18.
Clark Clifford was speechless. Clifford, the legendary adviser to Democratic presidents for five decades, was assisting President-elect Kennedy with the transition when he was told of Bobby Kennedy’s imminent appointment as attorney general. It was just days after the election when Jack Kennedy approached Clifford poolside at the Kennedys’ Palm Beach retreat.
“I listened in amazement,” Clifford later wrote about the impending announcement. Jack Kennedy explained, “My father said, I want Bobby to be attorney general. He’s a lawyer, he’s savvy, he knows all the political ins and outs and can protect you.’” Clifford had just finished warning Jack that an inexperienced attorney general could place him in great jeopardy, as had happened in numerous previous administrations. Jack agreed and asked Clifford to speak to “the Old Man.” Clifford flew to New York and attempted to convince the patriarch of his ill-advised suggestion. “I made a carefully prepared presentation,” Clifford wrote in his memoirs, “of why it wras not in the interests of the new President, the Kennedy family, the entire administration, and Bobby himself to take the post.” After what he thought was a persuasive argument, Clifford waited for Joe’s response.
“Thank you very much, Clark,” Joe said. “I am so glad to have heard your views.” Then after a brief pause, Kennedy looked Clifford in the eyes and added, “I do want to leave you with one thought, however - one firm thought. Bobby is going to be attorney general.” Clifford noted that there wras no rancor in Kennedy’s voice, but that “he was simply telling me the facts. For a moment I had glimpsed the inner workings of that remarkable family, and, despite my admiration and affection for John F. Kennedy, I could not say I liked what I saw.”
Jack Kennedy also enlisted a family friend, Senator George Smathers of Florida, to try to talk to the father, again to no avail. In Smathers’ presence, Joe Kennedy called young Jack over and upbraided him. “Jack! Come here!” Joe ordered. “By God, he deserves to be attorney general, and by God, that’s what he’s going to be. Do you understand that?” The president-elect responded like a scolded child, “Yes, sir.”
Even Bobby, who had worked so tirelessly as his brother’s campaign manager, resisted the idea. Although an arch-moralist, Bobby had tired of the grind from his tenure on the McClellan Committee. “I had been chasing bad men for three years,” Bobby later said, “and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” And just as brother Jack had been warned by Clark Clifford, Bobby was likewise cautioned by columnist Drew Pearson: “You would handle so many controversial questions with such vigor that your brother in the White House would be in hot water all the time.” (Those words would come to haunt Bobby three years later, when his intemperate handling of Cuban intrigues tragically backfired on his beloved brother.)
It is impossible to know how Joe Kennedy rationalized compromising his sons’ well-being by making untold promises to the underworld to gain its support, only to do an about-face once Jack was elected. It has been suggested that Joe understood that the only way to avoid a Justice Department probe of the Kennedy election fix would be to place a Kennedy at the top of that agency. If that was the reasoning, in that, at least, he was proved correct. The numerous clamors for such a probe indeed fell on deaf ears once Bobby was sworn in.
By mid-November, newspapers such as the New York Times were reporting that Bobby Kennedy was being floated as the next attorney general. It is not known exactly when the Outfit bosses became aware that they had been double-crossed, but they certainly realized it by December 19, when the appointment was made official.
The announcement reverberated across the country, hitting the underworld enclaves hardest. In Los Angeles, mobster Mickey Cohen reacted by saying, “Nobody in my line of work had an idea that he [JFK] was going to name Bobby Kennedy attorney general. That was the last thing anyone thought.” In Chicago, FBI mikes overheard Mooney Giancana complaining to ward boss John D’Arco about local state’s attorney Roswell Spencer, comparing him to Bobby’s double-crossing father. “He’s like Kennedy. He’ll get what he wants out of you, but then you won’t get anything out of him.” Giancana later told D’Arco, “Well, they got the whip and they’re in office and that’s it . . . They’re going to knock us guys out of the box and make us defenseless.” After the appointment of Bobby Kennedy, the FBI listened as Kansas City boss Nick Civella commiserated with Mooney in a phone conversation.
“If he [Kennedy] had lost this state here,” Mooney said, “he would have lost the election, but I figured with this guy [Sinatra] maybe we’ll be all right. I might have known this guy would fuck us.”
Civella attempted to console Giancana, offering, “Well, at the time it seems like you done the right things, Sam. Nobody can say anything different after it’s done.”
“Well, when a cocksucker lies to you-” responded the distraught Giancana.
The Bureau similarly noted Curly Humphreys’ rancor over the Bobby Kennedy development. In Curly’s FBI file, agents summarized the gangster’s conclusions: “Humphreys felt that if his organization had to endure eight years of the John Kennedy administration and eight years under the administration of Robert Kennedy, who he felt would succeed his brother John as President of the United States, that he and other top echelon members of organized crime in Chicago would be dead before a new administration might give more favored treatment to hoodlums.”
The FBI report, however, fails to describe the depth of the gang’s true feelings about the Kennedy double cross, and the repercussions for boss Mooney Giancana. Jeanne Humphreys remembered, “Everybody was sorry they got involved in it. And it all fell back on Mooney.” Most important, she added, “Giancana lost face and that’s when he started going downhill.” Mooney’s daughter Antoinette wrote in her autobiography about “the erosion of my father’s stature as a crime boss” that began to occur. Mooney himself was not deaf to the whispering behind his back. Soon, his infamous temper was again rising to the surface.
According to his brother Chuck, Mooney had a heated phone conversation with Frank Sinatra immediately after Bobby Kennedy’s appointment to make the crooner explain what was going on. Giancana ended the call by slamming down the phone and then throwing it across the room. “Eatin’ out of the palm of his hand,” Mooney yelled. “That’s what Frank told me. Jack’s eatin’ out of his hand. Bullshit, that’s what it is.” The FBI also listened in as the squabble between Mooney and Frank played out. They overheard as Mooney, now fully cognizant of the effect of Bobby’s appointment on his mob status, ranted about the Kennedy move. Giancana’s FBI file describes one conversation caught by its surveillance: “Giancana claimed that he made a donation to the recent presidential campaign of Kennedy and was not getting his money’s worth because if he got a speeding ticket ’none of those fuckers would know me.’” Concerning the 1964 presidential contest, Mooney said, “Kennedy better not think of taking this fucking state.”
In time, Mooney and Frank would temporarily patch things up in their on-again, off-again friendship. The ubiquitous FBI overheard Johnny Rosselli report back to Giancana that Sinatra had recently insisted that Rosselli stay at his California home (the interior of which was designed by Sidney Korshak’s wife, Bea, according to Architectural Digest Magazine). Rosselli said that while guesting at the Palm Springs estate, he was told by Sinatra that the singer had attempted to intervene with the Kennedys on Giancana’s behalf. “I took Sam’s name and wrote it down,” Sinatra told Rosselli, “and told Bobby Kennedy, ’This is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob.’ “ Rosselli added, “Frank saw Joe Kennedy three different times. Joe called him three times.”
But Giancana wasn’t buying: “One minute he [Sinatra] tells me this, and then he tells me that . . . he said, ’Don’t worry about it. If I can’t talk to the old man, I’m going to talk to the man [Jack 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.”
Statements by Giancana and his associates suggest that the vengeful boss was not about to take the Kennedy affront lying down. It now appears that Mooney decided to subvert the Castro assassination plot, a decision that would doom the upcoming Cuban invasion to failure. And that failure ultimately led the Kennedy brothers to undertake an ill-advised anti-Castro sabotage operation that would come back to haunt the Kennedy family.
“Mooney’s going to get even with the Kennedys,” Curly Humphreys informed his wife soon after the Bobby Kennedy appointment. “My husband was very cynical about this latest ’brainstorm’ by Giancana,” says Jeanne Humphreys. “Before Kennedy was elected, from what I understand, it [the assassination plot] was legitimate in the beginning. But after the Kennedys started going after the Outfit, as they did after the election, Mooney decided to string them along and get even with them.” Giancana also let on to friends such as Johnny Rosselli and D.C. detective Joe Shimon about the con. “I’m not in it,” he said to one associate; or, “I just gave Maheu a couple names,” to another. Giancana’s son-in-law attorney Robert McDonnell has clear memories of the episode. “Sam thought it was hilarious that the government was paying him to kill Castro, very humorous,” recalls McDonnell. “He never took it seriously.”
