Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  Shackley could have dropped Ed Leahy’s name in his memo simply to pump up his standing with his superiors at agency headquarters. But his boast about having a potential source inside the attorney general’s office does reveal much about the CIA’s attitude toward Robert Kennedy. RFK was the top lawman in the nation, he was the brother of the martyred president. Yet he was someone that the intelligence agency regarded as a proper target for surveillance.

  THEY WATCHED HIM AS he swam in his pool and romped in his backyard with his seven children. They watched him as he drove alone in his convertible to and from work. They were surprised to discover that he never had bodyguards with him. The CIA was not the only organization that was interested in keeping Robert Kennedy under surveillance. The attorney general was also being watched by agents of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the country’s largest and most powerful union. Like the CIA, the Teamsters, under the iron-fisted leadership of Jimmy Hoffa, had formed a sinister alliance with organized crime. Hoffa had been the principal target of Kennedy’s anti-crime drive ever since the Senate Rackets Committee hearings in the late 1950s. Now Hoffa and his Mafia allies, enraged by the attorney general’s increasingly effective crackdown on them, were targeting him.

  One day in August 1962, Hoffa was talking in his office at the “Marble Palace,” the Teamsters’ grand Washington headquarters, with one of his lieutenants, Ed Partin, a big ex-boxer and ex-con who ran the union’s Baton Rouge local. Hoffa, who kept his taut, compact body in shape by working out in the basement gym every day, was thrumming with angry energy. Suddenly he sprang from behind his immense desk and beckoned Partin to join him at his big picture window, with its panoramic view of the Capitol dome three blocks away. Hoffa asked his confidant if he knew anything about plastic explosives. “I’ve got to do something about that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go,” he growled.

  Hoffa told Partin he was considering two different ways of eliminating Kennedy—by torching his Virginia house or by shooting him with a long-range rifle as he drove in his convertible. Hoffa seemed to favor the first idea, having someone toss plastic explosives into the Kennedy home after he had retired for the night. “You know, the SOB doesn’t stay up too late,” Hoffa observed. “I’ve got a rundown on him…his house sits here, like this, and it’s not guarded.” With his finger, Hoffa drew a diagram of the Kennedy estate’s layout for Partin. If Kennedy somehow survived the incendiary explosion, he “and all his damn kids” would be consumed in the flames since “the place will burn after it blows up.” The sniper scheme was apparently Hoffa’s backup plan. The perfect time to shoot Kennedy, he said, would be while he was driving in his open car, preferably somewhere in the South, where the assassination could be blamed on white supremacists opposed to the Kennedys’ civil rights policies.

  In the end, Hoffa was too shrewd to carry out something as risky as this. “If Bob Kennedy’s house had blown up back then, [or] if he had been shot,” said Walter Sheridan, the chief of Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa Squad” at the Justice Department, “there’s one name we’d have put at the top of the list, in about five minutes…Jimmy Hoffa.” But the Teamster boss was unwise in his choice of confidants. Ed Partin soon became a government informant, telling federal investigators not only about Hoffa’s death threat against Kennedy but also about his jury tampering efforts in a Nashville trial.

  Kennedy would use the jury tampering information to finally win a conviction of the cagey Teamster leader in 1964. But when Sheridan told the attorney general about Hoffa’s death threat in September 1962, he shrugged it off and climbed into his closely watched convertible.

  Sheridan took the threat more seriously. When Bobby was traveling, Ethel would sometimes ask the aide to come over to the house to make sure the family was safe. Ethel and the kids occasionally spotted big black cars packed with burly men in dark suits gliding slowly by on the road out front. The family would get terrifying letters and phone calls. “We know where your kids go to school and we know how they get there.” “Do you know what hydrochloric acid can do to your eyes?” “Boom!”

