by Shawn Levy
Frank finally agreed to hear Lawford’s side of the story from Milt Ebbins, the actor’s manager, who explained the truth behind the snub—that Bobby didn’t want Jack so close to Sinatra when so many of Frank’s mob friends were under intense Justice Department scrutiny—but that did nothing to alter Frank’s resolve against Peter.
“None of it worked,” said Ebbins. “Frank just wrote Peter off. And Peter was destroyed. He loved Frank. He loved being a part of the Rat Pack. And all of a sudden he was on the outs.”
Peter had never felt very connected to things, but now the fog that always dampened his soul and separated him from the rest of the world seemed thicker than ever. He sulked. He drank. He saw anti-Lawford conspiracies in every downward turn of his career (he claimed that Frank put in a bad word for him with Billy Wilder, costing him a couple of film roles). He was still the president’s brother-in-law, of course, still a big movie star with a glamorous life. But he started dying when Frank cut him off, and it was one of the longest, ugliest, most painful deaths that could be imagined.
One of these days it’ll come out
Frank’s banishment from the Kennedy inner circle had been of his own making.
But it had begun, weirdly, in the Las Vegas hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan on Halloween, 1960.
Rowan had come to Sam Giancana’s attention as a rival for the affections of Phyllis McGuire, the star of the singing McGuire Sisters, whom the gangster had begun to court earlier in the year—in part by having the Desert Inn tear up nearly $100,000 in gambling markers she’d run up at the blackjack tables.
In an effort to find out just where he stood with McGuire, who was said to be engaged to Rowan but had seemed pretty darn available to Giancana when he’d brushed up against her, the gangster availed himself of a new friend, Bob Maheu, a real spook, with ties to the FBI and CIA, now working in the private security business. Maheu was part of the queer mix of government, criminal, and exiled Cuban forces trying to formulate a strategy to oust Fidel Castro and retake Havana for democracy and gambling. Johnny Rosselli, Giancana’s man out West, was Maheu’s contact with the mob, and Rosselli introduced the two in October 1960 at a Florida meeting attended by a variety of parties interested in Castro’s demise.
Giancana (who was, unbeknownst to him, the subject of the first-ever FBI wiretaps back in his Chicago headquarters) had always harbored a fascination with electronic eavesdropping equipment—he had once extensively grilled a navy man who was dating one of his daughters on the subject. He asked Maheu if it would be possible for him to bug Rowan’s room and find out if the comic was making time on him with Phyllis. Maheu, using the money with which the CIA was funding the Mafia’s cabal against Castro, hired an operative named Arthur J. Balletti and sent him off to the Riviera Hotel to surveil Rowan.
In Vegas, Balletti and a cohort wired Rowan’s room and telephone and took up a post in a room of their own. On October 31, 1960, they took a break from their work for lunch, leaving their recording and monitoring equipment out in plain sight on their beds. They forgot to hang the Do Not Disturb sign: A maid came in to make up the room, got a look at all those sinister wires and machines, and called the cops. When Balletti came back from lunch, alone, he was arrested. Rosselli arranged for the $1,000 bail to be paid by a Las Vegas gambling buddy, and the bumbling wiretapper split town.
Rosselli himself broke the news to Giancana about the bungled operation. “I remember his expression,” Rosselli recalled. “Smoking a cigar, he almost swallowed it laughing about it.” Rosselli, however, wasn’t amused: Unlike Giancana, who thought the CIA-inspired plot to kill Castro was a nice opportunity to take money from the government, he held out hopes that the hit could really be pulled off. The Balletti incident “was blowing everything,” he said years later, “every kind of cover I had tried to arrange.”
He didn’t know how right he was: When Vegas authorities had learned that Balletti was from Miami, they called the FBI in on the case, and the bureau’s attentions were heightened when they learned that Maheu was connected to the caper. An effort to find out what Maheu wanted with Dan Rowan led to Rosselli, surveillance of whom began in earnest in June 1961. The following January, Rosselli was seen leaving Romanoff’s restaurant in the company of Judy Campbell, and suddenly what had begun as a comical screwup in Las Vegas took on—for the handful of people who had the whole story in their heads—a truly gargantuan dimension.
