by Russo, Gus
One of Joe Kennedy’s oldest Chicago friends (and political allies) was the revered circuit court judge of Chicago William J. Tuohy, whom Kennedy had met in 1945. According to one well-placed source, when Joe needed to meet with Mooney Giancana, he asked Tuohy who might arrange it. Tuohy contacted the source, a close personal friend, who had served as an assistant state’s attorney in his office in previous years and was now well-known to represent members of the Outfit.
Robert J. McDonnell was described by his legal peers as “the rising star” in the state’s attorney’s office in the 1950s. One newsman went so far as to say “McDonnell could’ve been governor one day.” Born into a family (the Healys) that were the landed gentry of Chicago - McDonnell’s father worked with Joe Kennedy on the purchase of the Merchandise Mart, and his uncle was the premier public-works construction contractor in Chicago - McDonnell’s future seemed bright. However, along the way, McDonnell fell prey to the twin demons of booze and gambling. Soon he found himself working off his marker with the Outfit by defending them in court. This being the case in 1960, Tuohy knew McDonnell would know how to contact Giancana.
Although McDonnell knew many key mob players, at the time he had only a fleeting acquaintance with Mooney Giancana (in later years, he would marry the don’s daughter Antoinette). McDonnell told Tuohy that the way to reach Mooney was through his First Ward spokesman, Pat Marcy, who in turn was secretary to First Ward alderman John D’Arco. Tuohy, who indeed knew Marcy, thought the entire business was distasteful and made it clear that he was doing this only at the insistence of Joe Kennedy.
“Pat Marcy came over and talked with Judge Tuohy,” says McDonnell. “A few days later I was told that Mooney [Giancana] wanted to meet with me at the Armory Lounge.” The day he got the call, McDonnell drove to Giancana’s Forest Park headquarters. There Mooney informed him that he would attend the meeting, but only if it was kept secret. Two days later, Judge Tuohy called McDonnell. “The meeting is on for tonight at five o’clock in the judge’s chambers,” said the judge. “I want you there.”
Tuohy and Kennedy were already on-site when McDonnell arrived. Soon, Pat Marcy walked through the courthouse doors escorting Mooney Giancana. After making the introductions, Bob McDonnell left the men to talk in private. “As I was leaving, Judge Tuohy said to me, ’Wait for me, Bob. I’m just going to tell them to shut the doors when they’re finished.’” Tuohy and McDonnell exited, leaving the three men to their business. Exiting, Tuohy remarked to McDonnell, “I’m glad I’m not privy to this.” “He was very dispirited,” says McDonnell. “This was a man of the highest integrity.”
McDonnell is quick to emphasize that he has no firsthand knowledge of what the three men discussed. “But I later heard that Joe Kennedy was asking Mooney and Marcy what help they could bring to the election of his son. He was obsessed with the election of John Kennedy - absolutely obsessed with it., And I don’t know what deals were cut. I don’t know what promises were made.” Mooney’s brother Chuck later wrote, “All Mooney said was that he was too busy meeting with Joe Kennedy, working out the details of their agreement for Jack’s presidential campaign.” McDonnell adds, “This was the biggest secret in Chicago. Everyone was sworn to secrecy. Bill Tuohy was a highly religious, very moral man. I think he felt himself debased by Kennedy’s request. And I think he resented it. He did not discuss it again.”
Although McDonnell had no firsthand knowledge of what deal was struck, Mooney was telling his associates that, as a quid pro quo, he expected a hot line to the White House.
Following form, Mooney Giancana had to seek approval for such an alliance from his puppet masters, Accardo, Humphreys, and Ricca. “Even at that time,” Curly’s widow recalls, “Mooney didn’t make a move without the approval of the boys, you know.” If that approval was granted, then it would be assumed that Curly Humphreys, the gang’s political mastermind, would play a role in carrying out the directive. He did.
The episode is not only recalled by Jeanne Humphreys, but is recorded in her three-hundred-plus-page handwritten journal that details her extraordinary life with Curly. According to Jeanne, the “new business” was broached at one of the Outfit’s Thursday-night business dinners at Accardo’s Palace. She recalled her husband coming home the night the vote was taken to support the Giancana-Sinatra-Kennedy pact. “Mooney’s talking about trying to get that Joe Kennedy’s kid elected president,” Curly informed his wife. “He’s trying to impress Sinatra.” Through her husband, Jeanne picked up bits and pieces of what had transpired at the Palace. “Apparently, Joe had promised that his boys would back off the Outfit, especially in their Las Vegas business,” Jeanne said. “Mooney bragged about the assurances he got from Kennedy.”
