The Greatest Menace
"The term "Cold War" has long been associated with the "red menace" of communism at home and abroad. Yet as Lee Bernstein shows in this illuminating study, during the 1950s the threat posed by organized crime preoccupied Americans at least as much as the fear of communist subversion. At the beginning of the decade, the televised hearings of Senator Estes Kefauver's crime committee, focusing on colorful mob figures like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, attracted far more attention than the spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the years that followed, public concern about gangsters and racketeering continued unabated, even after the anticommunist fever of McCarthyism had begun to subside.". "Drawing on a broad range of evidence, from government records to films, television shows, and pulp novels, Bernstein explains how the campaign against organized crime reflected deep social and political anxieties. Just as the inquisitions of Senator McCarthy fed on popular fears of international conspiracy and alien infiltration, the anticrime investigations of the 1950s raised the specter of a foreign-based criminal cartel - the Sicilian Mafia - preying on a vulnerable American public. The association of the foreign-born with criminal activity led to the creation of state and local citizens' committees, to calls for new restrictions on immigration, and to a dramatic escalation of penalties for drug law violators. Labor unions also came under attack particularly after the McClellan Committee and its chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, claimed to have found a link between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, and the Mafia."--BOOK JACKET.