Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (21 page)

CIA officials, for their part, were to say that, while it was not proper to discuss such things with the President, they assumed he was aware of and approved of the assassination plots. As for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, one reading of the record suggests he was furious when he learned of the Mafia role in the plots. This occurred when, in early 1962, he discovered the CIA was trying to protect Sam
Giancana from prosecution, insisted on finding out why, and was then briefed on Giancana’s part in the early murder plans by CIA attorney Lawrence Houston.

According to Houston, the information upset Robert Kennedy, who expressed “strong anger.” “I trust,” he said, “that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the Attorney General know.” Houston testified, “If you have ever seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.”

Much later, in a discussion about the Castro assassination plots with two aides, Robert Kennedy claimed, “I stopped it… . I found out that some people were going to try an attempt on Castro’s life and I turned it off.”

It may be, though, that the Kennedys voiced disapproval only to create a smokescreen. In his biography of CIA Director Richard Helms, Thomas Powers argued that senior CIA officials refrained from saying on the record that President Kennedy approved such schemes—either because they had no proof, or because it was traditional for a secret service to “take the heat.”

In his autobiography, written just before his death in 2002, Helms recalled the key role of the “Special Group,” the term for a group of top presidential advisers first used during the Eisenhower administration. A key role of the Group, he wrote, aside from providing authorization for CIA covert action, was “to establish a screen, protecting the President from having to assume personal responsibility for every risky covert operation.” When during the Kennedy administration the Group became the focal point for decision of Cuba activity, Helms noted drily, “Robert Kennedy, the
Attorney General, added himself to the roster.”

“There were ways we would speak about assassination off the record,” former CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell said in 1994, “ways we would speak about it without using the word. We had to protect the President,” he added drily.

William Harvey, head of the Cuba task force in 1962 and early 1963, told the Agency’s Inspector General that plans to kill Castro were an integral part of the CIA’s contingency plan for murder in general—which “was developed in response to White House urgings.” A former officer at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s Florida headquarters, claimed Harvey was removed from the project in part because he “wasn’t having Castro killed fast enough.”

George Smathers, former U.S. Senator from Florida and the President’s close friend, was to expand on his previous statements on the subject. “Jack,” he said in 1994, “would be all the time, ‘If somebody knocks this guy off, that’d be fine.’ … But Kennedy obviously had to say he could not be a party to that sort of thing with the damn Mafia.”

Did Robert Kennedy know, too? “Sure,” Smathers said.

And then there are the claims of Judith Campbell, the California woman who was one of President Kennedy’s lovers between 1960 and the late summer of 1962.
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Campbell claimed that John Kennedy’s personal relations with members of organized crime ran in direct conflict with his brother Robert’s crusade to break the Mafia. In 1960, according to Campbell, there were secret contacts between Kennedy and Mob boss Sam Giancana to discuss Mafia support for his election campaign. There were also later contacts, she said, during the presidency, that “had to do with the elimination of Fidel Castro.”

Campbell’s account was specific in dates and details and supported by travel documents, by her
annotated appointment book, and by official logs recording three of her visits to the White House. A credible source said Campbell told him the gist of her story soon after the events in question.

Finally, there was Robert Kennedy, monitoring anti-Castro operations on his brother’s behalf after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. According to Sam Halpern, a former senior CIA official who worked the Cuba desk, the younger Kennedy ordered the Agency to have a case officer meet with Mafia figures. According to Halpern, Kennedy himself supplied the Mafia contacts.

President Kennedy was playing a horrendously dangerous game. For, throughout the presidency, his brother was vigorously pursuing his investigation of the Mafia—not least of Sam Giancana. As a quid pro quo for support during the election that brought Kennedy to power, Giancana and other top mobsters had evidently hoped for leniency under a Kennedy administration. By early 1962, however, Giancana would be overheard on an FBI wiretap saying, “The President will get what he wants out of you … but you won’t get anything out of him.”

If top Mafia bosses felt double-crossed, their law—the law of the Mob—might demand vengeance.

