Record
Hearing
1950-06-22/1950-08-16
U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, via Internet Archive
Kefauver Part 2: Virgil W. Peterson's statements naming Owney Madden (1950)
Three passages in the Chicago Crime Commission director's statement to the Kefauver Committee in which Owney Madden is named: among Frank Costello's associates of the 1920s and early 1930s, in a list of Costello's associations, and as someone Gaetano Ricci was "understood" to have telephoned in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
- Date
- 1950-06-22/1950-08-16
- Kind
- hearing
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A hearing print of the United States Senate, published by the Government Printing Office. A work of the United States Congress, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The Internet Archive item marks it not in copyright.
Virgil W. Peterson, operating director of the Chicago Crime Commission, gave the committee a long prepared statement printed in Part 2 of the hearings. The volume prints sessions from 22 June to 16 August 1950; the day of Peterson’s statement was not determined for this page. Owney Madden is named three times, read from the archive’s OCR of the printed pages.
On page 132: “During the 1920’s and the early 1930’s Frank Costello numbered among his associates such individuals as Louis Lepke Buchalter, Dutch Schultz, Arnold Rothstein, Joe Adonis, Owney Madden, and Willie Bioff.” On page 158, in a list of the men with whom, Peterson says, Costello’s wealth and power were made possible “through an association of several decades,” he names “Owney Madden, known as Owney the Killer.” On page 162, in a passage about Gaetano Ricci, he says: “He is also understood to have made calls to Owney Madden in Hot Springs, Ark. Madden was a close associate of Frank Costello and other members of that group.”
These are a private crime commission’s statements of its own information, offered to the committee. They are not testimony by Madden, who did not appear, and not findings of the committee. The Hot Springs sentence is hearsay on its face (“is also understood”). The nickname is Peterson’s and is repeated here only because the page quotes him.
