Reclaiming History
Page 208
Actually, it was more than that. Since leading mob figures from around the country were able to leave their respective cities to attend the meeting without the FBI having any knowledge of their movements (the FBI would never have even known of the meeting if a New York State Police sergeant hadn’t discovered it), Rogers set up a special group on organized crime in his office under the supervision of his assistant, Milton R. Wessel. The purpose of this group was to serve as a clearinghouse to coordinate the activities of mob figures, but it received no support from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, on which the group was necessarily dependent for its raw data. In fact, at the annual convention of the International Association of Police Chiefs in Los Angeles on October 3, 1960, when the proposal for a national nerve center to coordinate the fight against organized crime was formally presented, Hoover, greatly respected by police chiefs around the country, took the podium to tell the chiefs that “the persons who endorse these grandiose schemes have lost sight of some basic facts. America’s compact network of state and local law enforcement agencies traditionally has been the nation’s first line of defense against crime. Nothing could be more dangerous to our democratic ideals than the establishment of an all-powerful police agency on the federal scene. The truth of these words is clearly demonstrated in the experience of nations ruled by ruthless tyrants both here in the Western Hemisphere and abroad.” The proposal was not adopted and Wessel’s nascent group was abolished.29 It was clear that as late as 1960, Hoover was resisting the notion of his FBI vigorously pursuing organized crime in America.
Henry Peterson, a career prosecutor in the attorney general’s office who served under RFK’s predecessors (including Rogers) as well as RFK, and eventually headed the organized-crime section under Attorney General Ramsey Clark, said that before Robert Kennedy, “When you talked about organized crime, people would ask you to define what you meant. Robert Kennedy came in and said, ‘Don’t define it, do something about it.’ His instructions were: ‘Don’t let anything get in your way. If you have problems, come see me. Get the job done, and if you can’t get the job done, get out.’”30 Author William Shannon wrote that RFK’s “zeal to break up the syndicates was reminiscent of a sixteenth century Jesuit on the hunt for heresy.”31
One big reason for the Department of Justice not focusing heavily on organized crime before RFK’s tenure is that the department’s investigative arm, Hoover’s FBI, was using most of its resources during this period to combat Communism domestically—a mission with which virtually everyone agrees Hoover was obsessed. Although some have said the reason for the FBI’s inattention to organized crime was that the mob (specifically Meyer Lansky) possessed compromising photographs of Hoover in homosexual situations and blackmailed him into calling off his dogs, no credible evidence has ever surfaced to substantiate this allegation.*
The chief peddler of this argument is conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers. But the “evidence” Summers cites is so sleazy and so transparently unworthy of belief (e.g., that Hoover, who we know was more concerned about his reputation and legacy than perhaps any other public figure in America, would go out in public to famous nightclubs and racetracks and hold hands with his alleged lover, Clyde Tolson; dress up like a woman and engage in sex orgies with several participants at leading New York hotels; have homosexual sex parties at his home with men, including some of the top officials at the FBI; and permit mobsters to point to him at racetracks and shout out loud, so everyone could hear, that he was a “fucking, degenerate queer”) that I’m not going to dignify Summers’s charges by a serious discussion of them. I don’t know what Hoover’s sexual orientation was.* What I do know is that Summers failed miserably in trying to prove his allegation. How he got a book published in 1993 with scurrilous trash like this in it, I don’t know.32
Summers picked on an awfully difficult guy for his preposterous allegations. Even if Hoover had the sexual orientation Summers asserts he did, by all accounts he was exceptionally proper, even stiff in his demeanor. Compare the following description of Hoover with Summers’s Hoover: When recalling her going to Washington to testify before the Warren Commission, Marina Oswald said, “Seven or more men met me; apparently they were all FBI. But when I shook hands with Mr. Hoover, who was with them, I was chilled from top to bottom. It was as if you met a dead person. He had a coldness like someone from the grave.”33 Though Hoover was no prude, taking an occasional drink and dining regularly at night spots like Toots Shor’s, 21, and the Stork Club in New York, friends said they never heard him tell an off-color story in his life.34
Hoover’s counterpart in the federal intelligence community for several years was CIA Director Richard Helms. He was quite familiar with Hoover’s lifestyle, describing it as extremely routine, even banal. He goes on to say that “in the Washington fish bowl…I find it impossible to believe that anyone as well known and as easily identified as Hoover might have managed a clandestine sex life. Was Hoover eccentric? Yes. Very eccentric? Yes, indeed. An active homosexual? No way.”35
Here’s what Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, the deputy director, the number-three man in the FBI hierarchy, who worked alongside Hoover and Tolson for many years, has to say:
When Anthony Summers’ Official and Confidential was first published, I read it with disbelief…Summers charges in his book that Hoover and [Clyde] Tolson [Hoover’s number-one assistant in the FBI] were homosexual lovers…It so disgusted me that I simply put it out of my mind. Even when it was repeated in newspapers and echoed on TV talk shows, I concluded that the fair-minded people of America would reject so ridiculous an accusation based on such flimsy evidence, that their good sense would see through the fraud. But…I discovered that in the wake of Summers’ book, Hoover’s homosexuality was widely accepted as undeniable truth…Neither man [Hoover and Tolson] was a homosexual…No one who knew Hoover and Tolson well in the FBI has ever even hinted at such a charge. You can’t work side by side with two men for the better part of twenty years and fail to recognize signs of such affections. Contrary to what Summers would have you believe, neither Hoover nor Tolson was the least bit effeminate. Both were tough and manly.36
As indicated, there is no credible evidence that Hoover’s not going after organized crime was connected to his sexual orientation. So what was his reason? According to DeLoach, it was much more simple. Although organized crime was a national organization run by the commission of mob leaders since the early 1930s, as late as 1957 “Hoover had insisted there was no such thing as La Cosa Nostra…He believed the gangs were local, and he expected local authorities to take care of the problem*…His enormous faith in the agency he had created persuaded him that no such complex national criminal organization could exist without him knowing about it. He didn’t know about it; ergo, it did not exist.”37
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?”38
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 esta
blished 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.”51 Also, RFK said, “For the first time an insider, a knowledgeable member of the racketeering hierarchy, has broken the underworld’s code of silence.”52 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 stronges
t effort against organized crime that had ever been coordinated by the Federal Government.”53 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
Because 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.57