Part Six
19.
Upheaval was the rule in 1963, with pressures both personal and professional mounting with each successive day. The intensified scrutiny even forced Joe Accardo into doing the unthinkable, selling his palatial mansion in favor of a more modest eighteen-room rancher he had built at 1407 North Ashland, also in River Forest. Although Accardo’s ever-lowering public profile gave him an oasis of sorts, the others Humphreys, Giancana, and Rosselli especially - began to whither under the strain. Most of the bosses sought refuge in constant travel, hoping to elude their government pursuers.
“It’s a bad situation with the G on us,” Humphreys said into the hidden mike at Celano’s. “I stay around a week, and then go away for a week or so, that way they lose track of me. Then they get puzzled. I haven’t been home for weeks.” However, when the hoods moved about the Chicago environs, their lives were miserable. The local FBI’s report on the game of cat and mouse is informative: “The hoodlums take the most elaborate precautions to prevent themselves from being placed under surveillance. These involve frequent changing of automobiles, the use of various types of public conveyances, including taxicabs, the devious and circuitous routes followed to reach a particular point and the confrontation of individuals whom they believe to be following them.”
Humphreys’ FBI file shows that J. Edgar Hoover himself ordered his agents to escalate their surveillance of Humphreys, who went to extraordinary lengths to elude them. In addition to keeping his loaded .38 in his jacket pocket, Humphreys gave his associates intricate codes for calling him, using a prearranged number of rings and hang-ups before answering, and a Morse code of sorts for knocking on his apartment door. At his Key Biscayne home, Humphreys had the height raised on the retaining wall that encircled his property (the G responded with helicopter flyovers).
On the streets of Chicago, Curly walked in zigzags, hoping to throw off the G. Given that one of Curly’s many business triumphs was the local dry-cleaning concession, it was ironic that the G-men referred to Curly’s evasive tactics as “dry cleaning.” In one of their summary reports, the local feds wrote: “Humphreys located in vicinity of [King Arthur’s] Pub. He dry cleaned and walked approximately fifteen blocks, entering and exiting buildings, drug stores, etc. [for twenty five minutes when] he entered restaurant.” In another report, an agent described how Humphreys “left his Marine Drive residence and walked two blocks south . . . where he hailed a cab. It was again noted that during this two-block walk, Humphreys was constantly turning around and walking backwards and otherwise taking great pains to determine if he is being surveilled.”
FBI agent John Bassett recently spoke of his personal travails in tailing Humphreys. Bassett remembered Curly’s penchant for ducking into a large department store such as Marshall Field’s, where he would immediately head for the first-floor cosmetics section, utilizing its myriad mirrors to observe his observers. The FBI also listened in as Humphreys proudly read aloud from a purloined Chicago Police Intelligence Unit report, which stated that the local cops, at least, “had no success whatsoever in surveilling him.” Welsh historian Royston Webb aptly concluded, “No one knew the ’dry cleaning’ business better than Hump.”1
Even with the choke hold applied by his adversary, Humphreys was not without the occasional victory. In April 1963, Curly’s never identified FBI spy came through with a document that Humphreys shared with his fellows at Celano’s. As the eavesdroppers listened in shock, Curly read from a highly confidential Bureau memo that held the names on Bobby Kennedy’s target list, which included not only the Celano’s crowd, but their allies in Las Vegas. Humphreys discovered that the G had even ID’d the new courier the Outfit had brought in to replace the exiled Virginia Hill, Ida Devine.2
Humphreys quickly forwarded a copy of the memo to Las Vegas, where the casino bosses were similarly shocked. The warning inspired the Las Vegas contingent to press their own sources, who also served up a plum. Later in the month of April, Las Vegas FBI agents listened in astonishment as Fremont Casino manager Ed Levinson read aloud from a just-written FBI summary of the skimming operation. “My God,” Levinson lamented, “they even know about Ida [Devine].” The purloined memo sent the various casino executives scurrying throughout their physical plants in efforts to ferret out the illegal bugs. FBI mikes were soon ripped out of Levinson’s office, the Dunes, and also the Horseshoe. Not all the mikes were found, however, but open talk of money was soon forbidden in the gambling venues.
Not content with the pace of his antimob crusade, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the G to revert to its tried-and-true weapon, the IRS. Armed with the FBI’s discovery of the Humphreys’ luxurious Biscayne Bay home, the taxmen first sought to prove that it was impossible that the former $75-per-week dice girl Jeanne Humphreys, whose name appeared on the $55,000 mortgage, could have afforded either the home or the extensive improvements; likewise, the purchase was out of all proportion to Curly’s income, as reported to the IRS.
