If top Mafia bosses felt double-crossed, their law—the law of the Mob—might demand vengeance.
Chapter 14
The Mob Loses Patience
“Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him… . He is going to be hit.”
—Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, late 1962
Publicly, the Kennedys’ attitude toward organized crime had been uncompromising. In 1956, Robert Kennedy, then only thirty-one and counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, began turning up evidence that gangsters had penetrated the American labor movement. Some unions were already controlled by the Mob. Frightened informants told of massive sums in union funds being diverted into private bank accounts, of known gangsters acting as union officials, of murder and torture inflicted on those who complained or tried to resist.
Typical of the horrors encountered was the following, taken from Robert Kennedy’s account of the inquiry:
There was the union organizer from Los Angeles who had traveled to San Diego to organize jukebox operators. He was told to stay out of San Diego or he would be killed. But he returned to San Diego. He was knocked unconscious. When he regained consciousness the next morning, he was covered with blood and had terrible pains in his stomach. The pains were so intense he was unable to drive back to his home in Los Angeles and stopped at a hospital. There was an emergency operation. The doctors removed from his backside a large cucumber. Later he was told that if he ever returned to San Diego it would be a watermelon. He never went back.
That victim was relatively lucky. Robert Kennedy’s investigation was to turn up scores of killings—by multiple shooting in the face, by electrocution, by slow, excruciating torture.
Early on, the Kennedy inquiry led to the leadership of America’s largest and most powerful union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The Teamsters controlled the truck drivers and warehousemen nationwide, and exercised a direct influence on almost every industrial enterprise. The union was riddled with corruption, starting with its then president, Dave Beck. As the evidence piled up, a special Senate committee was assembled, with then Senator John Kennedy as a member and his brother as chief counsel. Its revelations destroyed Beck as a public figure and eventually saw him convicted and jailed for larceny and income-tax evasion. It was his successor James “Jimmy” Hoffa, though, who became the enduring focus of Kennedy prosecution and a dangerously vicious enemy.
Long before Hoffa became union president, Robert Kennedy was probing his crimes. Kennedy caught Hoffa red-handed giving a bribe to a Senate attorney, and a personal feud began. Hoffa wriggled out of the bribery case and two other charges, for perjury and wiretapping, and made no secret about how he did it. Dealing with a jury, he bragged, was “like shooting fish in a barrel.” Robert Kennedy obsessed about Jimmy Hoffa, and their mutual hatred became a fact of public life. Among Hoffa’s more printable descriptions of Robert Kennedy were “vicious bastard,” “little monster,” and “absolute spoiled brat.” In the Senate Committee hearings, both Kennedy brothers clashed with Hoffa time and again, and one exchange exposed Hoffa’s propensity for violence. Leaving one committee session, Hoffa was heard to mutter, “That S.O.B.—I’ll break his back, the little son of a bitch.” He was talking, very evidently, about Robert Kennedy.
In the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy election campaign, predictably enough, Hoffa threw his powerful union support behind Nixon. As the election approached, the Teamsters leader told a cheering audience of his members, “If it is a question, as Kennedy has said, that he will break Hoffa, then I say to him, he should live so long.”
John Kennedy had appeared to share his brother’s determination to cripple organized crime. Told that the Senate probe would likely implicate a powerful Democrat, Kennedy had replied, “Go back and build the best case against him that you can.” His strenuous efforts in 1959 had helped push a new law governing union elections through both houses of Congress. It was bitterly attacked by union leaders, including Hoffa.
Robert Kennedy was aware from the evidence that he was up against not only union corruption but also the Mafia. He put it more carefully, referring to gangsters who “work in a highly organized fashion and are far more powerful than at any time in the history of the country. They control political figures and threaten whole communities. They have stretched their tentacles of corruption and fear into industries both large and small. They grow stronger every day.”
