Campbell’s memoir offered a more romantic version of the story. Kennedy “looked so handsome in his pin-striped suit,” as he sat at Frank’s table, she wrote. “Those strong white teeth and smiling Irish eyes. . . . I was tremendously impressed by his poise and wit and charm.” It was Edward Kennedy, she said, who pursued her the first night: she had to fend him off when he saw her to her door. Then John phoned, inviting her to lunch with him the next day on Frank’s patio. They met for three hours and, she said, spent most of that time discussing religion. They were both Catholics, and Kennedy’s religion was a campaign issue. That second night, in Jack Entratter’s booth, they watched the Rat Pack perform. Kennedy made no moves that weekend, she claimed, but called soon afterward asking to see her again. They had sex for the first time a month later, according to Campbell, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. There followed what she characterized as “a long and intimate relationship” that lasted into the second year of the Kennedy presidency.
In her memoir, Campbell told how, two days after having sex with Kennedy, at Sinatra’s urging, she flew to Miami to see the Rat Pack perform at the Fontainebleau. When she arrived, she said, Frank introduced her to Joe Fischetti, then—at a social gathering—to Giancana.
“Come here, Judy,” Campbell recalled Frank saying. “I want you to meet a good friend of mine, Sam Flood.” Giancana was using one of his aliases. As she moved around the room, Campbell said, “Flood’s eyes never left me. . . . There was a little smile on his face.” Next day, she was seated next to Giancana at dinner. When she checked out, she discovered he had paid her hotel bill.
Campbell’s life would now be dominated by her sexual relationship with John F. Kennedy and parallel contacts with Giancana. Controversially, she claimed before her death that Kennedy used her as a sort of courier, to carry envelopes to Giancana. She carried money during the election campaign, she said, and, early in the presidency, papers relating to plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. She also claimed to have witnessed secret meetings between Kennedy and Giancana.
When she began speaking out, in 1975, keepers of the Kennedy flame denied or derided Campbell’s claims. “The only Campbell I know,” Dave Powers sneered, “is chunky vegetable soup.” Frank issued a press release when Campbell announced she was going to write a book. “Hell hath no fury,” it read, “like a hustler with a literary agent.”
Yet much of what Campbell claimed is credible. A good deal of it is supported by phone records, White House logs, and other documentation. Interestingly, some of her more controversial claims, suspect because she did not make them publicly until many years had passed, were first made contemporaneously as private confidences. It seems, nevertheless, that Campbell was far from candid. She was not, as she portrayed herself, a somewhat reserved young woman swept off her feet by glamorous men.
Frank’s acid 1976 press statement on Campbell had been edited by his attorney. In Frank’s draft, he had called her not a hustler but a “hooker.” Campbell always vigorously denied she took money for sex, and began a libel action when a book made that claim. Yet an FBI agent who investigated her, William Carter, said that he and colleagues “definitely thought she was selling her favors.” He had considered Campbell a “high-class whore.”
Carter’s statement buttresses those of Karen Dynan, who thought Campbell was a hooker when she saw her in Hawaii, and of Lawford’s agent Milt Ebbins. According to George Jacobs, Campbell was a sort of “call girl” who turned “discreet tricks.” If not exactly a prostitute, “she would date anybody. . . . She was the perfect Eisenhower era pinup of the girl next door. That she charged for her wholesomeness was beside the point. . . . If one of Sinatra’s friends came to town and wanted to get laid, he’d send Judy over . . . she stopped charging Frank, as a commission for the introductions. She made thousands. They got good money in those days. . . . All the pit bosses, the hotel bosses knew her.”
“Campbell was notorious to us in the hotel,” Sands dealer Count Guido Deiro said. “In those days we pimped out people from the pit all of the time. It was part of the complimentary package of delights that was offered to players. Her number may have been on the list, I’m not sure. . . . She was notorious in the sense that we knew who she was and that we considered her a high-class girl that could be bought.”
