The Outfit (54 page)

With the nomination commandeered, the Humphreys repaired to their Key Biscayne home for some much needed R St R. To their dismay, however, they found that the G had been harassing Jeanne’s brother’s family, who also lived in the area. Not long after arriving, the Humphreys were attending a family get-together when Jeanne was approached by her seven-year-old niece, Diana. With tears in her eyes, the child said one of her schoolmates had asked her if her aunt and uncle were murderers. It turned out that the G, desperate to draw out Curly and Jeanne from their hiding place, had begun harassing members of Jeanne’s family and friends, displaying Curly’s 1934 mug shot. Diana’s girlfriend’s Cuban family was distraught over the prospect of being sent back to the island if they did not cooperate with the G. Curly had Jeanne’s brother complain to the local FBI office, which claimed to know nothing of the encounter. The Family Pact, apparently, only applied to Roemer’s jurisdiction.

Even as they attempted to unwind in Florida, the “Harts” saw their getaway home visited regularly by reminders of Curly’s other life. In August, the Humphreys entertained Jimmy Hoffa at a time when their Key Biscayne neighborhood was enduring a fetid sewer backup. Still smarting from his treatment in Washington at the hands of Bobby Kennedy, Hoffa told Jeanne that he wondered if Bobby had fallen into Biscayne Bay, the stink was so awful. When the talk turned serious, Jeanne witnessed her husband explaining the Outfit’s work in support of Joe Kennedy’s son to the Teamster boss. “Of course I can’t officially endorse it,” Hoffa said. “But who knows? Maybe the Italians are right. If Jack feels he owes us one . . . “

Another visitor was Mooney Giancana, with whom the Humphreys dined at one of Giancana’s favorite Ft. Lauderdale restaurants. The trio was chauffeured by Mooney’s Florida driver, Dom, the parking valet at the Outfit’s Miami Beach Kennel Club. Although Curly and Jeanne had hoped to escape the campaign, it was all that Mooney wanted to talk about. Jeanne Humphreys described the dinner conversation in her journal:

Besides discussing what politicians had to be “turned around,” what union heads had to be convinced, and how much good it would do in the end, I was amazed to hear that Jackie K. had to be told not to wear slacks anymore when campaigning. Since I wasn’t included in the conversation I almost choked trying to suppress my laughter. There was a lot of “Frank said this” and “Frank said that” and “It’ll all pay off” repetition. Mooney was exuberant. I could read M [Murray] like a book and saw his lack of enthusiasm. When there was a lull in the conversation I told Mooney I should be put on the campaign payroll. His exact words were: “We’ll all get our payoff in the end.” How prophetic!

As if Mooney Giancana had not injected enough drama into the year 1960, he embarked on yet another adventure while waiting for the November election. Apparently, the election fix was not a large enough marker to have over the Oval Office, especially if Joe Kennedy’s kid lost the contest. Thus, Mooney, at Johnny Rosselli’s instigation, concluded that the only sure guarantee of the Outfit’s hold over the next president was its participation in a fanciful White House-CIA scheme to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

1
. Chicago historian Ovid Demaris described how Roma operated the club: ’One of Roma’s first acts as general manager of the Chicago Playboy Club was to award the garbage collection to Willie “Potatoes” Daddano’s West Suburban Scavenger Service . . . Attendant Service Corporation, a [Ross] Prio-[Joseph] DiVarco enterprise, was already parking playboy cars, checking playboy hats, and handing playboy towels in the rest room. Other playboys were drinking [Joe] Fusco beers and liquors, eating [James] Allegretti meat, and smoking [Eddie] Vogel cigarets.’

2
. An FBI telex of March 10,1960, notes Rosselli’s flight to New York from L.A. The Bureau guessed that Johnny was there on film production business.

3
. Confidential government sources reported to Johnny Rosselli’s biographers that “Mr. Smooth” also had a history of cooperation with the federal government. According to officials of the International Cooperation Agency, Rosselli assisted the CIA-backed Standard Fruit Company in the 1957 ouster of Guatemala’s president, Castillo Armas.

