Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Imprisoned, Genovese had heard rumors—apparently false—that Valachi was cooperating with authorities and had given his veteran soldier the “kiss of death.” Soon after, there were three attempts on Valachi’s life. Valachi didn’t want to wait for the fourth. So, believing a man in the prison courtyard was a Genovese killer, Valachi beat him to death. He picked the wrong man.

  With both the government and the mob seeking his life, Valachi decided he had nothing to lose by cooperating with authorities. Over the next year, he provided federal agents with a bonanza of information on the national crime organization known variously as the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra (Our Thing), the Outfit, the Arm, the Syndicate, and so on.

  On September 25, 1963, Valachi took his story to the public, testifying before McClellan’s Senate committee. He presented a wealth of detail about the organization of the mob, its codes, rules, and regulations, and its most important members, including those who sat on the “Commissione,” the board of directors.

  Valachi’s testimony was a great embarrassment to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who it was later learned was meeting with mob bosses at the time. These revelations forced Hoover to grudgingly admit that such a thing as a crime syndicate must exist.

  In his ever-increasing war against organized crime, Kennedy made use of the Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service to go after mob members. John H. Davis, a Kennedy relative and author of The Kennedys, wrote, “Given another five years in office, the Kennedys could conceivably have exterminated the Cosa Nostra entirely, or at least crippled it beyond repair.”

  Crime bosses wanted something done about the Kennedys, especially since they felt double-crossed by the two brothers.

  After all, the connections between crime and the Kennedys reportedly went back a long way. In 1927, a shipment of bootleg whiskey on its way from Ireland to Boston was hijacked in southern New England. Almost the entire guard was killed in the resulting shootout. The hijackers were part of the Luciano-Lansky mob, and it was rumored that Joseph P. Kennedy was involved in the shipment. Kennedy reputedly lost a fortune on the deal and was besieged by widows of the guards seeking financial assistance. Lansky later told biographers he was convinced that Kennedy held a grudge against him personally from that time on and, in fact, had passed the hostility on to his sons.

  But the crime contacts didn’t stop with Prohibition. According to crime author Ovid Damaris, Kennedy would likely have lost the state of Illinois—and possibly the 1960 presidential election—except for overlarge voting in Cook County, home of Chicago mayor Richard Daley. Following the election, Illinois Republicans made an unofficial check of 699 paper ballot precincts in Cook County and turned up enough irregular votes to shift the victory to Richard Nixon. However, demands for an official recount were blocked by Daley’s political machine. And behind that machine was the real power in Chicago at that time—Sam Giancana.

  Momo and His Girlfriends

  Sam Giancana (real name: Momo Salvatore Guingano) was born May 24, 1908, to poor Sicilian immigrants living in Chicago. He grew up in the ghettos and was streetwise at an early age.

  A member of a gang called the 42s, Giancana was first convicted of car theft in 1925. Before he was twenty, he was arrested in connection with three murders, including the slaying of Octavious Granady, a black man who sought election as a committeeman.

  In 1932, Giancana came to the attention of Paul “The Waiter” Ricca (real name: Felice DeLucia), who worked for the notorious Genna brothers. Giancana became the personal driver for Ricca, who took over the Chicago syndicate after the suicide of Frank Nitti in 1943. In 1944, Ricca went to prison for extortion and Anthony Accardo took over as Chicago’s syndicate boss. Giancana became his chauffeur. Giancana helped Accardo consolidate the rackets and gambling operations in Chicago. In 1957, Giancana was one of those who escaped from Vito Genevese’s ill-fated Appalachian meeting.

  In 1960, when Accardo retired after an income tax–evasion indictment, Giancana took over the syndicate. By 1963, Giancana had been arrested sixty times and had served time for burglary, auto theft, and moonshining. He also was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Chicago and in the syndicate.

  After the death of his wife, Angeline, in 1954, Giancana became well-known as a ladies’ man. While visiting Las Vegas in 1960, Giancana met Phyllis McGuire, the youngest of the McGuire Sisters singing group. According to G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, McGuire had run up gambling debts of more than $100,000. Giancana—who along with Accardo secretly owned interest in the Desert Inn and the Stardust casinos in Las Vegas although both were nominally owned by Morris “Moe” Dalitz—made good McGuire’s debt. Soon afterward, Giancana made his Las Vegas headquarters at the nearby Green Gables Ranch, leased by McGuire.

  During the 1960 election, Giancana and other mob leaders apparently thought they had bought some relief from growing government awareness and prosecution of the syndicate, especially considering the close ties between FBI director Hoover, who continued to deny the existence of the Mafia, and mob figures such as Roy Cohn and Frank Costello.

  In addition to meeting mob leader Joseph Bonanno in the winter of 1959, Kennedy reportedly received campaign contributions from the syndicate channeled to his father by singer Frank Sinatra. Yet another conduit for these funds may have been a woman with connections to both Kennedy and Giancana. Ironically, evidence of these contributions to Kennedy were picked up by FBI phone taps that were part of an electronic surveillance program initiated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s war on crime.