The initial vote was two for the deal (Accardo and Giancana), and one opposed (Humphreys). Just as he had at Felix Young’s, Curly refused to fall in line. Jeanne said, “Murray was against it. He remembered Joe Kennedy from the bootlegging days - called him an untrustworthy ’four-flusher’ and a ’potato eater.’ Something to do with a booze delivery that Joe had stolen. He said Joe Kennedy could be trusted as far as he, Murray, could throw a piano.” Of course hijacking hootch during Volstead was considered fair game, and Joe Kennedy may also have been such a victim. Doc Stacher, Meyer Lansky’s boyhood friend and bootlegging partner, remembered an incident in 1927 in which a shipment of Joe’s booze from Ireland was stolen in a Boston gunfight in which nearly all of Kennedy’s men were killed by Bugsy Siegel’s violent troops. When Siegel was upbraided by Lansky, Bugsy explained, “It really wasn’t our fault. Those Irish idiots hire amateurs as guards.”
Perhaps Humphreys had other reasons to be wary of the association: His old chum Lucky Luciano had been double-crossed when he’d made a deal with a previous presidential candidate, Franklin Roosevelt. And then there was Bobby Kennedy. As Humphreys’ grandson George Brady recalled from his many trips to Chicago to visit Humphreys, “There was also trepidation about backing JFK because of Bobby. But, on the positive side, Frank [Sinatra] talked him up.”
All that was needed was the vote of board member Paul Ricca, currently in “college” in Terre Haute. “Murray had to go to see Paul in prison,” Jeanne remembers. “When he got back from seeing Paul, he said, ’They’ve all gone along with it now, that Jack Kennedy thing.’”
“Anyway, the vote was three to one in favor,” Jeanne says. “Murray was stunned that the others voted with Mooney, but he later remarked about how the ’spaghetti-benders’ all stick together.” An entry in Jeanne’s journal reads: “Murray said he thought Mooney was nuts and that he [Murray] was working on Paul’s [Ricca] immigration problems, with no time for screwball ideas. He paced and mumbled.” Regardless of his personal misgivings, Curly deferred to the majority vote. Jeanne asked her husband what this meant for his workload. “Nothing - if I can get away from it,” Curly responded. “I’ve got enough on my hands.” But in his gut, Humphreys knew there was no one else with his particular skills, and sooner or later, the election fix would become just one more piece of gang business on his plate.
The FBI, which had been attempting to follow Humphreys’ every move, could attest to the gangster’s hectic schedule. On May 23, the G followed Humphreys to Washington, where he lobbied the Outfit’s agenda. The FBI followed the gang boss to O’Hare Airport, and one agent later described Humphreys’ appearance, noting, “He was dressed in a very conservative black suit, wearing his glasses as always to conceal his blind eye. He had on a long-sleeved shirt, neatly showing an inch of linen. His shoes were bright polished, every inch of him looked like the CEO of Motorola or some other high profile Chicago company . . . he could have been anything he wanted in this world - an attorney, a congressman, a top legitimate businessman. I believe that.”
On a later trip to Washington, Humphreys met with Congressman Libonati to confer on the Ricca parole. Also on the agenda was Curly’s desire to have Libonati introduce legislation that would outlaw then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s surveill
ance techniques. Libonati had the temerity to tell a Chicago television reporter, “Yes, I know Giancana. [My] bill would cover him.” When Bobby Kennedy heard of the Libonati bill, he ranted, “If Libonati shows up in Congress next year, I’ll have him arrested!”
The Bureau watched as Curly left Washington’s Woodner Hotel, carrying a small package, “believed to be a thick wad of cash,” to Libonati’s 224 C Street home, and leaving without it. From there, Curly proceeded to the Hamilton Hotel, where he met with Congressman Thomas J. O’Brien. Upon returning to the Woodner, the Bureau learned, Humphreys “went to the room of a well-known Washington call girl where he apparently spent the rest of the night.”
Humphreys would return to the nation’s capital two weeks later to meet with prominent mob lawyer H. Clifford Adler.
