by Jim Marrs
Debilitated by strokes as well as advancing Alzheimer’s, Marcello died in March 1993.
Conflict over who would lead the American crime syndicate was resolved on October 25, 1957, when two gunmen shot Albert Anastasia out of a barber’s chair in New York. Earlier that year, Frank Costello, Luciano’s successor, was shot while entering his Manhattan apartment. He lived but was charged with tax evasion after a note was found on him listing receipts from the recently built Tropicana Hotel in developing Las Vegas. Costello retired from the rackets.
Three weeks after Anastasia’s death, Vito Genovese called a mob conference, held at the country estate of a Mafia lieutenant near the small town of Apalachin in upstate New York. On hand was a collection of almost every leader of the crime syndicate. The purpose of the meeting, according to later testimony of some of those present, was to demand that Genovese be named “boss of all bosses” after he justified the attacks on Costello and Anastasia. One argument presented was that Anastasia had tried to move in on the Cuban gambling operations of Santos Trafficante Jr. of Florida.
But before business could be settled, the police arrived, tipped off by an alert New York State Police sergeant who had become suspicious of all the big black cars with out-of-state license plates. Police roadblocks and searches of surrounding woods netted fifty-nine of the crime leaders, most of whom claimed they had come to visit a sick friend. These included Joe Bonanno, Joseph Magliocco, Carlo Gambino, Carmine Lombardozzi, John Bonventre, and Joseph Profaci from New York; Anthony Magaddino from Niagara Falls; Vito Genovese, Gerardo Catena, Joseph Ida, and Frank Majuri from New Jersey; Frank DeSimone from California; Joe Civello from Dallas; and Trafficante. Carlos Marcello had wisely sent a surrogate while others, such as Sam Giancana of Chicago, escaped.
It was the first public look at organized crime since the Kefauver Committee hearings in the early 1950s. One of those aware of the serious threat posed by the mob’s syndicate was young attorney Robert Kennedy, who after making a nationwide fact-finding tour in 1956 and 1957 became most concerned with the mob’s takeover of labor unions.
On January 30, 1957, the US Senate unanimously created the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field—which became known as the McClellan Committee after its chairman, senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas. The committee’s chief counsel was Robert F. Kennedy. One member of the McClellan Committee was a young senator from Boston, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy later said his brother wanted him on the committee to keep it from being overloaded with conservative, antilabor people.
Both Kennedys were highly active in the committee’s work, which first took on the corrupt leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Dave Beck. Following the committee’s investigation, Beck was convicted in a state court of larceny and then convicted of tax evasion in federal court. Beck went to prison in 1957. President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon in May 1975.
With Beck gone, the presidency of the Teamsters Union went to Jimmy Hoffa. Even before Hoffa could be brought before the McClellan Committee, he was indicted for attempting to bribe commission attorney John Cye Cheasty.
At his trial, the FBI showed a film of the men conversing and Hoffa being arrested right after the money was exchanged. However, the jury of eight blacks and four whites was more impressed with Hoffa’s defense attorney, Edward Bennett Williams (owner of the Washington Redskins), as well as World Heavyweight Champion boxer Joe Louis, who embraced Hoffa while visiting the court.
Hoffa went free to testify before the McClellan Committee. But Hoffa said he had a faulty memory when it came to most questions concerning his association with underworld characters, such as Paul Dorfman. Dorfman was described by the McClellan Committee as “an associate of Chicago mobsters and the head of a local of the Waste Material Handlers Union.” Dorfman also was connected to a young Jack Ruby, the man who silenced Lee Harvey Oswald.
Dorfman’s stepson, Allen Dorfman, was to play a major role in Hoffa loans to the underworld using the Teamsters’ Central States Health and Welfare Fund as well as the Pension Fund. Today these are collectively known as the Central States Funds.
In 1951, Hoffa persuaded the welfare fund’s two trustees—one of whom was Hoffa’s successor, Frank Fitzsimmons—to place the fund with a newly formed branch of Union Casualty Agency. Union Casualty was owned by Paul Dorfman’s stepson, Allen, and the elder Dorfman’s wife, Rose.