  Giancana believed he had a strong hold on Kennedy in the form of a beautiful dark-eyed brunette named Judith Exner. Going then as Judy Campbell, Exner said she was introduced to John F. Kennedy on February 7, 1960, by Frank Sinatra, whom she had been dating. In her 1977 book, My Story, she wrote that both John Kennedy and his brother Edward were sitting with Sinatra in the lounge of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She said she and John Kennedy met again a month later, this time alone and in the Plaza Hotel in New York where, according to Exner, they shared a bed.

  From that point on, Kennedy saw Exner regularly. The pair exchanged telephone calls frequently, including some to the White House, which were noted by the FBI. Why the FBI? The bureau had been monitoring Exner’s activities because of the other man in her life—Chicago mob boss Giancana. Exner claimed she was introduced to Giancana, again by Sinatra, a month after she had become Kennedy’s lover. When Giancana discovered she was seeing the Democratic presidential candidate, he took an immediate and continuing interest in her. Soon Giancana was bedding the paramour of the soon-to-be president.

  In later years, Exner said, “I feel like I was set up to be the courier. I was a perfect choice because I could come and go without notice, and if noticed, no one would’ve believed it anyway.”

  What passed between Kennedy and Giancana in this extraordinary triangle is not known, but in 1988, Exner revealed that she had acted as a courier carrying sealed envelopes for the two men on at least ten occasions. Citing ill health, Exner said she wanted to set the record straight. She said she did not tell about the envelopes during 1975 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee because she feared for her life. She also claimed that she never opened the envelopes or knew their contents. Most of her courier activities took place during the tough 1960 campaign and Exner speculated that her actions may have been connected with attempts to influence the critical West Virginia Democratic primary.

  Once, after being questioned by FBI agents, Exner complained to Kennedy, who by then was president. She claimed Kennedy assured her, “Don’t worry. They won’t do anything to you. And don’t worry about Sam. You know he works for us.”

  Kennedy continued to see Exner until a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover on March 22, 1962. On that date Hoover revealed to the president the extent of Exner’s ties with organized crime and the obvious fact that he knew about Kennedy’s liaison with her. Shortly after Hoover left th
e White House, there was one more call to Judith Exner. No more were ever logged. Kennedy also broke off his friendship with Sinatra, perhaps suspecting that the singer had set him up. Exner died of cancer in 1999.

  But the worst was yet to come. Although still seeing Exner, Giancana became suspicious that Phyllis McGuire was seeing comedian Dan Rowan. Giancana asked his contact with the CIA, Robert Maheu, to place a wiretap on Rowan’s telephone, but a maid discovered the tap and told Rowan, who brought it to the attention of the federal government. The Justice Department initiated proceedings against Maheu for illegal wiretapping.

  In May 1962, a month after the Kennedy-Hoover meeting apparently ended the president’s relationship with Exner, CIA officials asked Robert Kennedy not to prosecute Maheu for fear that Giancana’s role in the incident would become known. They reminded Kennedy that Giancana had played a role in the clandestine effort against Castro’s government.

  Thinking the plots against Castro had been stopped back in 1961, Robert Kennedy was adamant about pressing charges. Then on May 7, CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston finally told Kennedy the whole ugly truth—that the agency had contracted with Giancana and John Roselli to murder Fidel Castro. According to Houston, Kennedy fixed him with a cold look and said, “I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know.”

  From that moment on, both Kennedys must have feared what Sam Giancana might reveal if he chose—the CIA-Mafia murder plots and Giancana’s girl in bed with the president. However, this fear did not stop the younger Kennedy from prosecuting his war against targeted Mafia big shots, including Giancana.

  The FBI haunted Giancana day and night, watching his home and trailing his car. It was most effective. Crime associates wouldn’t come near and Giancana couldn’t go where he pleased. He was isolated.

  In June 1963, Giancana caused chins to drop throughout the underworld by becoming the first mobster ever to go to court seeking an injunction against FBI surveillance. Gaining the injunction required Giancana to swear in court that he was an honest businessman, which in turn would expose him to government cross-examination—an unprecedented hazard for a crime boss. Giancana must have felt confident that the government would not question him too closely. And he was right. To a stunned courtroom, the US attorney announced that the government waived the right to cross-examination. The decision not to question Giancana had come straight from the attorney general.

  But his luck did not hold. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Giancana was deposed as a Mafia boss and went into exile in Mexico. However, the Mexican authorities arrested and deported Giancana back to the United States in mid-1974. Back in Chicago, he became a witness against organized crime. On June 19, 1975, just before he was to testify to a Senate committee about CIA and Mafia assassination plots, his police protection was suddenly called away while someone slipped into his home and shot him in the back, rolled the body over, and shot him six times in the face and throat, a time-honored underworld warning against stool pigeons.

  Back in 1963, even when the opportunity to get Giancana was dropped, the Kennedy Justice Department’s all-out war against the underworld continued. The top crime bosses were incensed. Hadn’t they contributed to Kennedy’s election? Hadn’t they helped steal critical votes? Hadn’t Kennedy dabbled with one of their women? It undoubtedly looked like double-cross to the mob chieftains. And in the underworld the only solution for a double-crosser is elimination—a “hit.”

