Corruption The United States Senate investigation into organised crime— the
investigation in which several million television viewers have been simultaneously an audience and an unofficial jury—has reached some startling, if provisional, conclusions about the extent, and the rapidity of growth of the industry, or complex of industries, concerned with vice of every kind. - And, indeed, the situation which it reveals in its third interim report would be bad enough even without the evidence of widespread official corruption and connivance extending from figures as prominent as Mr. O'Dwyer, the former mayor of New York, down to clerks and policemen. The roots go so wide and so deep that it is difficult to see how all of them are to be pulled tip. The remedy of legalisation, which was finally adopted after the experiment with prohibition of alcoholic liquor, is not open except in a few doubtful instances. In the case of gambling, for example, the committee has studied with respect the findings of the recent British .Royal Commission, but it finds that con- ditions in the United States are so different that the question of the legalisation of off-the-course cash betting does not really arise. The offenders have not merely ignored existing law. They have protected themselves by systematic. corruption of officials. What is more the leading eangsters are not only concerned with gambling. They have interests in the drug traffic, in prostitution. in the black market, and in illegal activities in connection with business and the trade unions. It is impossible to destroy the spiders and still leave part of the web. The only remedy is a clean sweep, and that will be far more difficult in organisation and much less spectacular in its dramatic appeal than the televised proceedings of the Senate committee.
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