Reclaiming History (264 page)

Additionally, Hoover always maintained that prior to the antiracketeering laws in a crime bill passed in 1961, the FBI never had enough federal laws to use to go after the mob. But this rings hollow. Why would Hoover have gone after something he himself did not think existed? Hundley, of the Department of Justice, said that the FBI should have “at least been aware of what the hell was going on. I mean, how can you have the top investigative agency in the world [FBI] and have all these top hoods meeting up in Apalachin and they didn’t even know about it?”
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Writer Nick Pileggi, who has followed and written about organized crime for years (his nonfiction book
Wiseguys
was the basis for the movie
Goodfellas
), said, “They [organized crime] owned politicians. They owned unions…The FBI said they didn’t exist. It was unbelievable. Glorious.”
³⁹
Following the startling discovery by New York State Police of the summit meeting of fifty-nine mob leaders in Apalachin, New York, on November 14, 1957, which generated front-page stories around America for days, Hoover, at the suggestion of Clyde Tolson, did at least commission his FBI research unit to prepare two in-depth papers, one on the Mafia in Sicily, the second on the Mafia in the United States. Shortly thereafter, a “Top Hoodlum” program was established at the FBI, and the first targets for investigation were supposed to be the Mafia leaders at the Apalachin meeting. By 1959, the FBI had opened up a “La Cosa Nostra” file and commenced some limited electronic surveillance of a few mob figures, including Chicago’s Sam Giancana. But everyone agrees that the FBI effort against organized crime did not increase and intensify very substantially until the appointment of RFK as attorney general in 1961.
⁴⁰

However, until Joseph Valachi came forward as a federal informant in September of 1962, a year before he went public before the cameras, Hoover wasn’t nearly as helpful as Kennedy wanted him to be, still preoccupied with fighting the American Communist Party, which exasperated RFK to no end. Kennedy told a reporter for the
London Sunday Times
in December of 1961, “It is such nonsense to have to waste time prosecuting the [American] Communist Party. It [American Communist Party] couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides, its membership consists largely of [undercover] FBI agents.”
⁴¹
In a 1971 letter to Hoover from Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan shortly after Hoover forced him to resign, Sullivan wrote that even when the membership of the Communist Party was down to around 80,000 in the mid-1940s, “you caused a Communist scare in this nation when it was entirely unwarranted…What happened when the Communist party went into rapid decline? You kept the scare campaign going just the same for some years. However, when the membership figures kept dropping lower and lower you instructed us not to give them out to the public…At the time of my leaving the Bureau this week, the membership figures…are down to an amazing 2800 in a nation of 200 million people and you still conceal this from the people. Of the 2800 only about half are active and wholly ineffective. I think it is a terrible injustice to the citizens and an unethical thing for you to do to conceal this important truth from the public.”
⁴²
What few knew was that Hoover’s fear and passion against Communism started way back in 1919, five years before he became FBI director, when he thoroughly researched the origin and philosophy of the worldwide Communist movement.
⁴³

Since federal law enforcement, before the Kennedy administration, hadn’t quite come out of its anesthesia over the threat that organized crime posed to the nation, it was left mostly up to congressional committees to conduct inquiries from time to time. The first was the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (named after its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver). The Kefauver Committee held widely publicized hearings in thirteen major cities throughout the country (as well as Saratoga, New York) in 1950 and 1951, a time when Mafia leader Frank Costello was considered to be the most powerful mobster in the land. But Kefauver’s committee, which took testimony from mob experts, politicians, and mobsters, including Costello, did not make much of a dent in the mob. This was primarily because most of its inquiry was directed to the mob’s control of professional gambling, particularly casino gambling and its effect on interstate commerce, although its ultimate conclusions on the power and deleterious influence of organized crime were never better stated:

1. There is a nationwide crime syndicate known as the Mafia, whose tentacles are found in many large cities. It has international ramifications which appear most clearly in connection with the narcotics traffic.

2. Its leaders are usually found in control of the most lucrative rackets in their cities.

3. There are indications of a centralized direction and control of these rackets, but leadership appears to be in a group rather than a single individual.

