not clear, although some in the underworld view his sending Louis Lepke to the electric chair in 1944 as having a link with the alleged payoff from the mob. At the time the right wing press, especially the Hearst
New York Daily Mirror
, speculated that Lepke, one of the top-ranking members of the national crime syndicate, tried to save his own life by offering Dewey "material ... that would make him an unbeatable presidential candidate." The thinly veiled reports inferred that Lepke could deliver to Dewey Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and President Franklin Roosevelt's most important labor adviser, as the instigator of several crimes including one of murder. In any event, Dewey, after granting Lepke a 48-hour reprieve, did not deal with Lepke and let him go to his death.
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Many Dewey sycophants lionized him for that act. Prosecutor Turkus said, "To the credit of Dewey, he did resist and he did reject. He would not do business with Lepke, even with the greatest prize on earth at stakethe presidency of the United States." But had Dewey granted clemency to Lepke, it more than likely would have guaranteed his defeat. If he had gotten Hillmanassuming Lepke could deliver himthe price essentially would have been letting such men as Luciano, Shapiro, Adonis, Costello, Lansky and Anastasia off the hook on murder charges. Indeed, Lepke indicated he would leak no mob information. To let Lepke live for the price of Hillman alone (although Hillman was never directly named) would appear a politically motivated effort to dethrone FDR by nailing his chief labor adviser.
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There are other explanations to the incident, especially that Lepke might not have been able to hand Dewey the labor leader because he had no evidence. When Lepke was strapped into the electric chair, it was likely that the biggest sighs of relief came not from Hillman or the White House, but from the ruling board of the crime syndicate. They inherited Lepke's racket empire and none of the headaches he might have given them.
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By the early 1950s, Dewey, disappointed at the end of his White House hopes, also exhibited considerable disinterest with his racketbusting past. His actions regarding the Kefauver crime investigation hearings in 1950 and 1951 were disturbing even to Republicans on the committee and in congress. Dewey refused to appear at the New York City sessions although he said that if given enough advance notice he might offer the senators a few minutes of his valuable time in his private office. The offer made no allowances for the committee's staff or counsel, investigators, court stenographers and so on, and under these circumstances, they declined leaving New York City for Albany. In refusing to appeara remarkable position for a racketbuster who had constantly hauled witnesses in for questioning and declared an innocent man would want to help official inquiriesDewey's behavior differed little, many held, from the actions of mobsters thumbing their noses at the U.S. Senate.
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The committee wanted to question Dewey about the facts surrounding Luciano's pardon, an action he had never been obliged to answer in an official forum, and also about the wide-open gambling in Saratoga in upstate New York, where evidence indicated the rackets and the fix were operated by Meyer Lansky. From the evidence the committee did hear, Governor Dewey was just about the most uninformed man in the state on gambling in Saratoga. His superintendent of the state police, John A. Gaffney, said it was not his responsibility to do anything about gambling there or pass along information about it to Dewey. However, even deprived of police intelligence, Dewey undoubtedly had to know what was going on in Saratoga, a watering hole for the social set in which Dewey mixed. Yet Dewey's ignorance about gambling was not repeated concerning bailiwicks other than in his own state, if the words of gambling expert John Scarne are to be accepted. Scarne related he once asked Dewey at a Republican rally in the Waldorf Astoria why he had cold-shouldered the committee. Dewey responded, according to Scarne, more or less in the following words: "Scarne, I knew that when I issued that invitation to Kefauver and his four Senate stooges, they would never show up in Albany. They knew that I knew that the Committee members' five states had more political corruption, gambling, casinos, bookies and houses of prostitution than any other five states in the country."
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Thus we are left with a governor of New York knowing more about crime and corruption in such states as Tennessee, Maryland, Wisconsin, Wyoming and New Hampshire (of all places) than in his own.
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Had the Dewey misadventures ended with Kefauver, his acts still might be construed as nothing more than political competitiveness, even though a number of other governors from both partiesStevenson of Illinois, Lausche of Ohio and Youngdahl of Minnesotahad eagerly cooperated. By the early 1960s however Dewey had become more accommodating than ever about mob gangsters and the way they operated in the new gambling scene. The former racketbuster became a major stockholder in Mary Carter Paints, which somehow just seemed to have an interest in gambling in the Bahamas. And on Grand Bahama the man pulling the strings for Mary Carter Paints (later renamed Resorts International) was none other than Meyer Lansky, who had long before learned how to invest secretly in companies through the wonders of Swiss bank accounts. While this did not disturb Dewey, it appears to have
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