Even Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department believed Giancana was selling the G a bill of goods. One of the earliest public hints of both the plots and Mooney’s scam appeared in an August 8, 1963, article in the Chicago Sun Times. Quoting Justice Department sources, the article noted that Giancana had only pretended to go along with the CIA operation. He did this, the Times said, “in the hopes that the Justice Department’s drive to put him behind bars might be slowed - or at least affected by his ruse of cooperation with another government agency.” (Italics added.) Chicago FBI agent Bill Roemer wrote, “Giancana’s part in the scheme was a ruse.” In his book Roemer: Man Against the Mob, Roemer added: “Here was the G coming to ask Sam a favor. They would put themselves in his hands and run up a ’marker.’ What did Giancana have to lose by going along? . . . Giancana continued to give lip service to the CIA. He did so with a little smile on his face. But the whole time, I believe he was just playing along for his own reasons.”
In Florida, the Outfit’s plot confederate Santo Trafficante (Joe the Courier) also apparently received Mooney’s memo. In a conversation years later with Jimmy Fratianno, Johnny Rosselli said, “Santo never did anything but bullshit everybody.” The CIA’s plans, Rosselli said, “never got further than Santo.” Trafficante himself admitted as much. “Those crazy people [CIA],” he told his lawyer Frank Ragano, “they gave me some pills to kill Castro. I just flushed them down the toilet. Nothing ever came of it.”
While Giancana continued to reel over the Kennedy swindle, the Humphreys were debating about how to respond to a missive that had just arrived by mail. Murray Olf, the powerful Washington lobbyist who had assisted Curly at the Stevens Hotel, had seen to it that Mr. and Mrs. Humphreys received an invitation to one of Jack Kennedy’s five inaugural balls, where their mutual pal Frank Sinatra would be holding court. Although Curly thought the event might be fun, Jeanne was not so enthusiastic, and her journal records how Curly and Murray Olf tried to convince her to attend: “They argued and pleaded and even got me to Marshall Fields trying on ball gowns . . . A Trigere ballerina-length with a $1,200 price tag almost hooked me until the question of alterations, and shipment of same came up . . . Finally, I said to the saleswoman, ’Bullshit. I’d rather go fishing in Florida’. . . Anyway, I was mad at Jackie K. for not having the chutzpah to wear slacks on the campaign.”
Bobby in Charge
Soon after Jack Kennedy’s January inauguration, the Outfit began to feel the repercussions of the Kennedy double cross. In the attorney general’s first magazine interview, Bobby Kennedy let it be known that organized crime was now the Justice Department’s top priority, and in his first press conference he added that, in this effort, he had his brother’s full support. In his book Kennedy Justice, Victor Navasky wrote that Bobby Kennedy possessed “a total commitment to the destruction of the crime syndicates,” and according to former Justice official William Geoghehan, the new attorney general “got five anticrime bills moved through the Judiciary Committee so quickly that nobody had a chance to read them.” Bobby Kennedy had soon drawn up a list of forty underworld “targets,” ranked in order of priority.
Under Bobby Kennedy’s watch, the number of attorneys in the Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section ballooned from seventeen to sixty-three; illegal bugs and wiretaps grew from only a handful to more than eight hundred nationwide; the IRS in another questionably legal Kennedy move, saw its man-days of investigative field work increase tenfold, from 8,836 to 96,182 in just two years; and within three months, New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello was grabbed off the street, under orders from Bobby Kennedy, and flown to Guatemala, a move Marcello’s biographer John Davis called “arguably illegal,” and Marcello’s attorneys tersely labeled “kidnapping.” Lastly, the list of “targets” expanded from an initial forty to a bloated twenty-three hundred, included among them Joe Accardo and Johnny Rosselli, If Accardo’s intention in placing Giancana in the gang’s forefront had been to make him the sacrificial lamb, it succeeded: Mooney was placed number one on Bobby’s targer list. And to guarantee success, Kennedy increased the number of G-men assigned to Chicago from ten to seventy.
Bobby Kennedy’s obsession with destroying the underworld provoked him to trample the civil rights of his targets, the very laws he had sworn to defend. In 2000, attorney and syndicated columnist Sidney Zion wrote of his experience as a foot soldier in the Kennedy Justice Department:
I worked under Bobby Kennedy as an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey. I can tell you true that there never was and hopefully never will be an attorney general who more violated the Bill of Rights. It was Bobby who took this country into eavesdropping, into every violation of privacy ever feared by the Founders. He used his office as if he were the Godfather getting even with the enemies of the Family. Liberals cheered as he went after Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Cohn, but libertarians understood that what he did went far beyond these guys, that there was nothing more un-American than the decision that the ends justify the means.
Predictably, like the U.S. attorneys who had to carry out Kennedy’s controversial orders, the underworld reacted strongly to the tactics of the new regime. FBI bugs soon began picking up the hoods’ response to the goings-on at the Justice Department. In New York, they listened as mobster Michelino Clements told an associate, “Bob Kennedy won’t stop until he puts us all in jail all over the country.”
Pennsylvania boss Mario Maggio was heard saying, “[Bobby Kennedy] is too much; he is starting to hurt too many people, like unions. He is not only hurting the racket guys, but others.” Maggio added that he feared “they are going to make this a family affair and [Bobby] wants to be president.”
In Chicago, the FBI overheard Mooney remark to associate Potsie Poe, “I never thought it would be this fucking rough. When they put his brother in there, we were going to see some fireworks, but I never knew it was going to be like this. This is murder. The way that kid keeps running back and forth, I don’t know how he keeps going.”
As if to cast opprobrium at his own father, Bobby Kennedy took a personal interest in the persecution of Papa Joe’s election-fraud accomplices in Chicago. Soon after taking his oath, Bobby traveled to the Windy City, where he met with the local G-men. From the Presidential Suite at the Hilton, the very hotel where his father’s Outfit cohorts had worked so hard for Jack’s election, he set up briefings with the FBI’s special agent in charge (SAC), Marlin Johnson. On this first of his many trips to Chicago, Bobby Kennedy sat attentively in the local FBI office as agents set up a reel-to-reel tape recorder and played some highlights from their illegal bugs and taps. The first tape Kennedy heard was a recording from the First Ward bug nicknamed Shade. Although likely unknown to Kennedy, the first voice he heard belonged to the man who had brought Mooney Giancana to Joe Kennedy when the election deal was cut, ward boss Pat Marcy.
Demanding numerous replays of the tape, an enthralled Kennedy listened as Marcy and two bought-off cops discussed a plan to murder another uncorruptable cop. Agent Bill Roemer described Kennedy’s reaction, writing, “This tape really got under Bob’s skin. A Democratic politician plotting murder - of a police officer yet!” Kennedy, of course, never informed Roemer that Marcy’s boss, Mooney Giancana, was at that very moment in Florida plotting the murder of the leader of a sovereign country - at the behest of another Democratic politician, Bobby’s brother Jack.
During his tenure, Bobby Kennedy often returned to Chicago, where he brought his informal style to the briefings. In a 1996 article in Real Crime Digest, Roemer wrote, “Off would come his shoes and tie. With sleeves rolled up, he would go to the refrigerator, take out bottles of Heineken for all of us, and get down to business.” Often, the business included the playing of more surveillance tapes. Four years later, when the courts finally put an end to the eavesdropping, Kennedy would allege, much as he would with the Castro assassination plots, that he had no knowledge that such a thing had occurred on his watch. (Bobby’s moral stance was especially disingenuous given that he and his brother were simultaneously secretly recording many of the most secret Oval Office gatherings, unbeknownst to the other participants.) According to Roemer, Kennedy “said [the surveillance] was a violation of civil rights and that if he had known we were doing that, he would have put a stop to it.” Although Roemer had grown to like Bobby, the fraudulent disclaimer destroyed their relationship. “Our friendship did not end smoothly,” Roemer wrote. “When he came to Chicago [after 1965] . . . he never called anybody in the FBI again . . . I never heard from him again.”
