The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  One of the guarantees alleged to have been lined up was the allowance of exiled mobster Joe Adonis to return to the United States. Adonis, a New York mobster close with Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had been deported in 1953 on the charge that he was not a legal citizen.

  Joe Kennedy allegedly made another trade-off to assure commitment to his word and ceded of a portion of his Cal-Neva resort to Giancana’s associates. The resort sat on the California–Nevada border, and in the time before gambling was legal in Nevada, unauthorized games poached by the authorities were pushed across the room and across the border, away from the arm of the law.

  Joe Sr’s. portion of the resort was purportedly fronted by Bert “Wingy” Grober.

  “Wingy was old Joe’s man there,” a local recollected in Gus Russo’s Chicago Mob narrative The Outfit, “and he looked after his stake in the joint.”8

  A revealing FBI memo relating the dubious arrangement between Joe Sr. and Giancana was sent to Bobby, the attorney general in 1962:

  Before the last presidential election, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of President John F. Kennedy) had been visited by many gangsters with gambling interests and a deal was made which resulted in Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others obtaining a lucrative gambling establishment, the Cal-Neva Hotel, at Lake Tahoe. These gangsters reportedly met with Joseph Kennedy at the Cal-Neva, where Kennedy was staying at the time.”9

  The details of the Cal-Neva arrangement are hazy. It is certain that Sinatra, his manager Hank Sanicola, fellow crooner Dean Martin, and Atlantic City gangster Skinny D’Amato purchased an almost 57-percent majority interest in the resort. John Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination on the day that general particulars of the deal were disclosed, July 13, 1960.

  Dean Martin, performing at the Sands that night, briefly silenced the crowd with a revealing joke. “I’d like to tell you some of the good things the Mafia is doing,”10 Dino quipped.

  In Giancana’s mind, the Kennedys would follow through on their assurances. To him, surely the elder Kennedy, a robber baron with strong ties to the Mob, was no different from anyone else in the underworld. There was a code to the Mafia, and certainly Joe Kennedy knew the importance of honoring a pact with someone like Giancana.

  “The flower may look different … but the roots are the same,” Giancana said to his brother. “Never be misled by appearances, Chuck. Once a crook, always a crook. The Kennedys may put on airs and pretend to be blue bloods, but they know and I know the real truth … we’re cut from the same cloth.”11

  Giancana had been blinded by the assurances of Sinatra, his slender paisan from Hoboken, that Kennedy was in his pocket, and Mooney crowed about it to anybody who would listen. Giancana, whose father made his money by selling goods out of a cart, which he pushed through the streets of Chicago’s Little Italy, had made it to the top of the Mafia in the city, and now he believed he could own the presidency. Giancana worked hard to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy. In an effort that would have made Honey Fitz proud, Mooney swung the Mafia-controlled wards in Chicago Jack’s way at an 8-to 20-percent margin.12

  “Sam Giancana was always talking about the Kennedys … It was clear that at some point he had met both brothers … [Lawford and Giancana] would talk fondly of their shenanigans with the first family … they used to talk about the girls Mooney used to produce for the Kennedys. Mooney was proud of it, very proud of his Kennedy connections.”13

  Mooney had not only bought into the promises of the Kennedys, but also into the lifestyle. Sinatra was the perfect broker for such an influence. His career had benefited through associations with the Mafia, and his friendship with Peter Lawford, the brother-in-law of John Kennedy, had bolstered his relationship with the would-be president.

  Those who worked for him began to worry about Giancana—stars were clouding the mobster’s business sense. Giancana raised his own profile, feasting when he should have been fighting, talking when he should have kept quiet, even when things began to go south quickly with the Kennedys.

  “Don’t play around with the newspapers,” Humphreys told Mooney. “Just stand in the background. That’s what I would do, Moe. You stay in the background.”14

  A snapshot of how much Giancana’s savvy had gone awry is revealed with the weekend at Cal-Neva he spent with Rosselli, Sinatra, Lawford, and Marilyn Monroe, shortly before the actress’s untimely death in 1962. Kennedy had already been president for a year and a half, and the heat was on organized crime. Giancana, while not ignoring the increased assault on the Mafia, also could not resist the celebrity. The story of the weekend of July 27–29, 1963 has been retold many times.