  Bobby despised the idea of living under a security blanket. The front door at Hickory Hill was usually left gapingly open. The only warning system was the cattle guard at the foot of the driveway, whose old iron pipes would send up a racket whenever a car rolled over them. That and the howls from shaggy Brumus and the rest of the family’s bestiary whenever someone arrived. A sign on the front lawn announced: “Trespassers Will Be Eaten.” But the worst damage Brumus had ever inflicted was to nip at the soft parts of unsuspecting guests as they sprinted by the lumbering Newfoundland in backyard football games. Out of concern for his family, Kennedy occasionally permitted Chief Marshal Jim McShane to set up a patrol on the road outside, Chain Bridge. But he took no precautions for himself.

  Kennedy had been tangling with gangsters, labor racketeers, hit men, and extortionists for years. He and his investigators had been threatened and strong-armed by a rogue’s army of dangerous characters. But Bobby had developed a reckless sense of bravado, a sense of Kennedy invincibility that his enemies found impressive even as they discussed his demise. You had to hand it to the son of a bitch, Hoffa told Partin—he had guts for strutting around unprotected. But no one was invulnerable, the Kennedy brothers’ enemies realized. Not even the two most powerful men in the country.

  Bobby Kennedy’s anti-crime crusade drew lethal fury that September from two other ominous sources: Carlos Marcello, the powerful Mafia godfather whose dominion included New Orleans and Dallas, and his close ally Santo Trafficante, the Florida crime lord who had joined forces with the CIA in its original murder plot against Castro. Both Mafia bosses had close financial ties with Hoffa, who had turned the Teamsters’ pension fund into a piggy bank for the mob. Meeting with prospective business partners at his swampland farm on the west banks of the Mississippi that month, Marcello—like Hoffa, the target of relentless Justice Department pursuit—flew into a rage at the mention of Bobby Kennedy’s attempts to deport him. But it was Bobby’s brother at whom the Mafia kingpin took aim: “You know what they say in Sicily: If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head. The dog will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail.” Marcello told his visitors that he had made up his mind that President Kennedy had to go, but his assassination had to be arranged in such a way that a “nut” would be set up to take the blame—“the way they do in Sicily.”

  The same month, during a meeting with a wealthy Cuban exile named Jose Aleman at Miami’s Scott Bryant Hotel, Trafficante bitterly complained about the Kennedy campaign against his business associate Hoffa and assured Aleman that President Kennedy’s days were numbered. “Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.”

  Trafficante had operated the wildly lucrative sin franchise in pre-Castro Havana on behalf of all the Mafia families until he was imprisoned by the new regime, which threatened to stand him in front of a firing squad before his crime associates bribed Cuban officials to release him. (According to some reports, Jack Ruby was one of the mob couriers who delivered the bribe money to Havana.) Trafficante’s lawyer, Frank Ragano, estimated that his client lost over $20 million when the revolutionary government seized the Mafia’s casinos, clubs, and hotels. Trafficante told his lawyer that the Kennedys’ “soft” policies towards the Castro regime ensured that the Mafia would never reclaim its tropical assets.

  Bobby’s reputation as a scourge of the underworld defined his early political career. But years later, in summer 1975, Richard Helms and his former—but still steadfast—CIA lieutenant, Sam Halpern, tried to demolish this image. While testifying before the Church Committee, the two CIA veterans told an eye-popping story—one that seemed to turn the image of Bobby Kennedy as an anti-crime crusader on its head. According to Helms and Halpern, Robert Kennedy had ordered the CIA to help him establish contacts with the Mafia, to determine if the mob’s old network in Cuba could be reactivated to wor
k against, and even kill, Castro. In response to Kennedy’s order, Helms and Halpern testified, they had enlisted Charles Ford, the same agent used to squelch Bobby’s illusory plan to cut out the CIA on Cuba. Helms and Halpern claimed that Ford was asked to serve as Kennedy’s intermediary with the underworld—under the appropriate-sounding alias “Rocky Siscalini.”

  Following the Senate hearings, Halpern continued to circulate this story to the media, including journalist Seymour Hersh, who featured it in his book, The Dark Side of Camelot. “I don’t know how Bobby Kennedy squared that in his own mind,” Halpern told Hersh. “On the one hand, he allegedly was going after the Mafia to destroy them; on the other, he was using them for information about Cuba. Maybe it was a deal he made with them. Who knows?”

  Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist whose exposés of Vietnam war atrocities and U.S. military abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, among other investigative feats, have won him wide respect. But he was led astray on The Dark Side of Camelot by his strong reliance on untrustworthy sources like Halpern—a man who worked so diligently during his life to undermine the Kennedys’ image and shield the CIA’s that it seemed this was his intelligence mission. In a frank interview with New York magazine in 2005, Hersh acknowledged that his journalism is deeply dependent on his sources in the national security world: “I’m not working with guys outside the system,” he said. “You do understand that, don’t you? I’m not outside the system in what I do. I’m really not.” Never were the limitations of this journalistic practice more evident than in his book about the Kennedys. As one critic wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Hersh’s book “turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy.”

  The explosive story about RFK and Charles Ford was difficult to check out because both men were dead. And Halpern could provide Hersh with no conclusive evidence. But it turns out that Ford left behind his own statement on the subject, a document that apparently escaped Hersh’s attention because it was declassified a year after his book was published—and the document directly contradicts the Helms and Halpern story. On September 19, 1975, Ford wrote a confidential memorandum for the CIA’s internal record, detailing what he had told Church Committee investigators when they came calling on him the day before. “The main, if not the only, point of concern to the [Senate] investigators is whether I was directed to sally forth and initiate contact with members of the underworld in the U.S. and who directed me to do so,” wrote Ford. “Once again, I explained that my job was broader than this by a long shot, and that I was never directed to take the initiative in establishing contacts with the underworld.” Ford added that the investigators were very interested in his meetings with Attorney General Kennedy, but he explained to them that these meetings focused on the efforts of a Cuban exile group to foment an anti-Castro uprising, not on Mafia assassination plots. (Ford was probably referring here to his September 1962 meetings with Kennedy to throw water on the quixotic plan to topple Castro without the CIA’s involvement.)

  The Ford memo strongly suggests that Helms and Halpern fabricated their story about Bobby Kennedy and the Mafia. It was not Bobby Kennedy who was crawling about in the underworld, but the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials like Helms and Halpern tried to deflect public outrage over their unseemly collusion by pinning the blame on the late attorney general. It was a particularly scurrilous smear job because Kennedy had literally risked his life to fight the Mafia. Kennedy’s primary motivation in taking on organized crime was his fear that it was becoming intertwined with government and business and threatening to corrupt the social contract that held together American democracy. There was no more shocking example of this than the CIA-Mafia merger. Kennedy’s anti-crime crusade threatened not just the lucrative fiefdoms of men like Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante, but shady power alliances like the one that targeted Castro. No federal official had ever poked so sharply at such a hornets’ nest of dangerous adversaries. As Hoffa told Partin during his murderous musings that summer day, Bobby Kennedy “has so many enemies now they wouldn’t know who had done it.”

  Even before he became attorney general, Kennedy knew how entwined American power was becoming with criminal forces. He learned, as the ruddy-cheeked, young chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, when a Mafia man brought in for questioning defiantly told him, “You can’t touch me. I’ve got immunity.” When Bobby asked him, “Who gave you immunity?” the gangster replied, “The CIA. I’m working for them, but I can’t talk about it. Top secret.” When Kennedy checked out the gangster’s story, he was sickened to find out it was true.

  The CIA—and its predecessor, the OSS—had been using the Mafia to do their dirty work since World War II, when the government enlisted mob bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to help guard against enemy sabotage in the New York harbor and to supply intelligence from their contacts in Italy. Later, in postwar Italy, U.S. intelligence used Luciano and his notorious colleague Vito Genovese to help eliminate the growing Communist threat there.

  Kennedy learned too about the merger of the underworld and overworld when distinguished senators and governors came before his committee to argue on behalf of organized crime despots, and when executives from Fortune 500 companies sheepishly testified about the deals they cut with burly gangsters to assure labor peace.

