Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (48 page)

2. The hit on Fidel Castro:
Unbeknownst to the Kennedy Administration, a few months before J.F.K.’s election as president, certain members of the underworld had linked up with the CIA in a misguided plot to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. The CIA, knowing that the Syndicate was angry at Castro for shutting down their lucrative Cuban casinos, initiated the plot. Joe Kennedy’s old Hollywood friend, Johnny Roselli, served as the point man in this operation, but Sam Giancana was assigned the role of actually recruiting the hitmen to carry out the various harebrained assassination schemes then under consideration.

As a quid pro quo for getting involved in the CIA’s “Get Castro” operations, Roselli, Giancana, et al. understood that there would be a moratorium on federal mob prosecutions or at least a lessening of pressure on the Chicago Outfit. Apparently, no one in the CIA had informed Bobby Kennedy about this arrangement. In light of the joint CIA-Mafia operation, the attorney general’s fervid legal onslaught against the mob felt, to the mobsters themselves, like yet another betrayal engineered by those “Irish bastards” in the White House.

3. The Valachi hearings:
In mid-1963, the Department of Justice announced “an extraordinary intelligence breakthrough” in their battle with organized crime. Bobby Kennedy asserted that disclosures by Joseph M. Valachi, a federal prison inmate, had revealed for the first time the whole picture of organized crime, its organizational structure and initiation rites, which included sacred oaths and bloodletting. Overnight, this small-time underworld hood from the streets of New York became an international celebrity.

A few months later, to the further shock and dismay of underworld figures everywhere, the McClellan Committee was reconstituted to provide a forum for Joe Valachi to be paraded in front of television cameras. As pure theater, Valachi’s testimony before the senate committee in September and October outdid the Kefauver Hearings, the Waterfront Commission Hearings, and the previous McClellan Hearings put together. With his gravelly, straight-from-central-casting New York accent, the sixty-year-old Valachi introduced words like don, caporegime, and consiglieri into the American lexicon, and insisted that what was known to the public as the Black Hand, the Unione Sicilione, or the Mafia was most commonly known to the mobsters themselves as cosa nostra.

Italian gangsters from coast to coast were stupefied by Valachi’s testimony, mainly because they believed he was a fraud. Valachi wasn’t even Sicilian; he was a New York Neapolitan who had never been anything more than a low-level thug. Yet he sat before the McClellan Committee and all of America on television making observations on how Sicilian gangs were organized and operated, including supposedly inside accounts of top-level decision making. As mob boss Joseph Bonnano later observed, it was like a “New Guinea native who had converted to Catholicism describing the inner workings of the Vatican.”

The breadth and scope of Bobby Kennedy’s assault on organized crime was unparalleled in modern history. To high-ranking members of the underworld, his actions were like a knife in the back, strategically plunged for maximum damage and then twisted around for the pure sadistic fun of it. The Outfit had helped put the Kennedys in the White House. Joe Kennedy, the Irish Godfather, in the eyes of Giancana, Roselli, and other Italian mobsters, had brokered an arrangement that was supposed to work in everyone’s favor. Now here was Bobby Kennedy on a holy crusade, casting aspersions on Italian organized crime as if his family’s lily-white Irish hands had never been sullied by dirty money. FBI bugs and wiretaps around the country began to pick up a steady stream of anti-Kennedy commentary about those “Irish bastards” and “those filthy, Irish cocksuckers.”

In Upstate New York, Peter Maggadino: “He should drop dead. They should kill the whole family, the mother and father, too.”

In Pennsylvania, Mario Maggio: “[Bobby Kennedy] is too much; he is starting to hurt too many people, like unions. He is not only hurting the racket guys, but others.”

In New York City, Michelino Clements: “Bob Kennedy won’t stop until he puts us all in jail all over the country.”

In Chicago, Sam Giancana: “I never thought it would get this fucking rough. When they put the brother in there, we were going to see some fireworks, but I never knew it was going to be like this. This is murder.”

The angriest words of all came from New Orleans, where Carlos Marcello was embroiled in his titanic battle with the Justice Department. Marcello had run up close to $1 million in legal fees and frothed at the mouth every time the Kennedy family name was mentioned in his presence.

