overworked, and underpaid. But it is staffed by honest, competent, imaginative and dedicated men, as have been the FBI, IRS, and Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents assigned to organized crime.

But look at the record. Between 1961 and 1968, the number of federally secured convictions of organized criminals rose from 73 to 520. That was a real accomplishment, but it scarcely touched the principal families of La Cosa Nostra. La Cosa Nostra has 5,000 members. Between 1961 and 1968 indictments were obtained against 290; convictions, against 147. That is three (3) percent. Of the 147, the most significant portion were convicted of tax evasion. La Cosa Nostra members are learning that by declaring on their tax returns more and more under "miscellaneous income," they can avoid prosecution.

To effectively strike against organized crime, we must strike it at all levels. But it is intentionally structured to avoid conventional sources of evidence. For these reasons, Mr. Chairman, we must take steps to encourage the giving of evidence, to enable the compulsion of evidence, and to render it less difficult to secure convictions where we do obtain evidence.

Providing physical protection for witnesses willing to testify is one of the steps we can take.

Providing immunity, so that we may constitutionally compel testimony is another. This is the purpose of S. 975, which permits the Attorney General or an Assistant Attorney General designated by him for the purpose, to approve the granting of immunity from prosecution for federal offenses revealed in the testimony of a witness. This is similar to the provision made in title two of S. 30. However, where S. 30 provides that the evidence revealed may not be used in subsequent prosecutions, S. 975 provides that there shall be no prosecutions.

Mr. Chairman, you indicated in your recent speech on the floor that you have made this departure from the usual form of immunity provisions in the belief that recent Supreme Court decisions have left the decision in Counselmen v. Hitchcock, 142 U.S. 547 (1892), without substantial foundation. Counselmen declared an earlier statute which prohibited only use of the evidence, and not prosecution for the act, unconstitutional. I will not argue the constitutional point, but merely suggest that my bill is free of constitutional doubts.

I have serious doubts that the difference in result to be obtained under the two measures will be great. The burden of showing at a subsequent trial that the evidence employed has been arrived at from independent sources-that it is not "fruit of the poisonous tree"-will be tremendously difficult to carry in most cases. And I would expect any witness who found himself compelled to testify to reveal adequate information to insure this kind of protection against subsequent prosecution. I think that prosecutors have found under existing rules an exclusion of evidence illegally gained and the doctrine of excluding the fruit of the poisonous tree that second prosecutions are most often futile. I can't really foresee a better result in the present circumstances.

The final bill that I introduced which is under consideration in these hearings, S. 976, find a counterpart in S. 30's title eight. This is the provision which gives a judge authority to commit persons who have been convicted of a crime which he finds to have been part of an ongoing scheme of organized criminal activity, to terms of up to thirty years of imprisonment.

This measure was recommended by the President's Crime Commission, and a Special Committee of the American Bar Association. As drafted it is based on the efforts of the American Law Institute, included as part of the Model Penal Code and the Advisory Council of Judges of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in the Model Sentencing Act.

These provisions were carefully drafted to meet potential constitutional objections, and I believe they will pass a constitutional muster. The circumstances under which the law can be brought to play are narrowly defined. It applies only to felony convictions, where the court finds that: the defendant is 21 years of age or older, the felony was committed as part of a continuing criminal activity in concert with one or more persons, and that because of the dangerousness of the defendant such period of confined correctional treatment or custody is required for the protection of the public.

The defendant is given the protection of a full hearing on the question of whether the provisions should be invoked, where he will be represented by counsel, and has a right to introduce evidence to resist application of the section to him.

Mr. Chairman, I want to take this opportunity to commend you again for your efforts in this area. You have devoted much time to it in the past, and made significant contributions to our knowledge about the workings of organized crime and the ways in which we must go about fighting it. I hope that, as a result of these hearings, you will soon be reporting out a comprehensive bill that will include the provisions I have discussed today. As I have noted, the provisions of S. 30 and S. 975 and S. 976 do not materially differ. However, I would strongly urge that you incorporate the provisions of S. 974 into the measure which you ultimately report to the full committee.

Senator TYDINGS. Mr. Chairman, as you know, perhaps better than most, the concern in the Congress with organized crime is not new. Because of the dimensions of the problem it will require a massive effort to overcome and there are no easy or readily apparent solutions. Also as you know better than most the public interest waxes and wanes depending on the sensationalism of the headlines from time to time.

Senator MCCLELLAN. Under conditions today which should they be doing waxing or waning?