When the IRS spoke with Curly, he informed them that Jeanne had indeed contributed $50,000 to the home. In seeking to determine if Jeanne was capable of such a purchase, the taxmen spoke with her former husband, Outfit bookie Irving Vine. Vine, who lived at a hotel owned by Humphreys aide Ralph Pierce, told the taxmen that his former wife maintained no such nest egg, and that he would agree to testify to that effect. Although Vine told the truth as he knew it, he was mistaken. During their marriage in the 1940s, Jeanne did indeed have a low income. But after they separated, Jeanne developed a high-class clientele in the better clubs. “I had one tip of fifteen hundred dollars,” she says. “Another time I had a first-class vacation to Vegas paid for by one tip alone.” By the midfifties, Jeanne had banked so much savings that she purchased her own home in Florida, thus to be near her brother who also lived in the Sunshine State. In Florida, Jeanne supplemented her savings by working at a dog track. Indeed, part of the money for the down payment on the Key Biscayne home came from the sale of her other Florida home. Thus, there was some truth in what Curly had told the IRS.
Some have postulated that Vine sought a possible payback on the man who he may have believed stole his wife, but Jeanne Humphreys emphatically denies it. “Our marriage broke up long before I began seeing Murray,” she says. “In fact, our marriage broke up long before we separated. The last three years we only lived together out of convenience.” Whatever his motivation, Vine unwisely agreed to testify against Humphreys.
According to the local press’ ubiquitous unnamed “informed sources,” the Outfit dispatched a number of soldiers who urged Vine to rethink his ill-considered persecution of underworld icon Curly. It is widely believed that when Vine ignored the warnings, the Outfit lashed out in a manner seen less and less frequently in recent years. After being called to Pierce’s Del Prado Hotel on May 6 by a hysterical chambermaid, homicide detectives surveyed a scene that was explicitly described by writer Ovid Demaris: “Homicide detectives found Irving Vine lying on the floor, dressed only in blood-smeared shorts, his mouth and nose sealed with surgical tape, his legs also bound with tape, a shirt twisted loosely around his neck and a pillow covering his head. Three of his ribs were broken, his face was scratched and his knees bruised, but the real damage was to the lower part of his body where savage tortures had been inflicted with an ice pick during a period of several hours. Death was due to suffocation.”
As first culled from Humphreys’ massive FBI file by Welsh historian Royston Webb, the Bureau was told by informants that “Vine was murdered on behalf and under instructions of Humphreys, due to the fact that he was a prospective witness for the IRS . . . but also to serve the purpose of enabling Mrs. Humphreys to say that she received money . . . from Vine . . . She will now be in a position where she can throw the blame, not on Humphreys, but on Vine, now deceased.” The G, however, was unable to track down the elusive Humphreys, who fled Chicago for Oklahoma and then Miami during the dustup.
“He flew to Florida the next day, worried that I had read the news of my ex-husband’s murder,” Jeanne recalls. “He told me, ’We didn’t have anything to do with it. We don’t do things like that.’” But Jeanne knew that when Outfit bosses believed they were betrayed, they did do things like that. She has always believed that her second husband authorized the murder of her first husband.
Returning to Chicago after the heat had died down, Humphreys maintained a furious workload, despite his own deteriorating heart condition, which periodically saw him hospitalized. In addition to his constant legal research on behalf of Accardo and Ricca, he also assisted Ralph Pierce on a lawsuit he had filed against the police department; Buster Wortman, who was being prosecuted for intimidating a racetrack official; and Marshall Caifano, for whom Humphreys rigged a jury. On the business front, Humphreys’ workload was equally daunting: He investigated gambling ventures for the Outfit in the Bahamas, Santo Domingo, and the Leeward Islands; brokered the sale of Pete Fish’s restaurant; met with Kansas City boss Nick Civella; negotiated the heavyweight boxing match between Ernie Terrell and Eddie Machen; worked with Libonati in Washington and others in the state capital to defeat antimob bills; bought and sold properties and continued to seek avenues for expanding his dry cleaning empire; and spoke regularly with Hoffa, Korshak, and Rosselli to oversee the Outfit’s national ventures.
Humphreys experienced some minor victories in his legislative partnership with Libonati, getting Mr. Malaprop to introduce legislation that would outlaw Bobby Kennedy’s surveillance techniques. In one conversation (overheard by the G) with Pat Marcy at the First Ward headquarters, Libonati spoke of his warfare with the attorney general, bragging, “I killed six of his bills - that wiretapping, the intimidating informers bill . . . “ The eavesdropping G-men summarized the balance of the conversation thus: “Libonati thinks that JFK is a sweetheart but RFK is cruel. Libonati describes how he opposed a RFK bill and got a call from Mayor Daley. Libonati told John Kennedy to stop Robert calling Mayor Daley on such matters. Bobby said on TV that his brother wants him to stay out of politics because he is the Attorney General. Libonati takes credit for this, saying, ’That was me.’”