4
. A third corroboration for the Kennedy luncheon at Young’s is a contemporaneous handwritten record, names included. Regretfully, the material is stored in an off-limits portion of a federal archive. The author was made aware of it through an employee with access. Out of consideration for the well-being of both the employee and the record, the location cannot be disclosed. There is currently an effort to force an opening of the collection that holds the material.

5
. Senate investigator Walter Sheridan, and separately, journalist Dan Moldea, have detailed how California congressman Allan Oakley Hunter played the go-between in the Nixon-Hoffa dealing. With assurances from Nixon that he would, if elected, ease Hoffa’s legal harassment, Hoffa saw to it that the Teamsters executive board endorsed Nixon. Close Hoffa aide Ed Partin has stated that he witnessed Hoffa deliver $1 million to the Nixon war chest, half of it collected from New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello, and half from New York/New Jersey mobsters. Marcello rightfully feared deportation in a Kennedy administration.

6
. Completed in 1930, the 4,023,400-square-foot Mart was the largest office space in the world until the construction of the Pentagon.

7
. According to the late talk-show host Morton Downey Jr., the son of Joe’s closest friend and business partner, Irish tenor Morton Downey Sr., Joe Kennedy and Downey (accompanied by Mort Jr.) would often meet at Frank Costello’s Waldorf-Astoria headquarters, where the foursome regularly went for haircuts.

8
. The videotape is in the author’s possession.

9
. Adamowski was a strait-laced anticorruption crusader who had broken from the Democratic ranks in protest of Daley’s ties to both the underworld and the party machine’s patronage gravy train. In 1959, Adamowski unearthed a $500,000-per-year traffic-ticket-fixing scheme in the city’s traffic court, with the kickbacks ending up lining the pockets of Daley appointees. At the beginning of 1960, Adamowski had broken the Summerdale Scandal, in which a twenty-year-old burglar admitted that, for two years, twelve Chicago policemen had assisted in his wholesale thievery by acting as lookouts, then using their patrol cars to cart off the goods to be fenced.
cont’d overt cont’d
When the dust settled, eight cops were imprisoned, and many more suspended. Also caught up in the fallout from the Summerdale Scandal were numerous Outfit-controlled police, who were being summarily reassigned. Concurrent FBI wiretaps disclosed that the thief, Richie Morrison, was the nephew of the mistress Curly Humphreys had taken on the lam with him to Mexico three decades earlier, Billie Jean Morrison. The Bureau also heard that after Morrison was arrested, Curly attempted to funnel money to Billie Jean to silence her talkative nephew. “This is gonna be the biggest thing that ever hit the mayor,” Humphreys predicted. “This kid has got thirty coppers, he has them all set up . . . This will spread like wildfire.” The Genius then pronounced his decree: “Well, boys, I don’t see how the Democrats can win with this scandal. This will whip the hell out of this administration... I hate to do it but we got to watch out for this administration.” As Humphreys told an associate at Celano’s tailor shop, “We can tell [the aunt] to give him five thousand dollars and tell him to claim he was hypnotized.”

10
. Years later, Kennedy’s wife, Rose, observed, “Joe had a genius for seeing something and knowing it would be worth something more later on. And with the Mart, he was absolutely right... it skyrocketed in value and became the basis for a whole new Kennedy fortune.”

11
. Incredibly, there is evidence that even mob-hating Robert Kennedy may have acknowledged the need to court the crime bosses. Award-winning investigative journalist for
Newsday
Mike Dorman was told by New Orleans Mafia don Carlos Marcello that RFK traveled to the Crescent City, attempting to convince Marcello to deliver the Louisiana delegation to JFK in the Democratic convention. Marcello turned him down, politely informing him that he was backing Lyndon Johnson. Marcello was convinced that this was the genesis of Bobby’s later obsessive crusade against both him and LBJ.

