The Outfit

by Russo, Gus

  November 8, election day, brought continued behind-the-scenes manipulations. While Curly labored on the national front, Mooney Giancana worked hard to deliver his key city wards to the Democrats, an effort that not only aided Kennedy, but also worked against crusading state’s attorney Bennie Adamowski. Scores of Giancana’s “vote sluggers” or “vote floaters” hit the streets to “coerce” the voters. Giancana’s biographer William Brashler wrote, “The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election played into Giancana’s hands . . . the master vote counters of the city’s river wards worked feverishly to deliver their man.” According to G-man Bill Roemer, there is no doubt that Giancana lent his considerable influence to the Kennedy effort. In 1995, Roemer recalled, “We had placed a microphone in Giancana’s headquarters right after the election. There was no question but that Giancana had been approached by Frank Sinatra before the election to help the Kennedys.”

  The Outfit bosses were not the only ones working behind the scenes to fix the presidential contest. In Nevada, real estate mogul (and Kennedy insider by marriage to Jack’s wife’s aunt) Norman Biltz was rumored to have imported black voters from out of state, bribing them to cast illegal ballots for Kennedy. Biltz had employed the tactic years earlier when boosting the career of the seminal Nevada senator of the thirties and forties, Pat McCarran. In Texas, Kennedy running mate Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic machine made its own contribution to the 1960 election fraud. Nixon biographer Earl Mazo wrote, “The election shenanigans [in Texas] ranged from ballot-box stuffing and jamming the Republican column on voting machines to misreading ballots cast for Republicans and double-counting those for Democrats.” Mazo points out that in one county, the official tally had 148 for Kennedy-Johnson, and 24 for Nixon-Lodge, although only 86 people voted. The skullduggery proved critical to the Texas outcome, and likely the national tally. In a state where its favorite son should have led the ticket to a huge majority, Kennedy-Johnson managed only a 1 percent edge. It was not the first time Johnson’s clique had been implicated in election fraud.7 And there was more. In Alabama, Kennedy’s popular vote was counted twice, as reported by Neal R. Peirce in his study of the electoral college, The People’s President. If even just the Alabama totals had been accurate, Nixon would not only have won the state, but the nation as well.

  From his Massachusetts home, Joe Kennedy continued to work the powerful Daley front via Marty Underwood, a Chicago consultant working for the mayor. Underwood, who would be brought to work in Washington after the Kennedy victory, was originally brought into the fold early on by Kenny O’Donnell as an election adviser. “The old man [Joe Kennedy] wanted to maintain contact with Daley, but didn’t want the phone calls traced,” O’Donnell recalls. “I was dispatched to Minneapolis on election night to route the calls from Hyannis Port to Chicago.” Underwood recently recalled an election night incident in which a Daley aide reported to the mayor that he wasn’t able to retrieve all the “votes” from a Chicago cemetery, as some of the tombstones were overturned. Daley barked, “Well, lift them up, they have as much right to vote as the next person!” Underwood was thus a witness to a ploy that has been recounted by, among others, the longtime JFK friend from Palm Beach, Patrick Lannan. Lannan told author John Davis’ literary agent, “Mayor Daley ’and friends’ went to work stuffing ballots and resurrecting the voters from the dead.” The 1960 election resurrected not just the dead, but an old Windy City proverb: “Death does not mean disenfranchisement.”

  It would later turn out that Hoover’s FBI was spying not only on the Outfit, but its friend in the mayor’s office, an undertaking that shed more light on the mayor’s role in the 1960 vote-fraud wars. When Richard Daley’s three-hundred-page FBI file was released in 1997 to the Chicago Tribune, the following passage was included: “on 11/18/60 [DELETED] advised that he had learned from [DELETED] . . . that a Chicago attorney . . . had told [DELETED] that Mayor Daley had paid for thousands of votes in the 11/8/60 election but had not received 25,000 of the votes for which he had paid.”

  Like his old friend Joe Kennedy, Los Angeles-based Frank Sinatra maintained an open phone line to Chicago via ward boss and Democratic national committeeman Jake Arvey, a known close friend of Mooney Giancana’s. Arvey updated Frank every half hour on the Chicago tallies.

  Back in Washington that night, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee was at dinner with his friend John Kennedy. He remembered his conversation with the candidate: “Over dinner he told me how he [JFK] had called Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley while Illinois was hanging in the balance to ask how he was doing. ’Mr. President,’ Kennedy quoted Daley as saying, ’with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.’ Later, when Nixon was being urged to contest the 1960 election, I often wondered about that statement.”

