The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (15 page)

Rosselli’s purpose, however, was not just to assassinate Castro but to set up the Mafia’s partner in crime, the United States government. Accordingly, he was laying a long, bright trail of evidence that unmistakably implicated the CIA in the Castro plot. This evidence, whose purpose was blackmail, would prove critical in the CIA’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.

April 4, 1961

New Orleans, Louisiana

O
n April 4, accompanied by one of his lawyers, Carlos Marcello, the rotund little Louisiana crime boss whose organized reign of terror had proceeded untouched for nearly twenty years, walked into the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Masonic Temple on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. As a resident alien, Marcello made such visits every three months or so, but this one proved different. An INS official read Marcello a letter on Justice Department stationery, informing him that he had entered the United States illegally from Guatemala and therefore would be deported forthwith. Two INS officers handcuffed him. Marcello demanded to call one of his attorneys but was refused. He asked if he could call his wife to get a toothbrush and some money. This too was refused.
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Marcello was immediately driven to New Orleans Moisant International Airport, bundled aboard a waiting INS plane by a small army of police and immigration officials, and flown 1,200 miles to Guatemala City. Along with his Shreveport attorney Mike Maroun, Marcello was later expelled from Guatemala to neighboring Honduras. After the bus carrying the two men crossed the border between the two countries, they were dropped off on the side of the road. They walked in the direction of a village in the high altitude, but the portly Marcello soon collapsed with exhaustion. Lying on the side of the road, his enjoinder to Maroun was to become a staple in the saga of the Marcello vendetta: “If I don’t make it, Mike, tell my brothers when you get back about what that kid Bobby done to us. Tell ’em to do what they have to do.”
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During the first weeks of the Kennedy administration, the new attorney general moved with emergency dispatch against organized crime. Asked how he hoped to be remembered, Bobby’s response was blunt: “As the guy who broke the Mafia.” He set about to recruit the best and the brightest for the assault. When, at a meet-the-new-boss discussion, twenty-six-year-old attorney William French expressed his desire to leave Justice because it was doing so little against organized crime, Kennedy took him aside and invited him to his office for a chat. He persuaded French to stay on and join a new task force investigating the Detroit mob. He then led French to a conference room in which there was a table covered with the green-bound transcripts of the McClellan Committee hearings and referred him to their contents.

