by Tapper, Jake
He tiptoed down the steps of their Greenwich Village brownstone and quickly hailed a cab to the Manhattan House of Detention, called the Tombs because the original structure, built in 1838, had resembled an ancient Egyptian mausoleum. The prison had been torn down and rebuilt twice since then, but the nickname stuck, as did its reputation for unrivaled wretchedness.
Two hours later Charlie was wedged into a small booth deep in the bowels of the facility looking through a thick pane of glass at his freshly arrested father.
“This place is infested with cockroaches and rats,” Winston Marder barked into his end of the telephone. “My cellmate weighs around eight hundred pounds and was pinched for molesting children. How do you think I’m doing?”
“But what did they charge you with?” Charlie asked.
“Some nonsense about consorting with known criminals. You can blame the playboy in the White House and his prick brother,” his father said, apparently by way of explanation. “A particularly specious charge to level against an attorney, as Alistair will prove. I’m sure they’ll cast it as part of Bobby’s crusade against organized crime.”
By his inflection, Winston conveyed his contempt for the attorney general. Charlie wondered if there was any truth to the charges but didn’t ask; the walls probably had ears.
“But why aren’t they offering bail?” Charlie asked.
“Some nonsense about me being a flight risk,” Winston said. “Where’s Alistair? Didn’t you call him?”
“He’s in Washington, he’s coming back on the first train.”
Winston grunted, a guttural note of dissatisfaction.
Winston Marder had a predilection for dark rooms and evening hours, so it had been years since Charlie had seen his father in such harsh light. What he saw under the fluorescent bulbs was dismaying. Winston’s skin looked almost greenish. The bags under his eyes appeared inflated and underlined. He was sixty-five but looked eighty, and his voice was shaky.
To the outside world, Winston was a savvy fixer and New York power broker who had worked his way up from a Brooklyn tenement to a four-story Upper East Side residence by making the right friends and the right deals. A Teddy Roosevelt Republican, he’d fought on the western front during the Great War and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Somme. Winston had a hand in every political pot he could reach. Seeking distraction after his wife’s death, he’d worked hard with his friend Governor Rockefeller to deliver the Empire State to Nixon in 1960, only to see that slick Jack Kennedy and his bootlegger father snatch it away.
The double blow of his wife’s death three years before and the election-night loss seemed to defeat Winston. Charlie’s father now often failed to show up for lunch dates at the Harvard Club—something that would once have been as unthinkable as putting ice in his whiskey—and Charlie frequently paid unannounced visits to his home to check on him. His dad initially would seem as sharp as the knuckle-duster trench knife he’d brought back from the war, but after a few drinks he’d sometimes repeat himself or descend into non sequiturs. Now, looking at his father through a cloudy, scratched glass window in the tiny room that stank of filth and mildew, Charlie worried that the trauma of the arrest had accelerated Winston’s decline.
There was a rap on the steel door, and Charlie turned to see a guard and a man he guessed was an associate sent by Crutchfield. The young man—closely cropped blond hair, air of noblesse oblige—dripped with disdain for his surroundings. Winston gave the slightest nod to acknowledge their arrival, then lowered his head and whispered urgently into the receiver: “Find out what Bobby wants and give it to him.”
Charlie looked at his father, waiting for more, but the guard grabbed Charlie under his arm and roughly pulled him out of the seat so the young lawyer could take his place.
Chapter Three
New York City
December 1961
Charlie couldn’t wait to breathe the cold air outside after the stench and claustrophobia of the Tombs. A brutal wind ripped his coat open; a winter storm had rolled onto Manhattan Island, pelting the city with freezing rain. He looked left and right for a neon sign. He needed a bar.
Ah. Across the street: the Last Shot.
It was 9:40 a.m.
The day drinking had started when his shell shock—a constant state of restless anxiety—had returned in full force, around the time of his fortieth birthday. So far he’d done a decent job of hiding it. Pushing away thoughts of what would happen if Margaret found out was as much a part of his routine as the mouthwash and chewing gum.
