Tampa residents once took on corruption that turned city into 'hell in a handcart'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : Other times, the committee sent investigation reports to the law enforcement officials they trusted.
53% : Their self-charged duties included vetting candidates for law enforcement positions, scrutinizing trials and investigations and forging their own probes.
48% : But neither the Vice Squad nor any law enforcement agency was part of that probe.
47% : Later that year, Nuccio declared that the commission was no longer needed because the city again trusted law enforcement.
42% : "The moral of the Tampa story is this," Estes Kefauver, the senator who led the nationwide investigation, wrote in his final report, "if good citizens of a community shut their eyes to wholesale violation of a law ... law enforcement and honesty in public office will go to hell in a handcart."
41% : According to Iorio, Tampa witnesses "produced a list of 105 officially protected outlets that law enforcement officials were not allowed to tamper with."
40% : And, in 1954, the committee helped the St. Petersburg police investigate whether Santo Trafficante Jr. and his brother Henry Trafficante offered a bribe to law enforcement in that city.
38% : Instead, it was led by the Hillsborough County Crime Commission, an independent organization that was backed by residents who claimed that local elected officials and law enforcement had become too corrupted by organized crime to be trusted without oversight.
38% : But, in December 1950, during a local hearing that questioned politicians, law enforcement and alleged gangsters, the federal Kefauver Commission charged with exposing organized crime throughout the nation used the Velasco story as evidence of Tampa's corruption.
34% : In 1952, they led a resident-raid on an illegal casino after local law enforcement did not respond to a tip.

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