Marcello was not the only candidate for deportation. Another was Johnny Rosselli, who had probably learned that FBI agents in Chicago had already pulled his phony affidavit of birth and were searching for some record of his real parents.
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It was now clear that Robert Kennedy would act against, even manhandle, mafiosi without warning or due process and deport them at will. (Kennedy initially had planned to deport Marcello to Formosa.) In a foreign country, with no money in their pockets, the mafioso could be imprisoned by the locals, or worse.
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But Rosselli was already on the move to “throw some fear” — as the Chicago Outfit liked to say when it applied low levels of terror — into the federal hunting party. If the mob contribution to the Kennedy campaign wasn’t having the desired effect, perhaps a little blackmail regarding Jack Kennedy’s amorous pursuits would. On March 21, 1961, Rosselli invited private investigator Fred Otash to lunch at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills. Otash, who did spot jobs for the Los Angeles mob, had been retained by Peter Fairchild in a divorce action against his wife, actress Judy Meredith. To reduce the alimony settlement to his wife, Fairchild, through Otash’s snooping, was prepared to document that she had sexually consorted with Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and Jack Kennedy. Rosselli told the stupefied Otash that “at the request of the attorney general” he was offering Fairchild $15,000 cash to get rid of the documentation. The fact that Otash brought Rosselli’s overture to the attention of the L.A. office of the FBI within days of the lunch strongly suggests the blackmail at hand. The FBI special agent in charge noted in his telex to J. Edgar Hoover that Rosselli had done this to “avoid derogatory publicity.”
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By this time, the mob knew that Hoover, a known purveyor of blackmail, feared the new attorney general, whom he described to former vice president Richard Nixon around this time as a “sneaky little son of a bitch.”
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News of the Rosselli move must have pleased Hoover, who railed against Bobby Kennedy’s intrusion into his fusty little kingdom of G-men, and in particular against the attorney general’s peremptory way of summoning him by means of a buzzer he’d installed between the two offices. Kennedy was openly derisory about Hoover, poking fun at the sixty-six-year-old’s collapsing jowls and wondering whether he had to “squat to pee.” He told Kenny O’Donnell on one occasion that “J. Edna” was “the kind of guy we can deal with.”
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In retrospect, however, Bobby Kennedy misjudged Hoover, who, like a crouched and glistening toad, could deliver a poisonous charge when a larger creature entered his lair. In early April, Hoover sent a letter — with damning enclosures — to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, accusing him of financially consorting with a Mafia financier. A frightened Lawford immediately relayed this to the attorney general, observing “his [Hoover’s] intimation is nothing less than extraordinary.”
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Kennedy’s reaction to these venomous emissions was notably nonplussed. He reported in his 1964 oral history for the Kennedy library that Hoover had given him a memorandum detailing FBI findings that the president and the attorney general had sexual “assignations” with a “group of girls” on the twelfth floor of the LaSalle Hotel in Washington. “He would do this,” Kennedy later said, “to find out what my reaction would be.”
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Why Bobby did not see Hoover as dangerous is unclear. Could he actually have been ignorant of the president’s philanderings? The LaSalle, along with the Carlyle in New York, was indeed a sexual watering hole for Jack Kennedy. Perhaps, Hoover’s relationship with Joe Kennedy — “Father was a good friend,” Bobby reports in his oral history — may have reassured Bobby that Hoover would ultimately not go for the family’s throat. Finally, Hoover was clever. He would do his destructive business and then assume a benign pose. “Dear Bob,” he wrote in a note dated June 9, 1961, “[Y]our confidence and support mean a great deal to me and I sincerely trust I shall always merit them.”
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All of this pointed to Bobby Kennedy’s chief failing: underestimating his enemies. His idea of political battle was frontal, but the attacks of men such as Hoover were often oblique and disguised. General Maxwell Taylor wasn’t exaggerating when he said that Bobby Kennedy would have made it in his 101st Airborne Division — “the kind of guy we wanted around to take a hill or a trench.”
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Such bravery conduced to forward movement but it could also result in sudden casualty. He was brave in taking risks, but he was not always capable of calibrating them.

Hoover already had a scandal file on John F. Kennedy dating back to the early 1940s.
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By 1961 the file was said to be six inches thick. “Joe always told me he should have gelded Jack when he was a boy,” Hoover observed around this period.
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The president was stunned to read the contents of Hoover’s dossiers about his potential appointees. “I don’t want any part of that stuff,” he told Kenny O’Donnell. “I don’t want to hear about it. I’d like to see the report they’ve got on me.”
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For all of his rhetorical counterpoint about sacrifice in the cause of national greatness and his earlier literary exercise in “profiles in courage,” Jack accepted moral compromise. But such was not the case with his brother, whose zeal about destroying the Mafia, ironically enough, handed Hoover license to continue using his favorite instrumentality of blackmail — bugs — and further expose the president to harm.

Electronic eavesdropping fit neatly into Hoover’s metier as voyeur-in-chief. Bugs revealed highly charged information about mob hits, schemes, crimes, disputes, etc., while granting the bugged mafiosi immunity from prosecution since the information was illegally gathered.
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Moreover, the director made it clear to his agents that if ever they were caught installing such devices, the Bureau would fire them outright and cooperate in their prosecution.
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The real targets of the bugs were not the hoodlums but the politicians they compromised with payoffs and the provision of women. Outside of the anticommunist headhunters on Capitol Hill, Hoover’s singular following was drawn from among this worried throng of potential blackmail victims. In July 1961, Attorney General Kennedy formally countenanced the expansion of this tricky practice when he told FBI assistant director Courtney Evans to use more “technical equipment” against the mob.
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In his war against the mob in 1961 Bobby moved on several fronts of investigation. He ordered up hundreds of FBI files on Mafia figures and rackets and personally read through them, producing a “hit list” of mob personalities. He asked his old law professor at the University of Virginia, Mortimer Caplin, to become an IRS commissioner and targeted leading Mafia figures for audits and indictments. It was the gambit that had finally ruined Capone. In 1957, the IRS had netted Chicago underboss and Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and put him in prison for two and a half years. In 1960, Tony Accardo was indicted for deducting a sports car as a “beer salesman.”
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The IRS charges were usually petty — and the manner in which mob leaders were targeted probably illegal — but they tied them up in audits of their huge incomes and dubious deductions and sometimes put them in prison.