Later Hoffa also sent the Central States Pension Fund to the Dorfman-controlled agency. These two funds made up 90 percent of the company’s contracts, according to author Dan Moldea.
Veteran mob observers have established the close ties between Hoffa and two other underworld chieftains—Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante Jr.
Santos Trafficante and Cuba
During the mid-1950s, with gunfire punctuating internal mob leadership disputes in New York and various government panels revealing the extent of organized crime in the United States, crime bosses began to look south for relief.
As early as 1933, the mob’s financial wizard, Meyer Lansky, had obtained gambling concessions in Cuba, located just ninety miles off the Florida coast. Lansky had originally visited Cuba seeking molasses to make rum but discovered a suitable political climate for gambling operations. Befriending the self-proclaimed dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, Lansky soon opened several casinos. But World War II brought a halt to his plans for turning the island into a haven for gamblers. There simply weren’t enough planes and boats available to make the project profitable.
In 1944, the Cuban economy was sagging and Batista was forced to make concessions to his political opponents, which included procommunists. According to investigative reporter Howard Kohn, the Office of Naval Intelligence—already in contact with Lucky Luciano through Lansky—asked Lansky to pressure Batista into stepping down. On Lansky’s urging, Batista called an election, was defeated, and left Cuba for an eight-year exile in Florida.
On March 10, 1952, Batista returned to Cuba and seized power in a bloodless military coup. Reportedly, it was large amounts of money Lansky placed in numbered Swiss bank accounts that convinced Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarras not to resist Batista’s comeback.
Under Lansky’s manipulation, Batista’s government agreed to match investments in Cuba dollar for dollar plus grant a gambling license to any establishment worth more than $1 million. Soon the island’s economy was booming as hotels and casinos were quickly built. Lansky built the Hotel Nacional, whose pit boss was his brother, Jake. He and other associates had interest in the Sevilla Biltmore and the Havana Hilton. Lansky himself built the $14 million Hotel Havana Riviera, which was run by Dino and Eddie Cellini, organized-crime figures from Ohio.
But Lansky, a Jew, still was not considered an official member of the Italian Mafia–dominated American crime syndicate. Organized-crime authority G. Robert Blakey wrote, “The undisputed Mafia gambling boss in Havana was Santos Trafficante, Jr.”
When Trafficante Sr. died in 1954, his family crime business—mostly narcotics trafficking and gambling—went to his namesake. By the late 1950s, Trafficante Jr. was well situated in Cuba, owning substantial interest in the Sans Souci, a renowned nightspot partly managed by a Trafficante associate, John Roselli, later a central figure in the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro.
Both Trafficante and Lansky also were part owners of the Tropicana Casino in Havana, which was managed by former Dallas gambler Lewis McWillie, the “idol” of Jack Ruby.
In Cuba, Meyer Lansky and associate Bugsy Siegel used the same tactics they had used successfully in 1945 when they turned a dusty parcel of Nevada desert into the Las Vegas strip—flying in high rollers to stay at their hotel-casinos. In reviewing the Havana operations during those years, Blakey wrote, “Havana, in short, was a full-service vice capital, owned and operated by the Mob.”
Other men who had gambling interests in Cuba during this time were connected to Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Two New York underworld figures a
llied with the Tommy Lucchese family, Salvatore Granello and James Plumeri, were part owners of a Havana racetrack and a large casino. Granello and Plumeri also helped Teamster officials get Miami Local 320 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters started, according to Dan Moldea, author of The Hoffa Wars. Moldea also wrote that at the time Granello and Plumeri were splitting kickbacks with Hoffa on loans made through the Central States Pension Fund.
One high-placed guest in Cuba at the time was Congressman Richard Nixon, who made frequent trips to the island, visiting both President Batista and the casinos. According to Nixon biographer Earl Mazo, Nixon visited Cuba as early as 1940 to consider “the possibilities of establishing law or business connections in Havana.”
But the glamorous nightlife of Havana came to an abrupt end on New Year’s Day 1959, when Fidel Castro entered the city and proclaimed a new Cuban revolution. Both Batista and Lansky fled Cuba that same day. Lansky later lamented that he caught one of the last planes leaving Havana and was forced to leave behind $17 million in cash that had been earmarked for his various partners via Swiss bank accounts.
