by Larry Tye
Jack knew that what he was proposing for Bobby was unprecedented and perhaps preposterous. Newly elected presidents often kept their campaign managers around to help with the political challenges of running the country, but the tradition was to make them postmaster general, not attorney general. Eisenhower broke the pattern in 1953 by naming Herbert Brownell, Jr., one of his key political operatives, as attorney general, but that president kept his brother Milton in the low-key role of special ambassador. Woodrow Wilson had thought about making his only brother a postmaster in Nashville in 1913, but decided “it would be a very serious mistake both for you and for me.” The whole government would eventually come around to that thinking, and in 1967 Congress passed and the president signed an antinepotism statute that banned such hiring.
But neither Eisenhower nor Wilson had been as brazen as Jack in running for president as an untested leader. And neither had a brother as artful as Bobby. The Kennedys believed that together, they could take the sting out of the anticipated charge of nepotism. They took the first step a full month before they made the appointment official, during a round of golf in Palm Beach. Jack let slip the idea of Bobby’s running the Justice Department to William H. Lawrence, the same friendly reporter at The New York Times to whom they had leaked embarrassing information on Hubert Humphrey’s draft records. An even chummier journalist, Joseph Alsop, had opined three weeks before that “it seems both ridiculous and unjust that Robert Kennedy’s relationship to John F. Kennedy should be widely thought to debar him for the kind of post he could otherwise count on.” Those trial balloons served two political purposes: to see whether appointing Bobby attorney general would generate a firestorm of protest (it didn’t), and to minimize the shock by gently letting the public in on the secret. (It worked so well that, the day Bobby and Jack shook hands over breakfast, they again leaked to Lawrence that there would be a formal announcement the next day.)
A dash of Kennedy wit helped, too. Asked by Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee how he would announce the appointment, a straight-faced JFK said, “I think I’ll open the front door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2:00 A.M., look up and down the street, and, if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’ ” Just before he did make it official, Jack advised Bobby, “Don’t smile too much or they’ll think we’re happy about the appointment.” A week later, during a talk in Washington, the newly inaugurated president joked, “I don’t see anything wrong with getting [Bobby] a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.” Bobby had heard the line before and didn’t see the humor. “You’ve got to make fun of yourself in politics,” Jack lectured him. Bobby: “You weren’t making fun of yourself. You were making fun of me.”
Bobby had never left anything to chance as a congressional staffer or campaign manager, and he took the same scrupulous approach in preparing for the anticipated battle over his appointment. A Kennedy staffer scoured the records of all past attorneys general to see if any had entered office with less legal experience than RFK, who had never actually tried a case in a court of law. “Even though I went back to the very, very beginning, I could find no one who hadn’t practiced law,” recalled John Reilly, who worked on JFK’s campaign and would oversee the U.S. attorneys in Bobby’s Justice Department. “But we finally came up with the fact—or I finally came up with the fact—that Harry M. Daugherty, who was attorney general during the Teapot Dome scandal, had practiced law for thirty-some-odd years, so that we decided that experience wasn’t much of a qualification anyhow. So at the time of the hearing we planted that question with [Senator] Phil Hart.”
Those preparations paid off especially with political reporters, who after eight dull years under Eisenhower took delight in the Kennedy brothers’ whimsy and boldness. Analysts and editorial writers were less easily charmed. Wallace Carroll wrote in The New York Times that Bobby’s appointment “struck the first jarring note today in five weeks of masterly political orchestration.” Legal scholars registered their own doubts, with the Yale law professor Alexander Bickel laying out in The New Republic a blistering critique of Bobby’s record as a Senate investigator. “Mr. Kennedy appears to find congenial the role of prosecutor, judge and jury, all consolidated in his one efficient person,” Bickel concluded. “On the record, Robert F. Kennedy is not fit for the office.”