4. The Mafia is the cement that helps to bind the…syndicate of New York and the…syndicate of Chicago as well as smaller criminal gangs and individual criminals throughout the country.

5. The domination of the Mafia is based fundamentally on “muscle” and “murder.” The Mafia is a secret conspiracy against law and order which will ruthlessly eliminate anyone who stands in the way of its success in any criminal enterprise in which it is interested. It will destroy anyone who betrays its secrets. It will use any means available—political influence, bribery, intimidation, et cetera, to defeat any attempt on the part of law enforcement to touch its top figures.
⁴⁴

Starting in January of 1957, the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (popularly referred to as the McClellan Committee after its chairman, Senator John L. McClellan, or the “Rackets Committee”) foreshadowed, for the first time, the real war that would eventually be waged against the mob by the Kennedy brothers from Massachusetts. Then-Senator John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, appointed chief counsel of the committee, took the lead in investigating the mob’s corrupt influence in labor unions
*
and management throughout the country. For three years as chief counsel of the committee, RFK “grilled, taunted, and derided many of the most vicious and vengeful men in America.” For instance, when RFK asked Chicago mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana whether he disposed of his enemies by stuffing their bodies in trunks, and Giancana coupled his invoking the Fifth Amendment with a chuckle, RFK sneeringly remarked, “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”
⁴⁵

The hearings before the McClellan Committee in the wake of the mob’s Apalachin meeting determined that twenty-three out of the fifty-nine organized crime figures who attended “were directly connected with labor unions or with labor-management bargaining groups.” JFK called the mob a “nationwide, highly organized, and highly effective internal enemy.”
⁴⁶
Still, the Department of Justice wasn’t entirely convinced. As indicated, things changed overnight with JFK’s appointment of RFK to head the Justice Department in 1961. Immediately, RFK used his authority to get Director Hoover to shift his primary emphasis away from fighting internal Communism to organized crime.
⁴⁷
In
Kennedy Justice
, author Victor S. Navasky writes that “Robert Kennedy’s organized-crime drive ranked at the top of the nation’s domestic priorities.”
⁴⁸

In September and October of 1963, RFK’s Justice Department coordinated the nationally televised hearings of McClellan’s Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee looking into organized crime in America. The highlight, by far, was the testimony of Joseph Valachi, starting on September 27, 1963, and continuing through October 8. Valachi (a defector from the Vito Genovese Mafia family in New York, who, while awaiting trial for murder, communicated to the authorities that he was willing to “talk” if he could get a deal) put on the record, for the first time ever, the existence throughout the country of the mob “families,” their inner structure and workings, the names of leaders of the families and the murders they ordered, as well as the names of the actual hit men and victims. With the help of large, detailed charts prepared by the subcommittee staff, Valachi, a member of the mob for more than thirty of his sixty years, chronicled the evolution of the Mafia from the reigns of mob leaders Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano in 1930 up to the present. Valachi’s testimony, which law enforcement was able to confirm as being truthful, “made it possible for police intelligence men to begin to see the dimensions of syndicated crime and stop looking at it as a series of unconnected cases.”
⁴⁹

The mob, still very much alive and kicking, had nonetheless been dealt a solar plexus blow. In late 1966, a survey conducted by the New York City Police Department found that more members of organized crime “had been sent to jail in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area during the three years since Valachi talked than in the previous thirty years.”
⁵⁰
Although Valachi’s credibility has been challenged by some, RFK called Valachi’s testimony “the greatest intelligence breakthrough” in the history of the federal fight against organized crime, adding that “for the first time the FBI changed their whole concept of crime in the United States.”
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Also, RFK said, “For the first time an insider, a knowledgeable member of the racketeering hierarchy, has broken the underworld’s code of silence.”
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Coupled with RFK’s tenacity, Valachi’s testimony initiated the diminution of the Mafia’s power, from which, to this moment, it has never recovered.