12
. Phil Regan would go on to spend a year in jail for bribing a California zoning commissioner, eventually pardoned by California governor Jerry Brown.

13
. Although Alo turned down acting as liaison with Giancana, some evidence suggests that Meyer did his bit to help in the election. In a letter written by a former employee of Las Vegas’ Desert Inn Hotel to its owner, Moe Dalitz, the employee, Annie Patterson, had, in 1966, fallen upon hard times and wrote the former Cleveland-based gambler for financial assistance. In her letter, Patterson firmly links Joe Kennedy to Lansky. In the context of her letter, it is clear that Patterson had gotten to know Joe Kennedy at either the Desert Inn or the Flamingo. It is also clear that Kennedy had wronged Patterson in some way. She alludes to a letter she had written, in retribution, to J. Edgar Hoover that instigated wiretaps that somehow incriminated the Kennedys. She further states that the material was locked away because “apparently none wanted to cross with the Kennedys.” The letter continued: “Meyer Lansky was not the one who I knew. Mr. Kennedy told me about him and all the money that he parlayed from Las Vegas for the presidential campaign . . . I did not feel welcome to write to the Flamingo because Mr. Kennedy went around me and at no time was I paid one penny for my work; nor would I have ever contacted Mr. Lansky because I know (or had been told by Mr. Joseph Kennedy) that they were very close friends; in fact, it was Mr. Lansky that caused wiretapping to start there in the first place. He continued to “needle” Mr. J. Kennedy that Mr. K. was not receiving his full share of the take and why - so the Kennedy clan got together. I sincerely don’t believe that Mr. Lansky had any idea of the damage that he was causing anyone because he wanted to be socially accepted by the Kennedy clan . . . I feel sure that if I contacted the kind-hearted Lansky and requested help, I would receive it but that is against my principals. He is a friend of Mr. Kennedy -I have never met him personally but I saw him from a distance in Miami Beach. (They met me there for an appointment.)” The Lansky election allegations appear to be supported by an FBI memo from a confidential friend of Lansky’s noting that prominent Miami hoodlums “are financially supporting and actively endeavoring to secure the nomination for the Presidency as Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy.”

14
. The key source of the information was Marcello’s bagman Jack Halfen. Marcello had been paying Johnson, and many others to kill legislation that threatened slot-machine and wire-service gambling. For ten years, according to Halfen, Johnson was paid $100,000 per year. Johnson’s voting record reflects that Marcello’s money was well spent. Halfen initially gave many of the details (and proof) to award-winning journalist Mike Dorman in his book
Payoff.
More details were unearthed in my first book,
Live by the Sword.
Interestingly, when I obtained Halfen’s list of bribe recipients, near the top of the list was Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, the same Tom Clark who, as attorney general, played such a key role in the early parole of the Outfit’s Hollywood seven.

15
. Later, during JFK’s presidency, Joe again called on Huie. This time the author was given a briefcase full of cash by the patriarch to deliver to Governor George Wallace, during his segregationist standoff against the Kennedy brothers. According to Huie’s protege, reporter Mike Dorman, Joe thought he could pay Wallace to “just go away.”

17.

The Pinnacle of Power

P
aul Ricca may have been incarcerated, but Humphreys and Rosselli likely felt an occasional twinge of envy, so exhausting was the year 1960. While Curly brainstormed Ricca’s and Accardo’s legal problems, cared for his mentally ill daughter and his grandson, entertained his new young wife, and worked the unions on behalf of Joe Kennedy’s kid (all the while dodging the G), Rosselli was himself pulling overtime out West. This was the period when, according to his biographers, Rosselli “came to preside over every facet of business in the gambling capital.”