That denunciation might have undone other nominees, but not Bobby, who had spent his life purposefully defying the low expectations others had of him. While many of the senators whose confirmation he needed had concerns at the outset of his hearings, there was but one dissenter in the end. That overwhelming endorsement may have come courtesy of Bobby’s least favorite person in the new administration, Lyndon Johnson. Senator Richard Russell, a powerful conservative from Georgia, had secured enough votes to kill the nomination and planned to use them, said Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Senate and LBJ’s longtime lieutenant. “Johnson called and said…‘This will be the most humiliating defeat I, as Vice President, could suffer if I don’t have enough influence in the Senate to confirm the President’s nominee,’ ” remembered Baker, who loathed RFK as much as LBJ did. “So I took Senator Russell over to the Secretary of the Senate’s office and I really poured heavy drinks in him. I said, ‘Your best friend and my best friend is pleading with me to talk to you to see if you’ll let us have a voice vote.’ Between my persuasion and the booze, he agreed. That’s the only way he was confirmed. He would have been defeated if there had been a roll-call vote.*1 The Republicans and Southern Democrats had enough votes to defeat Bobby Kennedy to be Attorney General.”
What Russell, Bickel, Carroll, and all the other skeptics failed to see was how much Bobby had grown by then. He was determined to show not just that he was up to the job, but that he could do it better than anyone before. He would exceed even the forecasts of his brother, who at times would have appreciated an attorney general less driven to go wherever the politically embarrassing facts led. Jack had learned during his yearlong presidential campaign just how capable Bobby was, and how resolute, which is why he risked so much in naming him to the trailblazing role at the Department of Justice. As for Bobby, he quickly forgot the to-ing and fro-ing that had brought him there. “Once I had made up my mind,” he wrote, “I was glad it was all behind.”
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BOBBY MIGHT CLAIM that he’d had enough of chasing bad men, but it wasn’t true. Not yet, and never entirely. Tracking down malefactors was what this pseudo-policeman did best and enjoyed most, and it was the only area of law in which he had any expertise when he arrived at the Department of Justice on January 20, 1961. So it became his highest priority in his early days as attorney general. At the Rackets Committee, Bobby had helped educate America about the existence of a Cosa Nostra crime syndicate. But back then he had to rely on the Eisenhower Justice Department to put them behind bars, and he’d been mad as hell at how few ended up there. Now he had a chance to put things right. The mission fit with the way he still viewed the world—in moral absolutes, with good people struggling to root out an enemy that Ethel, with characteristic directness, called the “baddies.”
Frank “Screw” Andrews, a poster-child baddie, entered the world as Frank Joseph Andriola in 1911 in Cincinnati’s Little Italy. He began his career peddling moonshine beer and whiskey to blacks in the West End. As he matured he realized the real money was in the numbers game, known in Little Italy as the “Italian lottery” and in the West End as the “nigger pool.” It ran like today’s lotteries, except that mobsters, rather than the government, managed the buying, selling, and skimming. With help from his brother “Spider” and his nephew “Junior,” Screw expanded across the Ohio River into Newport, Kentucky, a city of thirty thousand where, for the right money, the police refrained from asking embarrassing questions. In Newport, Frank earned his nickname by turning the screws on fellow racketeers, especially the black ones whose numbers businesses he coveted. Only one, Melvin Clark, refused to be intimidated, so Screw killed him. The police,
buying his improbable plea of self-defense, didn’t investigate why Andrews had shot Clark not once but several times.
That history earned Screw a spot on Bobby’s list of America’s top forty racketeers. His vicious numbers operation—and the famously corrupt government in Newport that let it thrive—was just the kind of setup Bobby meant to take down. Known as Sin City, Newport had been servicing Cincinnati’s cravings for vice since the Civil War, when it furnished prostitutes to Union soldiers garrisoned across the river. Local reformers hoped the new attorney general would succeed where others hadn’t. Despite his hesitancy to wade into provincial politics, Bobby dispatched to Kentucky an investigator who convened a grand jury. The Internal Revenue Service planted an informant in Screw’s syndicate, then staged a commando-style raid of his club, uncovering not just illegal slot machines but a safe full of guns and cash. The agents also found evidence that Screw’s gang had rigged the supposedly random selection of winning daily numbers to ensure the smallest payouts. Bobby’s men made sure the public knew about the fix. Lower-level operatives received immunity in return for testifying against kingpins. Finally, eleven months after Kennedy became attorney general, Screw, Spider, Junior, and six of their henchmen were indicted for evading nearly four hundred thousand dollars in gambling excise taxes on their two-million-dollar-a-year numbers caper. They went on trial the following summer, and just when prosecutors were starting to panic about the length of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict: guilty for Screw, Junior, and six of the other seven defendants. Screw was sentenced to five years in prison, and Bobby’s point was made.
