The World's Most Evil Gangs

by Nigel Blundell

  In February 1947 Sinatra stayed at the Miami mansion of his friends, the Fischetti family, cousins of Al Capone, before flying with Joseph ‘Joe Fisher’ Fischetti to Cuba for his most blatant walk on the wild side with the Mob. The notorious Havana summit of top US gangsters was under way, presided over by Godfather ‘Lucky’ Luciano. They all saw Sinatra sing, but he presented their subsequent meeting afterwards as pure coincidence. After the trip, he told Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper that he had ‘dropped by a casino one night and was asked if I’d mind meeting a few people. I couldn’t refuse. One happened to be Lucky Luciano. I sat down at a table for about fifteen minutes then went back to my hotel. When such innocent acts are so distorted, you can’t win.’

  In 1950 a US Senate Select Committeee looking into organised crime began an investigation known as the Kefauver hearings, named after its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver. In drawing up preliminary evidence, Frank Sinatra was called to account. His lawyers negotiated a private hearing for the sake of his career, but when summoned, ‘he looked like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death,’ said Joseph Nellis, the committee’s lawyer. Asked about the Fischettis, he said he barely knew them. But his innocent explanation of the brief Cuban meeting with the mobsters was shattered when Nellis revealed photographs of Sinatra with his arm around Luciano on the hotel balcony in Havana and of the pair at a nightclub surrounded by bottles and girls.

  The committee presented him with a list of known mobsters and asked whether he knew any of them. ‘Just to say hello,’ he replied, adding: ‘Surely you’re not going to put me on television and ruin me just because I know a lot of people?’ He was lucky, because they did not. They let him off the hook.

  Yet 12 years later, in 1962, Sinatra was named in a 12-page memorandum from the US Justice Department as being pals with a dozen of America’s top gangsters. Some of them, the document stated, even knew his ex-directory telephone number. Here are the Men of Honour with whom Ol’ Blue Eyes was linked:

  LUCKY LUCIANO, Mafia legend, as mentioned above. Likewise, JOE FISCHETTI, cousin of Al Capone and one of three brothers who were all major Chicago and Las Vegas gambling tsars. Brother Charles was one of Capone’s most violent cohorts and brother Rocco was a lesser hood. JIMMY ‘THE WEASEL’ FRATIANNO, confessed hitman turned informer. A family boss in Los Angeles, he was pictured with Sinatra at a theatre the Mob bled dry. RAYMOND PATRIARCA, Mafia boss in Boston co-owned a racetrack with Sinatra – the reason a Senate Crime Investigating Committee subpoenaed the singer. LOUIS ‘DOME’ PACELLA, a capo in the Genovese crime family, who chose to go to jail for eight months rather than answer a question about his ‘long and close’ friendship with Sinatra. They were ‘like brothers’, said a witness. JOSEPH GAMBINO, GREGORY DE PALMA, RICHARD ‘NERVES’ FUSCO and SALVATORE SPATOLA, all members of the Gambino crime family, with whom he was pictured in a notorious 1976 photograph. CARLO GAMBINO, steely-eyed head of America’s largest crime family, on whom Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather was modelled. He was also pictured with Sinatra. PAUL CASTELLANO, successor to Gambino, who was gunned down on a Manhattan street in 1985. He and Sinatra were photographed together at a theatre in suburban New York that the Mob controlled.

  The closest gangland figure to Sinatra was SAM GIANCANA, head of the Chicago Mob. Sinatra co-owned a Nevada gambling palace, the Cal-Neva Resort, with him. Judith Exner, who claimed she slept with President John F. Kennedy and Giancana (of which more later), said the singer introduced her to the don. Giancana’s daughter Antoinette was livid over Sinatra’s official denial of any friendship with her father. ‘They’d organised shows together,’ she said. ‘They’d eaten at the same table. They’d hugged and kissed each other like long-lost friends whenever they met.’ FBI records supported her story.

  And what of two other names on the list of Sinatra’s oldest buddies: ‘BUGSY’ SIEGEL and ‘WILLIE’ MORETTI? Siegel, who had been so admired by the rising star, was ‘rubbed out’ in a bloody execution – his death sentence discussed at the very same Cuba summit that Sinatra had graced in 1947. Moretti lasted some years longer – which was unique in Mafia history because of the way he behaved when called to testify at the aforementioned Kefauver hearings in 1950.