  “I developed the film, and some of the pictures, about nine frames, showing Marilyn, on all fours,” said photographer William Woodfield. “She looked sick. Astride her, either riding her like a horse or trying to help her up—I couldn’t make out which—was Sam Giancana. Frank asked me what I thought he should do with the pictures. I said I’d burn them. He took out his lighter, burned them, and that was the end of it.”15

  Monroe had been distressed because Bobby Kennedy, whom she was involved with at the time, stood her up. He had arranged to meet her at Cal-Neva that weekend, but when the attorney general canceled, Frank and Sam stepped in.

  “I was there at the Cal-Neva in ’62, when Peter and Frank were there with Monroe,” said member of the Genovese crime family Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo. “They kept her drugged every night. It was disgusting.”

  Monroe was a diversion for the Mob. “Because Johnny Rosselli was there that weekend, there was talk of an S&M Mafia orgy to teach Marilyn a lesson for bestowing her famous favors on the Kennedys,” recalled Sinatra valet, George Jacobs. “She was their girl, not those Micks’. 16

  The Kennedys could not be controlled as easily. Bobby had no intention of honoring any deals that his father had made, and neither did John. This was shown from the outset of the Kennedy administration—the ties that had been formed with organized crime before the election were promptly cut. Sinatra had done too good a job of talking up the words of the father. Now that Bobby was attorney general, he put all efforts behind expiating the sins of his father by destroying the Mafia.

  “Bobby pushed to get Giancana at any cost,” said Justice Department attorney Bill Hundley.

  The Kennedys did not honor the promise to allow Joe Adonis back into the United States. Adonis would die in Italy, and the attorney general would attempt to deport other mobsters in the United States under illegal status. All bets were off, and it looked bad for the popular crooner.

  “Sinatra was an idiot for playing both sides of the field like that,” said Skinny D’Amato. “Playing Mooney for a sucker? What? Are you kidding me? If he wasn’t so fucking talented, he never would’ve gotten away with being such a fink. With the boys, when you let ‘em down, you got hit … and lie to Sam? Forget it. I can’t think of anyone else who would’ve continued to breathe air after telling a story like the one Frank told to Sam.”17

  Sinatra attempted to keep the Kennedys to their word at the end of the election, but to no avail. In a taped conversation between Giancana and henchman John Formosa, Formosa revealed a bit of what Sinatra had told him: “I took Sam’s name and wrote it down and told Bob Kennedy, ‘This is my buddy, and this is what I want you to know, Bob.’”18

  It was not long until Sinatra, having done his part, was cut off from the first family.

  “The [Kennedys] used him [Sinatra] to help them raise money,” said mobster Vinnie Teresa, overheard on an FBI tap. “Then they turn around and say that they’re great fighters against corruption. They criticize other people for being with mob guys. They’re hypocrites.”19

  Frank would begin to pay back Giancana with his talent and his friends. He and his Rat Pack cohorts would play free shows in venues owned by Giancana. Still, for a while Giancana’s “friends” considered exterminating Sinatra for the embarrassment that the singer had caused the Mob boss.

  “Well, one m
inute he [Sinatra] tells me this, and then he tells me that,” Giancana was overheard telling Rosselli on an FBI recording, “and then the last time I talked to him was at the hotel down in Florida a month before he left, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man [Joe Sr.], I’m going to talk to the man [President Kennedy].’ One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, and the next minute, he says he hasn’t talked to him. So he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of shit. Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming.”20

  Giancana’s soft spot for Frank had shown earlier when he had listened to and believed Sinatra regarding the Kennedys’ promises—and it would show again when Giancana would call off a contracted hit against the crooner.