Attorneys general had been declaring war on lowlifes like Screw ever since Al Capone ran rampant in Chicago during Prohibition, but finally one was actually waging that war. The organized crime unit that Bobby inherited had seventeen lawyers; he added forty-three. Before Bobby took over, organized-crime lawyers spent 1,963 days in the field and 283 in court. Two years in, those numbers soared to 7,359 and 809. His card file of bad guys had begun with just forty names. By the time he left office he had amassed records, filling two large rooms, on twenty-three hundred triggermen, gangsters, and swindlers. Each file contained the most up-to-date information from the FBI, Secret Service, Internal Revenue Service, Coast Guard, and twenty-three other agencies that gather intelligence. A month after taking over, Bobby summoned to the Justice Department representatives of each essentially autonomous agency and laid down the laws: We need to be as single-minded as the Mafia, so get used to collaborating; criminal enterprises are firmly implanted, so dig up the roots after you chop down the tree; and this war matters to me so, needless to say, it matters to the president. The last dictum went unstated but not unheard.
The only agency that balked was the one that should have been leading the onslaught. For years, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had refused even to acknowledge the existence of a Cosa Nostra. It was one thing to track down Bonnie and Clyde: Lock ’em up or gun ’em down, and close the case. But the Mafia was a web that would take manpower and time to unravel. That meant more corrupt politicians for Hoover to confront, more chance his G-men would be compromised by the underworld’s drugs or money, and more uncomfortable questions about the director’s own relationship with Meyer Lansky and other mobsters. The FBI boss had more important wars to wage, like his long-running crusade against Commies and other subversives. Whatever the reason, the result was that in 1958, when the FBI’s own top crime researcher issued a report on the Mafia’s far-reaching influence, Hoover retrieved and destroyed every last copy, calling the findings “baloney.” A year later the FBI office in New York, the epicenter of mob power, had four hundred agents investigating Communists and only four tracking down racketeers. The director understood that Bobby was demanding change, but he assumed he could stonewall the new attorney general the way he had his predecessors.
Kennedy would not be denied, even by a seasoned infighter and survivor like Hoover. The attorney general was a crusader on a mission, and he was the president’s brother. G. Robert Blakey, a young member of Justice’s Organized Crime Section, witnessed Bobby confronting FBI officials on their inaction: “He said, basically, ‘get off your asses…Get me some evidence so I can prosecute these people.’ The bureau didn’t have anything but newspaper articles in these mob guys’ files.” And it wasn’t just that once. Bobby “pushed, ordered, cajoled and successfully enticed the FBI into the fray so that eventually it was a full-fledged if somewhat eccentric participant in the fight to destroy the syndicates,” said Victor Navasky, author of the most exhaustive review of the Kennedy-era Justice Department. The price Bobby paid, Navasky added, was that while Hoover entered the battle, he did it not as a team player but on self-serving terms. The bureau managed to accrue more resources, more power, and more latitude to use bugs and wiretaps, all of which would come back to haunt the attorney general.
If Hoover was a reluctant convert, IRS commissioner Mortimer Caplin was an evangelist from the first. The IRS had helped bring down Al Capone, ultimately on charges of tax evasion, and Caplin was anxious to bring investigative accounting once again to the war against high-profile lawbreakers. He also grasped, in a way the FBI chief didn’t, that by the early 1960s gangsters and mobsters posed more of a threat to America than did fifth columnists and insurrectionaries. That the anticrime campaign was being marshaled by his old law student, Bobby Kennedy, only increased his resolve. “The tax returns of major racketeers to be identified by the Department of Justice will be subjected to the ‘saturation type’ investigation,” Caplin wrote in a directive issued just after Bobby’s February 1961 interagency conclave. He had already given Jack’s and Bobby’s top aides access to the tax files of Jimmy Hoffa and other primary targets. Now he increased tenfold the number of IRS agents working on crime cases. As a final sign of Caplin’s readiness for battle, he authorized his men to carry guns, something “brand new” that he knew even before he asked had the “blessing” of his former student.
