando studied Frank Costello's raspy, wheezing testimony for his portrayal of Vito Corleone.
And then, in 1999, came The Sopranos. The long-running HBO drama, Thompson says, "is so conscious of this heritage, so conscious of where it comes from." He cites a scene in the show's first season, where the mobster Tony Soprano's daughter asks him, "Are you in the Mafia?"
Echoing those witnesses before the Senate committee a half-century earlier, he responds, "Am I in the what?"
"Whatever you want to call it, organized crime?"
Of course not, says the crime boss played by James Gandolfini. "I'm in the waste management business. Everybody immediately assumes you're mobbed up."
The link back to 1951, Thompson says, is inescapable. "That answer he gave his daughter could have come right out of, and practically did come right out of, the Kefauver hearings."
This story was edited and produced by Lauren Migaki and Elissa Nadworny, with production help from Kadin Mills.
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