The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (8 page)

The fact that Senator Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Richard Nixon (the other two leading presidential candidates that year) were also lining up bosses like Joe Civello and Carlos Marcello probably contributed to Kennedy’s interest in approaching them. LBJ and Nixon, moreover, could make a far better claim to blocking anti-racketeering laws than the Kennedys could.
⁸
The difference was, Joe reportedly told his son-in-law Steve Smith, they didn’t have the balls to go straight to the mob themselves. He would.
⁹

It was precisely this grasping style of Kennedy’s that had weakened and ultimately denatured the alliance he had initially enjoyed with Franklin Roosevelt.
¹⁰
In later years, Kennedy often spoke to friends, in anger tinged with bitter admiration, of FDR’s immense cunning — how he had fleeced Kennedy for nearly a million dollars in the ’36 presidential campaign, then given him the ambassadorship to get him out of the country, and then, when it got tough, set him up as a Nazi sympathizer and ruined him. As the years went by, the obsession with Roosevelt grew more grotesque and exaggerated. Kennedy claimed, for example, that FDR had personally reviewed the order to send his son on the high-risk bombing mission over France in which Joe Jr. had died. During the 1944 presidential campaign, Kennedy asked Senator Harry S Truman, Roosevelt’s running mate, “Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son Joe?”
¹¹
Within the Kennedy family, there became such a thing as “Joe time,” when their father would sit for hours on the cushioned rocker, alone in the house in Hyannis Port, looking out across the lawn past the dunes to the heaving Atlantic, a Beethoven symphony playing on the record player and filling the empty house.
¹²
He would sit there and cry until he fell asleep in the chair.

As deep as his grief over Joe Jr. may have been, the elder Kennedy did not let go of his ambition to make a Kennedy president. Nor did the fact that Jack’s health was shattered seem to count. Early in 1945 Jack wrote his friend Paul “Red” Fay how much he envied his life in sunny California. “I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage. I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t ‘all engines full ahead.’ ”
¹³
When asked by Merle Miller whether he had misgivings about having the Catholic Jack Kennedy in the White House, former president Truman replied, “It’s not the Pope I fear. It’s the Pop.”
¹⁴

The dilemma for the plucky but often indolent Jack Kennedy in 1960 was that without his father’s money and range of relationships with the likes of
Time-Life
publisher Henry Luce and J. Edgar Hoover, he could not win. With them, however, it became increasingly hard to deny the charge that the fix was in. Jack bridged the bargain with his nimble grace. He informed the press that he had just received a telegram from “Dad.” “Dear Jack,” he read with mock solemnity, “Don’t spend one more dime than you have to. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” When he heard about this, the old man exploded. The joke was unbelievably stupid, he told Kenny O’Donnell. “Jack is too loose. . . . Fortunately for all of us, we have Bobby.”
¹⁵
When journalist Fletcher Knebel checked with Jack about a rumor that his father had made a substantial personal loan to
Boston Post
publisher John Fox during the 1952 Senate campaign to shut him up, Jack turned Knebel over to Steve Smith, who read the reporter an official denial. After Knebel told Kennedy he found the explanation acceptable, Jack put a friendly hand on the journalist’s shoulder: “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper or I’d have been licked.”
¹⁶
Jack may have been “loose” in his father’s view, but his charm and calculated insouciance did much to allay the fear and loathing of his unscrupulous father.

Brod later recalled that he was the first person to greet Joe Kennedy that February day in Manhattan. Brod, who died in 1980, was a short barrel of a man, dark-complected with thick eyebrows. He had been an OSS captain in World War Two and his former commanding officer in Italy had been the CIA’s Jim Angleton. The alliance between the Agency and the Mafia was in many ways a natural: the mob offered muscle, money, and quicker ways to do things; the government offered protection and a measure of legitimacy. The matter of the CIA’s protection of Brod arose in 1963 when Attorney General Robert Kennedy, learning of Brod’s intimate relations with the Teamsters, sought to question him. Only a call from Angleton to Kennedy kept Brod out of the clutches of the Justice Department. Again in 1975, Angleton phoned Senate staff attorneys Walt Elder and Matt Aaron, then working for the Church Committee investigating assassination attempts by the United States government, to warn them off, claiming Brod faced Mafia retribution if it was discovered that he had worked for the CIA.
¹⁷