For anyone who could put all the pieces together, a stunning story unfolded. J. Edgar Hoover was chief among the cognoscenti. He knew a bit about Judy Campbell: She’d been mentioned as consorting with Jack Kennedy in sketchy reports he’d received about the Rat Pack Summit; she’d been interviewed in October 1960 about her acquaintance with Sam Giancana; and she’d been connected with the president in what was clearly an ongoing sexual relationship. The sight of her in Rosselli’s company enabled Hoover to draw a pattern of strings connecting Jack Kennedy to Giancana through the body of the woman to whom Frank had introduced them both—and to connect the government that was making such a decorous public show of prosecuting the mob with a shadow government that was willing to use the mob as a hit squad for a coup d’état in a foreign country.
In February, just after the announcement that Jack would be staying with Frank in Palm Springs, Hoover laid a carefully worded bombshell on Bobby Kennedy’s desk outlining just what he knew about the president, Campbell, and Giancana. The following month, two days before Jack’s trip West, Hoover had lunch with the president and touched on the same matter. That afternoon, Jack made his last-ever call to Judy Campbell from the White House and ordered Peter Lawford to inform Frank that there’d been a change in plans. Telling Peter that Giancana was known to have made several visits to Frank’s estate, staying in the very guest room in which the president was supposed to bunk, Jack said, “I can’t stay there while Bobby’s handling the investigation.”
Frank was finished as a player. And it wasn’t Jackie, who’d always felt Frank was too vulgar, who’d shot him down: It was his own tragic hubris—his belief that he and his friends were above morality, that his friendship could erase whatever was circumspect in a president’s shacking up with a mobster’s girl. Jack could ignore his wife’s qualms, and even those of Bobby, who had always been made a little queasy by his older brother’s fascination with showbiz types, but Hoover scared him—and Frank had inadvertently given Hoover plenty of ammunition.
If the Kennedys now found Frank’s society politically untenable, the others party to the singer’s audacious juggling game found his lack of juice with the Kennedy family infuriating. Frank had indicated to Giancana that the mob’s assistance with Jack’s election would be recompensed with an easing of federal inquiries into racketeering, but the fall of Sinatra’s star in the eyes of the Kennedys coincided with an increasingly ravenous attitude toward the mob on the part of the Justice Department.
In this, Giancana had good reason to be mad. He had played ball with Jack in the West Virginia primary and in Chicago during the general election. He had gone along with the CIA loonies and their cockamamie scheme to kill Castro. He had even helped Jack keep his good name in February 1961, when an L.A. restaurateur was set to name the president, Frank, Dean, Sammy, and even Jerry Lewis as correspondents in a divorce action against his starlet wife. Jerry was the hero in that one: He prevailed upon Judy Campbell to get Giancana involved, and the don sent Rosselli to L.A. to put a muzzle on the private eye who’d dug up all the dirt.
And what did he and his pals get for all this trouble? FBI listening devices in their homes and headquarters, burly agents harassing their mistresses and legit employees (families were, by mutual agreement, off base), and byzantine legal pressure unmatched since the IRS case against Al Capone.
The FBI had begun bugging the Chicago mob in the summer of 1959 by planting a listening device in a tailor shop the gangsters used as a front; political fixer Murray “The Camel” Humphries sensed as much and used to begin his business day by
declaring to an empty room, “Good morning, gentlemen, and anyone listening. This is the nine o’clock meeting of the Chicago underworld.” Eventually, dozens of schemes were uncovered by illegal FBI electronic surveillance, from the corruption of Chicago politicians, policemen, and judges, to efforts to silence witnesses in cases pending against various mobsters, to the split of mob interests in Las Vegas between the Chicago mob and a Las Vegas group led by former Detroit and Cleveland gangster Moe Dalitz.