With Humphreys working himself into an early grave, one can only imagine how he took the news that the so-called boss, Mooney Giancana, using the name J. J. Bracket, had spent two weeks in May with Frank Sinatra and Phyllis McGuire on the Hawaiian islands of Oahu (at the Surf Rider Hotel) and Maui (at the Royal Lahaina Lodge).
The constant surveillance became so bothersome that Humphreys decided to move from his Marine Drive apartment to new and hopefully more secure digs. Regretfully for Humphreys, the effort he put into the move had the opposite effect, although he never learned just how. Through their Celano’s bug, Little Al, the G heard Curly speak of the move, but perhaps as a tease, he refused to disclose the new location. At the tailor shop, he told his associates that his new address would be so secret that “not even you guys are going to know.”
After putting his furniture in storage with a friend, who adamantly refused to cooperate when the G came asking questions about where Curly was going to settle, the gangster decided on a shiny new twin-towered apartment complex, overlooking the Chicago River. Designed by famed architect Bertrand Goldberg, the two “corncob” towers consisted of pie-slice-shaped rooms radiating from a concrete core, with the first eighteen floors reserved for parking. The recently completed Marina Twin Towers sixty-story aerie was the tallest apartment building in the world, and much in demand with the city’s high-rolling apartment dwellers. Part-time residents like Curly’s upperworld alter ego Joe Kennedy were also quick to take apartments in the coveted habitat. FBI agent Bill Roemer claimed that, of all the apartments available in the Second City, he guessed that Curly was going to move into the Twin Towers and quickly moved to develop an informant, a secretary, inside the complex.
Although Roemer was allowed to see the building’s register log, he failed to pick up on the name Eddie Ryan, Curly’s longtime gofer, who had rented apartment 5131 in the East Tower. However, when Roemer’s informant called to say that Ryan had just shown up with Humphreys, who was going to move in the next day, the G-man had to hustle. Illegally presenting their government IDs, a crew of agents gained admission to Humphreys’ new dwelling later that same day, where they hid another microphone, which they nicknamed Plumb.3
After weeks of overseeing a meticulous painting and carpeting of the apartment, Humphreys moved in on Memorial Day, believing the FBI agents would be on holiday. Unaware of the G’s bug, Curly followed form and G-proofed (he thought) the apartment. Ironically, while Humphreys secured the abode, the very adversary he was securing it against was listening in. Humphreys’ very unofficial biographers in the FBI noted in Curly’s file how he sought to protect himself: “[He spent] considerable time in his new apartment supervising the installation of additional locks. He mentioned that although the G has expert lock-pickers, they will be unable to gain access to his apartment due to the expensive locks and bars he has installed on his doors and windows . . . Humphreys kicked a paper hanger out of his apartment because he was not convinced that the paper hanger was what he claimed to be.”
The Bureau further stated that Curly and his aide Ralph Pierce were attempting to “locate someone who can manufacture equipment which will scramble or garble their conversations so that their conversations cannot be monitored by someone outside the room.” And despite living on the fifty-first floor, Humphreys had bars and railings installed on his balcony, the perfect metaphor for the caged existence his was now forced to live when in Chicago. The FBI soon learned more about Curly’s security precautions, as noted in his file: “The apartment now has a burglar alarm, three inside and outside locks, a tear gas device, bars and double-thickness glass on balcony window, pistol and shotgun.” Curly also gave his maid a tear-gas gun that dispensed a dye that stained the offender for days. He also looked into the possibility of obtaining a “Tear Gas Watchdog,” which would automatically fire on any intruder.
With Curly now thoroughly compromised by Plumb, the FBI refocused on Mooney Giancana, whom it rightfully believed could be pushed over the edge, thereby exacerbating internal gang strife. On June 8, 1963, the FBI watched as Mooney and Phyllis joined Sinatra at his parents’ home in Hoboken, New Jersey. When he returned to Chicago, Mooney was met with a civil-liberties assault unparalleled in U.S. criminal history. In their effort to drive Giancana to self-destruction, the Chicago G-men, without the approval of their SAC (special agent in charge), Marlin Johnson, decided to complement their covert surveillance with blatant, round-the-clock, blanket coverage. The ploy had been used to a lesser degree thirty-three years earlier with Al Capone, when two uniformed cops tried unsuccessfully to unnerve Capone by following him everywhere after he left his voluntary incarceration in Philadelphia. Now, in 1963, the G called the technique lockstep, and the agents were certain that the attendant publicity would further ostracize the don from his associates.