The Mob Loses Patience

“Mark my
word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him… . He is going to be hit.”

—Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, late 1962

P
ublicly, the Kennedys’ attitude toward organized crime had been uncompromising. In 1956, Robert Kennedy, then only thirty-one and counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, began turning up evidence that gangsters had penetrated the American labor movement. Some unions were already controlled by the Mob. Frightened informants told of massive sums in union funds being diverted into private bank accounts, of known gangsters acting as union officials, of murder and torture inflicted on those who complained or tried to resist.

Typical of the horrors encountered was the following, taken from Robert Kennedy’s account of the inquiry:

There was the union organizer from Los Angeles who had traveled to San Diego to organize jukebox operators. He was told to stay out of San Diego or he would be killed. But he returned to San Diego. He was knocked unconscious. When he regained consciousness the next morning, he was covered with blood and had
terrible pains in his stomach. The pains were so intense he was unable to drive back to his home in Los Angeles and stopped at a hospital. There was an emergency operation. The doctors removed from his backside a large cucumber. Later he was told that if he ever returned to San Diego it would be a watermelon. He never went back.

That victim was relatively lucky. Robert Kennedy’s investigation was to turn up scores of killings—by multiple shooting in the face, by electrocution, by slow, excruciating torture.

Early on, the Kennedy inquiry led to the leadership of America’s largest and most powerful union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The Teamsters controlled the truck drivers and warehousemen nationwide, and exercised a direct influence on almost every industrial enterprise. The union was riddled with corruption, starting with its then president, Dave Beck. As the evidence piled up, a special Senate committee was assembled, with then Senator John Kennedy as a member and his brother as chief counsel. Its revelations destroyed Beck as a public figure and eventually saw him convicted and jailed for larceny and income-tax evasion. It was his successor James “Jimmy” Hoffa, though, who became the enduring focus of Kennedy prosecution and a dangerously vicious enemy.

Long before Hoffa became union president, Robert Kennedy was probing his crimes. Kennedy caught Hoffa red-handed giving a bribe to a Senate attorney, and a personal feud began. Hoffa wriggled out of the bribery case and two other charges, for perjury and wiretapping, and made no secret about how he did it. Dealing with a jury, he bragged, was “like shooting fish in a barrel.” Robert Kennedy obsessed about Jimmy Hoffa, and their mutual hatred became a fact of public life. Among Hoffa’s more printable
descriptions of Robert Kennedy were “vicious bastard,” “little monster,” and “absolute spoiled brat.” In the Senate Committee hearings, both Kennedy brothers clashed with Hoffa time and again, and one exchange exposed Hoffa’s propensity for violence. Leaving one committee session, Hoffa was heard to mutter, “That S.O.B.—I’ll break his back, the little son of a bitch.” He was talking, very evidently, about Robert Kennedy.

In the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election campaign, predictably enough, Hoffa threw his powerful union support behind Nixon. As the election approached, the Teamsters leader told a cheering audience of his members, “If it is a question, as Kennedy has said, that he will break Hoffa, then I say to him, he should live so long.”

John Kennedy had appeared to share his brother’s determination to cripple organized crime. Told that the Senate probe would likely implicate a powerful Democrat, Kennedy had replied, “Go back and build the best case against him that you can.” His strenuous efforts in 1959 had helped push a new law governing union elections through both houses of Congress. It was bitterly attacked by union leaders, including Hoffa.

Robert Kennedy was aware from the evidence that he was up against not only union corruption but also the Mafia. He put it more carefully, referring to gangsters who “work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful than at any time in the history of the country. They control political figures and threaten whole communities. They have stretched their tentacles of corruption and fear into industries both large and small. They grow stronger every day.”

Just before the 1960 election, the younger Kennedy’s book
The Enemy Within
, his account of the struggle with Hoffa and the racketeers, became a bestseller. “No group,” he wrote, “better fits the
prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union. They have the look of Capone’s men… . They have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jeweled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet smelling perfume.”