Jake Lansky, left behind to hold together his brother’s gambling and narcotics operations, was jailed by Castro along with Santos Trafficante. Castro loudly proclaimed, “I’m going to run all these fascist mobsters, all these American gangsters, out of Cuba. I’m going to nationalize everything. Cuba for Cubans!”
By 1960, Castro had made good on his threat. He had deported all syndicate members, closed the whorehouses and casinos, and shut down the drug labs.
Both the crime syndicate and some American government officials were appalled at this turn of events. The CIA particularly wanted something done since, according to agency sources quoted by journalist Howard Kohn, the agency had used the underworld’s Havana casinos to hide payments to the crime figures it sometimes employed. Thus the idea of invading Cuba may have been born. A murky alliance developed between the CIA, the crime syndicate, the US military, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and this alliance produced the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Four ex–casino bosses—including Hoffa associates Salvatore Granello and James Plumeri—even supplied the CIA with intelligence reports gathered from trusted Cuban contacts.
Along with the plans to invade Cuba, there were concurrent schemes to assassinate Castro. Involved in these plots were Trafficante, Frank Sturgis, Robert Maheu (the ex-FBI man who was liaison between the CIA and the Mafia and later became manager of the Howard Hughes empire), and two Mafia chiefs, John Roselli and Sam “Momo” Giancana.
With the failure of the invasion, the mob joined with the CIA, the military, and the Cuban exiles in placing the blame squarely on President John F. Kennedy.
Although mob gambling activity quickly shifted to Las Vegas and the Bahamas, crime leaders did not forget who had cost them their Havana “vice capital.”
According to evidence gathered by House Select Committee on Assassinations, Trafficante was in touch with a wealthy Cuban exile living in Miami named Jose Aleman. Trafficante had offered to arrange a million-dollar loan for Aleman from the Teamsters Union and had “already been cleared by Jimmy Hoffa himself.” Aleman said he met with Trafficante at Miami’s Scott-Bryant Hotel in September 1962, and the talk turned to Hoffa. According to Aleman, Trafficante brought the conversation around to President Kennedy, saying, “Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble and he will get what is coming to him.”
Aleman said when he disagreed, saying Kennedy was doing a good job and probably would be reelected, Trafficante replied, “You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He’s going to be hit.” Later Aleman said Trafficante “made it clear” he was not guessing and even gave “the distinct impression that Hoffa was to be principally involved in the elimination of Kennedy.”
Unknown to Trafficante, Aleman was an informant for the FBI at the time of this alleged conversation. He promptly reported what he had heard to the bureau but said FBI officials would not listen or take him seriously. In 1978, long after JFK’s successful assassination when Aleman testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, his story became vague. He said perhaps Trafficante meant Kennedy was going to be “hit” by a lot of Republican votes in 1964. Aleman also admitted he was “very much concerned about my safety.”
Jimmy Hoffa survived the McClellan Committee hearings. But it was the start of a personal war between two of the nation’s most powerful men—Bobby Kennedy and the Teamster leader.
The War on Hoffa
James Riddle Hoffa was born on February 14, 1913, in Brazil, Indiana. After the death of his father when he was seven, young Hoffa moved to Detroit with his mother, brother, and two sisters.
By 1932, Hoffa was already involved in the union movement. Angered over low pay and working conditions at the Kroger Food Company, Hoffa helped organize a work stoppage. After several days of negotiation, the company signed a one-page contract. It was the start of a one-company union and was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. By the mid-1930s, Hoffa’s fledgling union was absorbed by bigger organizations. After being fired by Kroger, he joined Detroit Teamsters Joint Council 43 as an organizer and negotiator.
In the early 1930s, Hoffa had a love affair with Sylvia Pigano, a woman with family connections to organized-crime figures. This was Hoffa’s introduction to the underworld, which over the years became an invaluable source of support. From that point on Hoffa’s rise to the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters continued unabated. He walked a thin line, maintaining contacts with mobsters on one hand and presenting the image of a respectable labor leader on the other.