Senator TYDINGS. They should be waxing, Mr. Chairman, and that is the purpose, the thrust of my comments, to make more certain the effort against organized crime is a continuing one and not one depending upon the vicissitudes of public opinion.

I think it is tremendously important that we take the necessary steps to reactivate and to institutionalize, so to speak, the Federal effort to combat organized crime.

In this area, perhaps more than any other area of criminal activity a sustained, long-term, continuing effort is necessary. You are dealing with a virtual hydra, with almost unlimited resources and powers of regeneration when you are talking about the Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, the organized criminal elements in this country. A few convictions of numbers racketeers or dope peddlers is really a drop in the bucket. I think it is going to take the efforts of many people in public and in private life over the course of many years to really effectively combat the forces of organized crime in this country.

When you just look at the annual profits involved, which run literally into the billions of dollars, you can see that a few raids here and there or a few convictions of minor professional dope peddlers or number solicitors doesn't really make the difference and won't make the difference.

Unfortunately the effects of the organized criminal activities are felt at every level of society, and yet sometimes they are so subtle that we don't even recognize them.

For instance, take the narcotics addict. He has it brought directly home to him in the fact of his addiction and the source of his continuing supply, although he may not realize the complex superstructure which actually supports and supplies the local pusher. The harassed borrower gets into the hands of the loan shark, where the usurious interest rates are enforced by savage and sometimes deadly enforcers. How often does the ordinary citizen recognize the additional pennies that he pays to support increased costs of law enforcement or perhaps even more shocking the extra cents he pays for given products because of the syndicates' infiltration of a legitimate business or of its infiltration of leadership of an individual local of a labor union.

The situation is more unfortunate because it is so often the very, very poor in our ghettos or center cities who are the most directly and

severely injured. The greatest single source of revenue for organized crime, Mr. Chairman, is its gambling activities, which net an estimate of between $7 billion to $50 billion a year depending on which crime report or which study you are using for the statistics.

According to the Intelligence Bureau of the IRS, persons who place illegal bets provide untaxed profits to the underworld at the rate of more than $600,000 an hour.

A great portion of this is gained through the numbers rackets and, as you know, the numbers rackets primarily prey upon the very, very poor, the desperately poor in the center cities of this country. They drain from these people, the inhabitants of our ghettos and slums and their families, precious dollars and cents which ought to be spent for food and shelter and clothing of their children.

The reasons for the unqualified success of organized criminal activities are varied and often as disturbing as the existence of the enterprise itself.

Too often they are evidence of the unknowing complicity of the average man and the willing partnership of some of the very politically and law-enforcement forces upon whom we should rely to ferret out and destroy the syndicates.

Even when isolated incidents occur or come to light, in most situations our local police forces are not really equipped to deal with them. Our law-enforcement structure is ill suited to the growth of new kinds of crimes, and organized crime is in the history of law enforcement in this country relatively new, a 20th-century development, really.

It is true we have always had some type of organized crime, and if we look upon the frontier gangs of the last century, they are really not comparable to La Cosa Nostra today.

The problem is further complicated

Senator MCCLELLAN. They were not comparable, Senator, because they were primarily local, isn't that correct, whereas the Cosa Nostra is national, indeed international.

Senator TYDINGS. Exactly.

Not only that, but one other aspect of La Cosa Nostra and I consider this perhaps more sinister than any other, Mr. Chairman, is the millions and millions of dollars which the syndicate spends every year to bribe police officers and politicians. That is one of the most deadly, destructive aspects of the whole operation of the organization of La Cosa Nostra or organized crime, the amount they spend to bribe and to infiltrate political organizations and law-enforcement agencies.

Senator MCCLELLAN. Senator, I remember the support you gave us in the battle we had to authorize limited wiretapping and electronic surveillance. I know you felt then, as I did, that that was and could be a very vital and important weapon in the fight against organized crime. I wonder if you agree with me that in the particular areas you have just commented on, bribery, corrupting public officials, isn't it an almost indispensable weapon there to get effective results?

Senator TYDINGS. Absolutely, Mr. Chairman. And as you will recall, I think we both made that point on the floor of the U.S. Senate in the debate on, I think it was title III of the Safe Streets Act last year. Senator MCCLELLAN. I hardly know how you are going to combat bribery and corruption of officials, unless we have that weapon plus

some others, and I think maybe S. 30 has some provisions in it that will also be helpful.

But where organized crime syndicates are able to corrupt local lawenforcement officials, they are able to operate with immunity. It is just imperative, I think, that we strike a blow at those who conspire with them or yield to their corrupt influences in order to eliminate and eradicate their operations from many areas where they are actually successful by reason of the corruption of the local government or the local authorities.

