Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (37 page)

The major concern seems to have been the threat of mob blackmail. If
organized crime so desired, it could have pressured Hoffa into calling a
nationwide Teamsters strike that could have disrupted the country. For the
Kennedys, this was an intolerable situation.

When the election year of 1960 arrived, Hoffa knew which side he had
to be on. He and the Teamsters threw their support behind Richard Nixon.
In fact Edward Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and later a government informant, has revealed that Hoffa met with Carlos Marcello. He
related:

I was right there, listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase
filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon. It was a
half-million-dollar contribution. [Another half million] was coming
from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.

But money wasn't enough. Nixon lost and Robert Kennedy became
attorney general. After the election, Hoffa was quoted as saying: "Nobody
had to tell me that he was really going to go after my scalp now."

In 1958, U.S. attorney general William P. Rogers formed a special
group on organized crime to investigate the Apalachin meeting. Kennedy,
following that precedent, organized a special unit within the Organized
Crime and Racketeering Section to investigate the Teamsters Union. Headed
by Walter Sheridan, who had been an investigator for the McClellan
Committee, the unit became known as the "Get Hoffa Squad." The squad
managed to bring 201 indictments and 126 convictions against Teamster
officials.

On May 18, 1962, Hoffa was indicted for receiving a million dollars in
illegal payments through the Test Fleet Corporation, a trucking company
set up under his wife's name. His trial ended in a hung jury, but Hoffa was
indicted along with five others for jury tampering on May 9, 1963.

On June 4, 1963, Hoffa was indicted for fraudulently obtaining $20
million in loans from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund.

Earlier, in September 1962-about the same time that Marcello and
Trafficante had hinted that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated
-Ed Partin, the Teamster official turned informant, went to Louisiana
law-enforcement officials to tell of a threat by Hoffa. Partin believed that
Hoffa thought he was closely associated with Marcello since he lived in
Louisiana. Visiting in Hoffa's Washington office in August 1962, Partin
said Hoffa began talking about plans to kill Robert Kennedy. Thinking out
loud, Hoffa discussed two schemes. One involved the firebombing of
Hickory Hill, Kennedy's Virginia estate. The second involved shooting
Kennedy with a rifle while he rode in an open car. The "ideal setup,"
Hoffa reportedly told Partin, would be to catch Kennedy somewhere in the
South, where "segregation people" might be blamed for the crime. The
"ideal time" would be to hit Kennedy while he rode in a convertible, said
Hoffa. Partin quoted Hoffa as saying: "Somebody needs to bump that son
of a bitch off. Bobby Kennedy [has] got to go."

Partin's story was passed along to Kennedy aides, who were highly
skeptical until an FBI lie detector test indicated Partin was telling the truth.
Further confirmation of the seriousness of the threat came when federal
officials taped a conversation between Partin and Hoffa. Partin said he had
obtained some plastic explosives and Hoffa asked him to bring them to
Nashville.

President Kennedy confided to journalist Benjamin Bradlee in February
1963, that Hoffa's men intended to kill his brother with a "gun fitted with
a silencer." Bradlee, in notes taken at the time, wrote he found the story
"hard to believe, but the President was obviously serious."

It was in the middle of Hoffa's jury-tampering case that President
Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Hoffa, upon learning that the flags were
flying at half-mast at Teamster headquarters in Washington, regaled officials
there, shouting: "Why the hell did you do that for him? Who the hell is he?"

On the day that Ruby murdered Oswald, Hoffa told a Nashville reporter:
"Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now."

In the jury tampering and the fraudulent loan cases Hoffa was convicted,
fined, and imprisoned. He received executive clemency from President
Richard Nixon on December 23, 1971, without the customary consultation
with the sentencing judge. However, the clemency contained a provision
prohibiting Hoffa from seeking office in the union. Hoffa filed suit to have
the restriction nullified and began making overtures to Teamster rank and
file. Ironically, he pledged that, if elected Teamster president in 1976, he
would purge the union of all mob influence.

On July 30, 1975, Hoffa was to meet Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano,
a New Jersey Teamster official and reputed member of the crime syndicate. He never returned.

One of the biggest boosts to Robert Kennedy's anticrime campaign
began in June 1962, when an underworld tough serving a prison term in Atlanta for narcotics murdered a fellow inmate with an iron pipe. The
convict's name was Joseph Valachi and he killed the man believing him to
be an assassin sent from his long-time boss and cellmate, Vito Genovese.
Genovese had slipped back into the United States after World War II to
resume his narcotics operations.

Imprisoned, Genovese heard rumors-apparently false-that Valachi
was cooperating with authorities and had given his veteran soldier the
"kiss of death." Soon after, there were three attempts on Valachi's life.
Valachi didn't want to wait for the fourth. So, believing a man in the
prison courtyard was a Genovese killer, Valachi beat him to death. He
picked the wrong man.

With both the government and the mob seeking his life, Valachi decided
he had nothing to lose by cooperating with authorities. Over the next year,
he provided federal agents with a bonanza of information on the national
crime organization known as the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra (Our Thing), the
Outfit, the Arm, the Syndicate, etc.

On September 25, 1963, Valachi took his story to the public, testifying
before McClellan's Senate committee. He presented a wealth of detail
about the organization of the mob, its codes, rules and regulations, and its
most important members, including those who sat on the "Commissione,"
the board of directors.

