Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  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,* 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.”

  “In other words,” Giancana says, “if I ever get a speeding ticket, none of these f_ _ _ _ _s would know me.”

  “You told that right, buddy,” Roselli replied.59 And in a January 1962 FBI wiretap of Giancana talking to John D’Arco, a Giancana associate, about the fact that Chicago mayor Richard Daley wanted to put a former FBI agent named Spencer in as a candidate for sheriff of Cook County, Giancana, talking about Spencer, made this remark: “He’s like Kennedy. He’ll get what he wants out of you, but you won’t get anything out of him.”60 Even assuming a Giancana contribution to Kennedy’s campaign, from the context of this wiretap and Giancana’s remark to Roselli about a “donation,” it hardly sounds like a multimillion dollar contribution from the leaders of organized crime, for which JFK’s lack of appreciation would cause them to want to kill him.

  Although it is possible the mob hedged its bets in the 1960 election, the theory that it heavily supported Kennedy financially seems extremely improbable. As stated earlier, during the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Rogers did not aggressively pursue the mob. Why would the mob leaders think things would get better with JFK in the Oval Office when they knew of his highly hostile feelings toward them, as demonstrated by his performance on the McClellan Committee a few years earlier? And although they would have no way of knowing that JFK would appoint RFK as attorney general, they certainly would have every reason to believe (particularly since RFK had been chief counsel to the McClellan Committee) that RFK would be helping his brother, in some way, fight organized crime.

  At bottom, the story that the mob financially supported Kennedy’s run for president is nothing more than a rumor, an unconfirmed allegation. And if we’re going to descend to rumors and unconfirmed allegations, Ed Partin, a Teamster official in Louisiana, said that in late September of 1960, he was with Jimmy Hoffa in New Orleans when New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello gave Hoffa “a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon. It was a half-million-dollar contribution. The other half [of the million promised] was coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.”61 At least this allegation makes sense, since the mob knew, from JFK and RFK’s McClellan Committee days, how determined and passionate the two brothers were about destroying organized crime in America, and Hoffa was supporting Nixon for the presidency. Announcing the endorsement of Nixon by the general executive board of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on September 7, 1960, Hoffa said that Nixon’s opponent, Kennedy, “presents a very real danger to our nation if he is successful in buying our country’s highest office.”62

  So there is no credible evidence that the mob made substantial contributions to JFK’s 1960 campaign for the presidency, nor has any evidence ever surfaced to substantiate the allegation that after the mob financially backed JFK’s bid for the presidency, it became infuriated with him when he never treated it well in return, and ordered his death because of it.

  In any event, no one would question that the mob was being hurt big-time by the Kennedy administration, and the conventional belief among many conspiracy theorists is not the retribution theory of some of their colleagues, but that the mob killed Kennedy simply to get RFK “off their back.” For example, former Life magazine editor Richard Billings, who wrote the HSCA Report with Robert Blakey, and coauthored with Blakey the book The Plot to Kill the President, says, “We know the motive” for the mob’s killing JFK. “The motive was that Bob Kennedy was determined to wipe them out.”63 But this is an anemic argument since organized crime would have no assurance that Robert Kennedy would not continue to be attorney general under LBJ, which he in fact did for almost a year, resigning on September 2, 1964, to run for the U.S. Senate from the state of New York. And if RFK concluded that the mob had killed his brother, it could expect a vendetta by him against them of unprecedented proportions. Moreover, even if one were to concede that organized crime had a motive to kill Kennedy, as I discussed earlier, motive is only a starting point in any investigation, not the solution to the murder that conspiracy theorists want people to believe. Contrary to the allegation by conspiracy theorists that after Kennedy’s assassination the fight against organized crime virtually stopped, the number of indictments against organized-crime figures (though not convictions) actually continued to rise dramatically. But there can be no question that once RFK left office in 1964, the Department of Justice’s effort against organized crime, without the engine of RFK’s passion, suffered measurably. One telling barometer: in fiscal year 1964, the number of “man days” in the field by members of the organized-crime section was 6,699; by fiscal year 1966 it had dropped to 3,480.64

  In any criminal case, if you’re going to accuse someone of a crime, you have to come up with some evidence that he committed it. There is no credible evidence of any kind that organized crime was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

  From early 1961 through the assassination in 1963, the FBI conducted extensive electronic surveillance (i.e., “bugging” by hidden microphones to pick up all conversations in a given area) of the nine members of organized crime’s nat
ional commission, the group, as indicated, that made decisions of national importance for the mob and gave approval or disapproval to other mafiosi wanting to engage in important acts. The HSCA said,