For years, the original “Dapper Don” had been brokering complex Sin City financing partnerships - successes that left his associates in awe. “If Johnny Rosselli told [pension fund trustee] Allen Dorfman to go shit on the courthouse steps in Carson City,” said legendary Washington influence peddler Fred Black, “he would shit on the courthouse steps.” When not taking over the lucrative ice machine concessions for all Las Vegas, Rosselli was setting up power lunches in New York for Joe Kennedy. He also assumed hidden control of Monte Prosser Productions, which booked talent into the large local casinos and the worldwide Flilton Hotel chain. Billy Wilkerson, publisher and close friend of Rosselli, wrote in his
Hollywood Reporter
that the Hilton agreement was “the biggest deal in club entertainment history.” At the same time, Rosselli was overseeing the hiring of the critical casino pit crews and backroom counters, many of whom were sending the skim back to Chicago. Johnny summed up his growing prosperity for a friend over a 1960 dinner conversation: “Everything’s nice and cool. There’s money pouring in like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve never seen so much money.” An FBI informant told the Bureau, “Rosselli was the ’power’ in Las Vegas.”

If Rosselli thought the binding on his day planner could not become more strained, he was wrong. The mob’s ambassador was about to take a meeting with a man who wanted to enlist Rosselli’s services in a secret White House-CIA operation so indelicate that its repercussions would be felt for decades and, in the opinion of many, would inadvertently result in the death of Joe Kennedy’s boy Jack three years after its inception. For the next eight months, the planning of the operation would divert much of Rosselli’s precious time from his Vegas work.

The dangerous enterprise commenced in August 1960, when Rosselli received a call from an upperworld friend living in Beverly Hills named Robert Maheu. A West Coast version of Mario Brod, private detective Maheu would later admit that he had a history of handling “delicate matters” for the Central Intelligence Agency. James O’Connell, deputy to the CIA’s director of security, later testified that he had utilized Maheu “in several sensitive covert operations in which he didn’t want to have an Agency or government person get caught.” After a stint with the FBI in the forties, Maheu formed Robert A. Maheu and Associates (RAMA) and quickly negotiated a monthly retainer as a spy for hire with the CIA. Over the years, the Agency employed RAMA to produce and distribute propaganda aimed at destabilizing enemy states or potentates. Maheu himself admitted to running “impossible missions” for the CIA, many of which were brilliantly researched and reported in Jim Hougan’s 1978 book,
Spooks.

Although Maheu often told how he had met Rosselli a year earlier in Las Vegas, Rosselli was adamant in FBI debriefs and Senate testimony that their relationship went back to 1955, when the two were introduced by an L.A. insurance executive named Spitzle. Washington detective Joe Shimon corroborated Johnny’s version, although Maheu’s rendition is admittedly more colorful.
¹

Regardless of the details of their original introduction, by August 1960, Maheu and Rosselli were, by both men’s admissions, good friends. “My children took to calling him ’Uncle Johnny,’ “ wrote Maheu. Sometime in August, Maheu was contacted by the CIA’s office of security. “They asked me if I’d help ’dispose’ of Castro,” Maheu recently recalled. Maheu was informed by his CIA handlers that the assassination would not take place in a vacuum. “The men from the CIA kept me informed of the invasion plan,” Maheu recently said. “The assassination plot was to take place just prior to the invasion, hopefully.” It seems that some senior CIA officers had met Johnny Rosselli at a Maheu clambake the previous spring and were so taken with the Outfit’s emissary that, when word came to the Agency that Castro was to be removed, the officers immediately thought of “Uncle Johnny.” It is not known if Rosselli had spoken to the CIA boys at the clambake as he had to actor George Raft a year earlier in a Los Angeles bar. When Raft had mentioned that he had just returned from Cuba, where Castro was threatening to take over, Rosselli had bragged, “You give me a couple of guys with machine guns, we could go down there and take over the whole island.” Whatever he had told the CIA officers in Maheu’s backyard, Rosselli left a powerful impression.

