The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  Bobby Kennedy, with his earlier experience as chief counsel on the McClellan Committee, saw that the real problem was organized crime, not the Robin Hood-esque crime sprees of a defunct era. These were not the high-profile heists of Hoover’s day. This was a corrupt system with ties to businesses, unions and, indeed, the government.

  Before Kennedy was appointed, the Justice Department, in the words of department attorney Bob Blakey, was “a Republican law factory with a staid hierarchy.”4 Kennedy opened the doors of the stuffy department, working personally and personably with his team-oriented staff of young lawyers looking to make a difference.

  “He’s given it the sense of the public man,” said former Deputy Attorney General Byron White.

  Bobby’s crusade, brought over from the McClellan Committee, would not sit well with the director.

  Despite President Kennedy’s insistence to Bobby that “you have got to get along with that old man,”5 the obstinate younger brother would not comply. Hoover was more of an impediment to the new Justice Department than a help.

  J. Edgar Hoover would have been of great use to Bobby in the fight against organized crime, as well as helpful in the creation of a nationwide dragnet, which would utilize shared bureau information from across the country to cooperatively attack the Mob. Unfortunately, despite extensive evidence to the contrary, the denial of a nationwide syndicate or of organized crime in general was one of the many inconsistencies in the director of the FBI’s career.

  In November 1957, close to one hundred Mafia members from throughout the country met in Apalachin, New York, at the estate of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara. The meeting was busted up by local police, and fifty of those gathered were arrested. The excuses from the hoods detailing their reasons for attendance were comical.

  “Mr. Barbara was sick, and we all came to see him,” reasoned one of the apprehended. “We just happened to drop in at the same time.”6

  “I had a problem with one of my windshield wipers, and I decided to get off the highway and drive the sixty-five miles here (Apalachin) to get it fixed,”7 offered up another.

  Among the notable underworld figures in attendance were Santo Trafficante from Tampa, Joseph Civello from Dallas, and Carlo Gambino from New York. The Apalachin meeting provided reasonable evidence for the existence and scope of a nationwide connected syndicate.

  “Never before had there been such a concentration of jailbirds, murderers free on technicalities, and big wheels in gambling and dope rackets,”8 remarked a prosecutor who investigated the case.

  “The FBI didn’t know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States,”9 Bobby would lament. It was more probable that the FBI didn’t want to know.

  For Hoover to acknowledge the existence of the Mafia would undermine the credibility of his institution and would help someone like Bobby, who challenged the director at every step.

  To top men in the Mafia, Hoover was a godsend: The top lawman in the country worried more about small-time crooks pilfering pennies from small-town banks than a tightly knit system of criminals working on the big heist.

  “Under FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s watch, the criminal organizations that would become known as La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, and the Outfit were allowed to operate unimpeded for decades,” Sam Giancana, nephew of the famed Chicago Mob boss, wrote. “Bureau resources focused instead on high-profile cases like the Lindbergh kidnapping and the apprehension of notorious bank robber John Dillinger—cases that were intended to elevate Hoover’s stature, undeservedly, to that of America’s quintessential crime buster.”10

  The laws Bobby tried to implement from his first days in the department focused on stymieing the interstate activities of organized crime. As early as May 17, 1961, when Bobby testified before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee No. 5, the young attorney general was attempting to halt “the huge profits in the traffic in liquor, narcotics, prostitution, as well as the use of these funds for corrupting local officials and for their use in racketeering in labor and management.”11

  Bobby “got five anticrime bills moved through the Judiciary Committee so quickly that nobody had the chance to read them,”12 said Justice official William Goeghehan.

  Where Hoover’s FBI had focused on small independent gangs or crooks, Kennedy’s Justice Department was focused on the interconnectivity of criminal activity. “Interstate” was the key word for the new Justice Department, which had previously impeded law enforcement on a local level and now worked also to tackle problems on a national level, laws such as those forbidding the transportation of gambling equipment across state lines or using highways or telephones for the means of racketeering.13

  “I’d like to be remembered as the guy who broke the Mafia,”14 said Kennedy.