  The committee’s review of the surveillance transcripts and logs, detailing the private conversations of the commission members and their associates, revealed that there were extensive and heated discussions about the serious difficulties the Kennedy administration’s crackdown on organized crime was causing. The bitterness and anger with which organized crime leaders viewed the Kennedy administration are readily apparent in the electronic surveillance transcripts, with such remarks being repeatedly made by commission members Genovese, Giancana, Bruno, Zerilli, Patriarca and Magaddino…While the committee’s examination of the electronic surveillance program revealed no shortage of such conversations during that period, the committee found no evidence in the conversations of the formulation of any specific plan to assassinate the President…The committee concluded that had the national crime syndicate, as a group, been involved in a conspiracy to kill the President, some trace of the plot would have been picked up by the FBI surveillance of the commission…Given the far-reaching possible consequences of an assassination plot by the commission, the committee found that such a conspiracy would have been the subject of serious discussion by members of the commission, and that no matter how guarded such discussions might have been, some trace of them would have emerged from the surveillance coverage.65*

  As an example of FBI surveillance of the mob on a local level, William Roemer of the Chicago office of the FBI and his men had succeeded in installing two “bugs” in the Armory Lounge, mobster Sam Giancana’s favorite watering hole in the Windy City, and at “Little Al’s” (named after Al Capone), the Chicago mob’s headquarters in a custom tailoring shop at 620 North Michigan. Having listened for hours to the two bugs in the FBI’s “tech room” on the weekend after the assassination, Roemer described the mobsters’ reaction to Kennedy’s death as “gleeful.” Indeed, an associate of Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno was heard saying, “It’s too bad his brother Bobby wasn’t in that car, too.” But Roemer heard not the slightest suggestion that the mob was complicit in Kennedy’s murder. In fact, one of Giancana’s closest henchmen, Chuckie English, opines that Kennedy was killed by “a Marxist.” Giancana responded, “He was a marksman who knew how to shoot.” But Giancana said nothing that even vaguely implied mob participation.66

  Roemer said that his people had started bugging the same two mob hangouts in July of 1959, and it continued until 1965. (“We did not wiretap the phone. They wouldn’t talk on the phone.”) Roemer said the FBI heard the mobsters “talking about every crime you could imagine. [But] in all that time [1959–1965] there was not an inkling that the JFK assassination was connected to any part of the mob.”67*

  Moreover, as indicated earlier, not only would the mob’s killing of Kennedy bring no assurance that RFK wouldn’t continue to go after it as attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, but unless the mob had LBJ in its hip pocket—and there’s no evidence of that—what assurance could it possibly have that LBJ, as president, would be any more congenial to its interests than JFK was? Indeed, for all the mob would know, he might be worse. Organized-crime figures might be criminals, but no one has ever accused them of being simple-minded. They can think as logically as anyone else. During a meeting of several local mobsters on February 9, 1962, in Philadelphia that the FBI had bugged, mob associate Willie Weisburg expressed such a hatred for Kennedy that he exclaimed, “Honest to God…I hope I get a week’s notice. I’ll kill. Right in the [obscenity] White House. Somebody’s got to get rid of this [obscenity].” Here’s how Angelo Bruno, the Philadelphia mob chieftain who was a member of the national commission, responded:

  Look, Willie,…there was a king, do you understand? And he found out that everybody was saying that he was a bad king. This is an old Italian story. So, there was an old wise woman about 140 years old. So, he figured, let me go talk to the old wise woman. She knows everything. So he went to the old wise woman. So he says to her, I came here because I want your opinion. He says, do you think I’m a bad king? She says, no, I think you are a good king. He says, well how come everybody says I’m a bad king? She says because they are stupid. They don’t know. He says, well, how come, why do you say I’m a good king? Well, she said, I knew your great grandfather. He was a bad king. I knew your grandfather. He was worse. I knew your father. He was worse than them. You, you are worse than all of them, but your son, if you die, your son is going to be worse than you. So it’s better to be with you. (All laugh)68

  The mob was using common sense. Something the conspiracy theorists wouldn’t dream of doing.