Among the names linked to Hoffa were Paul Dorfman and Barney Baker. Robert Kennedy referred to Baker as “Hoffa’s ambassador of violence.” Both, as this book will show, had links to Jack Ruby, the man who was to shoot Lee Oswald after the President’s assassination, ensuring his silence. Robert Kennedy also spent months pursuing Sam Giancana and investigating the chain relationship that extended to Mafia bosses Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante.

In 1961, when his brother appointed him Attorney General, Robert Kennedy made clear that combating organized crime was to be a priority. It was, he said, a “private government … resting on a base of human suffering and moral corrosion.” Until then, with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover virtually denying the Mob’s existence, Kennedy had been merely a thorn in the flesh of that private government. Now that he had power as the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, he used it unrelentingly.

Jimmy Hoffa was a prime target. Within nine months of the election, thirteen grand juries, sixteen lawyers, and thirty FBI agents were concentrating on bringing the Teamsters leaders to justice. Kennedy’s Justice Department became known as the “Get Hoffa Squad.” Hoffa was indicted for taking payoffs from trucking companies, for conspiracy to defraud the trustees of the Teamsters’ pension fund, and for taking illegal payments from an employer in Tennessee.

Hoffa used every trick he knew to get off the hook—including hunting for
blackmail material. He would brag years later that he obtained “seamy” information that could have seriously damaged the Kennedys, and both brothers were vulnerable. Hoffa said he had compromising tape recordings of phone conversations between Robert and Marilyn Monroe, and may indeed have had such tapes. Persuasive testimony indicates that both brothers had affairs of one sort or another with the actress.
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It is likely that Hoffa also learned of John Kennedy’s affair with Judith Campbell. At the very time she was seeing Kennedy, Campbell was being cultivated by both Mob boss Sam Giancana and by his henchman Johnny Roselli. Giancana, indeed, eventually became her lover for a while—after the relationship with Kennedy ended, she said. What was in it for Giancana, a man who had his pick of a bevy of women?

In July 1961, infuriated by the FBI surveillance ordered by the President’s brother, Giancana lost his temper. “Fuck J. Edgar Hoover!” he shouted at a group of Chicago FBI agents. “Fuck your super boss, and your super super boss! You know who I mean. I mean the Kennedys! … I know all about the Kennedys … and one of these days we’re going to tell all. Fuck you! One of these days it’ll come out.” For a top mafioso, intimacy with a mistress of the President offered potential access to information, and blackmail possibilities.

Giancana and Robert Kennedy had clashed long since, when the mobster appeared before the McClellan Committee. Thirty-three times, Giancana had pleaded the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional clause under which witnesses may refuse to give answers that might incriminate them. Kennedy had asked Giancana, “Would you tell us, if you have opposition from anybody, that you dispose of them by having them stuffed in a trunk? Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?” Sam Giancana just pleaded the Fifth and giggled.

Brutal
murder was a tool Giancana readily used. Federal investigators recorded him ordering the killing of opponents as casually as others might order a cup of coffee. The catalog of crimes linked to Giancana ranged from the old Mob method of dumping victims in rivers sealed in cement, to hanging a man on a meat hook for days until he succumbed to electric cattle prod, ice pick, and blowtorch. By this bloody path, Giancana had come to rule his own organized crime empire, an operation with an annual income reckoned at two billion dollars. By mid-1963, however, Robert Kennedy was making it difficult for Giancana to run that empire. He was the subject of blanket surveillance. FBI agents in cars sat outside his house twenty-four hours a day, every day. When Giancana went out golfing, the agents went, too.

In 1960, before the Kennedy presidency, there had been only thirty-five convictions for offenses connected with organized crime. In 1963, there were 288, a figure that doubled in the months that followed. Before the Kennedys came to power, Organized Crime Section lawyers spent 61 days in court and 660 days making investigations. In the final year of the Kennedy presidency, government lawyers fighting organized crime spent 1,081 days in court and 6,177 days in the field. “The end of an era had come,” said Ralph Salerno, New York City’s former chief organized crime investigator, “A tremendous financial empire was being very seriously threatened.” Just how much the crime bosses and their lieutenants felt threatened is clear from wiretap surveillance transcripts.