  All night long, Illinois, and the nation for that matter, was a toss-up. At eight-thirty on Wednesday morning, Ann Gargan, Joe Kennedy’s secretary, arrived to inform Jack that he had won Illinois. “Who says so?” inquired the exhausted candidate. “Your father says so,” replied Gargan.

  As it turned out, the election was so close that without Humphreys’ union work, and the other noted machinations, Richard Nixon would certainly have prevailed. In Chicago, Mayor Daley held back his county’s vote totals until the final tally was received from the Republican-stronghold farm belt in southern Illinois. It was common knowledge that the Republican pols in that region were counting thousands of uncast votes; Daley merely waited to see how many votes he would need to negate the downstate fraud. As the night wore on, Daley calculated that he needed to deliver a 450,000 vote advantage to Kennedy to carry the state; Kennedy took Cook County by 456,312 votes.

  When the final count was tallied, out of almost seventy million votes cast nationwide, Jack Kennedy had won by a scant 113,554, less than one tenth of 1 percent of the total, and less even than his margin in just Cook County. Most pertinent, in the states where the Outfit had a strong union presence, Kennedy squeaked to gossamer-thin victories: in Illinois (+.2%), Michigan (+1%), Missouri (+.6%), and Nevada (+1.3%). These states accounted for a decisive 63 electoral votes, which, if given to Nixon, would have changed the outcome (269 were needed to elect; Kennedy obtained 303). With Curly Humphreys’ charges ordered to get out the Democratic vote, which included the all-important ferrying of invalids to the polls, the Outfit’s contention that it “elected Jack” is not without merit.

  “I was an airhead,” says Jeanne Humphreys. “I didn’t know that a president could be elected on the whim of Chicago mobsters. In my ignorance, I thought majority ruled.” In Illinois, the next morning’s count showed that Nixon had prevailed in 93 of the state’s 102 counties, yet lost Illinois by 8,858 votes, the result of the large Kennedy majority in Cook County, where Daley and the Outfit turned out a staggering 89.3 percent of the eligible voters, including the eligible deceased. Chicago veteran reporter Walter Trohan asked his old friend Richard Daley about his party’s election shenanigans. “He never denied it,” recalls Trohan. “He confessed that they stole to offset the Republican stealing downstate, which I didn’t believe was on that grand a scale.” Years later, nearing death, Daley told his friend Washington power attorney Edward Bennett Williams, “I have only one question: Will God forgive me for stealing the election from Richard Nixon?”

  Of more pressing concern to Daley than even Jack Kennedy’s victory was the simultaneous defeat of Daley’s nemesis, Bennie Adamowski, the threatening state’s attorney. Adamowski’s chief investigator, Paul Newey, recently said, “We were creating bedlam in Cook County, so they knew they had to do something. That election was stolen from Ben - I have no doubt of it.” Three weeks after his defeat, a bitter Adamowski told the Chicago Tribune that more than one hundred thousand votes had been stolen by Daley’s machine.8

  With typical sarcasm, Jeanne Humphreys made a notation in her journal that reflected on the decision of the bosses who had outvoted her husband: “Well, the election efforts were a success and the Senat
e Racket committee was to be disbanded; Bobby Kennedy would kiss and make up with Jimmy Hoffa and all Mooney’s predictions of a respite from crime busters would materialize. What Dreamers!”

  After the election, state Republicans conducted an unofficial recount and found that a switch of 4,500 votes in Cook County would have given the state to Nixon and reelected Adamowski. This unofficial recount, which established a gain of 4,539 for Nixon, was prevented from becoming an official tally by Mayor Daley. After Jack Kennedy’s inauguration, a federal grand jury recommended a formal investigation of the vote fraud, but by that time the head of the Justice Department was Robert Kennedy, and the idea had predictably lost favor.

  Richard Daley’s help did not go unappreciated by the new president. The day after the inauguration, Daley became President Kennedy’s second visitor to the Oval Office, just after Harry Truman. Daley biographer F. Richard Ciccone wrote, “Of all the Democratic leaders in the nation, only Richard J. Daley had been invited to spend part of Kennedy’s first day in the White House with the new president. Camelot’s king had chosen the first knight for his Round Table.” The Chicago mayor made frequent trips to the White House in the ensuing months, often returning home to find Chicago awash in federal moneys, which led to the great rebuilding of the Chicago highway system. As president, Jack Kennedy appointed numerous federal judges in Chicago and sent many defense dollars Daley’s way. In three years, the city’s main east-west artery, the Northwest Expressway, was renamed the John F. Kennedy Expressway. In stark contrast was the treatment accorded the Outfit for its powerful role in the election, part of a deal struck with Jack Kennedy’s father, Joe.