  “[One night] I’m fucking Phyllis [McGuire],” Giancana recalled, “playing Sinatra songs in the background, and the whole time I’m thinking to myself, ‘Christ, how can I silence that voice? It’s the most beautiful sound in the world.’ Frank’s lucky he got it. It saved his life.”21

  Following the election, Giancana was left with promises never to be honored and a loss of respect from those around him.

  “Everybody was sorry they got involved in it,” wrote Murray Humphreys’ wife, Jeanne. “And it all fell back on Mooney. Giancana lost face, and that’s when he started going downhill.”22

  This left Giancana with two options: attempt to secure his bet or shut the casino down. Giancana, through two methods, would pursue both options. The first method, in an attempt to get the Kennedys to respect the pact they agreed to, was blackmail. In a method not dissimilar from Hoover’s, Mooney collected all the sleazy details that he could on the brothers as a means to rein them in.

  “I know all about the Kennedys,” Giancana angrily told the FBI early in the administration as the tide began to turn against him, “and one of these days … [I am] going to tell all.”23

  To turn the house in his favor, Giancana had, before the election, turned to a man who controlled the inner workings of casinos: his man in Las Vegas, Johnny Rosselli. Rosselli had moved out to Vegas in the early 1950s to look after Mafia interests in the casinos after having served prison time for his extortion of motion picture studios. Before long, if approval was to be granted or something needed to be done in Vegas, Rosselli was the man to see. He arranged the finances for the building and expansion of casinos and also handled the talent that performed within.24 He also “set up protection for the Sands, the Tropicana, and the Riviera hotels.”25

  It is no coincidence that Jack Kennedy attended a Sinatra concert in February 1960. It is also no coincidence that he met Judy Campbell there. Before Sinatra, Giancana, and Kennedy had their turns with Campbell, she had been a friend and intimate companion of Rosselli.

  “Johnny knew Judy Campbell when she was just a kid,” said Madeline O’Donnell, niece to Warner Brothers producer Brynie Foy. “Her first husband was Bill Campbell, and Bill Campbell was under contract to Warner Brothers, and they were very young, and they lived in the same neighborhood [as Rosselli].”26

  Giancana would later take Campbell in as a lover, and she would become his main route of blackmail regarding John Kennedy. Through Campbell, Giancana felt he had all the leverage he needed to get the Kennedys to listen. They didn’t.

  With the Kennedy blackmail ineffective, Giancana, along with Johnny Rosselli and Santo Trafficante, found members of the government who would be willing to use the Mafia members in their clandestine affairs, including the attempted assassination of a world leader, Fidel Castro.

  Giancana, with an unrewarded hand played out in the election of John F. Kennedy, was particularly interested in the replacement of the president with a man who would better honor underworld promises. Working with the CIA put them in contact with that man—the Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  Jeanne Humphreys, wife of Murray “The Camel,” reflecting on the Mafia’s strong influence in the 1960 election, wrote that “Nixon would have been elected. No assassinations, no Watergate, and most important to the outfit, no Bobby Kennedy as attorney general. The history of the United States from 1960 ‘til eternity was made by a mobster from Chicago’s West Side who wanted to impress a crooner from New Jersey.”27

  NOTES

  1. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 373.

  2. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, p. 299.

  3. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, p. 193.

  4. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 59

  5. Ibid, pg. 133.

  6. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 253.

  7. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 371.

  8. Ibid, pg. 377.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Tosches, Dino, pg. 329.

  11. Giancana, Double Cross, pg. 373.

  12. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 206.

  13. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 387.

  14. Ibid, pg. 415.

  15. Margolis, Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder, pg. 102.

  16. Ibid, pg. 102.

  17. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 423.

  18. Goldfarb, Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, pg. 137.

  19. Hilty, Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector, pg. 208.

  20. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 234.

  21. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 423.

  22. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 407.

  23. North, Act of Treason, pg. 100.

  24. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 169.

  25. Ibid, 167.

  26. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 208.