  While other mobsters – Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen and Frank Costello among them – refused to testify before the Kefauver committee by repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment, Moretti was the only one who cooperated. Although he didn’t give away too many secrets, he overplayed his role – playing to the cameras, joking and chatting with the committee, the senators and public breaking out in laughter at his wise-guy comments. However, the joker was violating the Mafia code of silence.

  A contract was placed on him by the Commission and a few months later, in October 1951, he was blasted to death as he lunched at a New Jersey restaurant. More than 5,000 mourners attended his funeral. In a Mafia trial 12 years later, a government witness, Joe Valachi, described a conversation with Vito Genovese about the murder, in which the Mafia Godfather said he had been concerned that Moretti was becoming deranged through syphilis. Valachi testified: ‘It was supposedly a mercy killing because he was sick. Genovese told me, “The Lord have mercy on his soul, he’s losing his mind”.’

  So some won, some lost. Sinatra was among the former. The Italian crime families helped launch his career, promoted it and Frank sang for his supper at Mafia venues. In The Godfather, one of author Mario Puzo’s more gory storylines involves the flagging career of a singer being restored when he gets an important film part – thanks to a horse’s head left as a warning in the movie producer’s bed. It is probably a coincidence (and, in this case, it almost certainly is a coincidence) that Frank Sinatra’s flagging career was relaunched when he unexpectedly got the part of Private Angelo Maggio in the 1953 movie From Here to Eternity.

  But there were other ways in which the Mob helped him out, and vice versa. In his 2013 autobiography, My Way, singer Paul Anka, who wrote that song for Sinatra and remained a friend for 30 years, told how the star would act as a bagman for the Mafia. He was once stopped carrying a briefcase through Customs containing $3 million in cash, said Anka – ‘They eventually stopped using him because he always got caught.’ It had already been noted by the FBI that when Sinatra turned up at the 1947 Havana summit to sing for ‘Lucky’ Luciano, he uncharacteristically carried his own heavy suitcase through the airport. Paul Anka also told how when Sinatra played Las Vegas – both on stage and at the gaming tables – his casino owning associates would give him $50,000 worth of chips and allow him to keep the winnings.

  Italians love song and Italian-American hoodlums just adore singers, so Sinatra is not the only one who has been linked to the Mob. His ‘Rat Pack’ pals Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior performed at Sam Giancana’s nightclub. Other great entertainers of the day who starred there included Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Frankie Laine and Jimmy ‘Schnozzle’ Durante.

  The ‘Schnozz’ was an especially close friend of Giancana. ‘That wonderful man loved my mother and treated her like a queen, and he adored Sam,’ said the Mafioso’s daughter. Another star, Phyllis McGuire of the singing McGuire Sisters, was even closer – she and Giancana became lovers.

  Godfather film actor James Caan proved to be close to a real-life Mafia godfather when he turned up at the 1999 trial of the notoriously violent Colombo crime family. His aim was ‘to give moral support’ to his long-time friend Andy ‘Mush’ Russo, who was a real-life godfather to Caan’s son, Scott. He offered to stand bail for Russo. He also greeted accused Colombo family boss Carmine ‘The Snake’ Persico with a kiss on the cheek.

  Another Hollywood star linked to the Mafia was the greatest screen goddess of her age, possibly of all time. But just how close Marilyn Monroe was to gangland has only come to light in recent years. And her fellow players in this murky game were Frank Sinatra, Mafia boss Sam Giancana and the President of the United States.

  For it is now reasonably established that Monroe spent her last day
alive in an angry confrontation with the Mafia boss. She had flown from Los Angeles to Nevada in Frank Sinatra’s private plane and was staying at the singer’s mountain retreat on the banks of Lake Tahoe, next to the Mafia-owned Cal-Neva Lodge hotel. There, Giancana – with whom she was allegedly in love – tried to persuade her not to go public about her affair with President John F. Kennedy and with his younger brother Robert, the Attorney General. She apparently refused to be silenced and, returning to her Hollywood home, she was found dead the following day, 5 August 1962, supposedly of a drugs overdose.

