Kefauver Part 7: Frank Costello on the Louisiana Mint Co. and slot machines (New York, 13 March 1951), pp. 915-927

Frank Costello testified at the United States courthouse, Foley Square, New York, during the committee’s March 1951 hearings; the session heading before these pages reads Tuesday, March 13, 1951 (Part 7, pp. 915-927). Counsel Rudolph Halley asked about income of $70,685.33 from “the Louisiana Mint Co. in New Orleans” shown on a tax return. Costello said: “It was a mint machine, known as a slot machine,” and later, “A mint office, slot machines.” He said he had left the business to Phil Kastel; his counsel supplied the answer that his last income from it was in 1946; and he agreed with the chairman that a brother-in-law also held a share.

He said he first went into the slot-machine business in New Orleans “in ‘35.” Counsel asked whether “Huey Long, then Governor of the State of Louisiana, came to New York and asked you” whether he would “care to go to New Orleans and go into the slot-machine business,” and he answered, “Yes; that is correct.” He said the Governor wanted him to survey locations “because he wanted to put these slot machines there,” and to pass legislation taxing them for an old-age pension, and that he left Kastel in Louisiana to make the survey. Senator Tobey asked whether slot machines were then illegal under Louisiana law. Costello answered, “I presume they were, otherwise he would not look to pass legislation,” and later said that it was he, not the Governor, who broke the law.

Senate Report 82-199, the committee’s report on Costello’s contempt, does not give this account. Its text contains no reference to slot machines or to the Louisiana Mint Co., and its only Louisiana reference is Costello’s statement that he had claimed privilege on whether gambling was conducted at the Beverly Country Club of New Orleans. The slot-machine account on this page comes from the Part 7 testimony alone. What Costello said about the Governor is his own account.