But it wasn’t until the summer of 1961 that they became bold enough to confront their prey directly. Oh, there had been little set-tos over the years, but nothing to compare to the onslaught launched that summer by a group of agents, led by former Notre Dame boxing champ and U.S. marine Bill Roemer, who, among other fancies, decided they would rattle Giancana by deposing Phyllis McGuire before a federal grand jury.
One day, they learned that McGuire would be flying to New York via Chicago and that Giancana would accompany her on the first leg of the trip; they decided to serve her with a subpoena at O’Hare Airport.
The plan was for Roemer and his partner, Ralph Hill, to distract Giancana with a series of pointless questions while two other agents hustled McGuire off to a private room for interrogation.
As soon as they identified themselves as federal agents, Roemer and Hill got hit full blast with the Giancana charm: “A man can’t even be left alone with his own girlfriend in this fuckin’ country.”
While Giancana was busy making friends, McGuire was spirited away; Giancana got back on the plane, apparently looking for her. When he came off, he was carrying her purse.
The sight inspired Roemer: “My, that purse certainly becomes you, Mo. I heard about you being a fairy but now we know, don’t we?”
Giancana went white. “You fuckin’ cocksucker!” he hissed. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I could have Butch [Blasi, his bodyguard] come out here with his machine gun and take good care of you right now.”
Roemer asked him if he was threatening a federal officer, a felony, and he backed off.
“I suppose you intend to report this to your boss,” he proffered.
“Who’s my boss?” Roemer asked, playing along.
“J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Yes, I imagine he’ll see a copy.”
“Fuck J. Edgar Hoover and your super boss!”
“Who is that?”
“Bobby Kennedy.”
“Might be he’ll see a copy, yes.”
“Fuck Bobby Kennedy! And your super, super boss!”
“Who is my super, super boss?”
“John Kennedy!”
“I doubt if the President of the United States is interested in Sam Giancana.”
“Fuck John Kennedy. Listen, Roemer, I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows more about the Kennedys and one of these days we’re going to tell all.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Fuck you. One of these days it’ll come out. You wait, you smart asshole, you’ll see.”
It did come out, too, but Sam wouldn’t live to see it. Instead of vindication, he got harassment. The FBI began tailing him everywhere he went, sometimes with results almost as comical as the attempt to bug Dan Rowan: In Miami, Giancana was leaving a restaurant when an agent who was watching him lost his grip on a tree limb and fell to the ground at the gangster’s feet; in New York, a Giancana associate was approached by another FBI agent who also, coincidentally, was named Bill Roemer, prompting Giancana, upon hearing the news, to cry out, “That cocksucker Roemer, he’s all over the fuckin’ place!”
A few weeks later, he was griping to one of his cohorts again, in a conversation captured by wiretap.
“I got more cocksuckers on my ass than any other cock-sucker in the country! Believe me when I tell you. I was on the road with that broad [McGuire]. There must have been up there at least 20 guys. They were next door, upstairs, downstairs, surrounded all the way around. Get in a car, somebody picks you up. I lost that tail, boom, I get picked up someplace else. Four or five cars with intercoms, back and forth, back and forth.”
The other man was incredulous: “This was in Europe, right?”
“Right here!” Giancana cried. “In Russia: Chicago, New York, Phoenix!”
It got to be too much for him: “This is like Nazi Germany and I’m the biggest Jew in the country,” he wailed.
The only choice, Giancana felt, was to call in the marker that Frank Sinatra had assured him he had with the Kennedys, and who better to call it in for him than Frank? Through the summer of 1961, Giancana and his associates, particularly Johnny Rosselli and Johnny Formosa, another Las Vegas operative who watched over gambling in Indiana as well, reminded Sinatra that he had promised to intercede with the Kennedys on their behalf.
And when he’d been in Hyannis Port that September, that is apparently just what Frank did. Alone with the attorney general, he wrote the name of the don of the Chicago mob on a pad, handed it across the table, and said, “This is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob.”
Bobby couldn’t believe the balls of him; it would be one of the unforgivable trespasses that would, mere months later, make it so easy for him to give Frank the heave-ho. Of course he would pay the message no heed.