For the next few weeks, the agents waited for Mooney to emerge from his Wenonah Park home in the morning, then followed him on all his sundry errands until he returned at night. When Mooney got out of his car, a team of agents likewise alighted from theirs, encircled the gangster at a radius of a few feet, and went everywhere he went: to the movies, restaurants, stores, golf courses, a walk, and even to church. Once again, the suburb was treated to the sight of the master wheelman coursing through its streets, his harassers in hot pursuit. When Giancana raced through his regular commercial car-wash tunnel, the employees cheered, “Go, Mo, go!” as he sped out the other end, spraying soap in all directions. On the golf course, the mediocre player Giancana and his playing partners were rushed by the FBI foursome behind them, with the agents often encircling the green and taunting Mooney as he putted. This was no small nuisance since Giancana took his game so seriously that he had had a putting surface landscaped into his backyard. Roemer described another aspect of the lockstep: “If he went to dinner, we went with him . . . [If] he got up from the table to go to the men’s room, I’d get up and be at the next urinal. I found that really bugged him. He had shy kidneys. He couldn’t do it when I was right there.”
The tactic soon began achieving its desired effect, as Mooney started snarling at his unwanted companions, “Get away from me, you cock-suckers!” In his first serious effort to terminate the coverage, Giancana set a trap for the G-men by luring them to his lair, the Armory Lounge. Agents Roemer and Rutland followed Mooney into his headquarters and quickly realized that all of Mooney’s most notorious musclemen were present. While some of the most dangerous men in America gave the G-men the Look, the agents wondered if perhaps they had gone too far and were now about to be ambushed. Surprisingly, the agents were allowed to leave the lounge unmolested. Minutes later, while the agents waited in their car for the Giancana party to exit, one of the gangster’s aides, Chuckie English, came out of the restaurant and ran menacingly up to Roemer’s car.
“Sam says to tell you that if Kennedy wants to sit down with him,” English said, “he knows who to go through.” He was of course referring to the same man Papa Joe Kennedy had gone through to get to Mooney for the election fix.
“Sinatra?” Roemer asked
“You said it,” said English.
Mooney’s flare-up with the G was immediately brought to the attention of Humphreys and Accardo. In a few days, the overweening agents listened to a conversation in Humphreys’ apartment that proved their strategy was bearing fruit. The Bureau’s transcript quoted one of Mooney’s underbosses, Frank Ferraro, venting to Curly:
Frank: “So help me God, I’m about to jump out your fucking widow.”
Curly: “What’s wrong?”
Frank: “That fucking Giancana, wait until you hear what he’s done now. He’s not making good decisions.”
Curly: “What happened?”
Frank: “Saturday night, Roemer and Rutland, they’re on Giancana. He takes them to the Armory. They get in a fucking shouting match. Whole bunch of our guys and Roemer and Rutland. When it’s all over, Giancana sends Charley McCarthy [English] out to see Roemer. What do you think he told Roemer?”
Curly: “What?”
Frank: “Charley McCarthy told Roemer that Mo told him to tell Kennedy to talk to him through Sinatra.”
Curly: “For Christ sakes, that’s a cardinal rule! You don’t give up a legit guy! He tells Roemer that Sinatra is our guy to Kennedy?”
Frank: “More or less. I’m so fucking mad, I could jump out your window. We got to do something about this. The G is driving this man goofy. He’s not right. He’s making mistakes. He don’t belong in that spot he can’t take the pressure.”
Curly: “I think this has to be brought to the attention of Joe [Accardo] and Paul [Ricca]. They’ve got to know the condition of this man’s mind.”
Within a few weeks, the Outfit conceded one battle to the G. On June 23, the gang abandoned Celano’s forever. As a parting shot, Curly Humphreys, in full stage voice, announced for the last time, “Welcome to the eleven A.M. meeting of the Chicago crime syndicate. We hope everybody is tuned in.”
That same month, Mooney Giancana virtually guaranteed the Outfit’s presence on the front pages when he did the unthinkable: He decided to sue the FBI over their lockstep harassment. Outfit bosses were said to actually be secretly rooting for the FBI, since a government victory might result in a college stay for their starstruck boss, who had been in gross neglect of his responsibilities. But Mooney placed an ace up his sleeve when he enlisted famed civil-rights attorney George N. Leighton of Harvard Law School to come to his aid. Giancana turned on the charm, having Leighton over to his home, where the lawyer saw nothing but a loving extended family coming and going. Interviewed recently, Leighton said, “I found Giancana to be one of the finest persons I have ever known.” Once aboard, Leighton devised a brilliant strategy, hiring a local production crew to film the G in action. Under the direction of private eye Don Ricker, the film crew accompanied Mooney on trips to the cemetery, church, golf course, and even the Armory Lounge. The FBI fully cooperated, not at all intimidated by the filmmakers. Occasionally, Mooney treated Ricker to the game of chase he played with the G, racing through the suburban streets, seemingly without disturbing the brake pedal. “I got my start this way,” Mooney boasted to his white-knuckled passengers.
