by Gus Russo
14. The key source of the information was Marcello’s bagman Jack Halfen. Marcello had been paying Johnson, and many others to kill legislation that threatened slot-machine and wire-service gambling. For ten years, according to Halfen, Johnson was paid $100,000 per year. Johnson’s voting record reflects that Marcello’s money was well spent. Halfen initially gave many of the details (and proof) to award-winning journalist Mike Dorman in his book Payoff. More details were unearthed in my first book, Live by the Sword. Interestingly, when I obtained Halfen’s list of bribe recipients, near the top of the list was Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, the same Tom Clark who, as attorney general, played such a key role in the early parole of the Outfit’s Hollywood seven.
15. Later, during JFK’s presidency, Joe again called on Huie. This time the author was given a briefcase full of cash by the patriarch to deliver to Governor George Wallace, during his segregationist standoff against the Kennedy brothers. According to Huie’s protege, reporter Mike Dorman, Joe thought he could pay Wallace to “just go away.”
17.
The Pinnacle of Power
Paul Ricca may have been incarcerated, but Humphreys and Rosselli likely felt an occasional twinge of envy, so exhausting was the year 1960. While Curly brainstormed Ricca’s and Accardo’s legal problems, cared for his mentally ill daughter and his grandson, entertained his new young wife, and worked the unions on behalf of Joe Kennedy’s kid (all the while dodging the G), Rosselli was himself pulling overtime out West. This was the period when, according to his biographers, Rosselli “came to preside over every facet of business in the gambling capital.”
For years, the original “Dapper Don” had been brokering complex Sin City financing partnerships - successes that left his associates in awe. “If Johnny Rosselli told [pension fund trustee] Allen Dorfman to go shit on the courthouse steps in Carson City,” said legendary Washington influence peddler Fred Black, “he would shit on the courthouse steps.” When not taking over the lucrative ice machine concessions for all Las Vegas, Rosselli was setting up power lunches in New York for Joe Kennedy. He also assumed hidden control of Monte Prosser Productions, which booked talent into the large local casinos and the worldwide Flilton Hotel chain. Billy Wilkerson, publisher and close friend of Rosselli, wrote in his Hollywood Reporter that the Hilton agreement was “the biggest deal in club entertainment history.” At the same time, Rosselli was overseeing the hiring of the critical casino pit crews and backroom counters, many of whom were sending the skim back to Chicago. Johnny summed up his growing prosperity for a friend over a 1960 dinner conversation: “Everything’s nice and cool. There’s money pouring in like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve never seen so much money.” An FBI informant told the Bureau, “Rosselli was the ’power’ in Las Vegas.”
If Rosselli thought the binding on his day planner could not become more strained, he was wrong. The mob’s ambassador was about to take a meeting with a man who wanted to enlist Rosselli’s services in a secret White House-CIA operation so indelicate that its repercussions would be felt for decades and, in the opinion of many, would inadvertently result in the death of Joe Kennedy’s boy Jack three years after its inception. For the next eight months, the planning of the operation would divert much of Rosselli’s precious time from his Vegas work.
The dangerous enterprise commenced in August 1960, when Rosselli received a call from an upperworld friend living in Beverly Hills named Robert Maheu. A West Coast version of Mario Brod, private detective Maheu would later admit that he had a history of handling “delicate matters” for the Central Intelligence Agency. James O’Connell, deputy to the CIA’s director of security, later testified that he had utilized Maheu “in several sensitive covert operations in which he didn’t want to have an Agency or government person get caught.” After a stint with the FBI in the forties, Maheu formed Robert A. Maheu and Associates (RAMA) and quickly negotiated a monthly retainer as a spy for hire with the CIA. Over the years, the Agency employed RAMA to produce and distribute propaganda aimed at destabilizing enemy states or potentates. Maheu himself admitted to running “impossible missions” for the CIA, many of which were brilliantly researched and reported in Jim Hougan’s 1978 book, Spooks.
