In January 1955, Democratic senator John McClellan of Arkansas became chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Previously Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) had used the chair position to conduct his discredited investigations into the Communist influences in the national government. McClellan turned the committee toward other topics. Initially he looked at corruption in government contracts and trade with Communist China. He selected a young attorney named Robert Francis Kennedy to be the chief counsel and chief investigator for the committee. Kennedy sensed a presence of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (the Teamsters’ union) in certain contract abuses, and he began to probe Teamsters’ activity. During 1956, he stumbled upon evidence of corruption by Teamsters’ president David Beck. Kennedy was influential in having McClellan’s committee transformed into a Select Committee on Labor Corruption. The eight-member bipartisan committee met for two years, during which Robert Kennedy’s efforts were directed first at Beck, who was forced to resign his union position after a conviction for stealing from the union, and then at Beck’s successor, James Riddle Hoffa. The investigations of Hoffa revealed a widespread involvement of Teamsters’ union funding of casinos in Nevada, as well as other connections of union officials and organized crime figures; in turn, union activity was linked to illegal gambling. The committee reiterated the conclusions of the Kefauver Committee that there was indeed an organized crime association known as the Mafia and that its major illegal activity concerned gambling.
Following the 1960 elections, McClellan was appointed to be the chair of a newly organized crime committee while Kennedy became the attorney general in the presidential administration of his brother John F. Kennedy. The crime committee met for three years.
Kennedy created a crime task force within his office and pursued gamblers and their activity whether it was legal or illegal. He also pursued Jimmy Hoffa, seeking to expose him as a thief and gangster within the union. Kennedy and McClellan often worked in tandem, especially in the legislative field. Their joint efforts led to the passage of two major pieces of legislation in 1961 that grew out of the Kefauver Committee report. One law banned the use of interstate commerce for any illegal gambling equipment – hence expanding the thrust of the Johnson Act. The other prohibited the use of any interstate communication devices (wire services) in order to transmit information used for wagering activities.
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