Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  Given the way Giancana had been ridiculed by Bobby Kennedy during the McClellan hearings, the mobster had every right to be skeptical. But he was apparently dazzled by the Irish patriarch; in later months, he was often heard bragging that he was “trying to get that Joe Kennedy’s kid elected president.”

  There were other meetings that summer, most of them held covertly at the Cal-Neva Lodge, a luxury resort that straddled the California-Nevada state line on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, a region known as Crystal Bay. In this bucolic setting, described in brochures as “Heaven in the High Sierras,” Kennedy maintained a series of bungalows that became headquarters for the unofficial Kennedy campaign braintrust. It was a short hop by plane from Cal-Neva to Las Vegas and on to Chicago, which became a well-worn path for Joe, Sinatra, Giancana, and others involved in a subterranean effort to ensure J.F.K.’s election as the country’s first Irish Catholic president.

  In hindsight, Giancana’s willingness to trust Joe Kennedy and go to bat for his offspring may seem inexplicable. Many people in Giancana’s own organization told him he was crazy. Murray Humphreys, a high-ranking member of the Outfit who remembered Joe Kennedy from his bootlegging days, bad-mouthed Kennedy as an untrustworthy “four-flusher” and a “potato eater.” Others told Giancana he was putting his neck on the line by working for the Kennedys after Bobby’s excoriation of “our friends.” Some mobsters flatly refused to help with Kennedy’s election in any way, most notably Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, who later made a personal cash contribution of $500,000 to the campaign of Kennedy’s rival, Richard Nixon. The money was picked up in New Orleans and delivered to the Nixon campaign by another avowed Kennedy hater, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

  But Momo Giancana had his reasons. An underworld traditionalist, his motives for cooperating with Joe Kennedy were rooted in a tacit agreement between certain Italian underworld figures and Irish Americans that had been in effect since at least the big Atlantic City conference of 1929. That conference had established new ground rules by redefining the role of the Irish in the eyes of Italian and Jewish racketeers. Irish mobsters were shut out or killed, nowhere more so than in Chicago, where young Sam Giancana had established a reputation as a fierce gangster described in one police report as “a snarling, sarcastic, ill-tempered, sadistic psychopath.” Giancana started out as member of the 42 Gang, a notorious Italian street gang, and eventually caught the attention of Al Capone, who enlisted the young gangster’s services as a wheel man. Giancana became a key player in the mob’s hostile takeover of Irish American bootlegging operations, forcing many would-be Irish crimesters to seek refuge in ward politics and police work, which is exactly where the Syndicate wanted them.

  By forcibly assigning the Irish this role, the Italians accepted as a quid pro quo that they at least listen when approached by an Irish American politician, lawman, or businessman looking to play along with the mob. After all, the Irish had arrived before everybody else and infiltrated mainstream society in a way the Italians and Jews had not. Their function was to hatch schemes from the inside, which is exactly what Joe Kennedy was offering Sam Giancana. Kennedy was dangling the prospect of an inside track on American political and business affairs unlike anything the Syndicate had ever experienced before. How could Sam Giancana say no to such an offer?

  The truth of this hypothesis is to be found in the way Giancana dutifully carried out Kennedy’s wishes, as if he were fulfilling an obligation that was at the very heart of the mob’s multiethnic agenda. Giancana didn’t just agree to go along with Kennedy’s plan; he leaned on others in the underworld to do so also, mortgaging his own reputation on the alliance with Papa Joe.

  The first order of business was to guarantee Jack Kennedy’s victory in the upcoming West Virginia primary, thus proving the candidate’s electability even in rural, non-Catholic regions of the country. Overnight, mob-controlled juke bosses throughout West Virginia began featuring J.F.K.’s campaign theme song, a reworded version of Sammy Cahn’s current hit “High Hopes,” sung by Sinatra. A Kennedy aide traversed the state (one of the poorest in the United States), paying tavern owners twenty dollars each to play the song repeatedly.

