Vol. 4, No. 7, July 2007
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Gambling, Round 1
Gambling in Atlantic City came to an end when Congress came to town
Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver chaired the committee from its May 1950 inception to May 1951. After that, Democrat Herbert O’Conor of Maryland ran the show. And it was a show, with televised hearings in cities around the country. Hearings were held in Washington as well as a number of cities throughout the United States.
During the March 1950 New York hearings, the sight of gangsters bristling at the questions of committee counsel Rudolph Halley became familiar, as did the stock response, “I refuse to answer on the ground that it may tend to incriminate or degrade me.” The hearings were a television landmark, and garnered the committee mountains of publicity.
By the time the committee arrived in Atlantic City, July 6 and 7, 1951, the bloom was off the rose: testimony as TV theater was played out, and Kefauver himself had left the committee.
But Atlantic City was still important enough to be included in the committee’s August 31, 1951 final report as one of three “medium-sized” cities spotlighted for their vice.
The committee met in executive session in Atlantic City, foregoing dramatic public hearings for a more intimate experience in rooms 325 and 326 of the Traymore Hotel. That’s right—the “executive session” took place in a regular hotel room.
Lester Hunt of Wyoming, the only actual senator in Atlantic City, presided over the sessions and special counsel Samuel Lane asked most of the questions.
The hearings started promptly at 10 a.m. with the testimony of Jack Portock, one of the “Four Horsemen,” a group of five or more policemen who had been ostracized for attempting to enforce anti-gambling statutes. His fellow Horseman Frank Gribben followed him.
Other witnesses included Robert Warke, a retired judge; Harry Saunders, the chief of police; and an assortment of public officials and former gambling operators.
The committee finished its work by 1:40 p.m. Thursday and quickly returned to Washington, D.C. to share its findings.
The committee’s final report, issued August 31, 1951, concluded that Atlantic City was “riddled with rackets, including nearly every known type of gambling” from bingo to the numbers (illegal lottery).
Nearly every cigar store, the report alleged, was a front for a book-maker, and the police deliberately refused to enforce anti-gambling statutes.
The committee found the area under the stranglehold of a two-headed monster: state Senator Frank S. “Hap” Farley controlled the county’s politics, while Herman “Stumpy” Orman ran the “rackets,” chiefly gambling.
The committee invited Orman to testify, and he did, though he evinced a peculiarly helpful amnesia. “His knowledge of local government and personalities was excellent,” the final report deadpanned, but “with regard to financial matters, he was unable to remember transactions that had occurred only a few months before.” Orman took the Fifth when asked why, in recent years, he’d deposited about $16,000 more in his bank account than, according to his taxes, he’d made in gross income.
Two weeks later, the committee met in Washington and heard a reprise of the Horsemens’ testimony as well as other witnesses.
Most public officials maintained that cracking down on the “rackets” would be bad for business, and history may have proven them right: after most of the city’s illegal gambling closed down in the 1950s, Atlantic City entered a tailspin that only ended with the legalization of gambling in 1976. One man’s vice, it seems, is another’s redevelopment.
