It started with a simple idea that became a surprise sensation. What it ultimately led to was a televised spectacle that shook the foundations of professional boxing in America.

The way it began was with a U.S. Senate committee convening to investigate the ways organized crime had infiltrated multiple areas of the American economy. This was 1950. Way before "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos." Even before "On The Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall," two films which dramatized the impact of the mob on the fight game. But in the late 1940s, magazine articles and newspaper stories about "the mafia" had caught the eye of many Americans, including Estes Kefauver, an ambitious senator from Tennessee.

Kefauver had cultivated a down-home, folksy brand for himself back home in the “Volunteer State,” where he'd played football at the University of Tennessee before attending law school and later running for political office. But he had grander designs for his political career than being just another face in the U.S. Senate. What he needed in order to make it a reality was some good publicity.

In January of 1950, he introduced a resolution to give the Senate judiciary committee the power to investigate the impact of organized crime on interstate commerce. After a prolonged, bitter debate and narrow vote, Kefauver got what he wanted. Then he set out to make the most of it.

The official name was "The United States Senate Special Committee To Investigate Crime In Interstate Commerce." But it was more broadly known by a much simpler moniker: The Kefauver Committee.

Three things separated it from the tedious work of most Senate committees. The first was that it took the show on the road, with hearings in 14 cities over the better part of two years. The second was that it involved (alleged) organized crime figures, who made for much more colorful characters than those on display in just about every other Senate hearing. But the third and perhaps most important detail was that many of these sessions were broadcast live on television, itself an invention that had just begun to enjoy widespread adoption in the United States.

At the close of World War II, only a few thousand households owned televisions. By the early 1950s, that number had exploded to around 12 million homes. So when the Kefauver committee gave Americans the chance to see the real-life mobsters they'd been hearing about, some of them squirming and others wisecracking their way through the senators' questions, it became a TV sensation.

"From Manhattan as far west as the coaxial cable ran, the U.S. adjusted itself to Kefauver's schedule," Time magazine later wrote of the hearings. "Dishes stood in sinks, babies went unfed, business sagged and department stores emptied while the hearings were on."

Those who didn't own televisions were said to have flocked to TV displays in electronics stores, or to bars with TVs bolted to the wall. One report claimed that bars in St. Louis were more crowded on Kefauver committee hearing days than they had been during the broadcast of the last World Series.

"You could actually see guys with names like 'Melonhead' and 'Nucky' and all of this," Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson explained later, adding that "most of them lived up to the reputations we've seen in movies."

As for what the hearings revealed, it was mostly more sizzle than steak. More than 600 witnesses were hauled in. Many availed themselves of their Fifth Amendment rights, refusing to answer questions they feared might incriminate them.

Frank Costello, one of the top mob figures questioned, refused to let the TV cameras show his face. Instead, the lenses were trained on his hands, which only provoked more mystery and intrigue. Viewers listened to his voice while watching his hands fidget nervously under questioning, which made the whole thing feel oddly interesting even when he was limiting his answers to "I don't know" and "I don't remember."

One of the more memorable exchanges came when Sen. Charles Tobey asked Costello what contributions he'd made to the country since becoming a U.S. citizen some 20 years earlier. Had he ever offered to serve in the military? He had not, Costello replied. Had he ever done anything for his country "as a good citizen," Tobey asked. Costello replied that he wasn't sure what that meant.

"You must have in your mind some things that you've done, that can speak to your conduct as an American citizen," Tobey said. "If so, what are they?"

Costello thought for a moment and then replied: "Paid my tax." It got a laugh, but it was unclear if he'd meant it as a joke.

Others were more forthcoming. Virginia Hill Hauser, the former girlfriend of mobster "Bugsy" Siegel, showed up draped in furs to recount how these men, who she insisted were not gangsters, gave her money and lavish gifts — including a house in Florida.

Willie Moretti, an underboss with the Luciano crime family, treated the whole thing as a lark. He joked around, insisted he had never even heard the term "mafia" before, and made wisecracks about carrying around a mob membership card. It made for great entertainment, but it also doomed him among his associates, who had begun to worry that his lips were getting a little too loose. Moretti seemed to be enjoying the attention too much, even giving interviews to reporters after his appearance and offering his views on current events.

"Moretti had talked too much and so had violated the code of Omerta," Jeffrey Sussman wrote in "Boxing And The Mob," an excellent book on the long history of organized crime influence in fight sports. "He was also suffering from an advanced case of syphilis, and the disease was affecting his mind. The mob decided it was time to get rid of him, and so while having lunch at a restaurant with several mob associates in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, he was shot in the face and head. … Years later, mob boss Vito Genovese said the hit had been a mercy killing."

That original committee issued its final report in the spring of 1951. It had interviewed, either privately or publicly, everyone from Frank Sinatra to Meyer Lansky. What it actually accomplished, beyond creating a media sensation, was less clear.

Even at the time, some newspapers and magazines noted that little new information had been uncovered by the hearings. Kefauver had merely found a way to make the real-life characters act it all out in public.

"Much of the evidence was old stuff contributed by friendly cops and newspapermen," Time Magazine wrote in a 1952 profile of Kefauver, who appeared on that issue's cover. "The committee achieved one really important result. It brought the decent, dishwashing, baby-feeding public face to face with the curled lip of organized crime, and taught the people to vote against public officials who have condoned it."

The committee had essentially established that organized crime existed and operated across state lines, and that no federal agency was specifically focused on addressing it. It recommended more than 30 specific people for prosecution by the Department of Justice. It's often credited with leading to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), but that wouldn't become law until nearly 20 years later. Its most enduring impact might have been on American media, which recreated versions of the committee hearings in movies like "The Godfather Part II" in 1974.

