Free The Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino by Matt Birkbeck

refused to answer most of the questions put to him on the ground that his answer might tend to incriminate him. He produced voluminous records but refused to disclose their contents. He refused to say whether he knew Louis Cohen and other underworld characters or whether he took Scranton police on trips in his airplane. He did admit, however, that his father was Ulisses Baldassari, who furnished the bail for the seven defendants arrested by the state police in the raids on Cohen’s printing operations.
    He declined to say whether he owned any slot machines and whether his brother ran a horse room at 108 Adams Avenue. He also refused to say whether he had paid protection money to any official or whether it was true that he had given a $2,500 ring to the director of public safety.
    At first he refused to name the partners in Baldassari Amusement Company, but he was finally compelled to admit that they consisted of himself, his brother Al and their two wives. He was unwilling to try to reconcile this with the fact that the firm’s income-tax returns listed only the two wives as the partners.
    The district attorney of Lackawanna County, Carlon M. O’Malley, gave what seemed to the committee to be a rather unsatisfactory explanation of the small number of gambling prosecutions in his county. He said his office by tradition is a prosecuting office, not a policing agency, although he does have four county detectives. He said he would be naive if he attempted to tell the committee that the Scranton horse rooms did not exist or had not existed for a number of years, but he claimed that the responsibility for any laxity rested with the city police department, which has 175 uniformed men and 12 detectives. He referred to the state police raids on the Cohen lottery ticket printing establishment last March, in connection with which Patrick Joseph Size, Gregory Size, and others received fines ranging from $200 to $300, but no jail sentences were imposed.
    O’Malley stated that on June 29, while on vacation, he issued orders to his staff to conduct a survey of gambling in the areas of Lackawanna County outside of Scranton. This was prompted, he said, by the reappearance of Cohen-controlled Treasury-balance lottery tickets in the county. It is significant to note that this committee’s investigators entered Scranton on June 20, and their presence was publicly announced several days before Mr. O’Malley ordered his survey.
    He said his staff reported back that they and the state police had communicated with all police chiefs in the communities outside of Scranton and had been informed that they had no knowledge of gambling, with the exception of punchboards, which they promised to suppress forthwith.
    Mr. O’Malley submitted to the committee a report of the survey, which showed that warnings to cease operations had been given to all suspected gamblers, including Louis Cohen, although Cohen’s chief lieutenant, Patrick Joseph Size, was not in Scranton when the warning was issued. In spite of Mr. O’Malley’s disclaimer of responsibility for gambling in the city of Scranton, the “close and stay closed” order described in his report was issued to a number of Scranton gamblers.
    Committee counsel posed this question to Mr. O’Malley: “I wonder if you can explain why it is the place stays wide open until our investigators arrive and our investigators can find it [gambling] like any other citizen, yet the police are not doing anything about it. Are the police receiving protection for that?” His answer was, “I have no knowledge of that and cannot answer it.” Mr. O’Malley’s attention was also called to the fact that the horse room in the Greyhound Terminal Building was across the street from the district attorney’s office, and the Baldassari horse room was in the next block. He acknowledged that a gambling place in Carbondale was located in a building owned by the mother of the prothonotary of Lackawanna County.
    Mr.