  Neither of the Kennedy brothers had been suitably secretive in their extra-marital activities. They had both been Monroe’s lovers and, in her developing state of depression and nervous disorder, it was thought that she might make public some of their indiscretions. Such stories, which were no more than rumours at the time of her death, have since become common currency.

  In 1981 a reformed criminal, Ronald ‘Sonny’ Gibson, wrote a book, Mafia Kingpin, in which he made some startling new allegations. Gibson said that while working for the Mob, he had been told that Marilyn had been murdered by a Mafia hitman. J. Edgar Hoover, he said, had been furious about the actress’s affairs with the Kennedys, whom he hated, so the Mafia had taken upon themselves the task of silencing her as a means of repaying favours done for them by the FBI.

  Gibson is not alone in his assertion that Marilyn died not because she had swallowed an overdose of barbiturates but because drugs had been injected into her. Even top pathologists who investigated the case have since gone into print to say the same.

  Then in 2011 an extraordinary tape-recording emerged that, for the first time, placed Marilyn with Sam Giancana on her last day alive. On the tape, made by the star’s late make-up artist George Masters before his death in 1988, it is claimed that Monroe was besotted with the Mafia boss. But Giancana, having shared her favours with both Kennedys, feared that she was about to go public about her scandalous affairs.

  In the recordings, Masters says: ‘The night before she died, the last time I saw her, was in Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge. She was there with Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Mafia.’ Masters flew back to Los Angeles with her and dropped Monroe off at her home that night. Her naked body was later found on her bed and it was assumed she had killed herself with sleeping pills.

  But 50 years after her death, a 2012 bombshell book, Marilyn At Rainbow’s End, claimed finally to reveal how the 36-year-old star had died. Investigative author Darwin Porter, who knew the star, says five Mafia hoodlums murdered her under orders from Sam Giancana. But Porter believes Robert Kennedy, who secretly visited Marilyn hours before she died, had a lot to do with her death. ‘Of course Bobby didn’t do it himself,’ he said. ‘He was a very smart man. Sam Giancana also had the motive to kill her – she was threatening to blow the lid off his operations. But it also begs the question, did someone pay him to murder Marilyn? And if someone did pay him, the only person I can think of is a Kennedy.’

  Distraught at being used and then abandoned by both Kennedys, Marilyn had told friends she was going to call a press conference to reveal all of her affairs. The vulnerable star, who was overdosing on drugs and alcohol, intended to expose the Mafia’s secrets too.

  Porter, who first met Marilyn as a teenager, said that like her occasional lover Frank Sinatra she had become entangled in the Mafia – in her case, after bedding Giancana’s henchman Johnny Roselli. President Kennedy also got caught up with the Mafia in sharing a lover, Judith Campbell Exner, with Giancana. In the months before her death, pill-popping Marilyn became more erratic, says Porter. A secret visit from Bobby Kennedy ended in a screaming match and further threats to bring down the Kennedy clan. Finally, someone – Porter does not say who – put a contract on the world’s biggest female star.

  According to the author, ex-lover Roselli called at Marilyn’s house at 10pm on 4 August, leaving the door unlocked so that five hitmen could sneak in. She was rendered unconscious with a chloroform-soaked washcloth, then her limp body removed to the guest cottage in her garden, where the thugs stripped her and administered an enema of barbiturates. ‘Giancana had ordered that her body was not to be bruised,’ says Porter. His account is convincing. ‘I went to see Marilyn’s surviving friends, many were dying and had nothing to lose by finally telling the truth,’ he says.

  The theory that the Mafia might have killed Marilyn Monroe to satisfy or protect John or Robert Kennedy seems pretty far-fetched. Particularly as, for many years, the Mafia had its own ‘Number One public enemy’ – the Kennedy clan itself. The feud went back half a century to the days when, according to mobsters’ stories, the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph, made a fortune from the profits of Prohibition whiskey illegally imported from Ireland to Boston. In 1927 one of the Irish cargoes was hijacked by the Mob and 11 smugglers were killed in the shoot-out. It was, believe the Mafia, the start of a long campaign, instigated by Joseph Kennedy and continued by his children – principally John, who became President of the United States, and Robert, who became Attorney General.