There is no way of knowing if Maheu and his Agency contacts were aware that the men pushing the hardest for the CIA operation (to be coincident with an all-out invasion of the Cuban island) were Vice President Richard Nixon and his military aide, General Robert Cushman of the marines. However, other CIA luminaries such as Thomas McCoy, deputy to former CIA director William Colby, knew that Nixon was frantic to add a victory over Castro to his campaign rhetoric before the November election. “It was suggested by various people [in the State Department and the CIA],” McCoy said in 1996, “that there was substantial pressure coming from the White House to get the Cuban thing settled by October 1960 so that this would not be an issue that Nixon had to deal with in the ’60 election.” Another senior Agency man, Tracy Barnes, was confronted by an overworked project officer who asked, “What’s the hurry?. . . Why are we working our asses off on this?” As CIA expert Peter Grose noted, “Barnes had the political savvy to understand that the person pressing the urgency was Vice President Nixon.”

Regarding the planned invasion, Nixon himself wrote in
Reader’s Digest
four years later, “I had been the strongest and most persistent for setting up and supporting such a program.” The go-ahead for Operation Pluto, the code name for the invasion, was given at a National Security Council meeting on March 17, 1960, just prior to the Maheu clambake. At Nixon’s urging, Cushman met with exiled Cuban militarists’ for the express purpose of implementing the assassination of all Cuban leaders when the invasion, later renamed the Bay of Pigs operation, commenced.
²

Either the CIA or Nixon, or both, decided that their liaisons with the unpredictable exiles might not produce the wished-for results. Hence, the overture to Rosselli and the Outfit. As noted, the desired partnership with Rosselli was merely a continuation of a long-secret relationship between the feds and the underworld. However, Maheu was initially taken aback by the unorthodox request for a murder, but after his Agency friends likened Castro to Hitler and told Maheu the action was “necessary to protect the country” and to save thousands of lives, the politically naive Maheu agreed to the assignment, even though it might place his own family in jeopardy in the future.
³

The CIA suggested Maheu contact the man they had met at the clambake, hoping that his associates were still enraged at Castro for taking over their casinos. The reluctant assassination accessory agreed to play middleman with the Outfit’s Johnny Rosselli, who agreed to meet for lunch at L.A.’s Brown Derby Restaurant. Surrounded by film people pitching scripts, the two discussed a real-life drama that dwarfed those being advanced by the lunching movie moguls. Without telling Rosselli of the larger invasion plan (he says he never told Rosselli of it), Maheu made his pitch. If Maheu was surprised by the government’s request, Rosselli was positively stupefied.

“Me? You want me to get involved with Uncle Sam?” Rosselli asked.
⁴
“The feds are tailing me wherever I go. They go to my shirtmaker to see if I’m buying things with cash. They go to my tailor to see if I’m using cash there. They’re always trying to get something on me. Bob, are you sure you’re talking to the right guy?” Like Maheu, Rosselli was also initially disturbed by the essence of the request, political assassination. However, after Maheu played the Hitler card, the archpatriot Rosselli agreed to come to the aid of his beloved country - gratis. But as with all serious business, his Outfit bosses would first have to approve. Rosselli wanted verification that this was a government-approved murder plot, and Maheu promised to provide the proof. However, Maheu warned, under no circumstances would the G admit to the partnership, or even the operation. “If anyone connects you with the U.S. government, I will deny it,” Maheu intoned. “I will swear you’re off your rocker, you’re lying, you’re trying to save your hide. I’ll swear by everything holy that I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about.”

According to Maheu, the appeal to Rosselli’s nationalism clicked. “If this is for the government,” Johnny finally answered, “It’s the least I can do, because I owe it a lot.” Although Maheu offered the Outfit representative a pot load of money, Rosselli declined the offer. Throughout Rosselli’s long involvement with the G’s assassination project, he not only never accepted a dime’s payment, but refused to have his hefty hotel and travel expenses compensated. Among his friends, who learned of the plots decades later, this gesture was no surprise. “He was one of the most patriotic men I ever knew,” remarked one longtime friend. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a Las Vegas singer and longtime Rosselli friend, remembers what Johnny told her after the plots were publicized years later: “He said it was his patriotic duty.”

