June 17, 1951: The Richmond Times-Dispatch publishes the first of two big Sunday stories that peek behind the curtain of the numbers racket in the Richmond region. Reporter Charlie McDowell calls it "Richmond’s largest, most lavish gambling indulgence,“ and estimates it is a $3 million a year criminal enterprise. "It is big business, this numbers game, and it is operated like one."
McDowell reports the numbers racket in Richmond is controlled by two syndicates working together "in relative peace and harmony." He doesn't namecheck Harry Donovan, but Donovan clearly is one of the kingpins he is describing. "This pleasant situation has made for reliable payoffs and the confidence of the players, lucrative profits and a minimum of strong-arm activity that would smack of distasteful hoodlumism." How very ... Richmond.
The Times-Dispatch stories helped provide a local frame for recent media coverage of congressional hearings conducted by the U.S. Senate's Kefauver Committee. The Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by ambitious freshman Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, held more than a dozen televised hearings across the country. Several of the hearings featured uncooperative mobsters and probed their connections to allegedly corrupt local officials. An estimated 30 million Americans were transfixed by the televised hearings, which helped galvanize the concept of organized crime in the nation's consciousness and linked street-level gambling and bootlegging to the more violent and nefarious activities of the Mob.
“Something big, unbelievably big and emphatic, smashed into the homes of millions of Americans last week when television cameras, cold-eyed and relentless, were trained on the Kefauver crime hearings,” the Associated Press reported at the time.
LIFE magazine predicted the televised Kefauver Committee hearings would come to occupy a special place in history: "People had suddenly gone indoors into living rooms, taverns, and clubrooms, auditoriums and back-offices. There, in eerie half-light, looking at millions of small frosty screens, people sat as if charmed. Never before had the attention of the nation been riveted so completely on a single matter."
And yet: "In 1951, after all the whoop-de-do kicked up by the Kefauver investigations, the House of Representatives and Senate passed only two antigambling laws," Sports Illustrated would later lament. One new law required a bookmaker to buy an annual $50 federal wagering stamp; the other imposed a 10% tax on betting income. "But inasmuch as few bookies either paid the tax or bought the stamp, the laws were a joke,” SI reported.
In fact, it appears 1953 represented a high-water mark for compliance with the wagering stamp by Virginia's professional gamblers and numbers kingpins: 50 wagering tax stamps were issued to Virginians in 1953, gradually tapering-off to just 17 stamps issued in 1960.
The wagering stamp program set-up a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' dilemma for the gamblers. The self-disclosure required in applying for the stamp provided a virtual road map to criminal activity for state and local police, while failure to apply for a stamp exposed gamblers to federal income tax prosecution. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the wagering stamp tax was an unconstitutional violation of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination.
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