# Kefauver Committee, Chicago: testimony of Theodore Roe (18 October 1950)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/kefauver-part-5-roe-testimony-1950-10-18/

Theodore Roe told the committee in Chicago that his business was "Operating a policy wheel," that he had been a partner for about ten years with the Jones brothers, then living in Mexico, and that he had started working for them about twenty-two or twenty-three years earlier.

Printed pages 743 to 749 of Part 5, in the session dated Wednesday, 18 October 1950. The first page number is inferred from the running heads in the OCR, which lack it; check the page images before citing a pinpoint. Roe was sworn by the chairman, Senator Kefauver, and appeared with his attorney, Edward J. Hess. Questions came from the chairman and from committee counsel George Robinson and Rudolph Halley.

Asked the nature of his business, Roe answered: "Operating a policy wheel." He said, "I think that I have been a partner about 10 years," and agreed that it was with the Jones brothers, who "are in Mexico." He named the partners as "Clifford Davis, and he takes care of that business of the books; and the other is George Jones and Ed Jones and their mother, Harriet Jones, five partners." He recalled one year in which the wheel was "around $800,000" ahead (the OCR garbles a second figure) and said, "I can't recall, but the records will show." He described the game as drawing twelve of seventy-eight numbers, and estimated the writers at "somewhere around 300 or 400." Asked where the books were written, he said "all over in the colored belt, Twenty-third Street on out to Sixty-sixth, or something like that"; "colored belt" is his phrase and the committee's. He said that Ed Jones had been kidnapped, "about 6 years ago, I think," and that the brothers had left for Mexico about two weeks later.

On the wheel's history he said: "I worked for the Jones brothers, and I guess from the time I started, it must have been about 22 or 23 years ago that I worked for them. But when they got indicted and were closed, they couldn't bother with opening any more soon, and they gave me the privilege to go ahead and open up." Asked why he was not indicted, he said: "Because I was just working." He denied paying the police captain anything and said he knew nothing about a syndicate beyond gossip and the newspapers.

These are a witness's sworn answers. The indictment of the Jones brothers that he mentions is not filed, and no record of it has been opened. In December he dated the kidnapping to 1946 ([his second appearance](/items/kefauver-part-5-roe-testimony-1950-12-19/)). The committee did not charge him.

## Sources

- Internet Archive, scan of the printed hearings, Part 5: Illinois (Boston Public Library copy): https://archive.org/details/investigationofo05unit
- Full text (OCR) on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/download/investigationofo05unit/investigationofo05unit_djvu.txt