Despite the denial of support from the feds and the questionable chances for success, Rosselli agreed to take the notion back to his Chicago bosses, and the two friends agreed to meet in New York on September 14 and, hopefully, proceed from there. In Chicago, Mooney Giancana, more concerned with getting a marker on the G than patriotism, made a jest of Johnny’s softheartedness. Detective Joe Shimon, a mutual friend of Mooney and Johnny’s, recalled, “[Mooney] always used to say, ’Give Johnny a flag and he’ll follow you around the yard.’” Of course, patriotism was not the only emotion that stirred in Rosselli; the partnership had practical business benefits. As Rosselli later told a gangster friend, “If somebody gets in trouble and they want a favor [from the G], we can get it for them. You understand. We’ll have the fucking government by the ass.” The idea of getting leverage on the G appealed to Mooney’s innate gangster style, and he seconded Rosselli’s proposal.

Although the Outfit’s low-profile brain trust was skeptical about the Castro plotting, they apparently gave a tentative go-ahead. But Giancana’s puppet masters were not unaware of the downside to Mooney’s new high-profile friends, Sinatra, the Kennedys, his girlfriends Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith - and now the CIA. On his forays back to Chicago, Mooney Giancana had been crowing about his blossoming relationship with the Kennedys. Columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, who wrote for
Esquire, Interview,
and other well-known magazines, became close with Giancana as a result of an introduction by Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford. Taki recalled, “Sam Giancana was always talking about the Kennedys . . . It was clear that at some point he had met both brothers . . . [Lawford and Giancana] would talk fondly of their shenanigans with the first family . . . they used to talk about the girls Mooney used to produce for the Kennedys. Mooney was proud of it, very proud of his Kennedy connections.”

According to Jeanne Humphreys, Curly and the rest were beginning to worry that both Mooney and Johnny might be putting their growing affinity for the high life ahead of their business sense. “They were starting to call Mooney and Johnny ’starstruck,’” Jeanne recalls. “The fear was that they were getting off on hanging out with Sinatra and CIA guys.” Nonetheless, it appears that the decision was reached to play along if Maheu supplied proof of the government’s authorization for the plot. That proof would be given at the upcoming New York rendezvous.

On September 13, while Johnny Rosselli was en route to his clandestine rendezvous with the G in New York, the G in Chicago was eavesdropping on an important conversation between Curly Humphreys, who had returned from his brief respite in Florida, and Gussie Alex. The agents listened in amazement as Curly spoke of his obtaining the jury pool list for the upcoming Accardo tax trial. The agents had a front-row seat as one of the nation’s great criminal minds gave a seminar on how to succeed in the underworld. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Curly said. “After we’ve decided which ones, then we’ll decide how to make the approach.” Alex offered that one potential juror lived in a town where a made guy, Joe Gagliano, had a cousin who owned a gas station. Humphreys then said, “You work on a plan. Do like an investigator would do. Find out if there’s a connection there. Send Gags out there to talk to the gas station guy. Find out how well he knows this woman, then we’ll decide.” Regarding one potential juror, Curly hinted at the power he wielded through Hoffa’s Teamsters: “Now I got a truck driver [juror]. We have an ace there.”

The next day, Rosselli arrived at New York’s Plaza Hotel for his meeting with Maheu. There, Johnny was introduced to Jim O’Connell, the CIA’s chief of the Operational Support Division. O’Connell, using the alias Jim Olds, suggested to Rosselli that Castro be hit in a Capone-style “gangland rubout.” Rosselli quickly disabused O’Connell of the dangerous notion, and the men agreed that poison made more sense. The inclusion of O’Connell was the imprimatur Rosselli needed, and he agreed that he would bring a man with extensive contacts in Havana named Sam Gold to Florida in about ten days, where the team would get down to business. Although he never told Maheu the reason for the timing, it was likely because Sam Gold, aka Mooney Giancana, had other pressing business to address: He was buying into Joe Kennedy’s favorite resort, the Cal-Neva.