  While Bobby pushed his organized crime agenda, Hoover dragged his feet. Prior to Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general, FBI offices in two of the nation’s hotspots for organized crime, New York and New Jersey, contained only a half dozen agents assigned to organized crime, with six hundred assigned to the detection and investigation of communism.15 Hoover contended that the FBI did not pursue organized crime vigorously because the dirty business threatened to contaminate the high standards of the bureau.

  “He was concerned that his men would be corrupted,” reasoned Howard Diller, a Bureau of Narcotics agent. “This was a nasty business. They could go after communists and kidnappers, but this caused aggravation, and he didn’t want any aggravation.”16

  Truth be told, as a gambler, Hoover was friendly with many of organized crime’s biggest players. Joe “Joe Bananas” Bonanno, Carlos Marcello, his partner Dub McClanahan, and Johnny Rosselli, when he was more than just a crate hauler for Joe Sr., were more than acquaintances to Hoover.17

  “I knew Hoover,” Rosselli said. “I’d buy him drinks, and we’d talk. It would be fun to be with the director of the FBI like that.”18

  Hoover was also close with mobster Frank Costello. William Hundley, one of Bobby’s top aides, met Costello through his friend, Washington DC trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who represented the New York Mob boss. Hundley heard a string of stories from Costello about his relationship with Hoover, relaying their mutual affection for the horse track and their frequent trips there together.

  “The horse races!” Costello exclaimed. “You’ll never know how many races I had to fix for those lousy ten-dollar bets of Hoover’s!”19

  In a conversation caught by FBI electronic surveillance between the “Mob’s Accountant” Meyer Lanksy, agent Alvin Malnik, and Jesse Weiss, a Miami Beach restaurateur and friend of J. Edgar Hoover, the fears of the Mafia concerning new aims of the bureau were aired:

  JW: But Al, you don’t see anything in the paper about him; it’s all BOBBY KENNEDY.

  AM: That’s all; nothing about him.

  JW: They are taking the play away from him.

  AM: Hoover is a lost …

  JW: … cause

  AM: A lost cause, that’s all. A lost cause

  AM: Well, does HOOVER realize this great transformation that’s happening within his own organization?

  JW: I spoke to him two weeks ago—I was in Washington before he went to California—he goes out to California—he goes out to California every year—he goes to Scripps Clinic in LA JOLLA—couple—goes out there every year—six weeks ago … [inaudible] … it’s like he … he told me the same thing … shucks, the Bureau is shot, what the hell, he says, but what can I do, he says; the Attorney General is the boss of the Bureau, he runs it … dare you to defy it.20

  With Bobby’s entrance, not only the aim but the ridged pretenses of the bureau that Hoover demanded his G-Men follow were being challenged by the more whimsically casual work environment that his new boss had brought with him. For years, the lives of the agents inside and outside of the bureau were dictated by the director’s peculiarities.

  “Ultimately it was not permitted to question even th
e most outlandish order, drink coffee at work, marry a woman not ‘Bureau material,’ go bald, or take a left turn with the director in the car,” wrote Burton Hersh. “The atmosphere was top-down authoritarian, Mussolini without the chuckles.”21

  Bobby did not adhere to the strict dress code or office behavior that the director of the FBI was accustomed to.

  “It is ridiculous to have the attorney general walking around the building in his shirtsleeves,” Hoover grumbled to head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division William Sullivan. “Suppose I had a visitor in waiting in my anteroom. How could I have introduced him?”

  It would not be long into Bobby’s tenure as attorney general before Hoover would refer to Bobby as an “adolescent horse’s ass.” Hoover, Bobby said, was a “psycho.”

