The Outfit (57 page)

“I was an airhead,” says Jeanne Humphreys. “I didn’t know that a president could be elected on the whim of Chicago mobsters. In my ignorance, I thought majority ruled.” In Illinois, the next morning’s count showed that Nixon had prevailed in 93 of the state’s 102 counties, yet lost Illinois by 8,858 votes, the result of the large Kennedy majority in Cook County, where Daley and the Outfit turned out a staggering 89.3 percent of the eligible voters, including the eligible deceased. Chicago veteran reporter Walter Trohan asked his old friend Richard Daley about his party’s election shenanigans. “He never denied it,” recalls Trohan. “He confessed that they stole to offset the Republican stealing downstate, which I didn’t believe was on that grand a scale.” Years later, nearing death, Daley told his friend Washington power attorney Edward Bennett Williams, “I have only one question: Will God forgive me for stealing the election from Richard Nixon?”

Of more pressing concern to Daley than even Jack Kennedy’s victory was the simultaneous defeat of Daley’s nemesis, Bennie Adamowski, the threatening state’s attorney. Adamowski’s chief investigator, Paul Newey, recently said, “We were creating bedlam in Cook County, so they knew they had to do something. That election was stolen from Ben - I have no doubt of it.” Three weeks after his defeat, a bitter Adamowski told the
Chicago Tribune
that more than one hundred thousand votes had been stolen by Daley’s machine.
⁸

With typical sarcasm, Jeanne Humphreys made a notation in her journal that reflected on the decision of the bosses who had outvoted her husband: “Well, the election efforts were a success and the Senate Racket committee was to be disbanded; Bobby Kennedy would kiss and make up with Jimmy Hoffa and all Mooney’s predictions of a respite from crime busters would materialize. What Dreamers!”

After the election, state Republicans conducted an unofficial recount and found that a switch of 4,500 votes in Cook County would have given the state to Nixon and reelected Adamowski. This unofficial recount, which established a gain of 4,539 for Nixon, was prevented from becoming an official tally by Mayor Daley. After Jack Kennedy’s inauguration, a federal grand jury recommended a formal investigation of the vote fraud, but by that time the head of the Justice Department was Robert Kennedy, and the idea had predictably lost favor.

Richard Daley’s help did not go unappreciated by the new president. The day after the inauguration, Daley became President Kennedy’s second visitor to the Oval Office, just after Harry Truman. Daley biographer F. Richard Ciccone wrote, “Of all the Democratic leaders in the nation, only Richard J. Daley had been invited to spend part of Kennedy’s first day in the White House with the new president. Camelot’s king had chosen the first knight for his Round Table.” The Chicago mayor made frequent trips to the White House in the ensuing months, often returning home to find Chicago awash in federal moneys, which led to the great rebuilding of the Chicago highway system. As president, Jack Kennedy appointed numerous federal judges in Chicago and sent many defense dollars Daley’s way. In three years, the city’s main east-west artery, the Northwest Expressway, was renamed the John F. Kennedy Expressway. In stark contrast was the treatment accorded the Outfit for its powerful role in the election, part of a deal struck with Jack Kennedy’s father, Joe.

Morris and Denton described a secret financial fallout from Kennedy’s victory, the bookie payouts: “An unknowing Graham Hollister - a wealthy Sierra foothills Democrat and future official in the Kennedy administration - brought Teddy [Kennedy] his winnings in Los Angeles, guilelessly carrying the cash in a ’brown paper package,’ as one witness remembered. Wingy Grober, it was said, sent the Kennedys their CalNeva winnings in similar wrapping.”

In Chicago, Mooney Giancana was on the top of the world and said to be acting like “a preening peacock” by one associate. “He was really cocky,” said another. On one occasion, Mooney told his and Jack Kennedy’s mutual girlfriend, twenty-six-year-old Judy Campbell, “Your boyfriend wouldn’t be president if it wasn’t for me.” Giancana bragged openly to the bosses that he had “elected” Kennedy, and that the gang would soon see a lessening of governmental harassment, both in Chicago and in Las Vegas. And as an added bonus, Mooney said, the hoods might even get Cuba back.