There can be no doubt as to the veracity of Roemer’s side of the Hilton listening-party story. Immediately after the first tape-playing episode in Chicago, the cunning FBI director made certain the event was preserved for history. “Never a man to let an opportunity go by,” wrote Hoover’s intelligence chief, William Sullivan, “Hoover insisted on and got sworn affidavits from every agent present stating that Kennedy had listened to the tapes and had not questioned their legality.”
For Curly Humphreys, 1961 saw a return to business as usual. High on his agenda was the brokering of a final intergang agreement on how to divide the shares of the skim from Las Vegas’ Stardust Hotel. After negotiating with Moe Dalitz at his St. Hubert’s Grill in the Loop in January, Humphreys returned to Celano’s, where the FBI listened in as the exultant Humphreys crowed about this most recent triumph, which assured the Outfit a 35 percent cut of both the Stardust and the Desert Inn.
“We’re right at the point where we can hit him [Dalitz] in the head,” said Curly. He went on to brag that 35 percent was pretty good, given that Dalitz was “a Jew guy.” Not coincidentally, the Outfit-controlled Teamster pension fund soon bequeathed $6 million to the Stardust Group for the construction of the Stardust Golf Course and Country Club. A similar Teamster loan had already financed the Desert Inn’s golf course. These additions were viewed by the investors to be integral to selling lucrative housing lots that would ring the courses.
“Anyway, we got harmony now,” Humphreys said. “It’s all worked out . . . We didn’t have to go through a showdown.” As the Bureau tracked the activity of courier Ida Devine, they learned that the monthly split from Vegas now sent $80,000 to Miami, $65,000 to Chicago, $52,000 to Cleveland, and $50,000 to New Jersey. However, due to the illegal manner in which the Bureau was obtaining most of its current intelligence, it was unable to bring charges against the skimmers.
Joe Accardo used his share of the bounty to finance a very public show of familial affection. While the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (sans Castro’s murder) self-destructed, Accardo gave his daughter Linda Lee away at a lavish wedding, with the reception held at Mooney’s Papa Bouche’s Villa Venice Restaurant in Norridge, Illinois. Giancana had owned the facility since 1956, using as fronts owners-of-record such as Alfred Meo, and later, Leo Olsen. It was the same ploy he had used with the Cal-Neva and dozens of other properties he wished to hide from the IRS.
The reception was to be Accardo’s last great shindig, and the boss made it his biggest. Among the more than one thousand attendees were the entire Chicago Outfit, with the exception of the imprisoned Paul Ricca. In addition to the Accardo family, Ricca’s wife and children, Rosselli, the Humphreys, Giancana (with Jack Kennedy’s mistress Judy Campbell), and virtually all the local underbosses, the heirs apparent, were present, among them Gussie Alex, Frank Ferraro, Jackie Cerone, Joey Glimco, James “Cowboy” Mirro, Phil Alderisio, Ralph Pierce, Hy Godfrey, Butch Blasi, Chuckie and Sam English, Joey Aiuppa, Pat Marcy, John D’Arco, Frank LaPorte, Joe Lombardo, Tony Spilotro, Dave Yaras, Ross Prio, Rocco and Joe Fischetti, Lou Lederer, Johnny Formosa, Frank Buccieri, and Marshall Caifano.
The attendance of the local bosses was no surprise, given their obsequiousness to boss Accardo. But what was most impressive was, as G-man Roemer wrote, “any mobster of stature anywhere in the country attended.” With the press and undercover G-men outside taking names and photos, a virtual who’s who of organized crime paid their respects to the most successful mob boss in the country.1
While the Outfit celebrated in Chicago, the Kennedy White House was in mourning. Only three months into the Kennedy brothers’ regime, the disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion threatened to permanently cripple the new administration almost before it was up and running. Although Jack Kennedy surely knew that he shouldered the lion’s share of the blame, since he had scuttled key components of the plan just days before its implementation, his knee-jerk reaction was to crack down on the CIA, the invasion’s operational planners. In this effort, the president harkened back to something his father had said: “Bobby can protect you.” Thus, at the request of brother Jack, Bobby agreed to place a name above Mooney Giancana’s on his “list,” Fidel Castro. The indefatigable thirty-six-year-old Bobby, with no experience in either the realm of intelligence or a criminal court, was now the boss of both the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the most powerful nation in the world. Few government careerists believed the nation would escape the period unscathed.
Although Bobby Kennedy’s embroilment with Castro would sputter along fruitlessly, his war with Giancana was slowly driving the Chicago boss to self-destruction. Mooney’s skirmishes now with the G demonstrated to all that the swarthy wheelman from the Patch possessed not a fraction of the prudence of his masters, Accardo and Humphreys. Jeanne Humphreys remembers that when she’d first met Mooney, Curly had warned his rapier-witted wife, “Don’t be a wise guy with this fella. He’s not the same as the rest of the fellas. He’s different.” It was now clear that Bobby knew how to push Giancana’s buttons, using an illegal tactic that would have destroyed his own brother: He authorized the FBI to bug the bedrooms of Mooney and his lovers.
Since his ascension to boss, Mooney Giancana, ignoring the lessons of Capone, had escalated his high-profile lifestyle, to the continuing dis- may of the Outfit brain trust. Of late, he had been squiring singing stars Keely Smith, after her divorce from bandleader Louis Prima, and Phyllis McGuire, of the popular McGuire Sisters singing trio. FBI bugs at Mooney’s Armory Lounge headquarters often overheard Mooney demanding that the restaurant’s jukebox be purged of all Smith records when Giancana was bringing over McGuire, and vice versa if Smith was in town. In the summer of 1961, Mooney was accompanying Phyllis as her group traveled the country on a concert tour. The unlikely lovers had met in 1960 at the gang’s Desert Inn Casino in Las Vegas. Over the last year, Mooney had lavished on McGuire, whom he nicknamed Wonderful, such love tokens as a brand-new white Cadillac convertible. He also arranged for Phyllis’ markers in the gang’s casinos to be erased, or “eaten.”
With Giancana busy partying in Las Vegas, the chore of running the gang’s business there typically fell to the overwrought Curly Humphreys. The gang elder statesman watched in disbelief as Giancana’s name, linked with the likes of Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith, appeared over and over in local papers. On one occasion, when a local journalist requested an interview with Curly, the hood vented his feelings to an associate at Celano’s: “I don’t give a shit who the newspaper guy is. Why should I talk to him, I said, and don’t you speak to any of our other guys.” When Giancana actually showed up at Celano’s, Humphreys seized the opportunity to set him straight. “Don’t play around with the newspapers,” Humphreys barked. “Just stand in the background. That’s what I would do, Moe. You stay in the background.” And on another occasion: “Giancana spends so much time away from Chicago when he has business here.” Once when Mooney missed a meeting, Curly was unnerved. The FBI eavesdroppers summarized what happened: “Giancana got a hurry-up call and appeared to be unable to make the appointment that night. Humphreys sarcastically felt the call was from one of Giancana’s girlfriends and appeared angered that Giancana let pleasure interfere with business.”
The unsolicited extra responsibilities only accelerated Humphreys’ desire to retire, but he knew that was impossible. In one monitored call to his ex-wife, Clemi, in Oklahoma, Humphreys waxed nostalgic about life before the Kennedy crackdown. “It’s so bad now,” Humphreys said, “that the coppers are even afraid to take money because they’re afraid of the G . . . Honey, things were a lot different then, when you were here.” His daughter, Luella, remembered a constant refrain whenever her father visited Oklahoma. “I’m so tired,” he’d say. “I want out so bad, but I made my decision and I have to live with it.” The FBI heard him say, “I got to sit around and control the underworld here.”
The G-men summed up the growing tensions within the Outfit hierarchy: “Humphreys and the other leading Chicago Hoodlums have been unhappy with Sam Giancana . . . Humphreys and Frankie Ferraro apparently met with Giancana’s predecessors, Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca, to discuss their feelings.” In their powwow, the Outfit old-timers, who were old enough to remember Big Jim Colosimo’s disastrous infatuation with a young singer named Dale Winter, worried about Mooney’s infatuation with singers Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith.