Much to his bosses’ horror, Giancana’s suit became a front-page staple and a lead television news story. When his suit was heard in court, a parade of Mooney’s friends and relatives attested to the harassment. At one point, the courtroom lights were dimmed as Don Ricker projected the incriminating film. Comic relief was supplied on occasion, such as when attorney Leighton implored the judge regarding the filmed lockstepping on the golf course.
“Maybe you’ll appreciate the position of a golfer,” Leighton said, “who is about to take his eighteenth putt and looks up to see six FBI agents watching him.”
“The most I ever had was four putts,” Judge Richard B. Austin responded.
What happened next surely caused Humphreys, Ricca, and Accardo to turn pale: Giancana took the stand in his own defense, leaving himself open to cross-examination, and a possible rehash of the entire history of Chicago crime and all the Outfit leaders who controlled it. It was a rare opportunity for the prosecuting U.S. attorney’s office, which made it all the more shocking, and infuriating, to the G-men when their lead attorney said to Judge Austin, “We have no questions, Your Honor.”
It was later revealed that Robert Kennedy had personally instructed U.S. Attorney John Lalinsky to refrain from cross-examining the mob boss, ostensibly because the Justice Department did not wish to legitimize the judicial branch’s authority over the executive. However, many have postulated that perhaps Robert Kennedy did not wish to risk giving Giancana a forum from which to hang out the Kennedy family’s own dirty laundry: the Castro murder plots, the affairs with Campbell and Monroe, and the election fix. This possibility was buttressed many years later when Will Wilson, the assistant attorney general, Criminal Division, in the Nixon administration testified before Congress about a statement made to him by J. Edgar Hoover. Wilson told the committee that in 1971 Hoover recounted for Wilson how, during the Kennedy administration, the Bureau was about to arrest Giancana for racketeering when Bobby Kennedy burst into Hoover’s office and prevented Hoover from going forward, saying, “He knows too much.”
The degree to which the Bureau had been placed on the defensive was made abundantly clear when SAC Marlin Johnson took the witness stand, under subpoena from Leighton. While his subordinates languished in the audience, Johnson stole a page from Curly Humphreys’ bible.
“Does William Roemer work for you?” Leighton asked.
“I respectfully decline to answer the question on instructions from the U.S. attorney general, order number 260-62,” Johnson answered.
For a brief moment, it was as though the court had entered a parallel universe, where Bobby Kennedy’s men were forced to plead their version of the Fifth Amendment for Giancana’s probers. Johnson repeated the plea thirteen times, and the Bureau offered no defense, insistent that the court lacked jurisdiction. Judge Austin quickly ruled in favor of Mooney, who broke out a huge cigar in Austin’s chambers, blowing smoke in Johnson’s face as they signed the required paperwork. Per the ruling, the G was instructed to keep a reasonable distance when following their prey - and Marlin Johnson was fined $500 for contempt.
Although Mooney gloated over what was one of his few victories inside a court, his grin was quickly erased by a cold dose of reality. In a mere few weeks, the appellate court reversed the decision (and the contempt fine), and Cook County sheriff (and future governor of Illinois) Richard Ogilvie added his men to the FBI’s lockstep carnival. Now, Mooney’s home became a local attraction, as hundreds of curious mob-watchers showed up daily to watch Mooney curse at his tormentors. The circuslike goings-on did not go over well with the Humphreys-Accardo-Ricca triumvirate.
Giancana’s biographer William Brashler neatly summarized the reaction in the Outfit’s inner sanctum, writing, “Through it all the Outfit seethed . . . Accardo and Ricca were severely critical. . . Meetings were held without him [Giancana] in which strong underbosses railed about Giancana’s lack of cool. Names like Sam Battaglia, Jack Cerone, even Giancana’s own enforcer Willie Daddano were brought up as possible replacements.”
The Clubhouse Closes
After spending all of six weeks in Chicago, Giancana headed West once again to continue his rolling party with Sinatra and McGuire, wasting no time in making front-page news in Nevada. According to his FBI file, Mooney, with Phyllis in tow, guested at Sinatra’s Palm Beach home, then went on to Las Vegas, where the mob boss cavorted with Eddie Fisher and Dean Martin, both of whom “made a big fuss over Giancana.” From there, Mooney traveled to the Cal-Neva, where Phyllis and her sisters were scheduled to sing the week of July 27. According to McGuire’s manager, Victor LaCroix Collins, the trio became involved in a drunken celebration at McGuire’s Chalet 50. Collins got into a disagreement with McGuire, whom he attempted to force back to her chair. When she missed the chair and hit the floor, Mooney raced across the room and punched Collins above the eyebrow, cutting him with one of his ostentatious diamond rings. The argument then escalated to an all-out brawl.
Hearing the ruckus, Frank Sinatra burst in and, in one telling, held Collins while Mooney punched him or, according to another, separated the two. Collins has said that Sinatra then warned Collins that the hoods would put a contract out on Collins for the affront to their boss.