  And Robert Kennedy learned as he was digging into the dirty history of racketeering in America, when he came across the name of his very own father. It was the buccaneering enterprise of Joseph P. Kennedy that had made possible his political career and that of his brother. His father’s aggressive climb to wealth and power illustrated with painful clarity for the younger Kennedy how ambitious families sprouting towards the sun often begin their journeys in the muck.

  BOBBY KENNEDY CAME FACE to face with a world that few young men of his class and privilege had to confront when he became chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. It was fall 1956 and he was just twenty-nine years old. His work on the Senate panel, better known as the Rackets Committee or the McClellan Committee after the Arkansas Democrat who chaired it, took Bobby down a hole into an underworld of cold-blooded killers, union thugs, crooked politicians, brothel queens, and pinstriped executives with tawdry secrets. It also introduced him to brave labor reformers, incorruptible cops and judges, and heroic newspaper reporters. With his romantic and religious frame of mind, Kennedy saw this colorful tableaux of human greed and turmoil as not just a struggle over who would control the nation’s economy, but a battle for the country’s very soul. He had missed World War II, where his older brothers had proved their courage, but this would become Bobby’s war.

  Armed with a staff of thirty-five investigators, forty-five accountants, twenty stenographers, and assorted clerks—more than a hundred people in all—Kennedy ran the biggest juggernaut of federal scrutiny on Capitol Hill. It was a restless operation. The young counsel and his investigators did not remain hunkered down in their warren of offices below the street floor of the old Senate Office Building. They roamed the country in search of malefactors, as well as the honest witnesses and incriminating evidence they needed to put them away.

  On a tip from a prisoner at Joliet, Bobby found himself one day digging in an Illinois farm field for the body of a newspaperwoman who the convict said had been killed by local mobsters. With Kennedy was one of his committee investigators, Jim McShane, the pug-faced former New York cop who would be called upon by Kennedy in many dire circumstances in the years to come. The two men shoveled away without finding anything, urged on by the con, who insisted he was telling the truth: “May I have syphilis of the eyes, and may my mother be a whore, if she isn’t buried here,” he declared. Kennedy later wryly observed that he knew little “about the man’s mother or his eyes, but Jim McShane and I both knew, after hours of digging, that the woman’s body was not there.” When the angry farmer whose fields were being ex
cavated by the Senate investigators suddenly appeared with his three corn-fed sons, that settled it—Kennedy and McShane beat a hasty retreat.

  On other occasions, McShane and his fellow investigators had guns drawn on them. Kennedy was offered bribes. A man mistaken for a Kennedy spy by Teamster goons in Detroit was hung out a tenth floor window of the union building by his heels. But the reform machine chugged forward, unearthing hundreds of eye-opening tales of corruption, violence, and abuse of power. Stories about men who were killed or savagely beaten or driven to suicide after standing up to tyrants like Hoffa. Men who had acid thrown in their faces, or cucumbers shoved all the way into their intestines. Walter Sheridan—the quiet, friendly investigator whose appearance Bobby described as “almost angelic”—would impress his boss by solving the mystery of an Indianapolis cab company owner who had vanished. There was nothing left of him to be found. Nothing but the records of the man’s final phone calls, which his wife handed over to the sweet-faced Sheridan when he knocked on her door. The calls were to Jimmy Hoffa and his henchmen.

  Kennedy brought the characters at the heart of these lurid stories parading into the grand, dignified setting of the old Senate building’s Caucus Room, so America could see the rot and brutality that often lay beneath the jeweled thrones of power. It was the same ornate Beaux Arts room where other historic investigations had unfolded, including the probes into the Titanic disaster and the Teapot Dome scandal. Crystal chandeliers hung from the room’s high, richly detailed ceilings; carved eagles adorned its wooden benches. It was here, Kennedy noted, “where the star of Senator Joseph McCarthy rose and fell.” The young Senate counsel had once been drawn to the McCarthy crusade, but now he had discovered an “enemy within” that he believed was more threatening to the American way of life and more deserving of his fury than communism.