Back in Chicago, Giancana’s soldiers coordinated the initial phase of the Joe Kennedy deal. The first order of business was to guarantee Jack Kennedy’s victory in the upcoming West Virginia primary on May 10. Although Kennedy had won the recent Wisconsin contest, the margin was far too slim to convince the national power brokers he could win the nation. Tied to the misgivings was the rampant anti-Catholicism in many parts of the country. In Wisconsin, Kennedy had failed to win even one of the four Protestant districts. Thus, the Kennedy team deemed rabidly anti-Catholic West Virginia the make-or-break primary. But the very state that campaign chronicler Theodore White called one of “the most squalid, corrupt, and despicable” states was about to meet its equal, in the form of Joseph Kennedy.
West Virginia state senator John Chernenko recently stated that just prior to the all-important West Virginia primary, he received a call from Dick Wright, the Kennedy chairman of the West Virginia primary, and one of the most powerful Democrats in the state. Wright requested that Chernenko go to Mingo Junction, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from West Virginia, to meet with Frank Sinatra. “The purpose of the meeting was for Sinatra to review the campaign in West Virginia and to see how much financial assistance was needed,” Chernenko said. No fan of Sinatra’s, Chernenko declined the offer. But soon, mob-controlled jukeboxes across the state began featuring Jack Kennedy’s campaign theme song, a reworded version of Sammy Cahn’s current hit “High Hopes,” sung by Frank. A Kennedy aide traversed the state paying tavern owners twenty dollars each to play the song repeatedly.
Nonetheless, as FBI wiretaps would later disclose, Sinatra’s and Giancana’s close friend Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, the manager of Atlantic City’s 500 Club, spent two weeks in the state dispensing over $50,000 for the Kennedy effort. D’Amato clarified to writers Hellerman and Renner that it was not the money that mattered so much - the Kennedys already had plenty of that - but it was the gang’s massaging of the poverty-stricken West Virginia pols. According to D’Amato, his boys’ contribution was in the form of “desks and chairs and supplies for politicians around the state.” The FBI taps also picked up a conversation wherein Giancana reminded Rosselli of “the donation that was made” to the Kennedy effort. What the FBI failed to learn was that, according to D’Amato, Joe Kennedy even paid him a personal visit and, in exchange for Skinny’s aid, promised that, if elected, his son Jack would allow deported New Jersey mobster Joe Adonis to return to the United States. Once again, Joe Kennedy’s zeal to see Jack elected would place his boy in a severely compromised position. (As president, Jack Kennedy refused to go along with the deal.) Corroboration for the direct Joe Kennedy D’Amato contact was obtained in 1988 by historian Dan B. Fleming, who spoke with Skinny’s next-door neighbor, Joseph DelRaso, now an attorney in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. “Skinny told me Joe Kennedy called him directly to help in the West Virginia campaign,” recalled DelRaso.
Kennedy eventually beat Senator Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia by a 60-40 margin. Humphrey complained, “I can’t afford to run through the state with a little black bag and a checkbook.” (Humphrey spent an estimated $25,000 compared to Joe Kennedy’s $l-$2 million.)
Covert Conclaves at Crystal Bay
The contacts between Joe Kennedy and Mooney Giancana appear to have continued throughout 1960. Jeanne Humphreys remembered, “We went to Mooney’s house in West Palm Beach in Florida, and there was a lot of conversation about it. Mooney was going out to California and meeting with Joe Kennedy, and it just kept evolving and evolving.” When Curly began the laborious task of coordinating his unions behind Kennedy, Jeanne wondered why he had to do all the work; after all, the idea had been Giancana’s. “I said, ’Where’s Mooney?’” Jeanne recalls. “Murray said, ’He’s taking care of his end, Blondie. He’s with Joe Kennedy in California.’ My husband didn’t go into great detail.” Although Jeanne was not privy to the “evolving” meetings in California, details have emerged about where they were likely held.