Senator TYDINGS. Mr. Chairman, it is really impossible for the Federal law-enforcement agencies to turn their backs and say if the local law-enforcement agencies did a better job they could clean up the problem. They just can't. We need a massive, nationwide effort, and the Federal participation I am speaking of is the active and the sustained involvement of Federal agencies under a continuing, institutionalized leadership of the Department of Justice in uncovering and prosecuting organized criminals.

Now, the Federal involvement in the fight against organized crime in one form or another, stretches back for a number of decades, but it has only been since the meeting of the Attorney General's Conference on Organized Crime in 1950, and the investigations of the Senate Select Committee To Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce that we have been committed to a sustained Federal effort.

The Kefauver Committee said that, while Federal agencies cannot be substituted for state and local enforcement in dealing with organized crime, the Federal Government must provide leadership and guidance, establish additional techniques for maximum coordination of law enforcement agencies, take a positive approach in using its power to fight organized crime, and seek legislation when its powers are insufficient.

In 1954, the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department, a part of the Criminal Division, was organized to coordinate Federal activities in this field. At the time of the famous Apalachin meeting, 3 years later, the Organized Crime Section of the Department of Justice had a staff of 10 attorneys.

As a result of the discovery of the Apalachin conference, which incidentally, was by a State patrolman of the New York State Police Force, highway patrol, the Attorney General appointed a special group on organized crime in April of 1958, which pursued the activities of the individual attendants at that Apalachin meeting and conducted a number of grand jury investigations. The group, however, was disbanded after the trial, and many of its functions transferred to the Organized Crime Section in the department.

The group also recommended that an Attorney General's Office on Syndicated Crime be established to spearhead the fight and to coordinate Federal efforts.

Many of its recommendations still remain to be implemented. Some are among the legislative proposals which are the subject of these hearings.

Now the next focus on organized crime came through the activities and the investigations of your committee, the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Managements Field, Mr. Chairman, and your investigation revealed to the Nation the significant and

greatly disturbing extent to which organized criminals had infiltrated legitimate business enterprises and legitimate labor unions.

However, by 1960, the Organized Crime Section of the Department of Justice still had only 17 attorneys.

It was not until Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that the Federal effort took a new direction and began to develop the staff and the resources which were needed and which must be marshaled now if we are to cope with the menace of the syndicates.

I might say, Mr. Chairman, if Senator Kennedy hadn't been your counsel and hadn't worked with you in these hearings and hadn't had a particular and personal knowledge of the viciousness of the implications of this Cosa Nostra, he might not have put the emphasis on the organized crime fight that he did when he was Attorney General. Senator MCCLELLAN. He did put an emphasis on it.

Senator TYDINGS. He did.

Senator MCCLELLAN. And in my judgment had he remained there he would have developed a very strong arsenal of weapons to combat it by this time. He had a very efficient organization.

Senator TYDINGS. I think the chairman is absolutely right.

Senator MCCLELLAN. I tried to give Attorney General Kennedy due credit in some remarks I made in the Senate a few days ago. I feel that he really initiated the effort

Senator TYDINGS. That is right, he did. From 1960 to 1963 he increased the number of attorneys in the Organized Crime Section from 16 to 60. He put the full force and prestige of the Attorney Generalship behind the fight so that the various Federal investigative agencies, who don't like to get involved in extra work if they can avoid it, were influenced to cooperate. They are human, I mean we have got the bureaucracy there as well as in every other part of the Government, but they knew when just a little divisional director of the organized crime section was calling for help he was speaking for the Attorney General, and even though he wasn't a Deputy Attorney General or even though he wasn't an Assistant Attorney General. They knew that he was speaking for the Attorney General of the United States and of course because of the relationship of the Attorney General and the Presidency, it became even more effective.

The point I would like to make, Mr. Chairman, is that when Senator Kennedy left the Attorney Generalship, we had good Attorneys General but they didn't have the same dedication, the same personal experience, the same interest, the same knowledge, the same force in carrying out this war on organized crime, at least for several years. After he left, it sort of lagged, and my concern is that any legislation that comes out of this committee provide for the institutionalization for the force within the Department which doesn't depend on the vicissitudes or the opinions or the personality or the knowledge of one Attorney General from another. If we don't provide that continuing machinery then we won't do the job, and it will depend purely on individual personnel, persons from time to time, who happen to become the Attorney General of the United States.

Now, I know within the Department of Justice, because I was U.S. attorney, that the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division always opposes an Assistant Attorney General in charge