  To me, the thought that organized crime would actually decide to kill the president of the United States is completely far-fetched and preposterous. Yet none other than leading anti-conspiracy author Gerald Posner thinks the mob may have been on the brink of murdering Kennedy. Posner wrote in Penthouse magazine, “Mafia kingpins may, indeed, have plotted to murder JFK, but Oswald beat them to it.”69 In a 1993 radio debate with conspiracy theorist Peter Dale Scott, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Marcello and Trafficante sat around the table and said, ‘Let’s kill Kennedy.’” When television host Charlie Rose asked Posner in a September 15, 1993, interview whether he thought the Mafia was out to kill Kennedy, Posner replied, “No question. They could have had Kennedy on a hit list.” And in Case Closed, he writes, “Mobsters may have discussed killing JFK…but [Oswald] beat the mafia to Kennedy.”70

  Posner has also said that although Ruby’s conduct on the weekend of the assassination rules out Ruby having killed Oswald for organized crime, there is otherwise “the odor of a Mafia hit all around Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.”71 But since when does the mob employ a blabbermouth and virtual idiot like Ruby to carry out an important contract for it? When does it have its hit man shoot the victim not in the head or even the heart but in the stomach, the least vulnerable part of the upper body? And when does the mob have its hit man carry out the hit right before the eyes of law enforcement, thereby guaranteeing he would be apprehended and grilled, and hence, possibly talk? Show me a precedent for any of these things.

  It is nothing short of remarkable that Robert Blakey, a respected authority on organized crime who worked in the organized-crime section of the U.S. attorney general’s office under Robert Kennedy, and later became chief counsel for the HSCA, also says in his book The Plot to Kill the President that “the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby had all the earmarks of a gangland slaying.” (And, of course, if the mob had Oswald silenced, that means they had Oswald kill Kennedy.) Why? Because, Blakey says, “a key witness [was] shot down by a shadowy figure at close range in public.”72 But Blakey doesn’t go on to cite any examples of similar mob murders, for the simple reason that none exist. Yes, mob figures have been murdered in public, but the killings don’t take place right in front of law enforcement, and the unknown killers (though only one may kill, he is always accompanied by at least one or more associates) always escape. About the only similarity between Ruby’s killing of Oswald and a mob hit is that mob killings are nearly always accomplished by use of a handgun.73 But of course, most homicides, period, are committed with a handgun.

  Indeed, I can’t think of one mob execution that was carried out by one killer, acting alone, nor can I think of one mob execution where the killers were immediately apprehended by law enforcement. Rather than Ruby’s killing of Oswald having the “earmarks” of a mob killing, the reality is that it unquestionably has the earmarks of a non-mob killing. Mafia historian Frederic Sondern describes the almost ritualistic procedure (there are, of course, exceptions and variations) of a mob killing. After a “sentence of death is agreed upon” by ranking members of the Mafia, “a small committee is designated to implement the decision. One of these writes to a cousin or uncle, perhaps in Chicago, Detroit or elsewhere in the almost indecipherable Sicilian-Italian diale
ct for ‘two good men’ to do ‘some heavy work.’ No such letter, even if found, would ever prove anything in court. Before long the two ‘good men’ arrive, for example, in New York. Their preparation for the task is always meticulous, which is the reason that Mafia killers are so seldom caught [never at the scene]. For days, sometimes for weeks, they study the habits and schedule of the condemned.”74 Really sounds like Ruby’s killing of Oswald, doesn’t it? Sondern also points out that the execution is virtually always by handgun. Even the location on the victim’s body in which he is shot follows tradition, the killers “aiming for the head and neck.” The reason for the neck is that if, perchance, the victim survives the shots to the head, “the victim can rarely articulate the name or description of his assailant before he dies.”75 As we know, Ruby shot Oswald in the stomach, which, unlike the head, can never be as reliably fatal.

  After serving for the HSCA, Blakey said he was convinced that organized crime, specifically Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, had killed Kennedy. But Frank Salerno, Blakey’s chief organized-crime investigator on the HSCA, and a former New York Police Department detective who had headed up the force’s fight against organized crime for twenty years, said, “I have the greatest respect for Robert Blakey, but I cannot join him in this hypothesis.” Salerno said that in all his years investigating organized crime, “there was no indication of their involvement [in Kennedy’s murder]. Since that time up to the current day, you have had a large number of high-level members of organized crime who have made a deal with the government and testified against their fellows. None of them have ever suggested that they knew of or even heard of involvement by organized crime in the death of President Kennedy.”76 Blakey responds to Salerno’s observation by saying that he agrees with Salerno “that it wasn’t the national commission” of organized crime who ordered Kennedy’s murder, alleging that Kennedy’s murder resulted from “a local operation of two [Mafia] families at most: Marcello in New Orleans and Trafficante in Florida.”77 But that’s not what Salerno said. Salerno is very well aware of Blakey’s position, set forth in his book and elsewhere, that Marcello and Trafficante were behind Kennedy’s murder. In other words, he knows Blakey’s “hypothesis,” and this is what Salerno disagrees with. His statement clearly shows that not only doesn’t he agree that organized crime (the national commission or what have you) killed Kennedy, but also he doesn’t agree with Blakey’s hypothesis that the two individual organized-crime families of Marcello and Trafficante did.