Although Maheu often told how he had met Rosselli a year earlier in Las Vegas, Rosselli was adamant in FBI debriefs and Senate testimony that their relationship went back to 1955, when the two were introduced by an L.A. insurance executive named Spitzle. Washington detective Joe Shimon corroborated Johnny’s version, although Maheu’s rendition is admittedly more colorful.1
Regardless of the details of their original introduction, by August 1960, Maheu and Rosselli were, by both men’s admissions, good friends. “My children took to calling him ’Uncle Johnny,’ “ wrote Maheu. Sometime in August, Maheu was contacted by the CIA’s office of security. “They asked me if I’d help ’dispose’ of Castro,” Maheu recently recalled. Maheu was informed by his CIA handlers that the assassination would not take place in a vacuum. “The men from the CIA kept me informed of the invasion plan,” Maheu recently said. “The assassination plot was to take place just prior to the invasion, hopefully.” It seems that some senior CIA officers had met Johnny Rosselli at a Maheu clambake the previous spring and were so taken with the Outfit’s emissary that, when word came to the Agency that Castro was to be removed, the officers immediately thought of “Uncle Johnny.” It is not known if Rosselli had spoken to the CIA boys at the clambake as he had to actor George Raft a year earlier in a Los Angeles bar. When Raft had mentioned that he had just returned from Cuba, where Castro was threatening to take over, Rosselli had bragged, “You give me a couple of guys with machine guns, we could go down there and take over the whole island.” Whatever he had told the CIA officers in Maheu’s backyard, Rosselli left a powerful impression.
There is no way of knowing if Maheu and his Agency contacts were aware that the men pushing the hardest for the CIA operation (to be coincident with an all-out invasion of the Cuban island) were Vice President Richard Nixon and his military aide, General Robert Cushman of the marines. However, other CIA luminaries such as Thomas McCoy, deputy to former CIA director William Colby, knew that Nixon was frantic to add a victory over Castro to his campaign rhetoric before the November election. “It was suggested by various people [in the State Department and the CIA],” McCoy said in 1996, “that there was substantial pressure coming from the White House to get the Cuban thing settled by October 1960 so that this would not be an issue that Nixon had to deal with in the ’60 election.” Another senior Agency man, Tracy Barnes, was confronted by an overworked project officer who asked, “What’s the hurry?. . . Why are we working our asses off on this?” As CIA expert Peter Grose noted, “Barnes had the political savvy to understand that the person pressing the urgency was Vice President Nixon.”
Regarding the planned invasion, Nixon himself wrote in Reader’s Digest four years later, “I had been the strongest and most persistent for setting up and supporting such a program.” The go-ahead for Operation Pluto, the code name for the invasion, was given at a National Security Council meeting on March 17, 1960, just prior to the Maheu clambake. At Nixon’s urging, Cushman met with exiled Cuban militarists’ for the express purpose of implementing the assassination of all Cuban leaders when the invasion, later renamed the Bay of Pigs operation, commenced.2
Either the CIA or Nixon, or both, decided that their liaisons with the unpredictable exiles might not produce the wished-for results. Hence, the overture to Rosselli and the Outfit. As noted, the desired partnership with Rosselli was merely a continuation of a long-secret relationship between the feds and the underworld. However, Maheu was initially taken aback by the unorthodox request for a murder, but after his Agency friends likened Castro to Hitler and told Maheu the action was “necessary to protect the country” and to save thousands of lives, the politically naive Maheu agreed to the assignment, even though it might place his own family in jeopardy in the future.3
The CIA sugge
sted Maheu contact the man they had met at the clambake, hoping that his associates were still enraged at Castro for taking over their casinos. The reluctant assassination accessory agreed to play middleman with the Outfit’s Johnny Rosselli, who agreed to meet for lunch at L.A.’s Brown Derby Restaurant. Surrounded by film people pitching scripts, the two discussed a real-life drama that dwarfed those being advanced by the lunching movie moguls. Without telling Rosselli of the larger invasion plan (he says he never told Rosselli of it), Maheu made his pitch. If Maheu was surprised by the government’s request, Rosselli was positively stupefied.