Did this flurry of government action actually pose a serious threat to the Mafia? No question, said Carlos Marcello, boss of the New Orleans crime family. “That fucking Bobby Kennedy is making life miserable for me and my friends.” Another chieftain who felt under siege was Sam “Mooney” Giancana, who started out as Al Capone’s wheelman and ended up running the Chicago mob. Mooney thought he had a deal with Joe Kennedy to leave him alone in return for supposed favors done during the 1960 election, his brother Chuck Giancana wrote, but it soon became clear that “Bobby Kennedy, now ensconced as the attorney general, was orchestrating what would become the largest attack on organized crime in the nation’s history….Mooney came to the conclusion that the man he’d envisioned slaving away behind a desk in some obscure legal office after the election was to be his nemesis.” Every step he took, the feds were there in the shadows. The Chicago don finally got a judge to rule that only one FBI car at a time could stake out his house or follow his pink Cadillac, and that when an FBI foursome tracked him on the golf course there had to be at least one other group between them and the Mob leader’s party.
Bobby himself wanted to be judged by his results, which were impressive but not decisive. The number of indictments of organized-crime figures rose from nineteen the year before he took over to 687 as he was leaving. His conviction rate was close to 90 percent. He and his allies went after the Bonnano family in New York, the Patriarca gang in Rhode Island, and the De Cavalcante operation in New Jersey. In Newport, Kentucky, he took down Screw Andrews and, in the process, helped spur a cleanup that indicted the mayor, councilmen, policemen, and the sheriff. Mooney was right, it was the most relentless attack on organized crime not just then but ever. Still, it didn’t come close to nabbing all the mafiosi on Bobby’s list, and it didn’t get Mooney himself. Once Bobby left office, Organized Crime Section lawyers quickly returned to their old level of productivity, spending half as much time in the field and in court, and demonstrating how difficult it was to institutionalize the war.
T
he Mafia made an easy target, but skeptics wanted to see what the hard-knuckled ex-campaign manager would do when justice intersected with politics. He said all the right things in the first meeting with his assistant attorneys general: “No politics—period. You don’t attend political functions, you don’t speak on political matters, you don’t get involved in any way.” Convincing words, but the department held its collective breath, waiting to see if he could back them up.
In the spring of 1961, the new attorney general faced his first politically sensitive case. Justice Department investigators compiled evidence that J. Vincent Keogh, a judge on the New York Supreme Court, had accepted thirty-five thousand dollars to fix the sentence of a jukebox operator convicted of bankruptcy fraud. The bribery case, however, was not as straightforward as it first appeared. The witnesses against Keogh were the convicted jukebox man and the supposed bagman, neither of whom had anything like the credibility of a member of the judiciary. The alleged payoff wasn’t simply trading money for a lighter sentence, since the case wasn’t Keogh’s, but involved his agreeing to get the judge handling the case to reduce the punishment. Most complicated were the politics. Vincent Keogh didn’t matter to Bobby or the White House, but his brother Eugene, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, had been instrumental in delivering the reluctant New York delegation to JFK in Los Angeles. Eugene was one of “the five people who were most helpful to the president in the election,” Bobby said. Weaknesses in the legal case against Vincent could have let the attorney general off the political hook with Eugene. “If the judge is indicted, even if he is acquitted, his usefulness as a judge will be over,” Bobby cautioned the aides gathered in his office. “I’d hate to have that on my conscience.” JFK, meanwhile, made clear where he stood. “The President asked me if Bobby was going to indict Vincent Keogh,” recalled the attorney general’s new administrative assistant, John Seigenthaler. “I said, ‘I honestly don’t know, but I know that there are some problems.’ And the President said, ‘My God, I hope that he doesn’t.’ ”