Also at the table that day was Tony Accardo or “Joe Batters,” the sleepy-eyed former Capone bodyguard and reported participant in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. He had earned his moniker by beating men to death with a baseball bat. Accardo stepped aside in 1956 as leader of the Chicago syndicate in favor of Giancana. Subpoenaed by the McClellan Committee in 1957, Accardo had opted to take the Fifth Amendment no fewer than 144 times under an onslaught of questioning by Bobby Kennedy and other committee members. Another silent witness before the committee and a guest that day at lunch was Murray Humphreys, a tall, gray-haired man of Welsh origin with all-American looks. He was the Chicago mob’s financial wizard and specialized in giving criminal operations legitimate storefronts. Humphreys, who in the 1920s had been one of Capone’s enforcers, had by the 1950s become one of the “connection guys” who studiously and effectively corrupted judges and elected officials.
¹⁸
Humphreys, according to his widow Jeanne, disliked Joe Kennedy, considering him a “a four-flusher and a doublecrosser .”
¹⁹

Johnny Rosselli himself was an ex officio member of the Chicago Outfit, having gotten his start in crime as a contract killer for Capone. In 1924, he had moved to Los Angeles for health reasons. There was something undeniably magnetic and dashing about Rosselli — the low, liquid voice, the coiffed silver hair, the high humor, the expensive dark suits with always a touch of bright plumage in his tie or handkerchief.

After twenty years of both muscling and financing the studios in Hollywood, coproducing some films himself, and romancing starlets like Lana Turner, June Lang, and Donna Reed, Rosselli had orchestrated the Chicago mob’s expansion into Las Vegas in the mid-’50s. In addition to his polished look and confident style, so different from the usual mode of most syndicate leaders, Rosselli was unique in another way. Although his primary allegiance was to Giancana and the old Capone outfit, he now operated as an independent player, maneuvering among the snarling, paranoid mob clans as they moved into new sunlit pastures such as San Diego, Denver, and Phoenix. Despite his grade-school education, Rosselli was well read and sophisticated. His approach was to take careful measure of a man before ruthlessly moving on him. It was Rosselli who quietly engineered the introduction of the blue-eyed brunette Judy Campbell (a young woman he himself had once dated) to Senator Kennedy in February 1960 in Las Vegas after her affair with Rosselli’s protégé, Frank Sinatra. For all of this, Rosselli was a devout Catholic.
²⁰

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glossy, self-invented Jay Gatsby, Johnny Rosselli remade himself when he moved west — severing ties with his family, the Saccos, in Boston, taking the name of the Renaissance artist who had painted the walls of the Sistine Chapel, producing movies like
G Man
that belied his criminal profession, and living in opulent lodgings at the Beverly Hills Garden of Allah (at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights), where Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and a host of Hollywood’s top stars came and went. Beginning in 1958, as part of their Top Hoodlum Project, the FBI put Rosselli under surveillance. But the FBI telexes revealed little more than descriptions of beautiful women, expensive clothes, and occasional drunken afternoons at the Friars Club in the company of entertainment types. During this time, as he scripted a new life for himself in the city of make-believe, Rosselli slipped in and out of Los Angeles for criminal work in Havana, Las Vegas, and Chicago. When he flew to New York (for the meeting with Joe Kennedy), the Los Angeles FBI office reasoned that it was probably to arrange for the purchase of film rights to Broadway plays.
²¹

The precise circumstances under which Rosselli became acquainted with Senator Kennedy are not known but probably date to the middle 1950s, when Kennedy’s relationship with Sinatra became more constant. All three were assiduous pursuers of glamorous women; Rosselli (whom the FBI office in L.A. described during this period as “sex crazy”) was a purveyor of women as well. Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn Monroe’s neighbor and friend, remembered that Monroe met Rosselli “through the Kennedys.”
²²