Mooney was not the only one shirking his responsibilities. Johnny Rosselli was increasingly absent from his Sin City post in favor of participating in CIA derring-do and bedding Vegas showgirls and Hollywood starlets. “Johnny became starstruck, like Mooney,” remembers Jeanne Humphreys. “And he talked too much. The very first time I met him, he laughed about how he had whacked the wrong guy once by mistake. Murray was appalled that he would talk like that to me.” In one Celano’s conversation with Giancana, Curly spoke of how he had to repeatedly discipline Rosselli: “I’ve known Johnny, and I’ve always kind of liked him. But after all, you have to be honest when you talk to him.” Curly recalled how he once scolded Johnny, saying, “Listen to me, you fucker. When I talk, this is it. Don’t you give me this shit. I’m one of the old-timers. I’m not a young punk. You’re talking to the wrong guy.” Humphreys added, “So then he changed his mind.”
Thus, like Mooney, Johnny Rosselli began to fall increasingly out of favor with his superiors. In his stead, the Outfit’s other West Coast mouthpiece and labor relations consultant, Sidney Korshak, took up the slack. In 1997, Vanity Fair magazine devoted a sixteen-page article to the shadowy Korshak, calling him “one of the great hidden figures of twentieth-century organized crime . . . Las Vegas was one of his kingdoms.” But what the article failed to note was that Korshak was totally controlled by Chicago, and specifically, by his handler, Curly Humphreys.
FBI wiretaps throughout the period detail Humphreys’ command over Korshak, who was by now also negotiating contracts for top-flight Hollywood entertainers, many of whom desired to pad their wallets with lucrative weeklong engagements in Sin City. One bugged conversation showed Humphreys worrying that Korshak was “getting too big for his britches.” Frequently, Curly would have to remind Korshak whom he worked for, as on the occasion when Sidney arranged a Las Vegas booking for singer Dinah Shore at a hotel not run by the Outfit. Since only Humphreys was allowed to contact Korshak, the idea being to insulate the valuable asset from gangster tarnish, it fell to him alone to straighten out Sidney. Humphreys, who continued to place calls to Korshak under the name Mr. Lincoln, was incensed and let Korshak know it.
After ordering Korshak to keep Shore “out of the wrong places,” Humphreys added, “Anything you want to do for yourself, Sidney, is OK, but we made you and we want you to take care of us first . . . Now we built you up pretty good, and we stood by you, but anything else outside of the law business is us, and I don’t want to hear you in anything else . . . Anytime we yell, you come running.”
Korshak indeed came running to the Outfit’s rescue whenever it perceived it was losing the public relations war. Such was the case with one of the underworld’s most vocal opponents, composer and television pioneer Steve Allen. The Chicago native and creator of the talk show genre became an outspoken anticrime activist in 1954, when he chanced upon a photograph of a man who had been severely beaten after speaking out against the installation of pinball machines in a store near a neighborhood school. Allen, under the threat of advertiser desertion, produced a two-hour documentary on labor corruption for New York’s WNBT, from where his Tonight show originated. After the documentary aired, one of the interviewees, labor columnist Victor Reisel, was blinded by an acid-thrower, and Allen endured slashed tires on his car and stink bombs set off in his theater. Then there came physical threats. One anonymous caller referred to the Reisel attack and told Allen, “Lay off, pal, or you’re next.”
But the hoods totally misread Allen, who was only emboldened by the threats. Over the years, Allen continued to take every opportunity to sound the clarion call, against not only the underworld, but also against its upperworld enablers. Allen made frequent trips to Chicago, where he spoke at benefits for the Chicago Crime Commission. His Van Nuys office contains more than forty binders labeled “Organized Crime,” holding thousands of notes and newspaper clippings. But the entertainer’s stance had a powerful impact on his career.
“I was blackballed in many lucrative establishments,” Allen recalled shortly before his death in 2000. “I was only invited to play Vegas twice in my entire career.” This alone deprived Allen of millions of dollars from a venue he would have owned if given the opportunity.
In 1963, Allen was hosting the syndicated late-night Steve Allen Show when he received a call from Sidney Korshak. “I was asked to take it easy on Sidney’s friends,” Allen recalled. Not long after politely refusing Korshak’s request, Allen felt the power of the underworld-upperworld collusion once again. “We had a terrible time booking many A-list guests for the show,” Allen explained. It was clear to Allen that Korshak, in connivance with Jules Stein’s entertainment megalith, MCA, had chosen to deprive the Steve Allen Show of the MCA talent roster, which at the time represented most of Hollywood’s top stars.
Despite the talent embargo, Allen concocted a wonderful program with his staple ensemble of brilliant ad-libbers such as Louie Nye, Don Knotts, Bill Dana, and Tom Poston, as well as quirky personalities like madman Gypsy Boots, and then unknown Frank Zappa, who appeared as a performance artist, bashing an old car with a sledgehammer. But Allen’s 1963 run-in with Korshak would not be his last encounter with gangster intimidation.
While the fuming Accardo and Humphreys kept the organization afloat in Chicago, the man who was supposed to be the day-to-day boss remained on the nightclub circuit. In July 1961, the Bureau learned through its Las Vegas bugs that Mooney and Phyllis were going to transit Chicago on their way from Las Vegas to Atlantic City. Alerted, the Chicago Field Office dispatched five agents to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on July 12, with the intent of driving Giancana over the brink by serving a grand jury subpoena on Phyllis, whom Agent Roemer disparagingly referred to as Giancana’s “mistress” (Giancana was a widower).2 The plan was to separate the pair, with the former marine boxing champ Roemer assigned to sequester the volatile Giancana, while the others interviewed McGuire. According to both Roemer’s and Giancana’s versions, the confrontation was explosive, with Giancana launching into a profanity-laced tirade. Not only did Mooney repeatedly scream “motherfuckers” and “cocksuckers” at the agents, but he did the same to innocent travelers observing the altercation as they walked by.
At one point, Mooney chided the agents about their unrelenting probing into his private affairs. He asked sarcastically if they knew that he owned 35 percent of Marshall Field’s, 20 percent of Carson’s, and 20 percent of Goldblatt’s Department Store. He was then asked if he had any holdings in Las Vegas, to which he replied, “I own ninety-nine percent of Las Vegas. And in Florida I own the Fontainebleau, the Americana, and the Diplomat.” Although these were obvious exaggerations, there was probably some truth in all the boasts, but given the Outfit’s penchant for hidden ownerships, the truth will forever be elusive.3
“I know this is because of Bobby Kennedy,” Giancana yelled at Roemer. Using hoodlum parlance, Mooney fumed, “You’re going to report this to your boss, and he’s gonna report it to the superboss . . . You know who I mean, the Kennedys . . . Well, I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows a lot more, and one of these days we are going to tell all . . . I’m going to light a fire under you guys and don’t forget that.” When Giancana was asked if he wanted the agents to call his aide Butch Blasi to give him a ride, Giancana said, “Yes, call Butch, and tell him to bring two shotguns with him.” And to make absolutely certain Roemer got the point, the furious boss snarled, “Do you know how many people I’ve killed? I might have to be responsible for another one very shortly.”
After being cursed at for an hour, Roemer also lost his cool and began his own shouting match with O’Hare patrons, yelling out to the unwary baggage-toting travelers, “Look at this piece of garbage, a piece of scum. You people are lucky to be passing through Chicago - we have to live with this slime. This is Sam Giancana, the boss of the underworld here. Take a good look at this prick.”
Before being reunited with McGuire and catching their connecting flight, Giancana walked up to Roemer and pounded a finger into the agent’s chest. “You lit a fire tonight, Roemer, that will never go out,” Giancana threatened. “We’ll get you if it’s the last thing we do!”
At the Armory Lounge shortly after the confrontation (and with the G listening in), Giancana told an associate, “If a man would call me what I called them fellows [at O’Hare], I’d shoot them right there.” The longer Giancana stayed on the topic, however, the hotter his temper grew. In a few moments, it had reached its extremely low kindling point, prompting the gangster to scream, “I’ve had enough of that guy [Roemer]. I’m putting up a fund of one hundred thousand dollars to figure out how to get that cocksucker.”