“The only way they’ll get me is from long distance with a high-powered rifle,” Collins answered, “because none of them has the guts to hit me face-to-face. I’m not afraid of nothing, wop.”
With that, the singer bellowed that because of the fight, he would now lose the Cal-Neva and his money.
“What do you mean, your money?” Collins shot back. “You don’t have a dime in the place. It’s all Mafia money and you know it.”
As Sinatra predicted, the coverage of Mooney’s presence at the Lodge, a violation of his Black Book listing, would indeed cause Sinatra to forfeit the Lodge, his 9 percent interest in the Sands, and his Nevada gambling license. The Gaming Board’s decision was guaranteed after Sinatra launched into a tirade against a board investigator who called to hear Sinatra’s version.
“Fuck you,” Sinatra yelled. “I don’t have to take this shit. Do you know who I am? I’m Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra!”
When the board immediately ordered Sinatra to divest himself of his Nevada interests, Mooney realized he would now never recoup his Cal-Neva investment. D.C. detective and Giancana confidant Joe Shimon remembered running into Mooney soon after the board’s decision. “He told me that Frank cost him over $465,000 on Cal-Neva,” Shimon told Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelley. “He said, ’That bastard and his big mouth. All he had to do was keep quiet, let the attorneys handle it. . . but no, Frank has to get him on the phone with that damn big mouth of his and now we’re going to lose the whole damn place.’”
Then governor of Nevada Grant Sawyer recalled how President Kennedy was making a stop in Las Vegas to speak at the Convention Center during the Cal-Neva flare-up. In the limousine from McCarran Airport, Kennedy asked Sawyer, “What are you doing to my friend Frank Sinatra?”
“Well, Mr. President,” Sawyer answered, “I’ll take care of things here in Nevada and I wish you luck on the national level.”
As early as 1961, the FBI had heard Sam express concern about his Cal-Neva investment. Speaking with Johnny Rosselli at the Armory Lounge, Mooney had said, “I’m gonna get my money out of there [Cal-Neva] . . . [or] I’m gonna wind up with half of the joint and no money.” Now, according to a source close to Mooney Giancana, the hot-blooded boss did not take the loss of his getaway retreat lying down. According to the source, who wishes to remain anonymous, the idea of killing Sinatra was again revived, this time by Mooney himself. “From what I was told,” the source says, “Mooney was furious that Sinatra refused to give back his investment, so he put out a contract. Frank begged the New York boys to intercede for him again, and Mooney called it off.” Shortly after the Lodge’s closing on Labor Day,4 Giancana was at the Armory Lounge with aides Charles Nicolletti, James “Cowboy” Mirro, and the source when who should arrive, drunk to the gills, but Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Mooney snarled. “That motherfucker is lucky to be alive - and he comes here?” In short time, the inebriated duo were escorted to their waiting limousine and whisked to O’Hare Airport, where a commercial plane had been kept waiting.
While Mooney continued to self-destruct, so too did Curly’s marital bliss. With Jeanne having spent much of the last year on her own in Switzerland and Key Biscayne, Curly once again began skirt-chasing. According to government informants, Curly was becoming a frequent habitue of a “twist” club called The Scene, and the Playboy Club, where he began dating club “bunnies.” His FBI file notes that “he was observed . . . on three occasions early this year in company of young women apparently not his wife.” Humphreys’ dalliances may have been warranted, given the treatment he was receiving from his young wife on her infrequent visits.
The Bureau’s illegal Plumb mike planted in Curly’s new apartment now became more a fount for FBI voyeurism and less for insight into Outfit business, its ostensible raison d’etre. “[Jeanne] appears extremely unhappy in her new apartment at Marina City because of its lack of room and its location,” noted one Bureau report. “I was used to large homes, with animals,” Jeanne says. “There was no way I was going to be happy in an apartment, no matter what the address was.” Another file notes how Jeanne demolished one of the expensive balcony windows: “She had pounded the window twenty times before she even got it to crack . . . Humphreys advised his wife that she was a maniac.” From another report: “Source advised that over the weekend, Humphreys’ wife became extremely intoxicated and apparently attempted to throw Humphreys off their fifty-first storey balcony.”
“I don’t remember trying to throw Murray off,” Jeanne now says, “but there was one time when I was trying to bash him with a frying pan and he locked himself in the bedroom. I climbed out on the balcony in my nightgown and tried to break the bedroom window to get to him.”
On August 28, 1963, the Humphreys’ amour fou marriage was dissolved in Chicago divorce court. Curly agreed to pay Jeanne a staggering $18,000 per month alimony, on top of the $6,000 he was sending to Clemi in Oklahoma. However, Curly maintained a cordial relationship with Jeanne, much as he had with Clemi. His FBI file illustrates many instances in which he continued to visit Jeanne in Florida, and to tend to her legal problems, including “fixing” a case for her.