  Hoover would throw any jab he could. When giving the official FBI tour at the outset of the Kennedy administration, the director had instructed the tour guides to add the line: “Mr. Hoover became the director of the bureau in 1924, the year before the attorney general was born.”22

  In January 1961, during his first month as attorney general, Bobby was paid a visit by Hoover and his associate director and personal companion Clyde Tolson. Burton Hersh, in his book Bobby and J. Edgar, describes the scene:

  The director and Tolson came by the attorney general’s office by appointment to find Bobby cocked back in his massive red cordovan-leather swivel chair, behind his six-foot-square mahogany desk, shirtsleeves rolled up and his undone necktie dangling in two strips down his narrow chest. Kennedy was tossing darts at a target across the room. As Hoover and Tolson attempted to open up the subject at hand, Kennedy continued to peg dart after dart, picking up the celebrated walnut paneling each time he missed and interrupting their disjunctive exchanges whenever he climbed out of his chair to recover his darts. An inveterate gum-chewer, Kennedy’s reedy, singsong voice could be very difficult to understand.23

  Hoover was infuriated and would begin to compare Bobby to a, “child playing in a Dresden china shop.”24

  The attorney general was also looking to adjust the color of the bureau. Noticing a scarcity of black agents working for the FBI, Bobby circulated a memo to hire a number of black people.

  “The only person who didn’t respond to the memo was J. Edgar Hoover,” said John Seigenthaler, the attorney general’s administrative assistant. “I sent a second memo, after which he wrote me saying it was a violation of federal regulations to inquire into the race of government employees. We went back and forth on it, and finally, after we’d found out that the most any division had was one, he wrote back to say he had two, and he gave their names. I showed the memo to Sal Andretta, chief administrator of the department, who’d been there for years, and he said, ‘Hell, they’re Hoover’s drivers.’”25

  Hoover saw the integration of the bureau as another attempt of Kennedy to exercise his authority and debilitate the standards of the prestigious bureau.

  “He wanted to lower our qualifications and hire more Negro agents,” Hoover said. “I said, ‘Bobby, that’s not going to be done as long as I’m director of this bureau.’ He said, ‘I don’t think you’re being cooperative.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you get a new director?’ ”

  The director wasn’t going anywhere, but the young attorney general was making noticeable changes in the Justice Department. In the 1960s, 117 black agents were hired; by 1970, there were 122 black agents working for the bureau.26

  Hoover was frantic that his power was being compromised and that his star-status within the Justice Department was being challenged. He liked to have total control over the bureau; when someone came along to test his high standing, the director would do his best to damage or neutralize his or her position.

  In 1934, when Special Agent Melvin Purvis pursued and was given credit for the death of Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger, his instant fame did not sit well with Hoover. Purvis was quickly given the cold shoulder of the bureau, which led to his resignation. Hoover changed the resignation status to, “termination with prejudice.”27 Purvis went on to pursue a variety of failed enterprises, including opening a detective agency. Hoover put out the word to law enforcement not to extend a hand to “Little Mel’s” new business, and it floundered. he later also sold his name and likeness to the cereal Post Toasties and found work at a radio station as an announcer. In 1960, he committed suicide with the gun that his fellow agents had presented him with at a party thrown after his resignation.

  From the time Purvis left the bureau until after his suicide, Hoover was relentless in his attempt to defer credit from him for the Dillinger killing. Sam Cowley, an agent who commanded the Dillinger squad and had later been shot and killed by “Baby Face” Nelson, was given commendation by Hoover and the bureau.

  “With Purvis out of the bureau and in disgrace, Sam Cowley fit the bill perfectly,” wrote Richard Gid Powers. “First, he was dead, so there was no danger that he would turn his glory to personal advantage. Second, by honoring one of its martyrs, someone who had given up his life for the FBI, the bureau would be honoring itself. Third, since Cowley had been Hoover’s personal representative on the Dillinger case, any credit Cowley got flowed directly back to Washington without being absorbed by the agents in the field. For these reasons it became permanent FBI policy to tear down Purvis as a glory hound and build up Cowley as the epitome of the corporate G-Man hero.”28

  Bobby Kennedy, however, as Hoover’s boss, was very much alive. In another show of authority, Bobby had a direct line installed, which was connected to a buzzer in the director’s office, so that he could alert and summon him at will.29 Hoover was not used to having to listen or deal with someone who would not bend to the will of the bureau, and he did not take the adjustment well.

