The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (11 page)

Despite Sinatra’s invitation, no Mafia chieftain attended the party that evening, according to those interviewed for this history. But the Mafia — and possibly others — was intent on covering its bets. Blackmail along with payoffs were the companion techniques that produced compliant politicians. Fred Otash, a private investigator in Los Angeles who performed jobs for a wide range of clients — including the mob — was called in to bug the Lawford home.
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For the Kennedy brothers, their father’s Faustian bargain with the Chicago mob was turning into something more — a Faustian embrace.
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September 24, 1960

Beach, Florida

T
he United States government had never before in its 180-year history attempted, in a time of peace, to murder a foreign leader. But in the summer of 1960, off-balance from real and perceived defeats in foreign affairs, the Eisenhower administration authorized “wet operations” against two of the most incendiary detractors of the United States — Fidel Castro and Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba.

The world in 1960, one journalist put it, had the look of a “barroom on the verge of a brawl.” There were insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that American leaders thought might be epidemic. On May 1, the Russians shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying over Soviet territory, after Eisenhower had publicly denied any such overflight. At a Paris summit meeting of the leaders of the two superpowers, Nikita Khrushchev, whose porcine visage and podium-pounding truculence were cause enough for fright, called the president a liar and a hypocrite. The Japanese government withdrew its invitation to Eisenhower for a state visit because it could not guarantee his security in the light of anti-American demonstrations. In July, the recently decolonized Belgian Congo exploded into antiwhite insurgency. When Belgium intervened with troops, Lumumba asked Khrushchev for military help. The fatigue and near-panic of the Eisenhower administration that summer as well as the ascendancy of personalities like Richard Bissell, J. C. King, and E. Howard Hunt in Allen Dulles’s CIA conduced to create a murderous expedient.

In a legal sense, President Eisenhower himself never formally authorized the attempts to murder; he rather ordered “all possible measures” to retain, in the favored phrase, “plausible deniability.” This gave the green light to Dulles and Bissell while providing them, in the event that such plotting ever came to light, the same defense as Adolf Eichmann: acting under superior orders. Hannah Arendt had termed this earlier iteration of impersonal, bureaucratic homicide “the banality of evil.” The national security state itself, with its huge budgets, its institutionalized paranoia, its contending departments and agencies all armed with the imperative of anticommunist survival, swept away any sense of restraint. At least in the case of Lumumba, there also may have been a racial factor in the decision to kill him. In the course of his visit to segregated Washington that summer of 1960, he had demanded the sexual favor of
une blanche blonde
(a blonde white woman).
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The Mafia was already hard at work on plans to take out Castro, who had shut down its casinos and rackets and had jailed mafioso Santos Trafficante Jr., among others; Meyer Lansky had reportedly put a $1 million bounty on Castro’s head. The CIA’s purpose in creating a joint venture with the Mafia was to accelerate and assist in the effort to murder Castro. With Agency authorization, Robert A. Maheu, a former FBI agent who had become a freelance covert operator, approached Johnny Rosselli in early September 1960 to discuss the idea of collaboration. The two met at the Brown Derby restaurant in Beverly Hills and Maheu laid out the CIA’s proposal to give Rosselli $150,000 to hit the Cuban premier. Rosselli was at first stunned, then doubtful about the idea, but after Maheu assured him that it was serious, he agreed to show up in New York on September 14 for a meeting with CIA officials.
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From Rosselli’s standpoint, there were advantages in a joint venture with the “G,” as the hoodlums called the government. Beyond ridding Cuba of Castro and restoring the mob’s biggest profit center east of Las Vegas, collaboration with the CIA could neutralize the federal government’s nascent war against the Mafia. But could Rosselli get the job done? His experience in Mafia hits was extensive, probably numbering over thirty in the course of his career. None had involved a head of state, however. He knew Havana reasonably well, but he knew nothing of the habits and security status of Castro.
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The meeting at the Plaza between Rosselli, Maheu, and CIA division chief Jim O’Connell went smoothly. Rosselli agreed to go to Miami to put together a plan for the hit, but refused any payment of money for himself. If the government wanted a partner, he would sign up; if it wanted just a hit job, that was another thing. Above all, this was terra incognita for both parties.