  Money began to fall out of the sky. Suitcases full of cash were delivered by silk-suited men named Vinnie, Tony, and Rocco. As FBI wiretaps would later disclose, Sinatra and Giancana’s close friend Paul “Skinny” D’Amato spent two weeks in the state dispensing $50,000 worth of contributions, most of it in the form of desks, chairs, and supplies for politicians around the state. According to D’Amato, Joe Kennedy even paid him a personal visit and, in exchange for his help in the campaign, promised that, if elected, his son Jack would allow deported New Jersey mobster Joe Adonis to return to the United States. This was just one of many Joe Kennedy promises to the mob that would go unfulfilled.

  J.F.K. won in West Virginia and went on to secure the nomination by August. By all indications, the general election that fall was going to be close, with Nixon and Kennedy neck-and-neck in most polls. Every vote would count. Just as Joe Kennedy had predicted, it looked like the race was going to come down to the state of Illinois. The Kennedy patriarch would pull out all the stops.

  There were continued meetings with Giancana, at least one of them arranged by Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. In the long history of Irish American political bosses, Daley was truly the last of his breed—a quick-tempered, salt-of-the-earth product of the Chicago Machine who was fiercely proud of his working-class Irish roots. “Da Mare” had known Joe Kennedy for years. Having come from opposite ends of the Irish American spectrum—Kennedy, the Irish WASP by way of Harvard, Daley, the aggrieved proletarian from blue-collar Bridgeport—their relationship was based more on political expediency than friendship. Kennedy cultivated the mayor to be his Irish lackey, and Daley soaked Kennedy for campaign cash. They met occasionally for lunch at the patriarch’s Merchandise Mart, no press allowed.

  At the Ambassador East Hotel in downtown Chicago, over the course of three meetings, Kennedy, Daley, and Giancana discussed strategy. It was agreed that certain key districts, including the First Ward, would be delivered on election day by large pluralities. Mayor Daley, through the Chicago police department, would make sure there was no outside interference.7

  On election day, November 8, 1960, everything fell into place. J.F.K. won by the slimmest margin in history, with the key districts in Chicago proving to be the margin of victory. The election was a classic Machine-style effort. Subterranean Irish and Italian criminal forces coalesced as they had in many old-style city, county, and state elections since the birth of the American underworld. In many ways, it was a replay of the election Joe Kennedy had engineered for his father-in-law, Honey Fitz, way back in 1918. Only this time, Papa Joe had outdone himself by making grandiose promises to the powerful underworld figures who had dutifully followed his every command. These were not men to be taken lightly. Now that they had done what was asked of them, they expected to see results.

  The Kennedy Double Cross

  The first shocker came with J.F.K.’s naming of his attorney general. The appointment of brother Bobby as the nation’s top cop had come at the insistence of Papa Joe, who saw the choice as a fait accompli. Joe must have known that Bobby’s appointment would not sit well with Giancana, Roselli, and the rest of the boys, but he was faced with an even more pressing concern. J. Edgar Hoover had come to Joe immediately after J.F.K.’s election with the startling information that Jack had been carrying on an affair with a woman named Judith Campbell (later Judith Campbell Exner), who was at the same time having an affair with Sam Giancana. Hoover claimed to be concerned that the president, at the very least, was opening himself up to potential blackmail. Joe Kennedy was concerned that Hoover would hold this information over the president’s head. The elder Kennedy believed Bobby’s appointment as attorney general would provide an essential buffer that would protect J.F.K. from internal government attack from the likes of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Bobby Kennedy undertoo
k his role as attorney general with the same kind of zeal he had exhibited during his stint with the McClellan Committee. In fact, at his first press conference under his new title, Kennedy announced that dismantling organized crime would be the Justice Department’s highest priority, and added that he had his brother’s full support in the effort.