Bobby Kennedy would have known little, if anything, about this. What little time he took off from work, either as a Senate counsel or later as his brother’s campaign manager, he tended to spend with his family. He must have at least heard rumors of his brother’s (and possibly his father’s) wide-ranging sexual adventures, particularly in Hollywood. But as a junior member of the male dynasty he did not question these philanderings.
²³
Bobby no doubt knew of Rosselli’s reputation but had not succeeded in subpoenaing him to testify before the McClellan Committee. On a trip to Las Vegas in 1958, Kennedy learned that Rosselli had attempted to take over the garbage union by buying off its leadership and then muscling the Las Vegas city manager.
²⁴

Finally at the lunch that day was Giancana himself, an ugly little man with a large wedge of nose rising out of his scowling face and a sloping and balding pate to which he constantly and fruitlessly administered. Unlike his rivals and sometime partners among the five balkanized New York families, Giancana enjoyed total power in Chicago. The Chicago Outfit was more disciplined, vicious, and politically savvy than its counterparts across the country. In the West, for example, its power was greater than that of all of the other Mafia families combined; in Las Vegas, the Chicago Outfit had controlling interests in no fewer than four casinos, which together threw off about $10 million in skim a year. When other mobsters such as New York’s Bugsy Siegel got out of line, Chicago exacted execution. Even the powerful Meyer Lansky, who had organized the national syndicate, could not save his old partner Siegel, who was gunned down in Beverly Hills on June 20,1947. “I had no choice,” Lansky laconically commented after Siegel’s murder. In 1955, when another Lansky confederate, Louis Strauss, tried to extort cash from Las Vegas casino owner Benny Binion, Rosselli and the Chicago sluggers were called in. “Russian Louie” was garroted outside Upland, California. Lansky again waxed philosophical in conversation with Chicago mobster Marshall Caifano. “That’s the last time a Jew will cheat a Sicilian in this town,” he told him.
²⁵
Within the hoodlum community, the Chicago mob was known for using torture before the execution of its victims as well as for its capacity, in a business where murder was the highest art, to conceal the source of the hit after the fact.

But by far the most distinctive trait of the Chicago Outfit — and one Joe Kennedy knew well — was its huge political machine, which controlled roughly one-third of the Chicago vote and could deliver margins of over 90 percent in key wards, if required. Giancana and his lieutenants had a working relationship with Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who rarely opposed their will, as well as with two U.S. congressmen, Roland Libonati and Thomas O’Brien, who were completely in their pocket. One of Giancana’s mob colleagues, Marshall Korshak, was then serving as Illinois State director of revenue. The Outfit even managed in 1962 to place one of its capos, Richard Cain (né Scalzetti), as the chief investigator in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
²⁶

Joe Kennedy’s pitch, Brod later reported, was direct: he wanted $500,000 for Jack’s presidential campaign. For Joe Kennedy, the money itself was not the critical issue. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What was critical was the support that followed the money, particularly the Chicago Outfit’s vote-getting strength. There was little discussion of the merits of Jack Kennedy’s candidacy until Giancano’s lieutenant Murray Humphreys, evidently under instruction, took Joe Kennedy to task about his other son, Bobby. Humphreys pointed out the abuse that each had suffered before the McClellan Committee. Robert Kennedy had even called Sam Giancana “a sissy” before the reporters and television cameras.
²⁷

The elder Kennedy replied that it was Jack who was running for president, not Bobby, and that this was “business, not politics.” The argument was not exactly persuasive, as Kennedy shortly thereafter got up and excused himself from the lunch, leaving Rosselli with some explaining to do. Brod remembered that Rosselli emphasized that it was Kennedy who had come to them, and that this was significant.
²⁸
The pitch worked. One week later Paul “Skinny” D’Amato delivered $500,000 to 230 Park Avenue, Kennedy’s Manhattan office.
²⁹