AMERICAN CRIME INQUIRY

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26516, 3 September 1951, Page 7

AMERICAN CRIME INQUIRY

Senate Committee’s Report

WASHINGTON, August 31. Many communities in the United States were held captive by the twin evils of organised crime and corrupt public officials, the Senate Crime Investigation Committee reported to-day. The committee issued the report after 16 months of investigation. It recommended that a national crime council be established, to act as a guiding body to local crime commissions. The committee painted a grim picture of narcotics trafficking in the United States, and suggested that a clearing house of information should be established, and that the growing of opium-producing poppies should be prohibited throughout the world. It also proposed increased enforcement staffs, and stiffer penalties for violators. The nation had been "jolted to its foundation” during the last two years by the “startling increase in the abuse of drugs by young people," the committee said. Noting the big increases in juvenile addiction in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, the committee declared: “In a large number of cases these young people were engaging in crime for the sole purpose of supporting their drug habit.” It stated that a carefully-devised educational programme to help to tell the nation the facts about narcotics would be helpful. Underworld operators in large metropolitan areas and in smaller communities obtained political influence by outright bribery of public officials, or by making substantial contributions to political campaigns, the committee said. "Democracy vanishes in a captive community because the ordinary citizen, for practical purposes, has nothing to say about his Government," the report said.' The report declared that Mr Abner Zwillman, a New Jersey millionaire and former bootlegger, wielded so much power in important Government circles that honest citizens who told committee investigators in private about his New Jersey operations were “too terrified to testify in the open for fear of personal or political reprisals, or financial ruin.”