The absurd notion of whacking a G-man was brought before Giancana’s bosses, who quickly disabused the fiery gangster of the idea. Mooney had requested such a sanction before, and the reply from Accardo was always the same: “That would be counterproductive. The whole FBI would come down on us from all over the country if we hit one of them. Call it off. Now.” Giancana obeyed, although once out of earshot of his own “superbosses,” he vented to his driver, “I’m the boss of this Outfit. Fuck anybody else!”
To be sure, Accardo and Humphreys had not turned their swords into plowshares, but their sanctioning of violence had greatly decreased in recent years, possibly due in no small part to their mellowing with age. Humphreys especially was deeply involved in charitable projects. In addition to his contributions to Native American children in Oklahoma, Curly was the sole executive in charge of the mob’s “family pension fund,” making certain that the gang widows of Capone, Nitti, Guzik, as well as Virginia Hill, were regularly compensated. Humphreys also found time to visit the terminally ill Frankie Ferraro daily at Wesley Memorial Hospital, and after Ferraro’s passing, looked after both Ferraro’s widow and his mistress.
When in Florida, one of the few forays Humphreys took away from his home was to visit Mae Capone and her boy Sonny on Palm Island. Humphreys alone sided with Sonny when he requested a $24,000 loan from the Outfit to shore up his foundering Miami Beach Restaurant; Curly was once again outvoted by “the spaghetti benders.” Jeanne Humphreys remembers, “We had to sneak money to Mae. It was our own money.” The FBI overheard discussions concerning Curly’s anonymous contributions to the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and “various Catholic and Jewish charitable organizations.” With Libonati, Curly raised funds for Boys Town and helped to establish the American-Italian Welfare League in Chicago.
Like Humphreys, Joe Accardo was frequently linked to unadvertised philanthropy and displays of conscience. Once, when an FBI informer named Bernie Glickman had ratted on some crooked fight promoters, he was badly beaten by Phil Alderisio. Worried that the Outfit had put a murder contract out on Glickman, who had steadfastly refused to name Accardo, Agent Bill Roemer, using Ralph Pierce as intermediary, sought a sit-down with the man himself, Joe Accardo, a man whom he knew so much about, but had never met. After consulting with boss Accardo, Pierce called Roemer.
“In the Sears parking lot at North and Harlem at midnight,” Pierce told the G-man. After his midnight arrival at the suburban intersection about forty-five minutes from the Loop, Roemer waited ten minutes before Pierce appeared from a Sears doorway.
“Walk west for a couple blocks,” Pierce instructed, before walking away. Roemer did as instructed, and after about two blocks, the most powerful mob boss in the nation walked out from the cover of a tree. The two men shook hands, and Accardo allowed Roemer to search him for a wire (the meeting was not authorized by Roemer’s superiors and he feared blackmail). “I’m the guy who should think you’d be wired,” Accardo joked. However, as soon as the agent touched Accardo, six men exploded out of two cars parked nearby.
“Hold on,” Accardo ordered his men. “I think it’s OK.”
Accardo suggested the two just take a walk and chat, and the two adversaries proceeded through the dark suburban streets “exchanging pleasantries,” according to Roemer, all the while tailed by Accardo’s cars.
“What is it you want from me?” Accardo eventually asked.
Roemer explained the situation with Glickman, assuring Accardo that the hood was not squealing on the boss.
“I want your word that he won’t be harmed,” Roemer said. “Call off the contract.”
“You believe what you read in the papers, huh, Roemer?” Accardo chided. “Is there a contract?”
Roemer sidestepped that debate and told Accardo that Glickman had been left unprotected by the Bureau, which had resulted in the Alderisio attack, and that Glickman was in need of medical help and peace of mind.
“Roemer, I thought we were supposed to be the bad guys,” Accardo said. “It seems to me here you are the fuckin’ bad guys.”
Roemer begged Accardo to show mercy to the infirm Glickman, who, the agent insisted, had shown undying loyalty to Accardo. After a few minutes of silence, the boss promised that Glickman would not be touched.
“You’ve got my word,” Accardo said. Then the two men inquired about each other’s families, as if they were old high-school classmates attending a reunion. The next day Roemer drove a stunned Glickman to Accardo’s River Forest Palace, so he could hear could hear about his indemnity from the boss himself. In his book Accardo: The Genuine Godfather, Roemer described what happened next: ’[Accardo] took Bernie to his personal physician. The physician put Bernie in St. Luke-Presbyterian Hospital . . . and treated him while Bernie recuperated from his ordeal . . . Accardo had paid all the bills.’
The tensions with the G were temporarily ameliorated in the fall of 1961 as social gatherings held sway. On September 23, 1961, ten months after the election, Joe Kennedy threw a thank-you party for Frank Sinatra at the family’s Hyannis compound. According to the Sinatra clan, Joe wanted to show his appreciation for Sinatra’s enlisting the Giancana support in West Virginia, not to mention the Outfit’s critical role in the general election. Two weeks later, Sinatra was in Chicago attending the coming-out party for Paul Ricca, who had just been released from prison.
The party atmosphere was not long-lasting, at least as far as the volatile Giancana-Sinatra relationship was concerned. Giancana had concluded by now that Sinatra had lied about intervening on his behalf with the Kennedys. Perhaps Mooney had expected some good word after Joe Kennedy’s party for Sinatra in September. According to Sinatra biographer Randy Taraborrelli, the singer consistently lied to Mooney about pleading his case with Papa Joe. Taraborrelli spoke with Philadelphia mafioso Nicolas D’Amato, and Sinatra’s fellow singer Dean Martin, both of whom were aware of the dangerous game Sinatra was playing.
“Sinatra was an idiot for playing both sides of the field like that,” said D’Amato. “Playing Mooney for a sucker? What, are you kidding me? If he wasn’t so fucking talented, he never woulda 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.” Dean Martin agreed, saying, “Only Frank could get away with the shit he got away with. Only Frank. Anyone else woulda been dead.”
On December 6, 1961, the FBI eavesdroppers also caught wind of the escalating warfare between Sinatra and Giancana. On that night, Mooney was meeting in his Armory Lounge headquarters with Johnny Formosa, an underling used as a courier between Chicago and the West Coast, and who occasionally worked at Mooney’s Cal-Neva Lodge.
“Let’s hit Sinatra,” Formosa advised Mooney. Formosa’s rage was such that he relished taking out the entire Rat Pack. “Let’s show those fuckin’ Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it,” Formosa said. “I could take the rest of them too - Lawford, that Martin prick, and I could take the nigger and put his other eye out.” The suggestion echoed what the normally restrained Johnny Rosselli had also told boss Giancana. According to FBI wiretaps, Rosselli told Mooney that he should lash out at the those who had broken their word. “They only know one way,” Johnny said. “Now let them see the other side of you.”
But Mooney responded, “No. I have other ideas for them. You call those cocksuckers and tell them I want them for a month or else.”
Giancana’s “other ideas,” which involved having the entire Rat Pack perform gratis at Mooney’s Villa Venice, would take a year to reach fruition. In the meantime, a Chicago associate of Mooney’s named Tommy DiBella learned just how close Sinatra had come to graduating from swing music to “trunk music.” Mooney told DiBella he was considering putting a contract out on the double-crossing singer when he had an erotic epiphany. “[One night] I’m fucking Phyllis, 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.”
Sinatra’s reprieve would be, like many of Mooney’s other pronouncements, temporary. In the meantime, Mooney began making plans for Sinatra’s payback for the Kennedy embarrassment.
Giancana’s restraint was surprising, especially given the continued heat being placed on the Outfit by the administration they had helped elect. Bobby Kennedy, clearly not privy to whatever hollow deals his father had cut with the mob, now began to move on Vegas, the very city the Outfit thought it had protected when it had fallen in with Joe Kennedy. Before the Kennedy regime, the FBI had managed to tap only the Fremont Hotel. In Vegas, the FBI was now authorized to tap twenty-five telephone lines into Outfit-controlled, or Outfit-invested, casinos such as the Desert Inn, the Sands, the Stardust, and the Riviera. (The phone taps were discovered in 1963 by an engineer for the Fremont, the manager of which promptly enlisted the other casinos in a class action suit against the FBI. The suit was pending until 1967, when the Justice Department indicted them for the skim operation.4) The noose became so tight for the hoods that they had to put a prohibition on phone conversations altogether. One wiretapped conversation gave evidence of the agony the taps were inflicting on the underworld: Hood One: “I need to get a hold of a guy in Las Vegas, and how the hell am I going to get ahold of him? They don’t even want you to make a call there.”