But the hearings had successfully propelled Kefauver to national prominence. He was even being seriously considered as a future presidential candidate. It was no big surprise, then, that Kefauver returned to this well later on, convening hearings with the U.S. Senate's Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee to look into a variety of different industries.

He may have had the bigger impact in areas like pharmaceuticals, but it was the examination into the mob's hold on boxing that brought the salacious stories and headlines.

One of Kefauver's star witnesses would be Jake LaMotta, the former middleweight champ who'd long been suspected of intentionally losing a 1947 fight against Billy Fox in exchange for a guarantee of a later title fight (which he then won). LaMotta had retired from the ring in 1954, and his life quickly spun out of control. By the time he was subpoenaed to testify in 1960, he'd even done a short prison sentence.

All this only seemed to make LaMotta more eager to pull back the curtain on how boxing in America really operated. He was also emboldened by the fact that the statute of limitations had expired, so the only repercussions he had to worry about were at the hands of mob.

"I wanted to come clean," LaMotta later wrote in his harrowing memoir, "Raging Bull," which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1980. "I wasn't exactly proud of it, but I did what I had to do to get the championship. I'd do it again."

LaMotta testified that he'd been offered $100,000 to lose to Fox, which he declined. After some negotiations with organized crime figures, he said he agreed to lose the fight only when he was promised a title shot in exchange, and once a training injury had hurt his chances of winning legitimately. He would also later say that, as he sat there before the committee, he had in his pocket a note from an unknown source, warning him to keep his mouth shut or else.

But LaMotta had grown up in a tough Bronx neighborhood where the mob was just a fact of life. He didn't fear them or the violence they were capable of, even if maybe he should have. He had tussled with mob figures before, sometimes in the streets, and lived to tell about it. From the moment he entered professional boxing, he wrote later, he knew the mob was as much a part of that world as the heavy bags in the gym.

"And I also noticed that around the gym all the time there were the mob guys, for the very simple reason that there's always betting on fights, and betting means money, and wherever there's money there's the mob," LaMotta wrote. "If you paste that inside your hat it will explain a lot of things to you and maybe even save you some trouble."

What this version of the Kefauver committee ended up uncovering was the inner workings of the International Boxing Club, better known as the IBC. On paper, it was a legitimate promotional company owned by James Norris and Arthur Wirtz. At one point, the Norris family owned significant stakes in major sports venues like Madison Square Garden and Chicago Stadium, as well as ownership shares of half the original six teams in the National Hockey League.

But the IBC was actually run by fight-savvy mobsters like Frank "Blinky" Palermo and Frankie Carbo, sometimes known as "Mr. Gray" or simply "The Gray." They pressured fighters to accept their chosen front men as managers, then took enormous cuts of the purses. They were also known to fix fights and even entire careers, as they had done with Billy Fox.

One of the fighters who testified about the pernicious influence of the mob-controlled IBC was Carmen Basilio, the former welterweight and middleweight champion. He told the Kefauver committee that his managers were regularly forced to kick up large sums of money to mobster Vito Genovese. Over the course of Basilio's career, it was estimated that his managers had paid Genovese around $64,000, including cash payments simply to secure the opportunity to fight for the title.

"I don't have any respect for those fellows," Basilio told the committee. "They don't belong in boxing and the quicker we get those fellows out, the better it's going to be for the sport."

Both Carbo and Palermo were subpoenaed to testify in front of the Kefauver committee. Both pleaded the Fifth Amendment multiple times. Even some of the fighters they'd siphoned money from, like Sonny Liston, whose prime boxing years were said to be almost entirely mob-controlled, seemed to go to great lengths to avoid incriminating them.

At one point, subcommittee counsel John Bonomi read aloud from a letter Liston had supposedly dictated, which referenced someone named Frank who he hoped might get him a title shot. Bonomi asked if this might be Frank Palermo or Frankie Carbo. Liston insisted it wasn't.

"Who else named Frank, in April or May of 1960, could get you a crack at the tile?" Bonomi asked.

"I know a million Franks," Liston replied.

If this was an effort to shield his mob handlers from prosecution, it was unsuccessful. Both Carbo and Palermo were charged with conspiracy and extortion in 1961, for attempting to strong-arm welterweight champion Don Jordan. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy served as the prosecutor, and both were convicted. Carbo was sent to Alcatraz. Palermo eventually did less than eight years of his 25-year sentence at Lewisburg.

The mob's control over boxing was effectively broken, or at least so thoroughly fractured that it could no longer operate with monopoly power the way the IBC had done. (The IBC was dissolved by federal court order in 1957, after it was ruled an illegal monopoly in violation of anti-trust laws.) But the other longterm fixes for the sport recommended during the hearings — federal regulation and oversight, for instance — did not materialize in the aftermath. Mostly what they had done was portray boxing as a crime-ridden cesspool, with writer Arthur Daley calling it "the slum area of sports" following the hearings.

"Perhaps Congress can sweep clear the debris and order the garbage jettisoned," Daley wrote in The New York Times.

The hearings had served their purpose for Kefauver and other senators. They used the fame of the boxers and the dangerous yet fascinating reputations of the mobsters to gain attention for themselves and their own political careers, then moved on to other business.

Kefauver would run for president twice — once in 1952, riding the immediate fame of his first hearings, and then again in 1956. Both times he surprised many political analysts with unexpected early success in the primaries, but fell short of the nomination both times. In the latter election, he was chosen to run alongside Adlai Stevenson as the vice presidential candidate, even though Stevenson was said to have preferred a young senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy.

Kefauver died in 1963, two days after suffering a heart attack on the Senate floor. Some of those then behind bars were probably not entirely sorry to see him go.