“See what Kennedy done,” Mob associate Willie Weisburg was tape-recorded saying in 1962 in a conversation with Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno, “With Kennedy, a guy should take a
knife, like one of them other guys, and stab and kill the fucker, where he is now. Somebody should kill the fucker. I mean it. This is true. But I tell you something. I hope I get a week’s notice. I’ll kill. Right in the fucking White House. Somebody’s got to get rid of this fucker.” That day, Bruno responded noncommittally. A year later, though, he was talking of giving up and going back to his birthplace in Sicily. On another FBI tape, Bruno could be heard saying despondently, “It is all over for us; I am going to Italy, and you should go, too.”

Others, of course, chose to fight rather than flee. “Organized crime had a practical motive to seek a quick end to the Kennedy administration,” said Congressman—and professional historian— Floyd Fithian, following his service on the House Assassinations Committee. “The picture for organized crime was very bleak indeed. Bleak enough, in my opinion, for individual members of organized crime to seriously consider killing the President. For if John Kennedy no longer sat in the White House, it would only be a matter of time before his brother would leave the Justice Department… . Organized crime had the means to kill John Kennedy. It had a motive. And it had the opportunity.”

The formal findings of the Assassinations Committee echo that assessment. That said, is there evidence that top criminals did plan to kill the President?

Jimmy Hoffa

By mid-1963, justice was catching up with Jimmy Hoffa. Though still managing to stay out of prison, he was now charged with conspiring to fix the jury in the Tennessee case over taking illegal payments from an employer. He would eventually be jailed, for the jury offense and for diverting a million dollars in union funds to his own use. By that time, though, Robert
Kennedy would have had little taste for the victory—his brother the President would be dead. There is evidence, however, that—in 1962—Hoffa had planned to retaliate against the Kennedys with violence.

A prime witness in the Tennessee case was Edward Partin, a Teamsters official in Louisiana who gave federal investigators incriminating information on Hoffa. In the summer of 1962, Partin said, at a meeting in Hoffa’s Washington office, the Teamsters leader talked of killing Robert Kennedy. According to Partin, Hoffa said: “Somebody needs to bump that son of a bitch off… . You know I’ve got a rundown on him … his house sits here like this [Hoffa drew with his fingers], and it’s not guarded… . He drives about in a convertible and swims by himself. I’ve got a .270 rifle with a high-power scope on it that shoots a long way without dropping any. It would be easy to get him with that. But I’m leery of it; it’s too obvious.”

Hoffa’s weapon of preference at the time, Partin said, was the bomb. “What I think should be done,” he said, “if I can get hold of these plastic bombs, is to get somebody to throw one in his house and the place’ll burn after it blows up. You know the S.O.B. doesn’t stay up too late.”

The evidence indicated he was telling the truth. According to Partin, who repeated his account to the author, Hoffa asked him to help obtain a suitable “plastic bomb” for the murder plan. Alerted by Partin, a federal investigator named Hawk Daniels listened in as Partin reported back to Hoffa in a telephone call. Daniels, who was later to become a Louisiana state judge, told the author, “Yes, there were two telephone calls, monitored by me. They originated with Partin and terminated with Hoffa on the other end of the line. Partin briefly brought up the subject of the plastic
explosives and told Hoffa he had obtained the explosive Hoffa wanted. Hoffa then said, ‘We’ll talk about that later’ and abruptly changed the subject. It was clear from the course of the conversation that he knew very well what Partin was talking about.”

Daniels took Partin’s warning seriously and informed the Justice Department, and law enforcement was apparently alerted to the danger. In early 1963, President Kennedy was to tell his friend Ben Bradlee, the future editor of the
Washington Post
, that a Hoffa “hoodlum” had been sent to Washington to shoot his brother. According to Partin in his interview with the author, however, the Teamsters leader “intended the death of the President as well as his brother.” Other testimony suggests that Hoffa’s friends in the Mafia shared his murderous intentions.