Just as there are doubts about Campbell’s denials that she took money for sex, there is reason to doubt what she said of her relations with mobsters. In the memoir, she wrote as though the world of the mob was unknown territory to her. Count Deiro said she was especially familiar to Sands staff “because she was a girlfriend of Johnny Rosselli.” At the time Campbell met Kennedy, Rosselli was operating in Las Vegas on behalf of Giancana. He also had a long-standing connection to Joe Kennedy—they were occasional golf partners and played cards together. Campbell told the Senate Intelligence Committee that she met Rosselli for the first time “possibly in 1960.” Until that year, she claimed in an interview, she had known no mobsters. In her memoir, however, she said she had met him “once briefly years before.”
Rosselli said in 1975 that he had known Campbell since 1951, when she was seventeen, that he met her later during her short-lived marriage, then dated her once she was divorced. Patricia Breen, widow of one of Rosselli’s Hollywood associates, said Rosselli saw Campbell “frequently.” Brad Dexter, who knew all the individuals involved, said Rosselli and Campbell had a sexual relationship. He also dismissed Campbell’s claim not to have met Giancana until after the start of her involvement with Kennedy, saying he was sure she had met Giancana earlier, through Rosselli. Rosselli himself said he saw Campbell with Giancana before 1960. These assertions, indicating that the woman with whom Kennedy became involved was already associating with a Mafia boss at the time she met him, put a new, more ominous cast on the entire shabby episode.
“When Sam wanted a girl,” George Jacobs said, “Sinatra sent her to him.” The order in which Campbell connected with the key men involved, Jacobs added, was not—as she claimed—Sinatra, followed by Kennedy, followed by Giancana. It was, rather: Sinatra, followed by Giancana, and then John Kennedy.
After Campbell’s memoir was published, Peter Lawford began compiling notes about the Judith Campbell affair. In a surviving fragment, retrieved after his death, he wrote: “Judy was a mob moll.”
CAMPBELL WENT TO LAS VEGAS the weekend she got together with Kennedy, she claimed, only because Sinatra asked her to. A Newsweek story published in 1975, when the Campbell-Kennedy story first broke, suggests another scenario. An unnamed source in that story—now identifiable as Sammy Davis Jr.—was much involved that weekend. He put his car and chauffeur at Kennedy’s disposal, and socialized with Frank and Kennedy in Sinatra’s suite. It had been assumed in advance, Davis told Newsweek, that Kennedy would want female company because “We all knew he was a swinger.” Accordingly, he said, female company was arranged. It was done, Newsweek reported Davis as explaining, “discreetly: rather than find somebody local . . . they decided on an ‘outside girl’—and someone asked Giancana to put in a call to Los Angeles.”
Giancana may have been close by when Campbell and Kennedy met. Sammy Cahn’s wife Gloria was in Sinatra’s party that weekend. She knew who Giancana was and, striving to remember when interviewed in 2002, said she thought the Mafia boss had been present in the hotel. She recalled people saying, at some point, “How can Frank possibly have those people around when he’s got the Senator and other wonderful people?”
Frank may have had little concern about that. For in those heady days, and even during the presidency, Kennedy himself behaved as though he could get away with anything, including a relationship with Giancana. “I met Jack Kennedy when he was a senator,” said Nick Sevano, “and we had dinner with Sam [Giancana] and a few others. Jack was very respectful to Giancana.” The society columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, who mixed with the people around the Kennedys in the early 1960s, recalled a night out in New York with Peter Lawford and Giancana, who was introduced by his nicknam
e Sam Mooney. “They talked about all the girls that Mooney used to produce for the Kennedys,” Theodoracopulos said, “reminiscing about the girls that JFK had through Mooney. Mooney was very proud of his Kennedy connection. Always dropping, ‘When JFK said this, when he said that, when he sent his plane. . . .’ You could tell that they’d met together.”
“I don’t think it takes a great deal of imagination,” Judith Campbell said years afterward, “to think there is a possibility I was used.” “They deliberately fed her to Jack,” Brad Dexter said before his death in 2002, “and Frank was part of it. Very serious.”
THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE stumbled on the Kennedy-Campbell affair in the mid-1970s while investigating whether, while president, Kennedy knew of plots to murder foreign leaders. The committee could not question Giancana because he was shot to death the day Senate staff arrived to arrange his testimony.