On the occasions where the pair attempted to rekindle their marriage, the Peeping Tom agents memorialized the goings-on for J. Edgar Hoover. A report filed six months after the divorce noted that on one recent visit “Humphreys cabareted her until the early morning and then brought her to his apartment where he became enamored of his former wife.”
“I was impossible to live with, there’s no denying it,” Jeanne Humphreys says about the breakup today. “I found out years later, when I began having seizures, that I had been been in the early stages of a form of epilepsy that made me uncontrollable. After I was finally diagnosed, I was put on medication that stopped the outbursts, but as a side effect I acquired diabetes.” Jeanne adds that her husband shared some of the blame for the failure of their marriage. “Murray was extremely jealous,” she says. “When we were in Italy for Lucky’s [Luciano] funeral, he wanted to kill an Italian that he thought was flirting with me.”
Bobby’s Reign Cut Short
It was just after 10:30 A.M., Pacific time, on November 22, 1963, when Johnny Rosselli was awakened at the Desert Inn by a call from Hollywood. The caller was an old friend, a producer at Columbia Studios named Jonie Tapps. When told that Jack Kennedy had been shot, Rosselli thought he was dreaming. “I didn’t believe it at first,” Rosselli later testified, “because I was in a deep sleep.” Rosselli soon accepted the news after Tapps persuaded him to turn on his radio.
“I got shocked,” Rosselli told Congress thirteen years later, careful to censor his language. “I said, ’Gosh Almighty, those damned Communists’ . . . You know, that was the first thing that came to my mind because a few months before that, Castro had made a speech, and I read it in the newspapers, and it sounded just like him, that he was threatening the establishment here.”5
Johnny had expounded on his theory three weeks after the assassination with fellow hood Jimmy Fratianno. During their chat, Fratianno lamented that the press was openly speculating that organized crime was responsible for the hit. “You know, Johnny,” Fratianno said, “the more of this bullshit I read, the more I’m convinced that we’ve become fucking scapegoats for every unsolved crime committed in this country. What’s this mob the papers are always talking about, for Christ’s sake? It’s against the fucking rules to kill a cop, so now we’re going to kill a president.”
“No question in my mind,” answered Rosselli. “I think [Castro] hit Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs operation . . . But it’s got nothing to do with us.” Of course, Johnny Rosselli, unlike virtually everyone else monitoring the tragedy that day, also had firsthand knowledge of the secret White House assassination plots that could have motivated “those damned Communists.” Rosselli’s opinions were shared by many in the American intelligence establishment, especially those who had worked with the Outfit on the Castro assassination plots, which were hidden from the official investigators into Kennedy’s murder - the repercussions were just too awful to contemplate.
Throughout the country, the FBI huddled around their illegal surveillance apparatuses, trying to learn if organized crime had finally gotten even with the hated Robert Kennedy. What they consistently heard convinced them that the country’s underworld would never even contemplate such an action. In Buffalo, local boss Stefanno Magaddino lamented, “It’s a shame we’ve been embarrassed before the whole world by allowing the president to be killed in our own territory.” He added that Kennedy was one of the nation’s greatest presidents and, as noted by the eavesdroppers, “blames the assassination on his brother, Robert Kennedy.” In Miami, a bug in the home of Charles Costello heard that boss voice a different lament: “It’s too bad his brother Bobby was not in that car too.” In northern Pennsylvania, the G heard Russell Buffalino agree, saying, “They killed the good one [Jack]. They should have killed the other little guy [Bobby].”
In Key Biscayne, Jeanne Humphreys had just been coming home from a boating party when the phone rang. It was Curly in Chicago.
“Did you hear what happened?” Curly asked. After Jeanne responded that she had, Curly said, “That’s no concern of ours.” Then after a pause, “We’re not connected with it, but they got the wrong one.”
In Chicago, Mooney had spent the morning with aide Chuckie English and singer Keely Smith. The FBI heard the don say, “Attorney General Robert Kennedy will not have the power he previously did.” That weekend, the Giancana family was glued to their television set like most of the world. While watching the assassination coverage, Mooney’s daughter Antoinette remembered what her father had said after the 1960 double cross: “Someday Jack will get his, but I will have nothing to do with it.” When the eventual actually happened, Antoinette recalls her father being saddened, but saying little. Three days later, after the pro-Castro Lee Oswald was charged in the murder, Mooney was again with English and the two engaged in a bit of twisted wordplay worthy of The Sopranos:
English: “This twenty-four-year-old kid was an anarchist. He was a Marxist Communist.”
Giancana: “He was a marksman who knew how to shoot.”
