Carmine Bellino; Probed Teamsters and Watergate

Carmine S. Bellino, the doggedly determined congressional investigator who played a major role in the downfall of Teamsters James R. Hoffa and Dave Beck, has died of prostate cancer.

The soft-spoken former FBI agent and one-time aide to President John F. Kennedy was 84 and died Tuesday in Coconut Creek, Fla., where he had retired in the early 1980s.

From the 1950s investigations of Beck and Hoffa by the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Management Field, to the Senate Watergate Committee where he was a leading investigator, Bellino served a single self-avowed purpose:

“To make the figures talk.”

He had followed the complicated trails of illicit funds since receiving his accounting degree from New York University. He became a special agent for the FBI in 1934 and had risen to administrative assistant to J. Edgar Hoover by 1945.

But the man whom Robert F. Kennedy once called “the best investigator in the country” grew restless in Hoover’s vast bureaucracy and retired to his private accounting firm before Congress called upon him. For the next three decades he would serve as a staff aide or consulting investigator to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the House Health Education and Labor Committee, the House Public Roads Committee, the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, the Senate Agriculture Committee and more.

He disclosed a “skimming” operation involving slot machines in West Germany played by American servicemen; the smuggling of millions of dollars in black-market currency out of Vietnam during the war and discovered that Maj. Gen. Bennett E. Meyers, deputy chief of procurement for the Air Force during World War II, had owned a war factory.

Meyers went to prison and so did John Maragon, a White House aide in the Truman Administration who was convicted of perjury during an investigation of 5% fees being assessed businessmen who were awarded government contracts.

During the time he was chief investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973--which investigated the break-in at Democratic national headquarters in 1972--Bellino himself was accused of having ordered electronic surveillance of Republican offices to help the Democrats in 1960, the year John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon.

The charge was made by George Bush, then Republican national chairman.

The Washington Post reported that Bellino was so thorough that he once determined the gross income of an Atlantic City hostelry that figured in an illicit sex operation by determining from a laundry the number of towels delivered there each week.

Between congressional posts he served as an adviser to President Kennedy and the Bureau of the Budget.

He was hired by municipalities across the country and, in 1976, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors brought him in to audit the tax rolls in a disagreement over the assessment policies of the late County Assessor Philip Watson.

Bellino’s first wife died in 1979. He is survived by his second wife, Catherine, seven children from his first marriage and 31 grandchildren.