Just before the 1960 election, the younger Kennedy’s book The Enemy Within, his account of the struggle with Hoffa and the racketeers, became a bestseller. “No group,” he wrote, “better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his chief lieutenants in and out of the union. They have the look of Capone’s men… . They have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jeweled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet smelling perfume.”
Among the names linked to Hoffa were Paul Dorfman and Barney Baker. Robert Kennedy referred to Baker as “Hoffa’s ambassador of violence.” Both, as this book will show, had links to Jack Ruby, the man who was to shoot Lee Oswald after the President’s assassination, ensuring his silence. Robert Kennedy also spent months pursuing Sam Giancana and investigating the chain relationship that extended to Mafia bosses Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante.
In 1961, when his brother appointed him Attorney General, Robert Kennedy made clear that combating organized crime was to be a priority. It was, he said, a “private government … resting on a base of human suffering and moral corrosion.” Until then, with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover virtually denying the Mob’s existence, Kennedy had been merely a thorn in the flesh of that private government. Now that he had power as the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, he used it unrelentingly.
Jimmy Hoffa was a prime target. Within nine months of the election, thirteen grand juries, sixteen lawyers, and thirty FBI agents were concentrating on bringing the Teamsters leaders to justice. Kennedy’s Justice Department became known as the “Get Hoffa Squad.” Hoffa was indicted for taking payoffs from trucking companies, for conspiracy to defraud the trustees of the Teamsters’ pension fund, and for taking illegal payments from an employer in Tennessee.
Hoffa used every trick he knew to get off the hook—including hunting for blackmail material. He would brag years later that he obtained “seamy” information that could have seriously damaged the Kennedys, and both brothers were vulnerable. Hoffa said he had compromising tape recordings of phone conversations between Robert and Marilyn Monroe, and may indeed have had such tapes. Persuasive testimony indicates that both brothers had affairs of one sort or another with the actress.1
It is likely that Hoffa also learned of John Kennedy’s affair with Judith Campbell. At the very time she was seeing Kennedy, Campbell was being cultivated by both Mob boss Sam Giancana and by his henchman Johnny Roselli. Giancana, indeed, eventually became her lover for a while—after the relationship with Kennedy ended, she said. What was in it for Giancana, a man who had his pick of a bevy of women?
In July 1961, infuriated by the FBI surveillance ordered by the President’s brother, Giancana lost his temper. “Fuck J. Edgar Hoover!” he shouted at a group of Chicago FBI agents. “Fuck your super boss, and your super super boss! You know who I mean. I mean the Kennedys! … I know all about the Kennedys … and one of these days we’re going to tell all. Fuck you! One of these days it’ll come out.” For a top mafioso, intimacy with a mistress of the President offered potential access to information, and blackmail possibilities.
Giancana and Robert Kennedy had clashed long since, when the mobster appeared before the McClellan Committee. Thirty-three times, Giancana had pleaded the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional clause under which witnesses may refuse to give answers that might incriminate them. Kennedy had asked Giancana, “Would you tell us, if you have opposition from anybody, that you dispose o
f them by having them stuffed in a trunk? Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?” Sam Giancana just pleaded the Fifth and giggled.
Brutal murder was a tool Giancana readily used. Federal investigators recorded him ordering the killing of opponents as casually as others might order a cup of coffee. The catalog of crimes linked to Giancana ranged from the old Mob method of dumping victims in rivers sealed in cement, to hanging a man on a meat hook for days until he succumbed to electric cattle prod, ice pick, and blowtorch. By this bloody path, Giancana had come to rule his own organized crime empire, an operation with an annual income reckoned at two billion dollars. By mid-1963, however, Robert Kennedy was making it difficult for Giancana to run that empire. He was the subject of blanket surveillance. FBI agents in cars sat outside his house twenty-four hours a day, every day. When Giancana went out golfing, the agents went, too.