“Me? You want me to get involved with Uncle Sam?” Rosselli asked.4 “The feds are tailing me wherever I go. They go to my shirtmaker to see if I’m buying things with cash. They go to my tailor to see if I’m using cash there. They’re always trying to get something on me. Bob, are you sure you’re talking to the right guy?” Like Maheu, Rosselli was also initially disturbed by the essence of the request, political assassination. However, after Maheu played the Hitler card, the archpatriot Rosselli agreed to come to the aid of his beloved country - gratis. But as with all serious business, his Outfit bosses would first have to approve. Rosselli wanted verification that this was a government-approved murder plot, and Maheu promised to provide the proof. However, Maheu warned, under no circumstances would the G admit to the partnership, or even the operation. “If anyone connects you with the U.S. government, I will deny it,” Maheu intoned. “I will swear you’re off your rocker, you’re lying, you’re trying to save your hide. I’ll swear by everything holy that I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about.”
According to Maheu, the appeal to Rosselli’s nationalism clicked. “If this is for the government,” Johnny finally answered, “It’s the least I can do, because I owe it a lot.” Although Maheu offered the Outfit representative a pot load of money, Rosselli declined the offer. Throughout Rosselli’s long involvement with the G’s assassination project, he not only never accepted a dime’s payment, but refused to have his hefty hotel and travel expenses compensated. Among his friends, who learned of the plots decades later, this gesture was no surprise. “He was one of the most patriotic men I ever knew,” remarked one longtime friend. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a Las Vegas singer and longtime Rosselli friend, remembers what Johnny told her after the plots were publicized years later: “He said it was his patriotic duty.”
Despite the denial of support from the feds and the questionable chances for success, Rosselli agreed to take the notion back to his Chicago bosses, and the two friends agreed to meet in New York on September 14 and, hopefully, proceed from there. In Chicago, Mooney Giancana, more concerned with getting a marker on the G than patriotism, made a jest of Johnny’s softheartedness. Detective Joe Shimon, a mutual friend of Mooney and Johnny’s, recalled, “[Mooney] always used to say, ’Give Johnny a flag and he’ll follow you around the yard.’” Of course, patriotism was not the only emotion that stirred in Rosselli; the partnership had practical business benefits. As Rosselli later told a gangster friend, “If somebody gets in trouble and they want a favor [from the G], we can get it for them. You understand. We’ll have the fucking government by the ass.” The idea of getting leverage on the G appealed to Mooney’s innate gangster style, and he seconded Rosselli’s proposal.
Although the Outfit’s low-profile brain trust was skeptical about the Castro plotting, they apparently gave a tentative go-ahead. But Giancana’s puppet masters were not unaware of the downside to Mooney’s new high-profile friends, Sinatra, the Kennedys, his girlfriends Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith - and now the CIA. On his forays back to Chicago, Mooney Giancana had been crowing about his blossoming relationship with the Kennedys. Columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, who wrote for Esquire, Interview, and other well-known magazines, became close with Giancana as a result of an introduction by Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford. Taki recalled, “Sam Giancana was always talking about the Kennedys . . . It was clear that at some point he had met both brothers . . . [Lawford and Giancana] would talk fondly of their shenanigans with the first family . . . they used to talk about the girls Mooney used to produce for the Kennedys. Mooney was proud of it, very proud of his Kennedy connections.”
According to Jeanne Humphreys, Curly and the rest were beginning to worry that both Mooney and Johnny might be putting their growing affinity for the high life ahead of their business sense. “They were starting to call Mooney and Johnny ’starstruck,’” Jeanne recalls. “The fear was that they were getting off on hanging out with Sinatra and CIA guys.” Nonetheless, it appears that the decision was reached to play along if Maheu supplied proof of the government’s authorization for the plot. That proof would be given at the upcoming New York rendezvous.
On September 13, while Johnny Rosselli was en route to his clandestine rendezvous with the G in New York, the G in Chicago was eavesdropping on an important conversation between Curly Humphreys, who had returned from his brief respite in Florida, and Gussie Alex. The agents listened in amazement as Curly spoke of his obtaining the jury pool list for the upcoming Accardo tax trial. The agents had a front-row seat as one of the nation’s great criminal minds gave a seminar on how to succeed in the underworld. “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Curly said. “After we’ve decided which ones, then we’ll decide how to make the approach.” Alex offered that one potential juror lived in a town where a made guy, Joe Gagliano, had a cousin who owned a gas station. Humphreys then said, “You work on a plan. Do like an investigator would do. Find out if there’s a connection there. Send Gags out there to talk to the gas station guy. Find out how well he knows this woman, then we’ll decide.” Regarding one potential juror, Curly hinted at the power he wielded through Hoffa’s Teamsters: “Now I got a truck driver [juror]. We have an ace there.”