Giancana’s swagger would have a life span of exactly one month, terminated when Jack Kennedy announced the unthinkable: He was appointing his mob-chasing brother Robert to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer. It became dreadfully apparent to the wisest hoods, such as Curly Humphreys, that the decision to help Joe’s kid get elected would prove to be nothing short of suicidal for the hard-won, forty-year reign of the Outfit. In her journal, Jeanne Humphreys opined about how history would have been different without the Outfit’s participation in the 1960 election: “Nixon would have been elected. No assassinations, no Watergate, and most important to the Outfit, no Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General. The history of the United States from 1960 ’til eternity was made by a mobster from Chicago’s West Side who wanted to impress a crooner from New Jersey.”

1
. Maheu said that he had taken on a job to serve a subpoena on the owner of Vegas’ El Rancho Hotel, Beldon Kettleman. The day before traveling to Sin City, Maheu found every hotel booked. In desperation he called old college buddy, and D.C. power attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, who then called Rosselli. Of all places, Rosselli, who had no idea of Maheu’s mission, booked Maheu into El Rancho. “They rolled out the red carpet,” Maheu later wrote. “[My wife] Yvette and I were given a beautiful bungalow, filled with flowers and fruit. And they told us everything was on the house. I was impressed. Johnny must be some kind of miracle worker.” It goes without saying the booking by Rosselli effectively dashed Maheu’s desire to serve Kettleman. When Johnny later found out about Maheu’s awkward position, he “laughed his ass off,” recalled Maheu.

2
. Regarding Nixon and the assassination of Castro, the reader is urged to read Anthony and Robbyn Summers’
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
(2000). In 1996, this writer conducted much of the research for the Castro-Nixon portion of that book, which gives ample evidence that Nixon approved the assassination plots.

3
. “I had conducted a serious and dangerous assignment on behalf of my government during World War II,” Maheu recently recalled, “living with German agents for two years. And I felt that if I could be responsible in saving lives and that the request was at the behest of my government, I would take it on.”

4
. Maheu originally tried to convince Rosselli that the plots were backed by businessmen, but Rosselli cut him off, saying, “I am not kidding. I know who you work for.”

5
. For details of the secret Kennedy briefings, see Russo,
Live by the Sivord,
and Hersh,
The Dark Side of Camelot.

6
. In 1996, as part of research this author conducted for Anthony Summers’
The Arrogance of Power,
the author convinced Anna Chennault to admit her liaison role with Nixon in the secret deal with the South Vietnamese delegation. The book goes into great detail regarding how President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey dealt with the electoral sabotage.

7
. Since 1948, Johnson had been pursued by nasty rumors about his ability to create close victories where none existed. In that year, Johnson’s supporters helped erase a twenty-thousand-vote victory by Johnson’s opponent, Governor Coke Stevenson, in the Democratic senatorial primary. For one solid week, new county-by-county totals appeared and turned the election into an eighty-seven-vote
Johnson
victory. In 1990, Luis Salas, the election judge in Jim Wells County (Precinct 13) admitted to
New York Times
reporter Martin Tolchin that under his supervision, and on orders of Johnson confidant and South Texas political boss George Parr, Salas stuffed the “Box 13” ballot with “votes of the dead, the infirm, the halt, the missing, and those who were unaware that an election was going on.” When Stevenson attempted to have the election investigated, he was forestalled when Johnson’s lawyer, Abe Fortas, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Johnson later returned the favor when, as president, he appointed Fortas to the highest court. The Box 13 episode earned Johnson the hated nickname later utilized by Bobby Kennedy to get under his skin, “Landslide Lyndon.”

8
. When Adamowski ran for county assessor ten years later, he ripped into the gross undervaluation of the Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart. Although Kennedy friend Cook County assessor P. J. Cullerton set the behemoth’s worth at $16 million, independent studies put the figure closer to $100 million. Deputy County Treasurer Peter Piotrowicz added that as a result of the undervaluing of the Mart and other Loop offices, the residents of Chicago faced a 17 per cent realty tax increase.

18.