Organized-crime authority and former New York Police official Ralph
Salerno evaluated Valachi's testimony:

The Valachi confessions are ranked next to Apalachin as the single
greatest [intelligence] blow ever delivered to organized crime in the
United States. This evaluation came from the lips of those most affected
by it: members of the criminal network whose comments were overheard through bug and wiretap. . . . Many of the incidents Valachi
described had . . . been known to the police, but . . . [Valachi] was
able to fill in the gaps and connect one incident with another. . . . The
pattern that Valachi furnished made it possible for police intelligence
men to begin to see the dimensions of syndicated crime and stop looking
at it as a series of unconnected cases.

The Valachi revelations were a great embarrassment to FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover. They forced him to grudgingly admit that such a thing as a
crime syndicate must exist.

In his ever-increasing war against organized crime, Kennedy made use of
the Treasury Department's Internal Revenue Service to go after mob members. John H. Davis, a Kennedy relative and author of The Kennedvs, wrote:

"Given another five years in office, the Kennedys could conceivably
have exterminated the Cosa Nostra entirely, or at least crippled it beyond
repair." Crime bosses wanted something done about the Kennedys, especially since they felt "double-crossed" by the two brothers.

After all, the connections between crime and the Kennedys reportedly
went back a long way. In 1927, a shipment of bootleg whiskey on its way
from Ireland to Boston was hijacked in southern New England. Almost the
entire guard was killed in the resulting shootout. The hijackers were part of
the Luciano-Lansky mob, while it was rumored that Joseph P. Kennedy
was involved in the shipment. Kennedy reputedly lost a fortune on the deal
and was besieged by widows of the guards seeking financial assistance.
Lansky later told biographers he was convinced that Kennedy held a
grudge against him personally from that time on and, in fact, had passed
the hostility on to his sons.

But the crime contacts didn't stop with Prohibition. According to crime
author Ovid Damaris, Kennedy would likely have lost the state of Illinoisand possibly the 1960 presidential election-except for overlarge voting in
Cook County, home of Chicago mayor Richard Daley. Following the
election, Illinois Republicans made an unofficial check of 699 paper ballot
precincts in Cook County and turned up enough irregular votes to shift the
victory to Richard Nixon. However, demands for an official recount were
blocked by Daley's political machine. And behind that machine was the
real power in Chicago at that time-Sam Giancana.

Sam Giancana (real name: Momo Salvatore Guingano) born May 24,
1908, to poor Sicilian immigrants living in Chicago. He grew up in the
ghettos and was street wise at an early age.

A member of a gang called the "42s," Giancana was first convicted of
car theft in 1925. Before he was twenty, he was arrested in connection
with three murders, including the slaying of Octavious Granady, a black
who sought election as a committeeman.

In 1932, he came to the attention of Paul "The Waiter" Ricca (real
name: Felice DeLucia) who worked for the notorious Genna brothers.
Giancana became the personal driver for Ricca, who took over the Chicago
syndicate after the suicide of Frank Nitti in 1943.

In 1944, Ricca went to prison for extortion and Anthony Accardo took
over as Chicago's syndicate boss. Giancana became his chauffeur. Giancana
helped Accardo consolidate the rackets and gambling operations in Chicago. In 1957, Giancana was one of those forced to flee from the ill-fated
Apalachin meeting.

In 1960, when Accardo retired after an income tax evasion indictment,
Giancana took over the syndicate. By 1963, Giancana had been arrested
sixty times and had served time for burglary, auto theft, and moonshining.
He also was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Chicago and
in the syndicate.

After the death of his wife Angeline in 1954, Giancana became well known as a ladies' man. While visiting Las Vegas in 1960, Giancana met
Phyllis McGuire, the youngest of the McGuire Sisters singing group.
According to Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, McGuire had run up gambling debts of more than
$100,000. Giancana-who along with Accardo secretly owned interest in
the Desert Inn and the Stardust casinos although both were nominally
owned by Morris "Moe" Dalitz-made good her debt. Soon afterward,
Giancana made his Las Vegas headquarters at the nearby Green Gables
Ranch, which records showed had been leased by McGuire.

During the 1960 election, Giancana and other mob leaders apparently
thought they had bought some relief from growing government awareness
and prosecution of the syndicate.

In addition to meeting mob leader Joseph Bonanno in the winter of
1959, Kennedy reportedly received campaign contributions from the syndicate channeled to his father by singer Frank Sinatra. Yet another conduit
for these funds may have been a woman with connections to both Kennedy
and Giancana. Ironically, evidence of these contributions to Kennedy were
picked up by FBI phone taps that were part of an electronic surveillance
program initiated by Attorney General Kennedy's war on crime.

But Giancana believed he had an even better hold on Kennedy-the
beautiful dark-eyed brunette named Judith Exner. Exner, going then as
Judy Campbell, said she was introduced to John F. Kennedy on February
7, 1960, by Frank Sinatra, whom she had been dating. In her 1977 book,
My Story, she wrote that both John Kennedy and his brother Edward were
sitting with Sinatra in the lounge of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She
said she and John Kennedy met again a month later, this time alone and in
the Plaza Hotel in New York where, according to Exner, they shared a
bed.

From that point on Kennedy was to see Exner on a regular basis. The
pair exchanged telephone calls frequently, including some to the White
House, which were noted by the FBI. Why the FBI? The Bureau had been
monitoring the activities of Exner because of another man in her lifeChicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Exner claimed she was introduced to
Giancana, again by Sinatra, a month after she had become Kennedy's
lover. When Giancana discovered she was seeing the Democratic presidential candidate, he took an immediate and continuing interest in her. And
soon Giancana-one of the top Mafia bosses in the nation-was bedding
the paramour of the soon-to-be president.

In later years, Exner said: "I feel like I was set up to be the courier. I
was a perfect choice because I could come and go without notice, and if
noticed, no one would've believed it anyway."