Senate Report 83: warrants for witnesses the committee could not serve (1951)
Senate Report No. 83, 82d Congress, in which the Kefauver Committee said it could not serve subpoenas on seventeen named witnesses and asked the Senate to direct the Sergeant at Arms to take them into custody.
- Date
- 1951-02-08
- Kind
- hearing
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- S. Rept. No. 83, 82d Cong., 1st Sess. (1951); Serial Set 11486
- Rights
- A work of the United States Congress. Public domain in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105.
The title printed on the report is “Relating to the apprehension of certain persons desired as witnesses before the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.” It is Senate Report No. 83, 82d Congress, 1st Session, submitted by Senator Kefauver to accompany S. Res. 65 and ordered printed February 8 (legislative day, January 29), 1951. The text was read from the Serial Set PDF on govinfo.
The committee reports that it had been unable to serve subpoenas on a list of witnesses who, it believed, had gone into hiding or left the country, and it recommends that the President of the Senate issue warrants directing the Sergeant at Arms to take them into custody. The list has seventeen names, including Rocco and Charles Fischetti, Murray Llewellyn Humphreys, Jacob Guzik, Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Louis Rothkopf (printed “Rothkapf” in the list) and Samuel Tucker. The report cites two Supreme Court decisions on the Senate’s power to compel testimony, McGrain v. Daugherty, 273 U.S. 135 (1927), and Barry v. United States ex rel. Cunningham, 279 U.S. 597 (1929).
The list prints last-known home addresses for the witnesses; they are not copied here. It also names business places where some of them were last sought: the Desert Inn, Las Vegas (Tucker); the Yorkshire Club, Newport, Ky. (Croft); the Lookout House, Covington, Ky. (Brink); and the Flamingo Club, Newport, Ky. (Levinson).
Several of the men on this list were later brought before the committee under these warrants. The contempt reports that follow from those appearances are Senate Reports 198 (Guzik), 205 (O’Brien), 207 (Croft), 208 (Kleinman), 209 (Rothkopf), 473 (Rocco Fischetti) and 474 (Humphreys). A list of names in a committee request is not a finding about any person on it.