  At one point, with William Hundley in his office, Bobby playfully pushed the buzzer to mobilize Hoover. When Hoover arrived, indignation covered his bulldog face.

  “They started arguing about something,” Hundley said. “Bobby put it to him, ‘How are you coming with hiring minorities and women?’ He was tough. Hoover said, ‘I can’t find any qualified.’ They jawed at each other … No attorney general had ever done that to Hoover. I couldn’t believe it.”30

  By spring of 1961, Bobby was sometimes bringing his bear-like Newfoundland Brumus, all fur and drool, to the office with him. If he beat Bobby to the car in the morning, the hulking Brumus would find himself as assistant to the attorney general for the day. Hoover was simmering when he found that Brumus was marking his territory in Bobby’s office and became apoplectic when a pile of dung was spotted outside the director’s suite. Hoover called an executive conference to discuss the chances of charges sticking against the attorney general for violating federal code concerning dogs in a government building.31 “Dog … shall not be brought upon property for other than official purposes”32 read Section 201, Chapter 8, Title 2, of Rules and Regulations for Public Buildings. That the tail-wagger in question also discharged on government property only made the offense more egregious.

  Knowledge of pooch legislation aside, there is a reason Hoover had retained his position and power for decades.

  Over the previous years, he had used his special files on fellow government employees or persons of particular interest to him to expand and protect the power of his bureau. Hoover, through manipulation or deception, had marginalized the many attorneys general who had come before Bobby Kennedy. In the late 1930s, Hoover neutralized Attorney General Frank Murphy, who had enough documented sexual indiscretions to fill a file. It was under Murphy that Hoover began to bypass the pesky nuisance of having to report to the attorney general and began taking his business directly to the president.

  “I was very close to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, personally and officially. We often had lunch in his office in the Oval Room of the White House,”33 Hoover boasted.

  Murphy’s successor, Robert Jackson, attempted to penetrate the dominance of the bureau, demanding access to Hoover’s secret files.
Hoover combated this initiative by opening a new system for the files. When, on March 15, 1940, Jackson ordered Hoover to cease of the use of wiretaps by the bureau, Hoover used scare tactics to regain control.

  “I spoke to J. Edgar Hoover and asked him whether he was able to listen in on [Nazi] spies by tapping the wires, and he said no; that the order given him by Bob Jackson stopping him had not been revoked,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. “I said I would go to work at once. He said he needed it desperately.”

  The plea for the use of wiretaps in the interest of national security quickly made its way up the ranks to President Roosevelt, who expeditiously rescinded Jackson’s order, effectively handcuffing the attorney general.

  Roosevelt wrote to the attorney general that the order was not meant to apply “to grave matters involving the defense of the nation.”

  “You are, therefore, authorized and directed in such cases as you may approve, after investigation of the need in each case, to authorize the necessary investigative agencies that they are at liberty to secure information by listening devices … of persons suspected of subversive activities against the Government of the United States, including suspected spies,” Roosevelt wrote. “You are requested furthermore to limit these investigations so conducted to a minimum and to limit them insofar as possible to aliens. FDR.”34

  Years later, speaking about Hoover, Jackson would confide in a friend that “he was sorry he hadn’t fired him.”35

  In 1943, Attorney General Francis Biddle, objecting to Hoover’s custodial detention list, compiled to locate individuals or groups who could become an internal security problem, told the director to trash the file. Hoover, instead, changed the file’s name and location.

  Whoever tried to subvert the legislative reach of the director found that Hoover had been long prepared for such an action. When President Harry Truman let Hoover know that he would not receive the director’s personal phone calls and that all pertinent information would be directed through the attorney general, Hoover gave Truman a whiff of the secret file, which contained dirt on many major government players, including, most likely, Harry himself. Hoover then had his direct line of communication with Truman.