The Outfit

by Gus Russo

  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 ove
r 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 whe
re 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.