The HSCA observed that “the Kennedy administration brought about the strongest effort against organized crime that had ever been coordinated by the Federal Government.”
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Robert M. Morgenthau, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who was one of the local prosecutors carrying out RFK’s agenda, said that “for pretty close to 25 years, organized crime had a free run. I mean, from the end of Prohibition down to 1960. And I think it kind of had woven its way into at least a part of the fabric of society…It really wasn’t until Robert F. Kennedy became Attorney General that an organized program was developed.”
⁵⁴
As a statistical measure of the increased emphasis the Kennedy administration put on fighting organized crime, between 1960 (prior to the Kennedy administration) and 1963, there was a 250 percent increase in the number of attorneys assigned to combat organized crime, from 17 to 60; more than a 900 percent increase in the number of days in the field, from 660 to 6,172; a 1,250 percent increase in the number of days before the grand jury, from 100 to 1,353; and a 1,700 percent increase in the number of days in court, from 61 to 1,081. From 1961 to 1963 there was a 500 percent increase in the number of defendants indicted, from 121 to 615, and a 400 percent increase in the number of defendants convicted, from 73 to 288.
⁵⁵

B
ecause RFK knew how much he and his brother’s administration had hurt the mob, one of his first thoughts after his brother’s death was that maybe the mob had his brother killed. Within days he asked his office to check into any possible Mafia (or Hoffa) links to the assassination.
⁵⁶
He also personally called Julius Draznin, a Chicago lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board who had excellent sources in the underworld and whom he had sought out before to secure sensitive information on people like Frank Sinatra and Judith Exner (see later text). “Do you have any angles on this [Jack’s death]?” he asked Draznin. “Can you tap in on this?” Draznin called RFK back in a few days. “There’s nothing,” he told RFK.
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Conspiracy theorists have alleged for years that the mob made substantial monetary contributions to Kennedy’s presidential campaign against Nixon in 1960 in the hope or understanding that if he were elected, he’d go easy on them, and when he didn’t, the “betrayal” caused his death. If, indeed, Kennedy had made such a promise to induce campaign contributions, it was
some
betrayal. I mean, almost immediately after being sworn in, he directed or allowed his attorney general brother, RFK, to go after organized crime with far more vigor than any prior presidential administration. But before one even gets to the issue of betrayal, it is difficult to see why, with JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, being a bottomless pit for campaign funds,
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JFK would even want to take the chance of accepting mob money? He’d have to know that if it were discovered, it would automatically kill his run for the presidency. One could say, “The same argument could be made about JFK’s extramarital relationships with women. If JFK was reckless there, why not with the mob?” The difference, of course, is that not only wouldn’t the public disclosure of womanizing be anywhere near as devastating as would the revelation that Kennedy was in bed with organized crime, but JFK, we have since learned, literally
needed
these other women. He did not need the mob.

This moldy
theory of retribution
against Kennedy by the mob is so devoid of evidence that although conspiracy theorists and millions of Americans continue to spout it unthinkingly, the HSCA, which conducted an intensive investigation of organized crime’s possible involvement in the assassination,
never even bothered to mention it once in its report
.

But is the allegation of organized crime contributing substantial money to Kennedy’s campaign true? There is some evidence that of all the leaders of organized crime, Chicago’s Sam Giancana, alone, may have made a contribution to JFK’s 1960 campaign. In 1997, singer Frank Sinatra’s daughter, Tina, confirmed that Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, had personally asked her father at Hyannis Port to ask Giancana, not for money, but to help get out the union vote (mostly Democratic) in Chicago, and her father had done so.
⁵⁸
Since it is well known that Sinatra supported JFK in his campaign, financially and in other ways, and that Sinatra and Giancana were friends, it makes sense that the singer might have suggested to Giancana it would be a good move to contribute to the campaign. And in G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings’s
Plot to Kill the President
, they quote a December 21, 1961, conversation between Johnny Roselli and Giancana (which Blakey told me was “in a transcript of an FBI surveillance tape given to the Committee [HSCA] by the FBI”) in which Roselli says that Sinatra had been in touch with Joe Kennedy. “He’s [Sinatra’s] got it in his head,” Roselli said, as if Sinatra’s belief was not justified, “that they’re [the Kennedys] going to be faithful to him.” When Giancana says, “In other words, then, the
donation
that was made…,” Roselli interrupts, “That’s what I was talking about.”