The Kennedy Double Cross:
The Beginning of the End

C
lark Clifford was speechless. Clifford, the legendary adviser to Democratic presidents for five decades, was assisting President-elect Kennedy with the transition when he was told of Bobby Kennedy’s imminent appointment as attorney general. It was just days after the election when Jack Kennedy approached Clifford poolside at the Kennedys’ Palm Beach retreat.

“I listened in amazement,” Clifford later wrote about the impending announcement. Jack Kennedy explained, “My father said, I want Bobby to be attorney general. He’s a lawyer, he’s savvy, he knows all the political ins and outs and can protect you.’” Clifford had just finished warning Jack that an inexperienced attorney general could place him in great jeopardy, as had happened in numerous previous administrations. Jack agreed and asked Clifford to speak to “the Old Man.” Clifford flew to New York and attempted to convince the patriarch of his ill-advised
suggestion.
“I made a carefully prepared presentation,” Clifford wrote in his memoirs, “of why it wras not in the interests of the new President, the Kennedy family, the entire administration, and Bobby himself to take the post.” After what he thought was a persuasive argument, Clifford waited for Joe’s response.

“Thank you very much, Clark,” Joe said. “I am so glad to have heard your views.” Then after a brief pause, Kennedy looked Clifford in the eyes and added, “I do want to leave you with one thought, however - one firm thought.
Bobby is going to be attorney general.”
Clifford noted that there wras no rancor in Kennedy’s voice, but that “he was simply telling me the facts. For a moment I had glimpsed the inner workings of that remarkable family, and, despite my admiration and affection for John F. Kennedy, I could not say I liked what I saw.”

Jack Kennedy also enlisted a family friend, Senator George Smathers of Florida, to try to talk to the father, again to no avail. In Smathers’ presence, Joe Kennedy called young Jack over and upbraided him. “Jack! Come here!” Joe ordered. “By God, he deserves to be attorney general, and by God, that’s what he’s going to be. Do you understand that?” The president-elect responded like a scolded child, “Yes, sir.”

Even Bobby, who had worked so tirelessly as his brother’s campaign manager, resisted the idea. Although an arch-moralist, Bobby had tired of the grind from his tenure on the McClellan Committee. “I had been chasing bad men for three years,” Bobby later said, “and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” And just as brother Jack had been warned by Clark Clifford, Bobby was likewise cautioned by columnist Drew Pearson: “You would handle so many controversial questions with such vigor that your brother in the White House would be in hot water all the time.” (Those words would come to haunt Bobby three years later, when his intemperate handling of Cuban intrigues tragically backfired on his beloved brother.)

It is impossible to know how Joe Kennedy rationalized compromising his sons’ well-being by making untold promises to the underworld to gain its support, only to do an about-face once Jack was elected. It has been suggested that Joe understood that the only way to avoid a Justice Department probe of the Kennedy election fix would be to place a Kennedy at the top of that agency. If that was the reasoning, in that, at least, he was proved correct. The numerous clamors for such a probe indeed fell on deaf ears once Bobby was sworn in.

By mid-November, newspapers such as the
New York Times
were reporting that Bobby Kennedy was being floated as the next attorney general. It is not known exactly when the Outfit bosses became aware that they had been double-crossed, but they certainly realized it by December 19, when the appointment was made official.

The announcement reverberated across the country, hitting the underworld enclaves hardest. In Los Angeles, mobster Mickey Cohen reacted by saying, “Nobody in my line of work had an idea that he [JFK] was going to name Bobby Kennedy attorney general. That was the last thing anyone thought.” In Chicago, FBI mikes overheard Mooney Giancana complaining to ward boss John D’Arco about local state’s attorney Roswell Spencer, comparing him to Bobby’s double-crossing father. “He’s like Kennedy. He’ll get what he wants out of you, but then you won’t get anything out of him.” Giancana later told D’Arco, “Well, they got the whip and they’re in office and that’s it . . . They’re going to knock us guys out of the box and make us defenseless.” After the appointment of Bobby Kennedy, the FBI listened as Kansas City boss Nick Civella commiserated with Mooney in a phone conversation.

“If he [Kennedy] had lost this state here,” Mooney said, “he would have lost the election, but I figured with this guy [Sinatra] maybe we’ll be all right. I might have known this guy would fuck us.”