One afternoon, Marcello and a group of friends and acquaintances were gathered at Churchill Farms, the mobster’s weekend resort located outside New Orleans in Louisiana bayou country. Among those present was Edward Becker, a former director of public relations of the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas who was now a private investigator. Becker made the mistake of bringing up Kennedy’s name: “Man, isn’t it a shame the bad deal you’re getting from Bobby Kennedy? I’ve been reading about it in the papers. All that deportation stuff. What are you going to do about it, Carlos?”

Marcello’s face flushed red.
Livarsi ’na pietra di la scarpa
, he said in Sicilian (
Take the stone out of my shoe
). “Don’t worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch. He’s goin’ to be taken care of. I got—”

“But you can’t go after Bobby Kennedy,” Becker interrupted. “If you do, you’re going to get into a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“No, I’m not talkin’ about that.” Marcello stood up, gesticulating as he spoke. “You know what they say in Sicily: If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.” The Kennedys, explained Carlos, were like a mad dog; the president was the head and the attorney general was the tail. “That dog will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail. But if the dog’s head is cut off, the dog will die—tail and all.”

Marcello continued yapping, seized by a deep personal animosity toward the Kennedys. He explained that the death of the attorney general would not solve anything, since his brother, the president, would surely go after Bobby’s enemies with a vengeance. The president himself would have to go, and it would have do be done in such a way that it could not be directly linked to the organization. He had already given some thought to setting up a nut to take the blame, “the way they do it in Sicily.”

To Becker, Marcello’s tirade, which lasted no more than five minutes, seemed fantastical, if chilling. But Marcello’s feelings went even deeper than his own personal animosities. The New Orleans branch of the Mafia was the oldest and most Sicilian of all the regional factions of Cosa Nostra. They often carried out operations on their own, without ever having to consult the governing commission in New York or the Outfit in Chicago. They had a deep and abiding sense of history—a bloody history that harked back to the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy and the subsequent lynching of fourteen Italians, a landmark event in the history of the Mafia in the United States. In fact, Marcello’s leadership of the New Orleans family, which began in the early 1940s, could be traced directly to the Matrangas, the same family that Chief Hennessy had betrayed in his dealings with the Mafia seventy years earlier.

The New Orleans mob’s problems with the Kennedys was a case of history repeating itself. Like Chief Hennessy, Joe Kennedy was another “Irish bastard” who represented the legitimate world but was as duplicitous as any underworld hoodlum. To Carlos Marcello and other mafiosi with a deep connection to the region’s Sicilian bloodline, the insult struck at the core of the underworld’s twisted code of honor. They had been betrayed by people who were passing themselves off as incorruptible and above reproach, when they were as dirty as the lowliest mobster. The mob had been used, manipulated, and played for a fool, and now they were being persecuted. There was no worse insult. It was a transgression punishable by death.

Death to Giovanni

Joe Kennedy was unable to react much to the heartbreaking events that occurred in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Twenty-three months earlier, the patriarch had suffered a massive stroke that rendered him speechless and practically immobile. Confined to a wheelchair, the once powerful leader of the Kennedy clan retreated into his own private universe. The alliances he had formed and promises he’d made to help get his son elected president were now a blur. Whether or not he had any cognizance that the murder of his son might have been a kind of blowback effect from his own dealings with the mob, the world would never know. When told of President Kennedy’s assassination, he did not cry, although a family assistant claimed later to have seen the remnants of tears on his cheeks.

For Carlos Marcello, November 22 was a good day. Almost simultaneous with the announcement that his nemesis had been shot down in Dallas, he and his brother were found not guilty in a New Orleans courtroom on conspiracy and perjury charges. Marcello embraced his attorney and hurried home to watch reports of the assassination on television.