To head the Organized Crime Division Kennedy appointed Edwyn Silberling, a New Jersey attorney he had come to know through the McClellan Committee. He increased the number of attorneys on staff in Washington from 15 to 60. As Victor Navasky described it, “Operating with a direct line to the top, the Organized Crime ‘whiz kids’ fanned out across the country and began raiding gambling establishments, closing down bookies’ services, indicting corrupt mayors and judges and generally picking off, one by one, the names on the ‘hit list.’”
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The new attorney general also established field units that drew together all federal agents in strike forces in the major cities of the United States. These strike forces were put under the command of assistant attorneys general, such as Bill French in Detroit. They shared intelligence on taxes, gun transfers, immigration status, cross-state trafficking, and the full range of Mafia rackets. Kennedy’s idea was to create a martial level of synergy within the twenty-two different agencies of federal law enforcement. At the national level, he proposed the creation of a national crime commission to consolidate federal leadership. Although Hoover successfully had excised the crime commission idea from all proposed legislation, Kennedy was able to push five anti-crime bills through the Congress so quickly, William Geoghegan remembered, that nobody on the Judiciary Committee even had a chance to read them.

Mafia chieftains soon felt the squeeze. They began calling in their political markers. California governor Pat Brown, a strong supporter of John Kennedy in 1960, fairly demanded — and got — an appointment with the attorney general for John Alessio, a California hoodlum, whom the governor described as “one of the finest men I have ever met [who] has done as much for the Democratic Party as anyone I know.”
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Kennedy gave the man five minutes — and no relief from the money-laundering probe that had caused Alessio to seek the meeting.

Kennedy’s McClellan Committee experience led him to conclude that narcotics would eventually become one of the underworld’s premier industries, and as attorney general he moved aggressively against its chieftains. Harry Anslinger, the federal commissioner of narcotics, remembered Kennedy “traveling the country, calling special meetings with our agents, exhorting them to nail the big traffickers. . . . He would go down the line, name by name, and ask what progress had been made. . . . He demanded action and got it.”
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No project in his war against organized crime was so personally prized by Bobby as the making of
The Enemy Within
into a movie. Producer Jerry Wald, among Hollywood’s finest at the time, had agreed to develop the book. Scriptwriter Budd Schulberg of
On the Waterfront
fame was retained to do the script. He and Kennedy soon became good friends. One evening at Hickory Hill, Schulberg told Kennedy that he liked the deeper theme of the book that “something at the core of our society was beginning to rot.” “Good,” Kennedy responded. “I wrote those last pages very carefully.”
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But no sooner had the formidable Wald (whom Schulberg later described as the man who “alone had the courage to produce it”) started putting the project together than he encountered strong resistance from key industry people like Jack Warner, an old and singularly powerful friend of Johnny Rosselli. There were rumors that the entertainment unions would strike the film. On May 3, 1961,
Variety
headlined a stinging article about the project: “Will Bob Kennedy-Written Film Bum-Rap All of U.S. Unions?”
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It is not known whether Rosselli, with his entree into the studios and proven clout with the entertainment unions, had a role in all this. But he certainly must have recognized the danger for the Mafia if such a searing indictment of his trade ever made it to the screen. Kennedy and his press aide Ed Guthman continued to work with Wald and Schulberg on the script throughout 1961. Actor Paul Newman was approached to play the part of Robert Kennedy. On July 2, 1962, Wald reported to Kennedy that the final draft of the script was finished.
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Four days later, however, Wald was found dead, reportedly of a heart attack, in his Beverly Hills home. He was forty-nine years old. The project was put on hold.