Hood Two: “You can’t call the state of Nevada. That’s the orders.”
The tireless assault on the underworld did not appear to hamper the Kennedy administration’s efforts regarding the rest of its agenda. Not unlike the overworked Curly Humphreys, Bobby Kennedy continued to burn the midnight oil in his zeal to bring down the number one man on his hit list, Fidel Castro. With the onslaught of millions of pages of recently released government documents, the evidence has become conclusive that Bobby Kennedy, like so many upperworld scions before him, attempted to walk the fine line between moral indignation and utilitarianism regarding associations with the underworld. For in his ardor to remove Castro from the scene, Bobby Kennedy almost certainly approved the ongoing CIA liaisons with Johnny Rosselli and others.5 Years later, Rosselli was asked by a congressional committee if he had ever met the Kennedy brothers during the operation. He responded that the only Kennedy he knew was patriarch Joe Kennedy. Then he postulated that he might indeed have met Jack when he first met Joe. “The only recollection I have,” Rosselli answered, “is I think when they were all kids out in California when his father was running the studio.”
On December 11, 1961, Hoover began a campaign of slow torture against the Kennedy family by first alerting Bobby that Hoover’s hidden mikes had heard all about Giancana’s frustration regarding the double cross in the election deal he had cut with Joe Kennedy via Sinatra. It was just the sort of dirt that Hoover had historically coveted as his own guarantee of job security. He had gathered information on the private lives of powerful people for decades, occasionally letting the subjects discreetly know how vulnerable they were. The Bureau’s head of intelligence at the time, William Sullivan, wrote, “[Hoover] kept this kind of explosive material in his personal files, which filled four rooms on the fifth floor of headquarters.”
Hoover was especially concerned about his purchase with the Kennedy brothers and knew that this was the sort of intelligence that would forestall any attempt to remove him from the FBI. Even before the election, candidate Kennedy had let it be known that he was considering replacing Hoover. “Jack Kennedy disliked Hoover in return,” wrote William Sullivan, “and wanted to replace him as Director.” Now, it appeared, Joe’s dealings had tied the brothers’ hands.
Hoover biographer Curt Gentry powerfully described the charged atmosphere in his book /. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets: “What happened between the Kennedys during the next few days can only be surmised. Robert would obviously warn John that Hoover believed the story (that is, had yet another arrow to add to his quiver), whether it was true or not. Typically, the attorney general would have confronted Joe, certainly to ask about the tale and probably to rant and rave. . . And Robert Kennedy would surely be writhing furiously at this latest twist of Hoover’s thumbscrew.”
Gentry is quick to point out that seven days after Bobby learned of Joe’s campaign shenanigans, and after a likely shouting match between the two, Joe suffered a massive stroke, from which he would never rebound. But Hoover was not yet finished with the education of Bobby Kennedy. In a few weeks, the director would apprise the self-righteous attorney general that he was fully cognizant of more examples of Kennedy family hypocrisy surrounding their dealings with the Outfit.
By the end of 1961, the Castro vendetta had transmogrified into a new joint White House-CIA venture code-named Operation Mongoose, which was typified by open sabotage against Cuba and more tightly held murder plots against its president. The man brought in to oversee this latest variation was a decorated CIA veteran and former FBI agent named Bill Harvey, who openly clashed with the impulsive and inexperienced attorney general over both style and strategy. By this time, Robert Maheu had long since extracted himself from the scheme, and Harvey had no desire to rerecruit him. When Rosselli was later asked about Maheu’s departure from the scene, he explained, “[Harvey] never trusted [Maheu] since his FBI days . . . they were in the FBI together.”
The perceptive Harvey also immediately cut Agency ties to Giancana and Trafficante, both of whom he rightly suspected were conning the White House. By the spring of 1962, Harvey had begun meeting Rosselli in Miami and elsewhere, and with Harvey as the conduit, the CIA passed four poison pills to Rosselli, which he in turn gave to a Cuban exile who promised to get them into Cuba with a team that would administer them to Fidel at the earliest opportunity.
Although he was shirking his Outfit responsibilities in Las Vegas, Rosselli enjoyed the CIA intrigue, and the strong bond he was making with new friend Bill Harvey. Like Rosselli, Harvey was an action man, who defied all bureaucratic refinements that slowed the pace. Both men were also strong patriots with a visceral hatred of all things Communist. Their bond would grow into a lifelong friendship, attested to by Harvey in congressional testimony, and more recently by Harvey’s widow, Clara Grace, or “CG.”
“Rosselli was a very good friend of ours,” CG Harvey recently recalled. “He had dinner in our home.” On those occasions when Rosselli showed up at the Harveys’ Indianapolis home, he always brought gifts for their children, a recurring theme in the childless Rosselli’s life. When the Harveys’ son was in Hollywood, Johnny squired him around, introducing him to movie stars. “He would do anything for you he could possibly do,” CG fondly recalled, “but Bobby Kennedy was hot on his neck.” Although CG Harvey was not naive about the ways of Rosselli’s other life, she made no apologies for her affection for the charming gangster. “I know he had his bad side,” she said, “but he was really doing things on our side that really counted. Bill defended Johnny, saying he was a loyal American. Bill said he would rather ride shotgun with him than anyone else.”
Like Mrs. Harvey, Bill Harvey’s coworkers also became aware of Harvey’s fast-growing bond with Rosselli. An assistant CIA chief of station who worked directly under Harvey recently noted, “Bill was proud of his friendship with Rosselli. He bragged about it. These were guys that got things done, and that appealed to him.”
As their friendship blossomed, Harvey granted Rosselli the privilege of an open door at the massive CIA base in Miami, from where Harvey’s Mongoose raids were coordinated. Throughout the summer of 1962, “Colonel Rosselli,” as he was known at the “JM/WAVE” CIA base, was a part of the Mongoose team, with all the excitement and bunkhouse camaraderie that such an undertaking entailed.
“[Rosselli] had virtual carte blanche into the highest levels of the [Miami] station,” remembers Bradley Ayers, an army captain assigned to the CIA base. “It was clear that somebody had said, you know, give this guy whatever he needs.” Ayers also saw in Rosselli what everyone else had seen regarding his devotion. “There was a quality to Rosselli that came off as the patriotic, true-blue, one hundred percent American. I could see the spark of patriotism there, and I guess that made it all palatable. We were all trying to get the same job done, although we were coming from entirely different places.”
Over many months, Rosselli commandeered V-20 speedboats across the straits to Cuba in dangerous nighttime runs, infiltrating shooters onto the island. On one occasion, his boat was sunk by Cuban patrols, leaving the fifty-seven-year-old gangster to swim hundreds of yards in the cold ocean at night to reach a second boat. On another occasion, a sunk boat forced him into a dinghy, where he drifted for days before being rescued by colleagues who had given him up for dead. For all his devotion, however, Rosselli (and everyone connected to Mongoose for that matter) saw few successes. As time wore on, Bill Harvey began to see the assassination project as not only unwise, but immoral. And Johnny Rosselli had grown weary of the Cuban teams, which seemed far less capable than the hit men with whom he had been acquainted in his other life. According to Harvey’s widow, also a CIA officer with whom her husband spoke freely, Bill Harvey began sandbagging the plots, hoping Bobby would just drop the idea.
At the end of 1962, Bobby Kennedy had drummed Harvey out of Mongoose for what he considered insubordination (Harvey had cursed out Bobby and his brother at a White House meeting). And Rosselli went back to his old life, only to find that the IRS was after him as well. Rosselli’s biographers wrote that he “resented what he perceived as the government’s double-standard - the pressure was increasing at the same time he was risking his life doing Uncle Sam’s dirty work in the Florida Keys.” Rosselli said as much to a Las Vegas associate, elaborating about the influence of Bobby Kennedy. “Here I am,” Rosselli said, “helping the government, helping the country, and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.”