In 1960, before the Kennedy presidency, there had been only thirty-five convictions for offenses connected with organized crime. In 1963, there were 288, a figure that doubled in the months that followed. Before the Kennedys came to power, Organized Crime Section lawyers spent 61 days in court and 660 days making investigations. In the final year of the Kennedy presidency, government lawyers fighting organized crime spent 1,081 days in court and 6,177 days in the field. “The end of an era had come,” said Ralph Salerno, New York City’s former chief organized crime investigator, “A tremendous financial empire was being very seriously threatened.” Just how much the crime bosses and their lieutenants felt threatened is clear from wiretap surveillance transcripts.
“See what Kennedy done,” Mob associate Willie Weisburg was tape-recorded saying in 1962 in a conversation with Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno, “With Kennedy, a guy should take a knife, like one of them other guys, and stab and kill the fucker, where he is now. Somebody should kill the fucker. I mean it. This is true. But I tell you something. I hope I get a week’s notice. I’ll kill. Right in the fucking White House. Somebody’s got to get rid of this fucker.” That day, Bruno responded noncommittally. A year later, though, he was talking of giving up and going back to his birthplace in Sicily. On another FBI tape, Bruno could be heard saying despondently, “It is all over for us; I am going to Italy, and you should go, too.”
Others, of course, chose to fight rather than flee. “Organized crime had a practical motive to seek a quick end to the Kennedy administration,” said Congressman—and professional historian— Floyd Fithian, following his service on the House Assassinations Committee. “The picture for organized crime was very bleak indeed. Bleak enough, in my opinion, for individual members of organized crime to seriously consider killing the President. For if John Kennedy no longer sat in the White House, it would only be a matter of time before his brother would leave the Justice Department… . Organized crime had the means to kill John Kennedy. It had a motive. And it had the opportunity.”
The formal findings of the Assassinations Committee echo that assessment. That said, is there evidence that top criminals did plan to kill the President?
Jimmy Hoffa
By mid-1963, justice was catching up with Jimmy Hoffa. Though still managing to stay out of prison, he was now charged with conspiring to fix the jury in the Tennessee case over taking illegal payments from an employer. He would eventually be jailed, for the jury offense and for diverting a million dollars in union funds to his own use. By that time, though, Robert Kennedy would have had little taste for the victory—his brother the President would be dead. There is evidence, however, that—in 1962—Hoffa had planned to retaliate against the Kennedys with violence.
A prime witness in the Tennessee case was Edward Partin, a Teamsters official in Louisiana who gave federal investigators incriminating information on Hoffa. In the summer of 1962, Partin said, at a meeting in Hoffa’s Washington office, the Teamsters leader talked of killing Robert Kennedy. According to Partin, Hoffa said: “Somebody needs to bump that son of a bitch off… . You know I’ve got a rundown on him … his house sits here like this [Hoffa drew with his fingers], and it’s not guarded… . He drives about in a convertible and swims by himself. I’ve got a .270 rifle with a high-power scope on it that shoots a long way without dropping any. It would be easy to get him with that. But I’m leery of it; it’s too obvious.”
Hoffa’s weapon of preference at the time, Partin said, was the bomb. “What I think should be done,” he said, “if I can get hold of these plastic bombs, is to get somebody to throw one in his house and the place’ll burn after it blows up. You know the S.O.B. doesn’t stay up too late.”
The evidence indicated he was telling the truth. According to Partin, who repeated his account to the author, Hoffa asked him to help obtain a suitable “plastic bomb” for the murder plan. Alerted by Partin, a federal investigator named Hawk Daniels listened in as Partin reported back to Hoffa in a telephone call. Daniels, who was later to become a Louisiana state judge, told the author, “Yes, there were two telephone calls, monitored by me. They originated with Partin and terminated with Hoffa on the other end of the line. Partin briefly brought up the subject of the plastic explosives and told Hoffa he had obtained the explosive Hoffa wanted. Hoffa then said, ‘We’ll talk about that later’ and abruptly changed the subject. It was clear from the course of the conversation that he knew very well what Partin was talking about.”