  On November 22, 1963, Attorney General Kennedy met with about forty of his Organized Crime and Racketeering Section staff. They had been meeting regularly for the past two and a half years.

  One of the young crime busters was G. Robert Blakey, who years later would become chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, created to investigate the murders of John and Robert Kennedy.

  Just before they broke for lunch, the last topic of discussion was Sam Giancana and political corruption in Chicago. The attorney general had just finished lunch at his McLean, Virginia, home when J. Edgar Hoover called to inform him, “The president’s been shot.” Hoover went on to give a fairly full account of Lee Harvey Oswald and his background at a time when the Dallas authorities were not even certain of their suspect’s identity.

  Kennedy never met with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section again. With John F. Kennedy’s death, the war on crime was lost. Organized crime was ecstatic, but on FBI wiretaps, older and wiser mob leaders urged caution in speaking about the assassination. One was overheard explaining, “Police spies will be watching carefully to see what we . . . think and say about this.” Such caution was certainly justified. In the years since the assassination, more and more attention has been drawn to the mob as one of the most likely suspects.

  Beginning with Jack Ruby right on through to David Ferrie and Jim Braden, crime figures keep cropping up throughout the assassination case. There is no question that organized crime had the means, motive, and the opportunity to murder the president. But could the crime bosses have effectively covered their tracks without the help of federal government officials?

  It now appears that the vocal wishes of the crime bosses to eliminate the Kennedys were echoed by certain powerful men in government, finance, and corporate business. In the subtitle of his book The Plot to Kill the President, G. Robert Blakey stated bluntly, “Organized Crime Assassinated J.F.K.” Blakey once told this author:

  One reason no one realized organized crime’s involvement [for many years] was that people never saw before . . . what was going on in Cuba. They failed to see the significance of men like [mobster and “mentor” to Jack Ruby] Lewis McWillie and Russell Matthews [a Dallas gambler friend of Ruby’s who was best man at the wedding of “babushka lady” Beverly Oliver and gangster George McGann] because they did not understand these men’s connections.

  Asked if the fact that organized crime has been connected with the assassination only in recent years might suggest some control within the government on the part of the mob, Blakey replied, “That’s conceivable. . . . I would find that troubling, but no more so than the fact that they killed the man and got away with it.”

  Following his brother’s death, Robert Kennedy appeared to lose interest in prosecuting the mob and the Justice Department staff followed suit. While there must have been motivation to protect his brother’s loving-husband image, the cooling of the attorney general’s passion for fighting the mob likely was due more to the potential revelations of CIA-Mafia assassination plots.

  In fighting what the Kennedys had perceived as a great internal evil, they had once again found themselves confronted by the CIA.

  Agents

  Since the first conflicts of man, there has been a need for intelligence, or information on the activities and purposes of a perceived enemy. In modern America the growth of myriad intelligence organizations over the years has spawned an intelligence industry. Under acronyms such as CIA, DIA, NSA, ONI, NRO, AFOSI, DEA, and NGA, these intelligence power bases have grown far beyond their original charters. Today many thoughtful persons are concerned that these disparate agencies, with the exception of the military, are now bundled together within the Department of Homeland Security.

  The most publicized of these is the Central Intelligence Agency, whose history reveals a government organization that does much more than merely collect and interpret intelligence. In less than ten years after its creation in 1947, this coordinating agency grew to oversee military operations, destabilization efforts in foreign countries, and the assassination of national leaders—aided by an unholy alliance with organized crime.

  At the end of World War II, information on a wide variety of issues and activities was being handled by as many as a dozen various intelligence organizations, including those within the military. President Harry S. Truman and others perceived a need for a coordinating intelligence unit. This need was further reinforced by the Congressional Joint Committee on th
e Pearl Harbor Attack, which concluded that the fragmentation of US intelligence prior to 1941 resulted in the Japanese taking this nation by surprise. The committee recommended a unified intelligence service. Creating such a hybrid would not be easy. None of the existing intelligence units wanted to relinquish power or authority.

  During World War II, one of the organizations that proved most effective against the Axis powers was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by the colorful General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. The OSS not only gathered a remarkable amount of information on the enemy, but also engaged in various covert activities. It was a rough-and-tumble wartime operation that provided the factual background for many a fictional spy novel and movie.

  The OSS was closed down at the end of the war, and on January 22, 1946, just four months later, President Truman signed a directive creating the National Intelligence Authority (NIA), composed of the secretaries of state, war, and navy as well as the president’s personal representative. The operating arm of the NIA was the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), made up of veteran intelligence officers from the participating departments. These men were managed by a director appointed by the president. To limit the CIG, Truman specifically prohibited any clandestine or paramilitary activities. The CIG was to have “no police, law-enforcement or internal-security functions” or conduct “investigations inside the . . . United States.”

  The veteran spies and operatives of the old OSS were soon transferred to this new organization, operating under the designation of the Office of Special Operations (OSO). And these men of action soon wanted more elbow room in their restricted world of intelligence gathering.