He had gone from nearly daily to assuredly daily drinking earlier that year, after a tough election. Forced into a brutal contest for his House seat against a young Democratic city councilman, Charlie reluctantly hired an Albany consultant with legendarily fungible morality, a man who made promises to local labor unions that Charlie learned about only after he’d won. Some union goons came calling with a list of demands Charlie couldn’t possibly accommodate, and they made it clear they were backed by friends in Chicago whose manners weren’t so genteel. They had delivered the union vote for Charlie Marder and now it was time for Charlie to deliver for them.
Charlie kept all this stress from Margaret, said nothing about the fire that burned inside him that only booze could quell. But now, before he could even step off the curb and cross Canal for that breakfast bourbon, a black Chrysler Imperial pulled up. On the passenger side, a man with white hair and a bullfrog neck that swallowed his chin rolled down his window and flashed his ID.
“Addington White, Department of Justice,” he said. “Hop in.”
Charlie hesitated, looking longingly at the entrance to the bar, then ruefully did as he was told. He guessed that the driver and the man in the back seat were also with the Justice Department. Based on their washed-out faces and similar builds, he assumed they were once-trim veterans now growing soft due to too much time behind their desks.
Charlie focused on his breathing, which sometimes helped him overcome the agitation in his soul until he was able to get his hands on the means to drown it. Back in France, fighting the Krauts, he’d learned to jam his anxieties and emotions into some faraway corner of his mind. He tried to do this now; he needed to channel all his energy toward figuring out a way to extricate his father.
The agents were quiet. Then White said, “We’ll be there in a few short minutes, Congressman.”
“There?” Charlie said. “Am I under arrest?”
“No, no,” White said. “Nothing like that.”
“And you’re taking me…” Charlie said.
“To a meeting,” White said.
“Do I need to call my lawyer?” Charlie asked. “My wife?” He looked at his watch; at this hour Margaret would have dropped Lucy, seven, off at elementary school and would likely be at a playground with Dwight, five. He probably wouldn’t be able to reach her on the phone until after lunch. He and his wife had moved back to his Manhattan congressional district after an insanely crazed first year in Congress, during which both he and Margaret had been enveloped in a vast conspiracy. Charlie now spent his weeks in DC and traveled home from the capital on the weekends and during congressional breaks, as was the case now.
“No,” said White. “The attorney general wants to see you.”
“Well, great.” Charlie wasn’t sure which made him angrier, being shanghaied by the Feds or missing his morning appointment with Jack Daniel’s. The sight of his father—stooped in his prison grays, undereye bags so big they could hide contraband, hands shaking—had hollowed him.
“Find out what Bobby wants,” his father had said, “and give it to him.” What Attorney General Kennedy wanted, Charlie could not yet fathom.
Winston Marder hated Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and, by association, his sons Jack and Bobby with the intensity of the hellfire that the Allies had unleashed on Dresden. Charlie, for his part, had gotten along with the Democratic princes, an attitude born of both hope and necessity.
Charlie had campaign
ed, unenthusiastically, for Nixon. But when he lived in DC, before he and Margaret started their family, he had enjoyed having then Senator Kennedy and, more important, his wife, Jackie, as neighbors. And he respected Robert Kennedy’s brute force of intellect and ambition, even if he didn’t trust him; they had spent some time together due to Charlie’s work on a House Armed Services Oversight subcommittee as well as socially. He told Margaret he thought Robert the sharpest of the Kennedys, and she’d pointedly asked how he could be so sure without having met any of the Kennedy sisters. Touché—he’d admitted, and not for the first time in their nearly seventeen-year marriage, that she was right.