Civella attempted to console Giancana, offering, “Well, at the time it seems like you done the right things, Sam. Nobody can say anything different after it’s done.”

“Well, when a cocksucker lies to you-” responded the distraught Giancana.

The Bureau similarly noted Curly Humphreys’ rancor over the Bobby Kennedy development. In Curly’s FBI file, agents summarized the gangster’s conclusions: “Humphreys felt that if his organization had to endure eight years of the John Kennedy administration and eight years under the administration of Robert Kennedy, who he felt would succeed his brother John as President of the United States, that he and other top echelon members of organized crime in Chicago would be dead before a new administration might give more favored treatment to hoodlums.”

The FBI report, however, fails to describe the depth of the gang’s true feelings about the Kennedy double cross, and the repercussions for boss Mooney Giancana. Jeanne Humphreys remembered, “Everybody was sorry they got involved in it. And it all fell back on Mooney.” Most important, she added, “Giancana lost face and that’s when he started going downhill.” Mooney’s daughter Antoinette wrote in her autobiography about “the erosion of my father’s stature as a crime boss” that began to occur. Mooney himself was not deaf to the whispering behind his back. Soon, his infamous temper was again rising to the surface.

According to his brother Chuck, Mooney had a heated phone conversation with Frank Sinatra immediately after Bobby Kennedy’s appointment to make the crooner explain what was going on. Giancana ended the call by slamming down the phone and then throwing it across the room. “Eatin’ out of the palm of his hand,” Mooney yelled. “That’s what Frank told me. Jack’s eatin’ out of his hand. Bullshit, that’s what it is.” The FBI also listened in as the squabble between Mooney and Frank played out. They overheard as Mooney, now fully cognizant of the effect of Bobby’s appointment on his mob status, ranted about the Kennedy move. Giancana’s FBI file describes one conversation caught by its surveillance: “Giancana claimed that he made a donation to the recent presidential campaign of Kennedy and was not getting his money’s worth because if he got a speeding ticket ’none of those fuckers would know me.’” Concerning the 1964 presidential contest, Mooney said, “Kennedy better not think of taking this fucking state.”

In time, Mooney and Frank would temporarily patch things up in their on-again, off-again friendship. The ubiquitous FBI overheard Johnny Rosselli report back to Giancana that Sinatra had recently insisted that Rosselli stay at his California home (the interior of which was designed by Sidney Korshak’s wife, Bea, according to
Architectural Digest Magazine).
Rosselli said that while guesting at the Palm Springs estate, he was told by Sinatra that the singer had attempted to intervene with the Kennedys on Giancana’s behalf. “I took Sam’s name and wrote it down,” Sinatra told Rosselli, “and told Bobby Kennedy, ’This is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob.’ “ Rosselli added, “Frank saw Joe Kennedy three different times. Joe called him three times.”

But Giancana wasn’t buying: “One minute he [Sinatra] tells me this, and then he tells me that . . . he said, ’Don’t worry about it. If I can’t talk to the old man, I’m going to talk to the man [Jack Kennedy].’ One minute he says he’s talked to Robert and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. So he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of shit. Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming.”

Statements by Giancana and his associates suggest that the vengeful boss was not about to take the Kennedy affront lying down. It now appears that Mooney decided to subvert the Castro assassination plot, a decision that would doom the upcoming Cuban invasion to failure. And that failure ultimately led the Kennedy brothers to undertake an ill-advised anti-Castro sabotage operation that would come back to haunt the Kennedy family.

“Mooney’s going to get even with the Kennedys,” Curly Humphreys informed his wife soon after the Bobby Kennedy appointment. “My husband was very cynical about this latest ’brainstorm’ by Giancana,” says Jeanne Humphreys. “Before Kennedy was elected, from what I understand, it [the assassination plot] was legitimate in the beginning. But after the Kennedys started going after the Outfit, as they did after the election, Mooney decided to string them along and get even with them.” Giancana also let on to friends such as Johnny Rosselli and D.C. detective Joe Shimon about the con. “I’m not in it,” he said to one associate; or, “I just gave Maheu a couple names,” to another. Giancana’s son-in-law attorney Robert McDonnell has clear memories of the episode. “Sam thought it was hilarious that the government was paying him to kill Castro, very humorous,” recalls McDonnell. “He never took it seriously.”