In 1957, fresh from his victory in exposing Teamster president Dave Beck’s embezzlement of union money, McClellan Committee chief counsel Robert Kennedy turned his sights on Beck’s successor, Jimmy Hoffa. After the committee hearings, Hoffa was acquitted on charges of wiretapping and perjury. He was living a charmed life, but his hatred for Kennedy was increasing.
And the feeling was mutual. Robert Kennedy voiced concern over blackmail by organized crime. If the mob so desired, it could have pressured Hoffa into calling a nationwide Teamsters strike that could have disrupted the entire country. For the Kennedys, this was an intolerable situation.
When the election year of 1960 arrived, Hoffa knew which side he had to be on. He and the Teamsters threw their support behind Richard Nixon. In fact, Edward Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and later a government informant, revealed that Hoffa met with Carlos Marcello to raise money for Nixon.
But money wasn’t enough. Nixon lost and Robert Kennedy became attorney general. After the election, Hoffa was quoted as saying, “Nobody had to tell me that he was really going to go after my scalp now.”
In 1958, US attorney general William P. Rogers had formed a special group on organized crime to investigate Vito Genevese’s Appalachian meeting of mob bosses. Following that precedent, Attorney General Kennedy organized a special unit within the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section to investigate the Teamsters Union. Headed by Walter Sheridan, who had been an investigator for the McClellan Committee, the unit became known as the “Get Hoffa Squad.” The squad managed to bring 201 indictments and 126 convictions against Teamster officials.
On May 18, 1962, Hoffa was indicted for receiving $1 million in illegal payments through the Test Fleet Corporation, a trucking company set up under his wife’s name. His trial ended in a hung jury, but Hoffa was indicted along with five others for jury tampering on May 9, 1963. On June 4, 1963, Hoffa was indicted for fraudulently obtaining $20 million in loans from the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund.
Earlier, in September 1962—about the same time that Marcello and Trafficante had hinted that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated—Ed Partin, the Teamster official–turned–informant, went to Louisiana law-enforcement officials about a threat by Hoffa. Partin believed that Hoffa thought Partin was closely associated with Marcello since
he lived in Louisiana and spoke openly with him. Visiting in Hoffa’s Washington office in August 1962, Partin said Hoffa began talking about plans to kill Robert Kennedy. Thinking out loud, Hoffa discussed two schemes. One involved firebombing Hickory Hill, Kennedy’s Virginia estate. The second involved shooting Kennedy with a rifle while he rode in an open car.
Partin’s story was passed along to Kennedy aides, who were highly skeptical until an FBI lie detector test indicated Partin was telling the truth and had actually obtained explosives to deliver to Hoffa.
It was in the middle of Hoffa’s jury-tampering case that President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Upon learning that the flags were flying at half-mast at Teamster headquarters in Washington, Hoffa admonished officials there, shouting, “Why the hell did you do that for him? Who the hell is he?” On the day Ruby murdered Oswald, Hoffa told a Nashville reporter, “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”
In the jury-tampering and the fraudulent-loan cases Hoffa was convicted, fined, and imprisoned. He received executive clemency from President Richard Nixon on December 23, 1971, without the customary consultation with the sentencing judge. However, the clemency contained a provision prohibiting Hoffa from seeking office in the union. Hoffa filed suit to have the restriction nullified and began making overtures to Teamster rank and file. Ironically, he pledged that if elected Teamster president in 1976, he would purge the union of all mob influence.
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa was to meet Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official and reputed member of the crime syndicate. Hoffa disappeared from a Detroit restaurant parking lot and was finally declared dead in 1982. To this date, neither his body nor his killer has been found.
One of the biggest boosts to Robert Kennedy’s anticrime campaign began in June 1962, when an underworld tough serving a prison term in Atlanta for narcotics murdered a fellow inmate with an iron pipe. The convict’s name was Joseph Valachi and he killed the man, believing him to be an assassin sent by his longtime boss and cellmate, Vito Genovese. Genovese had slipped back into the United States after World War II to resume his narcotics operations.