Margaret had been eagerly anticipating Dwight starting kindergarten so she could return to her work in clinical research as a postdoc in zoology at Brooklyn College, specifically studying equine behavior. She’d always found animals easier to understand than humans; they were so refreshingly straightforward and real. Lately, reading Runaway Bunny or watching animated shorts featuring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig or arranging the stuffed bears on her children’s beds, she felt she was going out of her mind.
The car pulled over on the east side of Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Charlie and his Justice Department sentries removed their hats as they walked through the massive, intricately carved bronze doors and into the sanctuary. Charlie heard the choir rehearsing for Christmas and winced.
Wahr Mensch und wahrer Gott,
hilft uns aus allem Leide,
rettet von Sünd und Tod
The last time he’d heard German, he’d been in France, listening to defeated prisoners of war. He could understand the lyrics: “True man and true God / It helps us from all trouble / Saves us from sin and death.”
Sin and death. Charlie’s already foul mood darkened. He needed that drink.
Addington White guided Charlie past men, women, and children in winter coats lighting candles. In the distance, lit brightly, was the main sanctuary, which contained the crypts of past archbishops. An organ of nine thousand pipes filled the chamber with the kind of music that always unsettled Charlie, calling to mind Lon Chaney unmasked in Phantom of the Opera. He followed his escorts down the main aisle, passing dozens of empty darkened wooden pews and a white marble baptistery, a place of purification where worshippers were absolved of their sins.
White patted Charlie’s shoulder, less a friendly gesture than a way to guide him down a pew, at the end of which, next to a white marble column, was a familiar silhouette: a nest of hair, a beaky nose, and an overbite. The man’s elbows rested on his knees, his head hung low, and his unruly bangs flopped forward; it was hard to tell if he was deep in prayer or lost in thought.
Charlie eased himself next to the man. “I hope I’m not interrupting you, Mr. Attorney General.”
Kennedy raised his head and forced a smile. “Hello, Charlie,” he said. The attorney general reached down into the briefcase next to his feet and withdrew what appeared to be a sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. Dispensing with any further pleasantries, looking toward the altar rather than at Charlie, Kennedy spoke quietly. “I’m sure you’re concerned about your father.” He peeled back the tinfoil and took a bite. To Charlie, whose olfactory gifts were a constant curse, the smell of fried egg was unmistakable.
“I’m not quite clear what the charges are,” Charlie said. “How can an attorney get in trouble for consorting with known criminals if the alleged criminals are clients?”
“I’m not certain how steeped you are in organized crime, but Sam Giancana is, one, a murderous thug and, two, not one of your father’s clients. And we’re not talking just consorting—there is evidence of conspiracy.”
Charlie knew who Giancana was, of course, primarily because two years ago, Robert Kennedy himself, as Democratic counsel on the Senate committee investigating labor racketeering, had chastised the mobster for laughing while invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
“I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana,” Kennedy had said.
The choir abruptly began rehearsing another song, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” startling both men. Kennedy chuckled; Charlie, whose heart had been pounding since his father called him that morning, exhaled. What did Kennedy want? But voicing that rage would only hurt his father. He tried to relax and listen to the choir. He held no cards.
“He’s an old man,” Charlie said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Does Rockefeller know?”
“I’m sure there’s very little that goes on in New York that the governor is unaware of,” Kennedy said dryly. “This is very simple, really. We need help combating organized crime, help that your father is refusing to provide. Information.”
Kennedy took another bite of his sandwich. Chewed slowly. Swallowed. The casual arrogance drove Charlie mad. And meanwhile, his father, his poor sad dad, was in a dank cell downtown.
The attorney general was as ruthless as he was effective. He’d been an aide and loyal friend to Senator Joe McCarthy through the years of McCarthy’s witch hunts right up until the senator was censured. Then it was as if his time as chief Democratic counsel on the McCarthy Committee had never happened. Afterward, as chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee in the late 1950s, Kennedy pursued Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa by starting with the suspect and then proceeding to find the crime. Kennedy ran his brother’s 1960 presidential campaign with the same single-mindedness; Democratic primary rival Senator Hubert Humphrey once expressed outrage over “that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby” paying off local West Virginia pols with “wild abandon.” Humphrey was hardly the only suspicious Democrat; the entire civil rights community, including and especially Martin Luther King Jr., eyed the Kennedy brood warily.