Sinatra came back to Giancana empty-handed. Unwilling to admit that he’d failed, though, he stalled them with assurances that he’d work things out. Sam Giancana was a past master at detecting bullshit, however. His increasingly agitated complaints against the Kennedys and Sinatra became a litany on FBI transcripts of conversations recorded in his hangouts.
In December 1961, Giancana and Rosselli spoke at bitter length about their situation, particularly about how ineffective Frank turned out to be. Rosselli had recently seen the singer in California.
“He says he’s got an idea that you’re mad at him,” Rosselli reported. “I says, ‘That, I wouldn’t know.’”
“He must have a guilty conscience,” replied Giancana. “I never said nothing.”
He pondered Frank’s claims to having put in a good word for him with the Kennedys. “I don’t know who the fuck he’s talking to,” he finally said. “After all, if I’m taking somebody’s money, I’m gonna make sure that this money is gonna do something, like, do you want it or don’t you want it? If the money is accepted, maybe one of these days the guy will do me a favor.”
“That’s right,” Rosselli said. “He says he wrote your name down.”
Giancana was annoyed. “Well, one minute he tells me this and then he tells me that and the last time I talked to him was at the hotel down in Florida a month before he left and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man [Joe Kennedy], I’m gonna talk to the man [Jack Kennedy].’ One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, and the next minute 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.”
“I can imagine,” Rosselli commiserated. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. If he can’t deliver, I want him to tell me, ‘John, the load’s too heavy.’”
“That’s all right,” Giancana responded resignedly. “At least then you know how to work. You won’t let your guard down, know what I mean?”
He had begun to see how little pull he and his emissary Frank really had. “If I ever get a speeding ticket,” he sighed, “none of those fuckers would know me.”
“You got that right,” said Rosselli, who then offered a little bit of advice: “Go the other way. Fuck everybody. We’ll use them every fucking way we can. They only know one way. Now let them see the other side of you.”
In the coming weeks, Giancana spoke worse and worse about Frank: “If he [Jack Kennedy] had lost this state here he would have lost the election, but I figured with this guy [Frank] maybe we will be alright. I might have known.… Well, when a [obscenity deleted] lies to you.…”
Giancana considered Dean a pain in the ass as well. He wanted the singer to play some nightclub dates for him and found him e
lusive.
“That fuckin’ prima donna,” Johnny Formosa complained. “You can’t call him. I gotta go there and lay the law down to him, so he knows I mean business.”
“It seems like they don’t believe us,” Giancana sighed. “Well, we’ll give them a little headache, you know? All I do is send two guys there and just tell them what they’re working at. Bang, you crack them and that’s it. Just lay them up. If we ever hit that guy you’ll break his jaw. Then he can’t sing.”
Formosa must’ve liked Dean; he softened at the thought: “Maybe none of them gotta get hurt. Maybe they’ll come to their senses.”
But soon enough, Formosa had grown as impatient as Giancana. At a meeting soon after, he explicitly described to his boss how he’d like to revenge himself on Frank and everyone around him.
“Let’s show ’em,” he told Giancana. “Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys. Lawford and that Martin. And I could take the nigger and put his other eye out.”
Giancana muzzled his bloodthirsty grunt: “No, I’ve got other plans for them.”
He could’ve gone Formosa’s way, or Rosselli’s—shown them his other side. For the most part, Giancana loathed show folk: “Hollywood is the only place I’ve ever been, besides Washington, D.C., where everybody—men and women—are just beggin’ for you to use ’em,” he told his brother. He liked to use celebrities to ferry money for him—“They make great bagmen. Everybody’s too busy bein’ dazzled by a star and askin’ for their autograph to ask what’s in a briefcase”—but he looked down on them: Sammy was “a nigger weasel,” Peter was “Peter the Rabbit,” Dean and Jerry Lewis were “fuckin’ prima donnas.” Only Frank was okay: “A real stand up guy,” he said approvingly, “too good for those bums in Hollywood.”