From the start, Castro sensed that if he did not feint and move, he would be destroyed. His visit to New York was a brilliant ambuscade that both baited and bemused Washington, and gave him some breathing space to prepare to defend his island. Four days after Rosselli and the CIA men had arranged their business, Castro and his entourage of fifty arrived in the city. In almost comedic fashion, they first refused to pay their deposits at the Shelburne Hotel, then took their case in a streaming convoy of police, press, and pedestrians to Secretary General of the UN Dag Hammarskjold. Dressed in his olive-green fatigues and declaiming in a voice designed for the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, Castro informed the amazed Hammarskjold that if he could not find them lodging, the Cubans would march to Central Park. “We are mountain people,” he boasted. “We are used to sleeping in the open air.”
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But there was method to his madness. Although Hammarskjold found the Cubans alternative lodging, Castro, in a flamboyant motorcade up Seventh Avenue at midnight, moved into the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. Over the following week, Castro and his bearded and youthful confreres ate, drank, danced, and otherwise held court at all hours of the day and night. After receiving heads of state from the nonaligned world and Americans such as Malcolm X, Castro pulled off his coup de theatre — and the real reason for the trip — when he greeted Khrushchev at the entrance to the hotel before several hundred press and African Americans, in what the
New York Times
dryly described as “the biggest event on 125th Street since the funeral in 1958 of W. C. Handy, who wrote ‘St. Louis Blues.’ ”

Castro had come to cement an alliance that would save revolutionary Cuba and have the additional effect of both changing the world’s balance of power and bringing it to the brink of nuclear war. “He made a deep impression on me,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. Twenty years later, Khrushchev could still remember the embrace: “He bent down and enveloped me with his whole body.”

The coupling confirmed Washington’s worst fears. At a hospitality suite in the Waldorf Astoria that the CIA set up, incredibly enough, to entertain the huge detail of New York police protecting Castro, Inspector Michael J. Murphy was approached by a CIA agent who had a plan: the Agency would like to plant a special box of cigars at a place where Castro would smoke one. When he did so, the agent explained, the cigar would explode and blow his head off. Murphy was appalled.
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Rosselli meanwhile had boarded a plane for Miami to make his own murderous arrangements. He brought to this effort — and all his far-flung criminal pursuits — a verve that, if one accepts his FBI profile, was partly based on his devout Catholicism. There was a crusading, almost medieval, element to his use of diplomacy and terror in the cause of Mafia enterprise as well as a surprising concern about social justice. During this period, Rosselli retained Father Albert Foley, S. J., a professor at Springhill College in Mobile, Alabama, to script the true-life story, ironically enough, of a priest who traveled from New England to the South during the Civil War.
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And so Rosselli, the criminal missionary who had traversed the Sun Belt for a decade from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Phoenix to Dallas, providing juice and bringing in muscle, now prepared for his most ambitious mission in a city that was rapidly coming to a boil.

Miami was a city divided: the Beach, so familiar to Rosselli and his mob associates, with its pastel necklace of resorts three miles out to sea on a thin strip of coral; the opulent Miami of Coconut Grove and Coral Gables, with its verdant groves and tethered yachts; and the other Miami, a shabby freckling of stucco and clapboard, dredged and drained out of the dark green swamp and sprawling ever inward under the migrant-driven pressure of impoverished blacks and dispossessed Cubans. Nothing in any economic or cultural sense united these places except the blue apparition of sea, the heavy heat, and the vast, oozy Everglades that lay to the west and south. There was something at once glossy and seamy, growing and rotting about the place. Beneath it all lay the ulcerating swamp that continued to swell and collapse under the jerry-built development, as if to communicate the extent of the ecological imposition at hand.

Beginning in the middle of 1959, Miami turned at first slowly, then rapidly, into a war zone, altering the uneasy balance among poor blacks, south Florida rednecks, and Rotarians, and the millionaire boom-and-bust developers who ran the place. For a good twenty-five years, that balance had, strangely enough, depended on Havana. For the Cuban rich, Miami had served as a Switzerland of sorts. It was where they shopped, put their money, or boarded midnight flights to escape yet another round of Cuban political bloodletting. For the mob, flush with cash from the Havana casinos and rackets, Miami served as a pecuniary laundromat and a place where they could frolic free of any molestation from law enforcement. Accordingly, every member of the Chicago Outfit’s high command had a home in Miami. Many of the Beach resorts, like the enormous Fontainebleau (where Capone’s cousin, Joe Fischetti, served as social director) were mob-financed.