Liberal wariness hadn’t slowed the Kennedys’ sprint to power, and they now had the levers of government to use as they saw fit. Charlie had never fully trusted the younger Kennedy, who had Charlie and his dad in his sights.
“We need information,” Kennedy said. He took another bite and this time seemed to chew even more slowly.
Excruciating. And yet Charlie had to remain silent. He hadn’t been aware that his father was in contact with Giancana, though such an allegation was not a surprise; his dad had spent decades overcoming previously insurmountable hurdles. Often that required knowing some unsavory characters. He knew that his father occasionally had to communicate with members of the Five Families, not to have anyone rubbed out but to guarantee the availability of union labor.
“I’m trying to figure out how I can help, but I’m drawing a blank,” Charlie said. “I don’t know anything about my father’s relationship with Giancana. I didn’t even know he had one.” He wondered if the attorney general knew that the Teamsters had also been visiting Charlie in New York, had been leaning on him for almost a year.
“Did you ever hear of a man called Mooney?” Kennedy asked. “Or Momo?”
“No,” said Charlie, thinking about it. “No Mooney. No Momo.” Why did mobsters always have such moronic nicknames? “I’m guessing you’ve seized my dad’s files and haven’t found anything.”
“Nothing yet,” said Kennedy.
“Who’s Momo?” Charlie asked. “Who’s Mooney?”
“Aliases,” Kennedy said. “Giancana.”
“Hail the son of righteousness!” the choir sang. “Light and life to all He brings.” The lyrics were about Jesus; Charlie couldn’t help but wonder if the Kennedy brothers thought of themselves as the sons of righteousness. There was certainly nothing virtuous about their father, the would-be appeaser of Hitler. From the pew behind them, Addington White gave Kennedy a manila envelope. The attorney general opened it and handed some papers to Charlie.
“A transcript from a wiretap this week,” Kennedy explained. “Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, the Mob’s man in Hollywood.”
In the dim light of the nave, Charlie read:
ROSSELLI: You ask Winston?
GIANCANA: I leave messages with his secretary.
ROSSELLI: Christ, he doesn’t call you back? What the sainted [expletive deleted]—
“I don’t know what any of this is about,” Charlie said.
“Keep reading,” said Kennedy.
GIANCANA: What happened with Frank?
ROSSELLI: We talked. I said, “Frankie, can I ask one question?” He says, “Johnny, I took Sam’s name and wrote it down and told Bobby Kennedy, ‘This is my buddy. This is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob.’”
GIANCANA: Well, I don’t know who the [expletive deleted] he’s talking to. Maybe one of these days he will actually do what he promised.
ROSSELLI: He says he wrote your name down.
GIANCANA: Well, one minute he tells me this and the next minute he tells me that. The last time I talked to him was at the hotel in Florida and he said, “Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man, I’m going to talk to the man.” One minute he says he talked to Robert and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. It’s a lot of [expletive deleted]. Why lie to me?
ROSSELLI: If he can’t deliver, I want him to tell me, “John, the load’s too heavy.”
GIANCANA: When he says he’s gonna do a guy a little favor, I don’t give a [expletive deleted] how long it takes, he’s got to give you a little favor.
The transcript ended there. Charlie handed the papers back to Kennedy.
“I don’t know what they’re talking about either,” Kennedy said. “I don’t know what favor Giancana wants regarding me or my father or my brother. No one ever brought any of this up to me.”
“Who’s Frank?” Charlie said.
“Sinatra,” Kennedy said. He reached into his briefcase and withdrew another transcript.
FORMOSA: Let’s show ’em. Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys, Lawford and that Martin, and I could take the coon and put his other eye out.