  27. Russo, The Outfit, pg. 403.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CONTACT

  In Johnny Rosselli’s final interview, Jack Anderson of the Washington Post heard a lot about the Kennedy assassination. The key bit of information in Anderson’s article was that the Mafia had ordered Jack Ruby’s slaying of Oswald.1 Rosselli had been leaking anonymous confidences to Anderson for some time. Perhaps Rosselli, at seventy-one, felt he had outlived a traditional Mob death, or that he was immune to it. Perhaps Rosselli was past the point of giving a damn. He had already testified before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence twice the year before concerning his role working with the CIA and was approached about testifying again in the summer of 1976.

  Across the years, Rosselli revealed some tightly concealed secrets. He threw hints about the conspirators of the Kennedy assassination lazily into the breeze. There were many accounts of his own involvement. When imprisoned with Joe Bonanno at Terminal Island in the early 1970s, Rosselli told an outlandish story concerning his role in the Dallas ambush.

  “Sam [Giancana] and I both knew I was going to be the one to make the hit,” Rosselli said in Bonanno’s account. “I had the best chance. My position is in the storm drain on Elm Street, facing the route of the motorcade. The car’ll be ten feet from me. There were four of us including the patsy, but Sam and everyone else knew I was the one who’d have the shot. We had this safe house where all of us got together before two different times. Sam wants to make sure I understand what to do afterward. I even did a dry run the day before. Three blocks to the Trinity River, car was right there. But then it wasn’t, Bill. There was no fucking car. I’m standing there on these iron rungs, I watch the cars make the turn, see the guy’s head maybe ten feet away. How could I miss, ya know? I don’t miss. I saw his head go up. And I’m thinking all the while I’m going like a rat through that tunnel, I was so close, they saw the flash of the muzzle. I’m never gonna make it. My heart’s going like a cannon. And then, there’s no fucking backup!2

  Perhaps the story was meant to trumpet disinformation or was simply a Rosselli flight of fancy. Either way, it was too close to the truth.

  In July 1976, Rosselli had dinner with Tampa Mob boss Santo Trafficante at The Landings, a restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale.3 It is anyone’s guess what the two old friends talked about, but more than likely, Trafficante laid the hammer down. Two days later
, Rosselli went missing. On August 7, a fifty-five-gallon oil drum was discovered in Dumfounding Bay off the shores of Miami. The drum, punched with holes and weighted down by chains, contained the body of Rosselli. He had been sawed in half and stuffed inside. The drum had become buoyant, filled with gases from the decomposing body.

  Rosselli’s 1975 Chevy Impala was subsequently found by his brother-in-law, parked at the Miami International Airport.4 The killers, believing Rosselli’s body would never be found, clearly wanted investigators to think that the aging mobster had taken a long trip.

  From his early days lugging crates of booze ashore for Joe Sr., Rosselli had spent his life with the Kennedys always close by. Rosselli had rubbed shoulders with the Rat Pack and Marilyn Monroe, all of whom had stood at the gates of Camelot, and he had conspired with the Mafia and the CIA to bust the gates open. Rosselli perpetually hovered between the pinnacle of glamour and the dirt stuck just under the nail. In the end, he was a little too close to all of it.

  A year earlier, Rosselli’s Mafia and CIA counterpart Sam Giancana went in similar gangland fashion. On the night of June 19, 1975, Giancana was frying sausages in the basement kitchen of his Oak Park, Illinois home. The next day, he was scheduled to meet with US Senate Select Committee members for questioning. Mooney would not make the appointment. Seven rounds from a .22-caliber handgun were fired into the back of his head. The bullets had ripped through Giancana’s throat and mouth, which indicated to organized crime lawyer Frank Ragano that the hit had been Mob related: The bullets through the throat signified that Giancana had been talking, the bullets through the mouth that he would never talk again.5

  The handgun was discovered on the side of the road in a nearby suburb. Investigators traced it back to the Miami area, the home of Trafficante and Rosselli. The manufacturer had delivered the weapon to a gun dealer in Miami on June 20, 1965.6