It's a good bet you couldn't have opened many newspapers in the early 1950s without reading about another gambling crackdown in the metro-east.
Dice games. Policy rackets. Slot machines. Bookie joints. With the U.S. Senate Crime Investigation Committee turning up the heat, local officials were finally working to get gamblers out of the betting kitchens.
Led by Sen. Estes Kefauver, the committee opened 11 months of hearings on May 26, 1950. Under the new glare of TV spotlights, the committee probed the connection between politicians, law enforcement, gamblers and the mob, trying to determine whether new federal laws against certain types of crime were needed.
Day after day, the barrage of front-page headlines clearly revealed gambling's pervasive hold on the metro-east. The Carroll Mooney enterprise in East St. Louis was allegedly taking in 20 million a year on horse racing and baseball bets from gamblers in 19 states before its telegraph wires and phone lines were cut.
March 1951 raids in Monroe County netted 100 slot machines in 40 taverns. A policy game in Brooklyn had brought in $500,000 in three months. St. Clair County Sheriff Max Hill had to threaten to shut down Caseyville VFW bingo games because village officials refused to act.
On July 18, 1950, the crime commission even came to St. Louis, where Granite City Mayor Eugene Burnett told them of "winking by some officials at gambling operations."
But several figures whom the commission wanted to talk to most evaded subpoenas. One was John T. English, who would resign as East St. Louis police commissioner the day before the commission issued its final report. He attacked the commission's methods as "contrary to the American system and contrary to fair dealing."
Another was Fairmont City Mayor Jack Vickey, who, like English, had raised eyebrows by accumulating personal wealth beyond what his legitimate income would justify, the commission alleged. Still another was Frank "Buster" Wortman, who allegedly led the Southern Illinois arm of Chicago's Accardo-Guzik-Fischetti gang.
Newspaper editors got into the act, too. Future U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, then at the helm of the Troy newspaper, accused former Madison County Sheriff Dallas Harrell of failing to suppress gambling during his last two years in office. James Monroe of the Collinsville Herald made the same accusations about officials for failing to shut down the 200 Club in Madison.
Yet even at the end of 1950, the Metro-East Journal accused local law enforcement of still looking the other way unless pressured by higher officials. It alleged, for example, that bookmaking continued even during Kefauver's St. Louis appearance and that the 88 Club was resurrected in the spring of 1950 to help raise money for the Democratic primary elections in East St. Louis.
As a result, on May 1, 1951, the commission issued a scathing report on the area's efforts to control gambling.
"There can be little doubt that wide-open conditions flourished in Madison and St. Clair counties because of protection and payoffs," the report stated. "Most shocking .. was the blindness of law enforcement officials and the evidence of their unexplained income. It is no wonder that the law was disregarded flagrantly in East St. Louis."
Accompanying the report were 22 suggestions ranging from a three-member federal crime commission to stiffer narcotics laws and checks of tax returns. Yet even as 1952 dawned, Metro-East Journal writers wondered if they had seen the death or merely the hibernation of wide-open commercialized gambling.