  Kennedy’s actions were swift and unprecedented. The number of attorneys in the Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section ballooned from seventeen to sixty-three; the number of illegal bugs and wiretaps grew from only a few to more than eight hundred nationwide; Bobby drew up a hit list of top mob targets—a list that included Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, the very men whom Papa Joe had leaned on to get J.F.K. elected. To the gangsters, Bobby’s antimob initiative was inexplicable and seemed highly personal in nature. Among the many acts undertaken by the Kennedy Administration that rocked the underworld were

  1. The “kidnapping” of Carlos Marcello: Tops on Bobby’s mafiosi hit list was New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, who had defied Bobby during the McClellan hearings and, as Kennedy later learned, made a secret $500,000 contribution to the Nixon campaign through arch-enemy Jimmy Hoffa. On April 4, 1961, under pressure from the Justice Department, Marcello was literally snatched off the streets of New Orleans by federal agents, put in an airplane, and flown to Guatemala, where he was summarily deported under the pretext of traveling under a false passport.

  Outraged to the point of hysteria, Marcello snuck back into the United States two months later and filed suit against Attorney General Robert Kennedy. At the same time, he apparently tried to broker a truce. According to author John H. Davis in Mafia Kingfish, an FBI wiretap picked up a conversation between two well-known northeastern mob bosses about how Marcello had tried to use Frank Sinatra to help get Bobby Kennedy off his back. Sinatra was successful in getting Bobby’s ear, but the overture only made matters worse. Instead of getting Kennedy to take it easy on the Louisiana mob boss, the stubborn attorney general, suspecting perhaps that his father had put Sinatra up to it, stepped up his efforts against Marcello. The U.S. government reinitiated criminal proceedings against the mafioso on charges of conspiracy in falsifying a Guatemalan birth certificate and committing perjury. Marcello’s brother also was indicted.

  Down in New Orleans, the volatile Marcello seethed and cursed the Kennedy name, telling anyone who would listen, “You just wait; you wait an’ see if that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy is gonna take me away from my wife an’ kids.”

  2. The hit on Fidel Castro: Unbeknownst to the Kennedy Administration, a few months before J.F.K.’s election as president, certain members of the underworld had linked up with the CIA in a misguided plot to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. The CIA, knowing that the Syndicate was angry at Castro for shutting down their lucrative Cuban casinos, initiated the plot. Joe Kennedy’s old Hollywood friend, Johnny Roselli, served as the point man in this operation, but Sam Giancana was assigned the role of actually recruiting the hitmen to carry out the various harebrained assassination schemes then under consideration.

  As a quid pro quo for getting involved in the CIA’s “Get Castro” operations, Roselli, Giancana, et al. understood that there would be a moratorium on federal mob prosecutions or at least a lessening of pressure on the Chicago Outfit. Apparently, no one in the CIA had informed Bobby Kennedy about this arrangement. In light of the joint CIA-Mafia operation, the attorney general’s fervid legal onslaught against the mob felt, to the mobsters themselves, like yet another betrayal engineered by those “Irish bastards” in the White House.

  3. The Valachi hearings: In mid-1963, the Department of Justice announced “an extraordinary intelligence breakthrough” in their battle with organized crime. Bobby Kennedy asserted that disclosures by Joseph M. Valachi, a federal prison inmate, had revealed for the first time the whole picture of organized crime, its organizational structure and initiation rites, which included sacred oaths and bloodletting. Overnight, this small-time underworld hood from the streets of New York became an international celebrity.

  A few months later, to the further shock and dismay of underworld figures everywhere, the McClellan Committee was reconstituted to provide a forum for Joe Valachi to be paraded in front of television cameras. As pure theater, Valachi’s testimony before the senate committee in September and October outdid the Kefauver Hearings, the Waterfront Commission Hearings, and the previous McClellan Hearings put together. With his gravelly, straight-from-central-casting New York accent, the sixty-year-old Valachi introduced words like don, caporegime, and consiglieri into the American lexicon, and insisted that what was known to the public as the Black Hand, the Unione Sicilione, or the Mafia was most commonly known to the mobsters themselves as cosa nostra.