The seriousness of the Mongoose enterprise was not without occasional comic relief. One such episode occurred during the summer of 1962, when Curly and Jeanne Humphreys arrived at their Biscayne Bay house after a recent Jamaican vacation. During the island jaunt, Jeanne had learned about how the Jamaicans had imported mongooses to solve their snake infestation problems. Coincidentally, the Humphreys were having a snake problem on their Florida property, and when the pair made a trip to Miami Beach to visit Rosselli at the Fontainebleau, the subject of mongooses was in the front of Jeanne’s mind. Thus, while Curly was upstairs with some of “the boys,” Jeanne remained poolside and made what she thought was innocent small talk with Johnny Rosselli. In doing so, a simple intention to determine what the plural was for mongoose turned into a potential disaster for Rosselli. Jeanne remembers the following exchange:
Jeanne: “What do you know about the word mongoose}”
Johnny (nervously): “Is this a joke?”
Jeanne: “Not to some people it isn’t.”
Johnny: “Are you crazy? This Castro stuff is OK’d by the G. We’re not supposed to talk about it. I can’t believe Curly would talk about such a thing.”
Jeanne: “First, why on earth would Castro be concerned about the snakes in my front yard, and second, I’m the one who told Curly about them.”
Johnny (realizing): “Look, I just fucked up. Please don’t tell Curly.”6
The moral tightrope the Kennedys had been negotiating was about to become as fine as a human hair. Their use of the underworld, or castigation of it, depending on which was more politically advantageous at the time, was about to blow up in their faces, due ironically to Bobby Kennedy’s pressure on Hoover to increase his surveillance on members of organized crime. If Bobby Kennedy had any doubts as to just how indistinguishable were the upperworld of his family, which he turned a blind eye toward, and the underworld of those he crusaded against, he had to look no further than his own brother’s bedroom. The occurrence that crystallized the truism was put most succinctly by Hoover biographer Curt Gentry: “The bug in the Armory Lounge had gradually led [Hoover] to a discovery that even the old cynic must have found stunning. [Judy] Campbell, mistress of the president, was also romantically involved with Sinatra, Giancana, and Johnny Rosselli.”
Although the Bureau had suspected the relationship since its inception two years earlier, it had now acquired hard evidence via phone records and other surveillance (all encouraged by Bobby Kennedy’s mob crack down) that Campbell had been in regular telephone contact with the president at the White House.
The information played right into Hoover’s Chinese water torture of the Kennedys. On February 27, 1962, Hoover sent a memo to Bobby informing him that Hoover had become aware of the Campbell story; in March, Hoover similarly informed the president. And there was one more item. In May, Hoover sent a memo to Bobby letting him know that Hoover was fully aware of the CIA-Maheu-Giancana plotting against Castro. Although the Bureau had known the gist of the story for many months, they had recently been given the specifics by both the CIA and Maheu, both having been pressured to explain the Rowan wiretapping incident in Las Vegas.
The tug-of-war between the Outfit and the G was unrelenting. By this time, the Outfit knew of some of the FBI’s bugs and wiretaps. Recall that Jeanne Humphreys has spoken of an FBI source cultivated by her husband. Even Agent Bill Roemer had become aware that Humphreys had obtained a highly confidential list of mobsters designated for targeting by Kennedy’s Justice Department. According to Jeanne Humphreys, one celebrated Bureau infiltration represented nothing more than an elaborate Outfit charade.
On February 11, 1962, Miami agents listened to a bug they had illegally installed in Chicago boss Jackie Cerone’s vacation home in Florida. The G listened in as Cerone conferred with fellow Chicago underbosses Fifi Buccieri and Dave Yaras. In great and violent detail the hoods discussed their past killings, and an attempted execution of rival numbers kingpin “Big Jim” Martin. Among other killings, they discussed the horrific torture murder of William “Action Jackson” Kelly, an Outfit juice collector. Agent Bill Roemer described the killing, which took place at a meat-rendering plant, in gruesome detail: ’They hoisted him a foot off the ground and impaled him on a meat hook through the rectum. . . They took a cattle prod . . . and attached it to his penis. They plugged it in . . . Then they poured water on the cattle prod, increasing the voltage . . . Then they smashed his kneecaps with a hammer . . . they stuck him with ice picks . . . They let him hang there for three days until he expired.’
As in the execution of Fred Evans, Roemer took credit for being the cause of the Kelly killing, claiming that the killers were trying to obtain a confession that Kelly had squealed to Roemer and his partners. In fact, the actual motive for the crime left many otherwise nonviolent insiders saying, “Kelly had it coming.” According to recent interviews, what happened was that Kelly, a known sexual degenerate, had been trying to collect on a gambling debt from an Outfit-connected burglar named Casey Bonakowski. At the time Kelly came calling, Bonakowski was in prison on theft charges. Kelly therefore decided to collect the debt in the form of sexual favors from Mrs. Bonakowski, who put up a struggle before being raped. As if to put a signature on his depravity, Kelly bit off one of his victim’s nipples and spat it on the floor. When word got back to Casey, he immediately took it up with the bosses, who made Kelly an example for future rapists of their women.
After the war stories concluded, the conspirators got around to the business at hand, planning the murders of Laborers International Union official Frankie Esposito and First Ward boss John D’Arco, both of whom were on route to the Sunshine State. The long session was highlighted by the following exchanges:
Yaras: “I wish for Christ’s sake we were hitting him now.”
Cerone: “Well, if we don’t score by the end of the week . . . then we got to take a broad and invite him here.”
Yaras: “Leave it to us. As soon as he walks in the fucking door, boom!
We’ll hit him with a fucking ax or something . . .”
Buccieri: “Now, if he comes in with D’Arco . . . we could do everybody a favor if this fucking D’Arco went with him.”
Cerone: “The only thing is, he [D’Arco] weighs three hundred fucking pounds.”
The conversation continued for several minutes as the gangsters discussed in excruciating detail when and how to use their knives and axes, and whether to rent a boat, so as to deposit the bodies at sea.
Back in Chicago, the local G-men warned the alleged targets, who were disbelieving, to put it mildly. “That’s all bullshit,” Esposito told one agent who phoned him with the news of the threat. “Those guys wouldn’t hit me, you guys are full of shit. I have no reason to talk to you.” Esposito then hung up on the G. Even Bill Roemer, despite his later use of the tape to portray his prey in the worst possible light, admitted that he understood Esposito’s response. “If I hadn’t heard it myself on the tapes, maybe I would have thought it was all ’bullshit’ too.” According to Jeanne Humphreys, Roemer should have believed Esposito.
“The entire conversation was a farce, orchestrated by Murray,” Mrs. Humphreys recently recalled. “I was there at D’Arco’s Hollywood Beach house when they rehearsed it. It was scripted. They knew the bug was illegal and they wanted to drive the G crazy.” It is worth noting that neither Esposito nor D’Arco were ever even ambushed, let alone murdered. The Bureau’s transcript of the incriminating conversation was leaked to Life magazine writer Sandy Smith and later used by Chicago agent Bill Roemer in his autobiography to illustrate not only the Outfit’s violent ways, but the Bureau’s great surveillance coup. No one wras ever told about the rape of Casey Bonakowski’s wife.
The occasional game-playing with the G notwithstanding, the situation became so intolerable that Jeanne Humphreys chose to spend the better part of 1962 in Zurich, Switzerland. Every March for years, she and Curly had been ferrying Outfit “pension” money to Virginia Hill, who had been living as an expatriate in the banking capital. According to Jeanne, Gussie Alex had been making the deliveries to Flill for a few years, until he was barred from going to Europe by the Outfit, who feared he was being followed. “I met Virginia in Gstaad,” Jeanne recently said. “Fler mouth was so foul, she made me look like Mother Teresa.” Humphreys says that she smuggled $100,000 per year to Hill, the large-denomination bills hidden in Jeanne’s nylon waistband when transiting customs. In 1962, after she and Curly had toured Africa, Egypt, and Europe and made their delivery to Ms. Hill, it was agreed that Jeanne should take an apartment in downtown Zurich. “My husband stayed for about three months, but had to return to Chicago to run the show,” Jeanne recalls.