As one hoodlum friend of Joe’s told writers Denton and Morris, “Joe’s] ties to the underworld intersected at a hundred points,” and if the players in these intersections had a clubhouse where their furtive caucuses could be conducted, it was the Cal-Neva Lodge. Described in ads as “Heaven in the High Sierras,” the Lodge consists of luxury bungalows, a swimming pool, and a casino. This idyllic venue is set on a parcel of land that literally straddles the California-Nevada state line on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, a region known as Crystal Bay. When gambling was illegal in both states, the owners of the Cal-Neva Lodge confounded raiding police by merely pushing the card tables across the room - and the state line - the direction dependant on which locale was conducting the raid. When Open Gambling was approved in Nevada, the gambling paraphernalia found a permanent home on the Nevada side of the casino room. The Lodge had been built in 1926 and purchased two years later by the “Duke of Nevada,” real estate mogul Norman Biltz. In 1930, Biltz married Esther Auchincloss Nash, the aunt of Joe Kennedy’s future daughter-in-law Jacqueline Bouvier. During the 1960 campaign, Biltz canvassed the Vegas Strip, collecting some $15 million for the Kennedy war chest. Jack Kennedy himself had made it clear that he coveted secret Sin City contributors, writing a note to pal Frank Sinatra, “Frank - How much can I count on from the boys in Vegas? JFK.” The note hung in Sinatra’s “Kennedy Room” for four decades.
At about the same time as Biltz’s purchase, Joe Kennedy began frequenting the Lodge, a hunting and fishing escape that would be a lifelong getaway for him and his clan. Wayne Ogle, the longtime maintenance manager at the Lodge, has recalled how for years he would ship two ten-foot Tahoe pine Christmas trees from the Lodge’s property to the Kennedy home in Hyannis.
Joe Kennedy was not the only former bootlegger escaping to the sanctuary of the Cal-Neva. In recent years, Mooney Giancana had been using the bucolic setting to escape the G’s surveillance. According to both Mooney’s people and the G, Giancana had viewed the Lodge as a personal haven from the Bureau. Although agents would tail him as he moved about the Las Vegas casinos, it was later learned that Mooney and his driver would go to a movie matinee, sneak out the back door, and drive to Crystal Bay, where the don could either relax or conduct business.
The Lodge changed hands numerous times, with many of the purchasers underworld dwellers. For a time, Bugsy Siegel’s San Francisco partner, Elmer “Bones” Remer, took the helm; at another juncture, Bill Graham, who fronted for the Outfit at Reno’s Bank Club, owned the Lodge. In 1955, Joe Kennedy’s lifelong friend Bert “Wingy” Grober (so-named due to a shriveled left arm) took over the Cal-Neva. Grober, a sometime associate of Meyer Lansky’s in Florida, had previously operated Miami Beach’s Park Avenue Steak House, where his liquor and steak supplier was his pal Joe Kennedy. During Grober’s five-year tenure, it was commonly believed that he was fronting for the real owner, Joseph Kennedy. As seen in the case of Morton Downey, Joe frequently hid his business interests behind other owners of record. Las Vegas chroniclers Roger Morris and Sally Denton recently located sources who claimed to know of the secret arrangement. “Wingy was old Joe’s man there,” one of the locals recalled, “and he looked after his stake in the joint.” Another candidat
e for a Kennedy front was Charlie Bloch, Grober’s partner in the Park Avenue Steak House. Bloch, it turns out, was Joe Kennedy’s liquor distributor for the Southern region that included Miami and was believed by some to have been another of the Cal-Neva’s many silent partners.
Two years after the fact, the FBI was told by a former New York-based federal prohibition agent named Byron Rix of a secret election-year liaison at the Lodge between Joe Kennedy and “many gangsters.” Rix, who was personally acquainted with the Kennedy family and later worked in the Las Vegas gambling business, learned from numerous unnamed sources that Joe Kennedy had a nefarious meeting in 1960 at the Cal-Neva. In 1962, the FBI summed up Rix’s information in a memo to then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, noting that “this memorandum is marked ’Personal’ for the Attorney General and copies are not being sent to any lower echelon officials in the Department in view of Rix’s remarks concerning the Attorney General’s father.” The memo summarized Rix’s story thus:
Before the last presidential election, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of President John F. Kennedy) had been visited by many gangsters with gambling interests and a deal was made which resulted in Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others obtaining a lucrative gambling establishment, the Cal-Neva Hotel, at Lake Tahoe. These gangsters reportedly met with Joseph Kennedy at the Cal-Neva, where Kennedy was staying at the time.
The Cal-Neva was uniquely equipped to cater to gangland gatherings, according to a Lodge hairdresser from the 1970s who set up her shop in Sinatra’s old bungalow. When she took over the singer’s gatehouse cabin, the hairdresser discovered that it concealed an extensive tunnel system that interconnected the various cabins and the main lodge, and which had allowed the stars and “underworld” bosses to come and go without being seen.