  Italian gangsters from coast to coast were stupefied by Valachi’s testimony, mainly because they believed he was a fraud. Valachi wasn’t even Sicilian; he was a New York Neapolitan who had never been anything more than a low-level thug. Yet he sat before the McClellan Committee and all of America on television making observations on how Sicilian gangs were organized and operated, including supposedly inside accounts of top-level decision making. As mob boss Joseph Bonnano later observed, it was like a “New Guinea native who had converted to Catholicism describing the inner workings of the Vatican.”

  The breadth and scope of Bobby Kennedy’s assault on organized crime was unparalleled in modern history. To high-ranking members of the underworld, his actions were like a knife in the back, strategically plunged for maximum damage and then twisted around for the pure sadistic fun of it. The Outfit had helped put the Kennedys in the White House. Joe Kennedy, the Irish Godfather, in the eyes of Giancana, Roselli, and other Italian mobsters, had brokered an arrangement that was supposed to work in everyone’s favor. Now here was Bobby Kennedy on a holy crusade, casting aspersions on Italian organized crime as if his family’s lily-white Irish hands had never been sullied by dirty money. FBI bugs and wiretaps around the country began to pick up a steady stream of anti-Kennedy commentary about those “Irish bastards” and “those filthy, Irish cocksuckers.”

  In Upstate New York, Peter Maggadino: “He should drop dead. They should kill the whole family, the mother and father, too.”

  In Pennsylvania, Mario Maggio: “[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.”

  In New York City, Michelino Clements: “Bob Kennedy won’t stop until he puts us all in jail all over the country.”

  In Chicago, Sam Giancana: “I never thought it would get this fucking rough. When they put the 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 angriest words of all came from New Orleans, where Carlos Marcello was embroiled in his titanic battle with the Justice Department. Marcello had run up close to $1 million in legal fees and frothed at the mouth every time the Kennedy family name was mentioned in his presence.

  One afternoon, Marcello and a group of friends and acquaintances were gathered at Churchill Farms, the mobster’s weekend resort located outside New Orleans in Louisiana bayou country. Among those present was Edward Becker, a former director of public relations of the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas who was now a private investigator. Becker made the mistake of bringing up Kennedy’s name: “Man, isn’t it a shame the bad deal you’re getting from Bobby Kennedy? I’ve been reading about it in the papers. All that deportation stuff. What are you going to do about it, Carlos?”

  Marcello’s face flushed red. Livarsi ’na pietra di la scarpa, he said in Sicilian (Take the stone out of my shoe). “Don’t worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch. He’s goin’ to be taken care of. I got—”

  “But you can’t go after Bobby Kennedy,” Becker interrupted. “If you do, you’re going to get into a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “No, I’m not talkin’ about that.” Marcello stood up, gesticulating as he spoke.
“You know what they say in Sicily: If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.” The Kennedys, explained Carlos, were like a mad dog; the president was the head and the attorney general was the tail. “That dog will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail. But if the dog’s head is cut off, the dog will die—tail and all.”

  Marcello continued yapping, seized by a deep personal animosity toward the Kennedys. He explained that the death of the attorney general would not solve anything, since his brother, the president, would surely go after Bobby’s enemies with a vengeance. The president himself would have to go, and it would have do be done in such a way that it could not be directly linked to the organization. He had already given some thought to setting up a nut to take the blame, “the way they do it in Sicily.”

  To Becker, Marcello’s tirade, which lasted no more than five minutes, seemed fantastical, if chilling. But Marcello’s feelings went even deeper than his own personal animosities. The New Orleans branch of the Mafia was the oldest and most Sicilian of all the regional factions of Cosa Nostra. They often carried out operations on their own, without ever having to consult the governing commission in New York or the Outfit in Chicago. They had a deep and abiding sense of history—a bloody history that harked back to the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy and the subsequent lynching of fourteen Italians, a landmark event in the history of the Mafia in the United States. In fact, Marcello’s leadership of the New Orleans family, which began in the early 1940s, could be traced directly to the Matrangas, the same family that Chief Hennessy had betrayed in his dealings with the Mafia seventy years earlier.