Even Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department believed Giancana was selling the G a bill of goods. One of the earliest public hints of both the plots and Mooney’s scam appeared in an August 8, 1963, article in the
Chicago Sun Times.
Quoting Justice Department sources, the article noted that Giancana had only pretended to go along with the CIA operation. He did this, the
Times
said, “in the hopes that the Justice Department’s drive to put him behind bars might be slowed -
or at least affected by his ruse of cooperation with another government agency.”
(Italics added.) Chicago FBI agent Bill Roemer wrote, “Giancana’s part in the scheme was a ruse.” In his book
Roemer: Man Against the Mob,
Roemer added: “Here was the G coming to ask Sam a favor. They would put themselves in his hands and run up a ’marker.’ What did Giancana have to lose by going along? . . . Giancana continued to give lip service to the CIA. He did so with a little smile on his face. But the whole time, I believe he was just playing along for his own reasons.”

In Florida, the Outfit’s plot confederate Santo Trafficante (Joe the Courier) also apparently received Mooney’s memo. In a conversation years later with Jimmy Fratianno, Johnny Rosselli said, “Santo never did anything but bullshit everybody.” The CIA’s plans, Rosselli said, “never got further than Santo.” Trafficante himself admitted as much. “Those crazy people [CIA],” he told his lawyer Frank Ragano, “they gave me some pills to kill Castro. I just flushed them down the toilet. Nothing ever came of it.”

While Giancana continued to reel over the Kennedy swindle, the Humphreys were debating about how to respond to a missive that had just arrived by mail. Murray Olf, the powerful Washington lobbyist who had assisted Curly at the Stevens Hotel, had seen to it that Mr. and Mrs. Humphreys received an invitation to one of Jack Kennedy’s five inaugural balls, where their mutual pal Frank Sinatra would be holding court. Although Curly thought the event might be fun, Jeanne was not so enthusiastic, and her journal records how Curly and Murray Olf tried to convince her to attend: “They argued and pleaded and even got me to Marshall Fields trying on ball gowns . . . A Trigere ballerina-length with a $1,200 price tag almost hooked me until the question of alterations, and shipment of same came up . . . Finally, I said to the saleswoman, ’Bullshit. I’d rather go fishing in Florida’. . . Anyway, I was mad at Jackie K. for not having the chutzpah to wear slacks on the campaign.”

Bobby in Charge

Soon after Jack Kennedy’s January inauguration, the Outfit began to feel the repercussions of the Kennedy double cross. In the attorney general’s first magazine interview, Bobby Kennedy let it be known that organized crime was now the Justice Department’s top priority, and in his first press conference he added that, in this effort, he had his brother’s full support. In his book
Kennedy Justice,
Victor Navasky wrote that Bobby Kennedy possessed “a total commitment to the destruction of the crime syndicates,” and according to former Justice official William Geoghehan, the new attorney general “got five anticrime bills moved through the Judiciary Committee so quickly that nobody had a chance to read them.” Bobby Kennedy had soon drawn up a list of forty underworld “targets,” ranked in order of priority.

Under Bobby Kennedy’s watch, the number of attorneys in the Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section ballooned from seventeen to sixty-three; illegal bugs and wiretaps grew from only a handful to more than eight hundred nationwide; the IRS in another questionably legal Kennedy move, saw its man-days of investigative field work increase tenfold, from 8,836 to 96,182 in just two years; and within three months, New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello was grabbed off the street, under orders from Bobby Kennedy, and flown to Guatemala, a move Marcello’s biographer John Davis called “arguably illegal,” and Marcello’s attorneys tersely labeled “kidnapping.” Lastly, the list of “targets” expanded from an initial forty to a bloated twenty-three hundred, included among them Joe Accardo and Johnny Rosselli, If Accardo’s intention in placing Giancana in the gang’s forefront had been to make him the sacrificial lamb, it succeeded: Mooney was placed number one on Bobby’s targer list. And to guarantee success, Kennedy increased the number of G-men assigned to Chicago from ten to seventy.