  Bobby Kennedy was responsible for pursuing Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa to jail in the US Justice Department’s relentless drive to crush Mafia influence within the organised labour movement. It was elder brother John who, as President, failed to give full backing to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion attempt of Cuba, planned by the CIA with Mafia assistance.

  Years later, after the assassination of both men, the question was being asked: was the Mafia linked with the killing of the President in 1963? At one time, such a question would have been unthinkable. But when dealing with the Mafia, the unthinkable often becomes perfectly feasible. That was what happened in 1979 when a committee set up by the US House of Representatives suggested it was likely that a contract killer was involved in the assassination that shocked the world, in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. After a $3 million investigation lasting two years, the committee’s experts reported: ‘An individual crime leader or a small combination of leaders might have participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.’

  The report went on to name the ‘most likely family bosses of organised crime to have participated in such a unilateral assassination plan’ – Carlos Marcello, of New Orleans, and Santos Trafficante, of Miami – although both men issued strong denials of any involvement.

  Lee Harvey Oswald, who is presumed to have fired the shots that killed the President, certainly had links, far from tenuous, with underworld figures. So had Jack Ruby, the man who gunned down Oswald before the latter could be brought to court.

  Oswald’s connection was through his uncle, Charles Murret, and an acquaintance, David Ferrie, both of whom worked for Carlos Marcello. The investigative committee described Murret, who died in 1964, as ‘a top deputy for a top man in Marcello’s gambling apparatus’. Murret took Oswald under his wing when his nephew moved from Dallas to New Orleans in 1963, treating him like a son and giving him a home and a job in his book-making business.

  David Ferrie also worked for Marcello, as a pilot. He had flown him back to the US after Robert Kennedy deported him to Guatemala in 1961. Ferrie also had secret connections with the CIA and had trained pilots who later took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Oswald’s New Orleans work address in 1963 was the same as Ferrie’s and Oswald was in the same air club in which Ferrie was a pilot.

  Such evidence, quoted in the House of Representatives committee’s report, is circumstantial, but judged alongside the evidence linking Oswald’s executioner Jack Ruby, to the Mafia, the conspiracy theory becomes stronger. Club owner Ruby’s connections with underworld figures were well established. His telephone records showed that he had been in contact with Mob personalities in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago. He had visited Santos Trafficante. And on 21 November, the day before Kennedy’s death, Ruby was seen drinking with a friend of pilot David Ferrie.

  To this day, no one knows who was pulling the strings but all the evidence points to Ruby’s public exec
ution of Oswald being a certain way of keeping him quiet and preventing him naming accomplices during his trial. Ruby’s own life would not have been of high account; he died in prison shortly afterwards of cancer.

  Ruby’s connection with Santos Trafficante brings the amazing web full circle. When Meyer Lansky, ‘Lucky’ Luciano and their associates ran the Havana hotel and casino business under corrupt Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Trafficante was a small cog in the business. Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime in 1959 and threw the Mob’s men either into jail or out of the country. Among them was Trafficante – whose pilot, David Ferrie, also worked for the CIA. And this might not have been a coincidence.

  It had long been the ambition of the CIA and a group of big business interests to overthrow Castro and return Cuba to ‘democratic’ and capitalist rule. Equally, the US government wanted to remove the communist threat from the Caribbean. The Mafia’s motives were more pragmatic: it wanted to restore its interests in Cuba’s profitable tourist, gambling and vice industries, with acquiescent officials and politicians susceptible to bribes.

  There had already been various plots to bring down Castro. And the CIA and the Mafia had often worked together successfully, even launching joint military operations before and during the allied invasion of Sicily during World War Two. A similar link-up made sound sense in the organising of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which 1,400 Cuban exiles launched a botched attack on the south coast of Cuba on 17 April 1961.

  The invasion was a debacle. It had been authorised by previous President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 and John F. Kennedy had been briefed on it by the CIA. But the military support that the rag-tag army of Cubans, the CIA and the Mafia had hoped for never materialised. It was a humiliation – and President Kennedy was blamed.