Aaron Kohn Attacks Corruption in New Orleans: An Intersection of Media and Politics, 1953-1955

Aaron Kohn’s career as a driven professional crime fighter with the Special Citizens Investigative Committee, and later the Metropolitan Crime Commission, began after the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime, one of the first Senate investigative committee hearings broadcast on the evolving medium of television, gripped the American public in 1950. Sen. Estes Kefauver’s committee visited cities across America, including New Orleans. The hearings’ popularity revealed public thirst for coverage of sensational topics like organized crime, and established how Kohn would soon approach the SCIC job: with force and bombast, featuring flair and sometimes bended truth. Aaron Kohn combined Kefauver’s crusading spirit and media savvy and attempted to apply it to his own long career as a citizen crime fighter in New Orleans, but he met limited success taking on a corrupt establishment in a career that could ultimately be deemed a failure