Daniels took Partin’s warning seriously and informed the Justice Department, and law enforcement was apparently alerted to the danger. In early 1963, President Kennedy was to tell his friend Ben Bradlee, the future editor of the Washington Post, that a Hoffa “hoodlum” had been sent to Washington to shoot his brother. According to Partin in his interview with the author, however, the Teamsters leader “intended the death of the President as well as his brother.” Other testimony suggests that Hoffa’s friends in the Mafia shared his murderous intentions.
Santo Trafficante
Expulsion from Cuba and the CIA plots to kill Castro were not the only matters preoccupying Santo Trafficante. The Kennedys had dragged his name into public disrepute even before they came to power. As a result, the world had heard the director of the Miami Crime Commission define Trafficante as “the key figure in the Mafia circles of Tampa, Florida.” Trafficante’s Sicilian family had been discussed in the same breath as a score of gangland killings and narcotics operations. Trafficante saw his friends Hoffa and Giancana being pursued as never before. The writing was on the wall.
In 1962, according to testimony taken by the Assassinations Committee, Trafficante met at Miami’s Scott-Bryant Hotel with a wealthy Cuban exile named José Alemán.2 The subject for discussion was a million-dollar loan Trafficante was arranging, money that was to come from the Teamsters. The loan, he told Alemán, had “been cleared by Jimmy Hoffa himself.”
According to Alemán, in an account he repeated at a 1978 meeting with the author, Trafficante said of the President, “Have you seen how his brother is hitting Hoffa, a man who is a worker, who is not a millionaire, a friend of the blue collars? He doesn’t know that this kind of encounter is very delicate.” (Hoffa was, in fact, a millionaire.) “It is not right what they are doing to Hoffa,” Trafficante went on, “Hoffa is a hardworking man and does not deserve it.”
In an apparent reference to the Mob’s assistance in getting Kennedy elected in 1960, and the prosecutions that had followed notwithstanding, Trafficante went on to say the Kennedys were “not honest. They took graft and they did not keep a bargain… . Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.”
When Alemán disagreed, saying he thought the President was doing a good job and would be reelected to a second term, the Mafia boss replied very quietly. “You don’t understand me,” he said, “Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.”
Trafficante, Alemán was to tell investigators, “made it clear [implicitly] that he was not guessing about the killing; rather he was giving
the impression that he knew Kennedy was going to be killed.” Alemán said he was “given the distinct impression that Hoffa was to be principally involved in the elimination of Kennedy.”
It is clear how Alemán—at the time—interpreted Trafficante’s remark that the President was “going to be hit.” In his talks with investigators and in his interview with the author, it was understood that he believed “hit” meant “murder.” In 1978, however, when Alemán was called to testify in public session before the Assassinations Committee, he proved hesitant and garbled his words. The words “going to be hit,” he suggested at one point, could have meant merely that Trafficante thought the President was going to be defeated in the 1964 election.
Even almost two decades later, Alemán was a frightened man. The author was required to go through a complicated security routine before meeting with him. “I am very much concerned about my safety,” he told the Assassinations Committee, “I sold my business. I been in my home because—I mean—Santo Trafficante can try to do anything at any moment.” The Committee’s Chief Counsel, Robert Blakey, said: “[We] have seen manifested in a witness that fear that is all too often characteristic of people called to testify in matters touching on organized crime. A fear that, frankly, must be recognized as justified.”
At the time of his meeting with Trafficante, Alemán was already an FBI informant. He promptly reported the conversation to his Bureau contacts, he was to say, but they appeared to ignore him. In 1963, as he continued to meet with Trafficante, he told the FBI that he felt “something was going to happen… . I was telling them to be careful.” Only when it was too late, according to Alemán, did the FBI take him seriously. On November 22, 1963, hours after the assassination of the President, agents rushed to see him.3
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 21