Rosselli did testify, but repeatedly refused to answer questions as to what he knew about Campbell’s first meeting with Kennedy. “I will not answer that question,” he said. Asked whether he ever saw her with Kennedy, he replied, “I think I will stop. I could answer some of these questions, but I do not think I want to get into it.” He never would answer those key questions, for he in turn was killed a few months later.
Campbell was questioned, but not under oath. She was allotted just one paragraph in the committee’s interim report, which referred to her only as an unnamed “close friend” of the president. The committee did not interview Frank, a striking omission never satisfactorily explained. William Safire fulminated about the omission in several columns, listing more than a dozen questions Frank should have been asked. Among them:
When did you introduce Sam Giancana to Judith Campbell, if you did, and at whose request?
Did the mobsters ask you to introduce her or anyone else to the Kennedys?
Did you ever see Campbell and Kennedy together, or Giancana-Rosselli and Campbell together?
To your knowledge, were any recordings ever made of any meetings between Miss Campbell and John Kennedy, or were any pictures taken of them that could have been used by organized crime for blackmail purposes?
Were you aware of any communications between the President and men hired to kill Castro through the woman you introduced to both?
It was unacceptable, Safire wrote, for the committee chairman to “slam the lid of Pandora’s box now that he has glimpsed the evil that lurks therein. As that great matchmaker of Mafia hoodlums, good-looking women, and a president of the United States used to croon: ‘All—or nothing at all.’ ”
In March 1960, the week Campbell said she first dined with Giancana, in Florida, an FBI report quoted an informant as having said that Frank was “being made available to assist Senator Kennedy’s campaign whereby Joe Fischetti and other hoodlums will have an entrée to Senator Kennedy.” The mobsters, moreover, were “financially supporting and actively endeavoring to secure [Kennedy’s] nomination.”
Sinatra and Joe Kennedy were also in Miami at that time, and Frank asked Sammy Cahn to do him a favor. “Frank,” Cahn said, “asked me, ‘Sammy, take Papa Joe down the hall and introduce him to Mr. Fischetti.’ So there I was, walking through the hotel, taking the father of the soon-to-be Democratic nominee down the hall to meet Mr. Fischetti. I mean, one of the best-known criminals in the United States!” Cahn did as he was told, though it occurred to him, even then, that these men were playing “a dangerous game.”
25
The Go-Between
IT’S NOT THE POPE I’m afraid of, it’s the Pop,” former president Harry Truman said of the prospect that John Kennedy, a Catholic, might win the White House. “Old Joe Kennedy is as big a crook as we’ve got anywhere in this country.” As the campaign heated up, Joe courted the Mafia more assiduously than ever. The month before the Miami episode, he invited Giancana and Rosselli and other mob leaders to join him for lunch at Felix Young’s restaurant in New York. Giancana listened to Joe make his case, but did not commit to helping his son win the presidency. Giancana’s adviser Murray Humphreys, who remembered the quarrels with Joe Kennedy during Prohibition, was leery of his blandishments. Giancana knew, too, that the would-be president’s brother Robert was a zealous foe of organized crime—during his work for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations he had targeted and personally interrogated the Mafia boss. Giancana wondered if he might fare better with Richard Nixon in the White House.
Joe Kennedy needed to bring Giancana on board because the mob’s hold on Illinois politics was so strong and Illinois was a key election state. Nearly three decades later, when his daughter Tina was preparing the TV movie of her father’s life, Frank revealed what happened next. Over lunch at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, he said, Joe Kennedy told him what he wanted. As rendered in the film, the conversation ran as follows:
JOE KENNEDY: Frank, we’re cut from the same cloth, came from the same world, worked our way up. We know the same people. And I know you know the people I mean.
FRANK: Sure, I know.
KENNEDY: We need a boost from our friends in Chicago who control the unions. They can win this race for us. But you understand, Frank, I can’t go to those people. It might come back to Jack. The White House can’t owe them any favors. The best thing you can do for Jack is to ask for the help as a personal favor to you.
FRANK: I understand.
Frank agreed to be an intermediary. His first mission, though, involved not Illinois, but a vital primary campaign. In real life, and in the movie, he broached the subject with Giancana during a golf game. “My friend Jack Kennedy,” Frank told the mafioso, “needs some help with the West Virginia primary.”