By the summer of 1962, the “Rosselli-Giancana-Sinatra Show” was becoming almost unbearable for the Outfit brain trust. According to the FBI’s bug at Giancana’s Armory Lounge, Giancana spoke with Rosselli about an assignation with still another celebrity, actress Marilyn Monroe. Over the years, numerous sources have stated that both Rosselli and Giancana had known Monroe, who like Judy Campbell had also been on Jack Kennedy’s “nooky list.” Also like Campbell, it appears that Monroe fell hard for the handsome president, who rarely let his emotions spoil a good romp. However, Monroe had recently been told the facts of life by numerous Kennedy aides, and very likely also by Bobby, and now fell into one of her recurrent self-destruct modes. Having no success in calming the actress, the Kennedys tried a different tack. During the last week of July, a distraught Monroe accepted an invitation from Jack Kennedy’s sister Pat to join her and her husband, Peter Lawford, at Frank Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge, where Monroe had previously visited when filming The Misfits in nearby Reno in 1960. Likely unbeknownst to the Kennedys, another occasional consort would be in attendance, whom Monroe had met through either Sinatra or Rosselli, the Lodge’s true owner, Mooney Giancana.
A number of Giancana’s closest associates assert that Mooney was intent on bedding Monroe, mostly as a swipe at President Kennedy, her other lover. According to Bill Roemer, who heard the Armory Lounge conversation between Giancana and Rosselli (who also knew Monroe), there was little doubt about what had transpired at Cal-Neva’s Bungalow 52. As Roemer later wrote: “What I had gleaned was that Giancana had been at Cal-Neva, the Lake Tahoe resort, with Frank Sinatra and Marilyn the week before she died. There, from what I had been able to put together, she engaged in an orgy. From the conversation I overheard, it appeared she may have had sex with both Sinatra and Giancana on the same trip.”
Meyer Lansky’s partner and Las Vegas overseer, “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, recently recalled, “I was there at the Cal-Neva in ’62, when Peter and Frank were there with Monroe. They kept her drugged every night. It was disgusting.” One of Frank Sinatra’s photographers recently stated that a few weeks after the orgy, Sinatra showed him a proof sheet of photos Frank had taken in Monroe’s chalet at the Lodge. The pictures showed a nauseated Monroe on all fours being straddled by Giancana, then kneeling over a toilet, then covered in vomit. At the photographer’s insistence, Sinatra destroyed the proofs in his presence. Afterward, according to one Giancana confidant, Mooney derided both Monroe’s body and her sexual inadequacy to anyone who would listen. But Mooney was satisfied just to have cuckolded the man who had double-crossed him and made him the laughingstock of the Outfit, Jack Kennedy. As the G listened in on the Armory bug, they heard Rosselli wisecrack to Giancana, “You sure get your rocks off fucking the same broad as the brothers, don’t you.”
Although the Lawfords struggled against the Sinatra-Giancana onslaught at the Lodge, attempting to sober up Monroe, they had no success. A week later, the troubled Monroe was dead, a likely suicide by the lifelong manic-depressive. Worried that the death would somehow backfire on the Outfit, Humphreys and Accardo demanded more details on Monroe’s controversial drug overdose. Mooney, however, hoped that the truth of Monroe’s death would give him leverage over the dogged Bobby Kennedy. According to Jeanne Humphreys, Rosselli showed up at the Humphreys’ apartment a few months later, toting a thick manila envelope.
“Murray had no problem letting me read the first few pages - he rarely hid things from me,” Jeanne remembers. “I only looked at three or four pages of the stash, which was about an inch thick. It started off with the medical report on Monroe’s death. The way I understood it, Mooney and the other guys were very curious about her death. It was a topic of conversation.” Jeanne Humphreys also heard whispers that “the boys thought maybe the Kennedys had hit her.”
The practical effect of Rosselli’s and Giancana’s escalating high jinks was that the two fell even further out of favor with their Chicago bosses. And no matter how many times they were scolded by their superiors, the wayward playboys continued down their errant paths. In the fall of 1962, Mooney was ready to extract his pound of flesh from Frank Sinatra, the man who had sold him the bill of goods regarding the Kennedy “deal.” Throughout 1962, Mooney had overseen a massive remodeling of his Villa Venice Restaurant, and according to some of his cronies, the entire undertaking was aimed at making a onetime killing, with Sinatra’s Rat Pack as bait. According to Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, “The shows were Dad’s way of paying back Giancana for the help he provided to the Kennedys.”
Giancana’s plan involved setting up a gambling operation on the grounds of the Villa, which, in order to attract Illinois’ high rollers, had to first be rescued from its dilapidated state. Mooney’s daughter Antoinette wrote of the result of Mooney’s efforts: “[Guests] climbed into restaurant gondolas that were steered back and forth along a river by appropriately costumed gondola rowers, complete with music from the Old Country - all on the house, part of the ambiance. The seating capacity had been increased to eight hundred. The interior renovation was absolutely exquisite . . . the food was perfection and the table dinnerware was the finest that could be found in the Chicago area.”7
But the most important addition to the compound was “The Quonset Hut,” a gambling venue two blocks away, which could also be reached by shuttle bus for the more pampered guests. Starting on November 26, and for the better part of a month, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Eddie Fisher, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jimmy Durante appeared for free at the Villa Venice. During the soid-out run, there were lavish parties and receptions in Mooney’s suite while the suckers wrere being ferried to the Quonset Hut to be relieved of their money at the craps, blackjack, and roulette tables.
Both the local press and the G, with its bugs, took a great interest in the proceedings at the Villa. The Chicago Daily News reported, “During the last twenty days . . . a heavy toll has been levied at the Hut on the Villa patrons. Individual losses of as much as $25,000 have been reported.” The Chicago Tribune added, “The betting den began full-blast operations when Sinatra and his group opened at the Villa Venice . . . A host of gangsters were on hand for Sinatra’s first night. Among them were Willie (Potatoes) Daddano, Marshall Caifano, Jimmy (the Monk) Allegretti, and Felix (Milwaukee Phi!) Alderisio. Sinatra’s gangland fans from other cities appeared too. The Florida contingent was led by Joe Fischetti, from Miami. A delegation of Wisconsin gangsters, including Jim DeGeorge, occupied a ringside table.”
When the dust settled in December, Giancana (with the G listening) counted his profit, which exceeded $3 million. Hoping to learn more, the Bureau made discreet contact with some of the Villa’s performers. With great candor, Sammy Davis, Jr. told them, “I can’t talk about it. Baby, I got one eye, and that eye sees a lot of things that my brain says I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”
A few weeks after the monthlong party, Mooney abandoned the Villa, which curiously burned to the ground soon thereafter. Mooney Giancana would need every penny of his take from the Villa operation, as the new year would bring increasing pressures, both from the unyielding Bobby Kennedy and his own disgusted Chicago masters.
1. Among those ID’d were Gambino, Columbo, Profaci, Marcello, Alo, Buffalino, Bompensiero, Genovese, Patriarca, Lansky, Costello, Trafficante, Marcello, and Dalitz. As a final reminder that this was an effort to outdo the recent Bonanno-Profaci wedding in New York, the only mobster not invited was Bonanno, who was an outcast even in New York.
2. The agents were Harold Sell, Bill Roemer, Vince Inserra, Johnny Bassett, and Ralph Hill.
3. Regarding the Fontainebleau, Frank Sinatra’s 1,275-page FBI file notes that Giancana associate Joe Fischetti “was deeply involved in this hotel” and arranged for Sinatra to perform there “without charge.”
4. Even Nevada’s lieutenant governor, Cliff Jones, found he was being watched when, in 1965, he found a microphone and phone-line-powered transmitter hidden in his office.
5. For more on Bobby and the use of the underworld in the Castro operations, see Russo, Live by the Sword, and Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot.
6. Jeanne says that the confused byplay actually went on longer, although she cannot recall all the details four decades later. Once back at the Biscayne home, Jeanne could not restrain herself and brought up the hilarious non sequitur that had just occurred at the Fontainebleau. But just as with the election, Curly found nothing funny about the charade. “Forget about Mongoose,” he told his wife. ’It’s another crazy scheme of Johnny’s.’
7. Old-time Chicagoans are quick to point out that not many availed themselves of the gondola rides since the Des Plaines River, on which the boats traveled, was linked to an open sewer line, the effect of which removed much of the romance from the boating experience.