Hearing the Outfit discuss Kennedy’s killing, Agent Roemer concluded the same as his fellows around the country, later writing his summation of the atmosphere in the Outfit’s inner sanctums: “The mobsters discussed the Kennedys constantly . . . But never in any way did they indicate they were interested in assassination . . . After the assassination, they talked about it frequently. They weren’t at all unhappy about it, but they gave absolutely no indication that they knew about it in advance or that they had anything at all to do with it.”
After Jack Kennedy’s murder, his brother Bobby retreated not only from his work at Justice, but from life itself. Convinced that the vendettas against the people on his ’list’ (either Castro or the mob) had backfired on his brother, Bobby fell into a deep depression. His withdrawal, and the subsequent appointment of a do-nothing attorney general by the new president, Lyndon Johnson, briefly encouraged the underworld, but J. Edgar Hoover, with congressional legislative support, let it be known that the pursuit of the nation’s underworld would continue.
In the spring of 1965, a federal grand jury investigating organized crime in Chicago deposed Mooney Giancana. The FBI listened as Curly Humphreys counseled Mooney and the other hoods about pleading the Fifth. With the belief widespread that the illegal bugs would sink the government’s case, few in Chicago feared this umpteenth grand jury probe. However, no one suspected that the G would grant Giancana immunity, thus forcing him into a no-win situation: If he still refused to talk, he would be cited for contempt; but if he talked honestly about organized crime in the Windy City, the Outfit would hit him faster than he could say stool pigeon.
Mooney’s first instinct was to put the word out on the streets that he would pay $100,000 to the man who could extricate him from his dreadful situation. When help was not forthcoming, Giancana believed it was time to tell his lawyer, D.C. power attorney Edward Bennett Williams, about the many governmental secrets (and those of the Kennedy family) to which he had been privy. Williams shrewdly contacted Bobby Kennedy’s close friend and chief of Organized Crime at Justice, William Hundley, to give him the bad news. The Justice Department, still populated by many of Bobby Kennedy’s disciples, agreed to cut a deal, promising to ask Mooney only a handful of benign questions about petty crime. It looked as if Mooney had obtained a sweetheart deal, but as it turned out, the don had second thoughts once on the witness stand. Leaving the courtroom to meet his attorneys (lawyers are barred from the grand jury), Mooney gave them the bad news.
“I couldn’t make myself answer the questions,” Mooney told his stunned attorneys. It became clear to his team that the code of omerta (silence) was all-encompassing, preventing Mooney from even admitting that he had ever even bootlegged a bottle of beer.
Mooney chose to keep quiet and accept imprisonment. It is unclear whether the government or the Outfit was happier to have Mooney out of commission. When Giancana was released a year later, the Justice Department prevented the state’s attorneys from going after him again. When the original judge in the case, William E. Campbell, later learned of the CIA plots with Giancana, he became convinced that the spy agency had prevailed with Justice to let sleeping dogs lie.
If the loss of the gang’s front man induced no grief among the bosses, such was not the case when one of the Outfit’s guiding lights breathed his last later that year. The loss of Curly Humphreys, combined with the semiretirement of Accardo and Ricca (and the death years earlier of Jake Guzik), dictated that Al Capone’s heirs turn their focus away from the grandiose expansions for which they were famous, in favor of merely struggling to maintain the status quo.
1. Located among the staff files of the Kefauver Committee is a report stating that Curly met his Intelligence Unit contact once a month at venues such as the Roosevelt Club coffee shop or the Bismarck Hotel. “The sole purpose of the meet,” the committee’s report stated, “is to chat and make a drop [payoff].”
2. The wife of one of Las Vegas’ chief meat suppliers, Irving “Niggy” Devine, Ida brought the skim from Vegas by train to Chicago, where she was usually met at Union Station by perennial Outfit lawyers George Bieber and Mike Brodkin. After the money was cut, Devine trained on to mob strongholds such as New York, where she gave Frank Costello his share, or to Cleveland and John Scalish, or to Miami and Meyer Lansky.
3. Roemer writes that the name came from Humphreys’ penchant for resolving problems by referring to what “Joe the Plumber,” or Al Capone, would do. In their report, the agents described Curly’s elegant, if not spacious, new fifty-first floor home: “Looking straight ahead, it commands an excellent view of Lake Michigan. Looking slightly to the left, it commands an excellent view of the Tribune Tower, and looking to the right, it commands a view of State Street, the most prominent street in Chicago . . . The apartment is one of the choicest at Marina City . . . it is furnished extravagantly with several expensive-looking paintings hanging on the walls, with a player piano, apparently new, and with very expensive-looking furniture.”
4. The Cal-Neva was reopened in January 1964 under new ownership.
5. On September 6, 1963, in a public speech in Havana, Castro indeed said: “We are taking into account . . . the Caribbean situation, which has been deteriorating in the last few days due to piratical attacks by the United States against the Cuban people . . . Kennedy is a cretin . . . the Batista of our times . . . If U.S. leaders are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they too can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their deaths.”