The next day, Rosselli arrived at New York’s Plaza Hotel for his meeting with Maheu. There, Johnny was introduced to Jim O’Connell, the CIA’s chief of the Operational Support Division. O’Connell, using the alias Jim Olds, suggested to Rosselli that Castro be hit in a Capone-style “gangland rubout.” Rosselli quickly disabused O’Connell of the dangerous notion, and the men agreed that poison made more sense. The inclusion of O’Connell was the imprimatur Rosselli needed, and he agreed that he would bring a man with extensive contacts in Havana named Sam Gold to Florida in about ten days, where the team would get down to business. Although he never told Maheu the reason for the timing, it was likely because Sam Gold, aka Mooney Giancana, had other pressing business to address: He was buying into Joe Kennedy’s favorite resort, the Cal-Neva.
It was a perfect deal. Joe Kennedy wanted to demonstrate his seriousness, and Mooney needed a getaway retreat, especially one with the added lure of subterranean passages. On September 20,1960, with Frank Sinatra fronting for him, Mooney purchased stock in the Cal-Neva for approximately $350,000 from Joe Kennedy’s friend Wingy Grober. It has been widely misconstrued that Grober et al. sold the Lodge outright to Sinatra and Giancana. However, a close reading of the application put before the Nevada Gaming Commission reveals that the Sinatra purchasers (Sinatra; his manager, Hank Sanicola; and Dean Martin) only obtained a 49.5 percent interest in the operation, while Grober’s group maintained a 50.5 percent controlling interest. Gaming board member Turner emphasized that “the operation would remain the same, that, in other words . . . the present controlling interest would remain as it is.” Board chairman Milton Keefer added the Sinatra group’s purchase “is not really a transfer, that it is a new acquisition of stock from the present 100 percent operation.” However, if Grober was actually a front for Kennedy, and Sinatra was a front for Giancana, then, in essence, Bobby Kennedy’s nemesis, Mooney Giancana, was now in partnership with Bobby’s father. In an account that echoed the Rix allegation, Peter Lawford’s biographer James Spada reported that Joe Kennedy’s son-in-law Lawford was another of the resort’s many silent partners, a disclosure that has led some to believe that Joe Kennedy staked Lawford in the deal, thus reta
ining even more interest in the business.
Connected people like Mooney’s future son-in-law Bob McDonnell have known all along of Mooney’s stake in the Cal-Neva. “Mooney Giancana backed Sinatra totally, put up all the money for the Cal-Neva,” McDonnell says emphatically. The FBI also believed that Mooney Giancana was the “silent” owner of the hotel. Rosselli’s friend Betsy Duncan Hammes says emphatically, “I know for a fact that Giancana put the money up for the purchase. Besides, Frank didn’t have that kind of money back then.” One of Mooney’s drivers recently disclosed how he personally took the money from Chicago to Nevada for the transaction.
The allegations of Byron Rix add to the drama of the purchase. If Rix is accurate, then the transfer of Cal-Neva stock to Mooney was Joe’s way of solidifying the deal with the Outfit to back Jack in the election. The secret meeting at the Lodge that year between Joe Kennedy and “many gangsters” may have indeed been, as Rix reported, another reason the hoods decided to support the Kennedy effort. Whereas some in Chicago believed that the reason Mooney brought the Kennedy request to them was a combination of his desire to get a marker on the G, and his groupie mentality toward Sinatra, it now appears that he had a third reason: Joe Kennedy had promised him a piece of the coveted Cal-Neva.
The transfer of Grober/Kennedy stock in the Lodge to Sinatra/Giancana may have been the show of sincerity Mooney and the Outfit needed to fulfill their end of the election bargain. But before that would occur, Giancana and Rosselli moved forward with their participation in Operation Pluto, a scheme that, even if unsuccessful, would ingratiate the Outfit with the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. It was classic hedge-betting.