By September 1960, when Rosselli arrived to put the Castro conspiracy into operation, the great inundation of Cuban refugees, about two thousand per month, was cresting. In addition to the usual racial and economic frictions immigration causes, Newsweek detected something else, calling Miami “America’s Casablanca,” an enclave of the bitter and the brutalized, a place of spies and guns-for-hire, floating in a treacherous demimonde based on the dream of violently reclaiming Cuba. Miami, along with Dallas and Phoenix, had always been one of the most right-wing cities in the United States, but the Cuban dislocation gave that predilection violent cause.

With the arrival of the CIA in the summer and fall of 1960, anticommunism became south Florida’s growth industry. Miami was suddenly transformed into a vast staging ground for the war against Castro. The CIA leased a 1,500-acre tract south of Miami that soon became the largest CIA base in the world. Exile recruitment centers run by Agency staff began popping up at the Opa-Locka Air Force Base, downtown Miami, Virginia Garden, and a half-dozen other places. Dozens of transport planes and de-mothballed bombers were flown into Opa-Locka and Homestead Air Force Base for use in the secret war. CIA officers began purchasing the first of some hundred safe houses to harbor exile agents and assets, as well as creating front companies — detective agencies, real estate companies, boat-repair businesses, etc. — to help conceal their vast enterprise and nominally employ thousands of exiles. Operational sites and arms caches were scattered throughout the region, particularly in the Keys facing the Windward Passage to Cuba. The CIA navy in south Florida grew to two hundred vessels — supply ships, subchasers, high-speed patrol boats, airboats, and rubber landing craft. Meanwhile, scores, perhaps hundreds, of pro-Castro agents monitored the extraordinary buildup.

On September 24, 1960, the CIA’s Jim O’Connell arrived in Miami to work out the assassination plot against Castro. He met Rosselli and Maheu at the executive suite they were sharing at the Kenilworth Hotel. It was decided beforehand that everyone at the meeting would use aliases, to maintain a deniable distance. Rosselli got O’Connell’s agreement on two key concerns: that Giancana (“Sam Gold”) and Trafficante (“Joe”) would be looped into the plot (Rosselli simply included them in the meeting), and that the hit would be something “nice and clean,” not the gangland-style ambush the CIA originally wanted. Poison was the preferred means. The next day, O’Connell and Maheu flew back to Washington and ordered up a slow-acting poison from the CIA’s Technical Services Division, which CIA Director Dulles preferred to call the “Health Alteration Committee.”
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October 21, 1960

South Florida

J
orge L. Recarey García-Vieta, a handsome, green-eyed Cuban of seventeen, looked back at the boiling wake of the Swift V-20 as it pulled out of the Miami River and accelerated into the harbor on a midnight ride across the Windward Passage. In five hours, operating under the name Julio Cesar Blanco, Recarey would be back in Cuba to join the underground fight against the regime of Fidel Castro. Concealed in his coat were sealed instructions to be given to the underground leader of the anti-Castro movement. Recarey’s specialty was demolitions, a dangerous business for a rich man’s son; those caught were either executed on the spot or brutally broken down by Castro’s police interrogators.
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Recarey’s odyssey from a life of privilege in Cuba to resistance training by the CIA in south Florida was fueled by several motivations. Castro’s revolution had initially fascinated him and thousands of other young Cubans. By the first months of 1960, however, it had become a threat to his family and to his class. He had been revolted first by the sight of officially tolerated looting of the elegant homes in his Havana neighborhood of Vedado; then by the mass seizures of property by the state; and finally by the arrest of friends at the University of Havana, where Recarey was studying for a law degree. The fact that the Americans, with all their power and resources, had turned against Castro was a critical factor in the young Cuban’s change of mind. As Manuel Artime, one of the leaders of the Cuban exiles, later commented: “The United States was great and powerful, the master not only of the hemisphere but perhaps of the world. . . . And the mysterious, anonymous, ubiquitous American agents who dealt with the Cubans managed to strengthen that belief.”
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Recarey dropped out of school and headed for Miami over the objections of his mother and father, who were trying to keep the family and its holdings together in Cuba.