In the years that followed, theories on the Kennedy hit were hatched and expounded upon, with the official explanation put forth by the Warren Commission—that it was a single gunman acting alone—turning out the be the least likely scenario of all. Much credible evidence led back to New Orleans; respected criminal defense attorney Frank Ragano related a chilling snippet of conversation he had with his client, mobster Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello’s closest associate in the underworld. “Carlos fucked up,” Trafficante told his lawyer. “We shouldn’t have gotten rid of Giovanni. We should have killed Bobby.” Ragano, adhering to lawyer-client constraints, kept this and other details he learned from Trafficante under wraps until after the mobster passed away in 1987.

One person who was convinced that the Mafia killed the president was Bobby Kennedy. The attorney general went into a deep depression in the months immediately following his brother’s murder. Those who knew him best said he seemed to be racked not only with sorrow, but also with guilt. His personal vendetta against the Mafia had quite possibly boomeranged with horrible consequences. Bobby admitted as much in the summer of 1967, when he told close family friend Richard Goodwin that he believed his brother was killed by “the guy from New Orleans,” meaning Carlos Marcello.

History shows that the volatile melding of forces that brought about the assassination of J.F.K. was not without precedent. Police Chief Hennessy had straddled the same fault line with similar results. The Mafia had been dealing with characters like Joe Kennedy all along. To them, Papa Joe was merely a grandiose variation of all the other micks—Jimmy Walker, Jimmy Hines, T. J. Pendergast, Richard Daley—legitimate citizens whose careers were enhanced by their willingness to stoke the flames and play along. Bobby Kennedy was from the new generation; either he didn’t know the rules, or he knew the rules and was deliberately setting out to undo what his father had done. Either way, it was a lethal game, and Bobby’s posturing as a knight in shining armor was, to the aggrieved mafiosi, the height of hypocrisy and an insult that demanded retribution.

“The flower may look different, but the roots are the same,” was how Sam Giancana once put it to his brother, describing how he and the Kennedys, despite outward appearances, were operating within the same universe. Giancana, no doubt, was referring to the roots of the underworld, which had sprouted up to entangle people like Joseph P. Kennedy. Irish and Italian immigrants had been among the progenitors of the underworld, and so their offspring found themselves inheriting the old grudges. The Kennedys and the Mafia were engaged in a high-stakes game of social ascendancy that could be traced back to the earliest maneuverings for power in neighborhoods like Five Points, Little Hell, the Valley, and Hell’s Kitchen. In the wards and on the waterfront, Irish and Italian racketeers, gangsters, and quasi-legitimate operators had been engaged in this dance for nearly a century. Players like Joe Kennedy, Sinatra, and Momo Giancana raised the stakes to new levels, but the game was the same.

Key details surrounding the J.F.K. assassination would take decades to surface. When they finally did, the most compelling explanation, that the killing was a mob-generated conspiracy enacted as payback for Joe Kennedy’s double-crossing, had roots that could be traced back nearly to the beginning of organized crime in America. The Kennedy hit was merely the latest and loudest salvo in the ongoing war between the dagos and the micks. The war wasn’t over yet.

CHAPTER
#
Ten

10. irish vs. irish

T
he assassination of JFK altered the course of U.S. history, but for most Irish Americans the significance of the Kennedy presidency had been carved in granite nearly three years earlier, on Inauguration Day, 1961. The moment Jack Kennedy was swept into office, the issue of his Catholicism was effectively taken out to sea, given a ten-gun salute, and dumped overboard. Three years later, after the shots were fired on a November day in Dallas, the transformation was complete. How could anyone, WASP or otherwise, question the fidelity of Irish Catholics when they had just offered up one of their most fortunate sons, an Irish prince whose youth and idealism, among other things, made terrific television. The shackles of anti-Catholic bigotry were shattered once and for all. Paddy was home free.

And so began the second great Irish exodus; this time from the city to the suburbs. It wasn’t as dramatic as the Great Potato Famine, but the numbers were, over the course of the next two decades, almost as startling. This process of white flight, later chronicled by untold social historians and academic ethnographers, would eventually lead to the reconfiguration of many U.S. cities, among them New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In urban areas that had once served as incubation centers for the Irish American gangster, shifting ethnic trends in formerly white neighborhoods would lead to a slow dissolution of the Irish Mob over the next forty years.