West Virginia had looked like a sure thing until Hubert Humphrey, a Protestant, entered the race. The population of West Virginia was more than 95 percent Protestant, and had never elected a Catholic to any important office. Yet Kennedy trounced Humphrey in the primary, a victory clouded by allegations of corruption ever since.
“I knew Joe Kennedy well,” Bob Neal said. “He made a deal with Giancana, and the first part of it was West Virginia.” Giancana had finally been won over at secret one-to-one meetings with Kennedy that Frank arranged. The mobster’s associate Murray Humphreys, who had remained skeptical even after having been “talked up” by Frank, lost the argument. Humphreys concluded, his wife Jeanne said years later, that Giancana agreed “to get that Joe Kennedy’s kid elected president” in part “to impress Sinatra.”
In West Virginia, Frank’s friend Skinny D’Amato was soon spreading money around like manure. “We got them in,” D’Amato said, acknowledging that he talked with “the Old Man,” one of the Kennedy brothers, or one of their close aides, every day throughout the campaign. A contemporary photograph shows him in conversation with John Kennedy. Also visible in the photograph is Angelo Malandra, a mob lawyer who, an FBI agent said, was “one of the people who, with Sinatra, had the mob’s money in West Virginia.”
A former Democratic county chairman in West Virginia, John Chernenko, said he received a message in 1960 from a known racketeer. “Frank Sinatra,” the contact said, “was interested in knowing if there was any money needed.”
Money for West Virginia, D’Amato was overheard saying on an FBI wiretap, had come from Las Vegas. Back in February, as Kennedy relaxed in Frank’s suite at the Sands, Peter Lawford had taken Sammy Davis aside. “If you want to see what a million dollars in cash looks like,” he whispered, “go into the next room. There’s a brown leather satchel in the closet. Open it. It’s a gift from the hotel owners for Jack’s campaign.”
After an evening out with Frank that year, Brad Dexter had a similar experience. “We got back,” Dexter said, “and he said there was a valise in his car, and to go get it for him. I brought it in, and he said ‘Open it.’ The goddamn valise was chock-full of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in packages. There had to have been a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars in there.
“I said ‘Jesus Christ, Frank, we’ve b
een out all night. Any of the parking attendants could have taken the valise out of the car and swung with all this fuckin’ money.’ He says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Brad. There’s more where that came from.’ ” Frank explained that the money in the bag came from “the Boys”—the mob. Frank’s secretary Gloria Lovell, Dexter said, “used to take messages and money back and forth for him, to Chicago, to Sam Giancana, for Jack Kennedy, to distribute for payoffs.” Giancana would say that Frank had been merely “our errand boy.”
In July, at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, the errand boy was busy. With Davis and Lawford—Dean Martin also appeared for Kennedy during the campaign, though not at the convention—Frank entertained three thousand Democratic faithful at the convention eve banquet. He sat beside Kennedy on the dais, talking animatedly.
Los Angeles police later learned that both men were supplied with prostitutes “just prior to the opening day of the convention.” On the opening day itself, according to Judith Campbell, Kennedy tried to get her to do something Frank had tried months earlier, to have sex with him and another woman.
The convention opened with Frank and twenty other stars singing the national anthem to a noticeably jazzy rhythm. All 4,509 delegates and alternates had been handed Frank’s campaign record on arrival—his special version of “High Hopes” on one side, “All the Way” on the other.
Frank roamed the convention floor all week, drumming up support for his man. Mindful of the television cameras, he had the bald patch on the crown of his head covered with black makeup. Bob Neal, who was at his side much of the time, thought Frank “really loved politics. He was just in the middle of everything, loved to be part of it. Macho, just great.”
Gore Vidal, who was at the convention as a delegate, saw Frank as (an improbably slender) Falstaff to Kennedy’s Prince Hal. At a party thrown by Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh after Kennedy had been nominated, the author observed Frank closely. “I was placed, along with Sinatra, at the table where Kennedy would sit. We waited. And waited. Sinatra looked edgy; started to drink heavily. Dinner began. Then one of the toothy sisters of the nominee said, casually, ‘Oh, Jack’s sorry. He can’t come. He’s gone to the movies.’ Opposite me, Falstaff deflated and spoke no more that evening.”
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