  Morris and Denton described a secret financial fallout from Kennedy’s victory, the bookie payouts: “An unknowing Graham Hollister - a wealthy Sierra foothills Democrat and future official in the Kennedy administration - brought Teddy [Kennedy] his winnings in Los Angeles, guilelessly carrying the cash in a ’brown paper package,’ as one witness remembered. Wingy Grober, it was said, sent the Kennedys their CalNeva winnings in similar wrapping.”

  In Chicago, Mooney Giancana was on the top of the world and said to be acting like “a preening peacock” by one associate. “He was really cocky,” said another. On one occasion, Mooney told his and Jack Kennedy’s mutual girlfriend, twenty-six-year-old Judy Campbell, “Your boyfriend wouldn’t be president if it wasn’t for me.” Giancana bragged openly to the bosses that he had “elected” Kennedy, and that the gang would soon see a lessening of governmental harassment, both in Chicago and in Las Vegas. And as an added bonus, Mooney said, the hoods might even get Cuba back.

  Giancana’s swagger would have a life span of exactly one month, terminated when Jack Kennedy announced the unthinkable: He was appointing his mob-chasing brother Robert to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer. It became dreadfully apparent to the wisest hoods, such as Curly Humphreys, that the decision to help Joe’s kid get elected would prove to be nothing short of suicidal for the hard-won, forty-year reign of the Outfit. In her journal, Jeanne Humphreys opined about how history would have been different without the Outfit’s participation in the 1960 election: “Nixon would have been elected. No assassinations, no Watergate, and most important to the Outfit, no Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General. The history of the United States from 1960 ’til eternity was made by a mobster from Chicago’s West Side who wanted to impress a crooner from New Jersey.”

  1. Maheu said that he had taken on a job to serve a subpoena on the owner of Vegas’ El Rancho Hotel, Beldon Kettleman. The day before traveling to Sin City, Maheu found every hotel booked. In desperation he called old college buddy, and D.C. power attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, who then called Rosselli. Of all places, Rosselli, who had no idea of Maheu’s mission, booked Maheu into El Rancho. “They rolled out the red carpet,” Maheu later wrote. “[My wife] Yvette and I were given a beautiful bungalow, filled with flowers and fruit. And they told us everything was on the house. I was impressed. Johnny must be some kind of miracle worker.” It goes without saying the booking by Rosselli effectively dashed Maheu’s desire to serve Kettleman. When Johnny later found out about Maheu’s awkward position, he “laughed his ass off,” recalled Maheu.

  2. Regarding Nixon and the assassination of Castro, the reader is urged to read Anthony and Robbyn Summers’ The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (2000). In 1996, this writer conducted much of the research for the Castro-Nixon portion of that book, which gives ample evidence that Nixon approved the assassination plots.

  3. “I had conducted a serious and dangerous assignment on behalf of my government during World War II,” Maheu recently recalled, “living with German agents for two years. And I felt that if I could be responsible in saving lives and that the request was at the behest of my government, I would take it on.”

  4. Maheu originally tried to convince Rosselli that the plots were backed by businessmen, but Rosselli cut him off, saying, “I am not kidding. I know who you work for.”

  5. For details of the secret Kennedy briefings, see Russo, Live by the Sivord, and Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot.

  6. In 1996, as part of research this author conducted for Anthony Summers’ The Arrogance of Power, the author convinced Anna Chennault to admit her liaison role with Nixon in the secret deal with the South Vietnamese delegation. The book goes into great detail regarding how President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey dealt with the electoral sabotage.

  7. Since 1948, Johnson had been pursued by nasty rumors about his ability to create close victories where none existed. In that year, Johnson’s supporters helped erase a twenty-thousand-vote victory by Johnson’s opponent, Governor Coke Stevenson, in the Democratic senatorial primary. For one solid week, new county-by-county totals appeared and turned the election into an eighty-seven-vote Johnson victory. In 1990, Luis Salas, the election judge in Jim Wells County (Precinct 13) admitted to New York Times reporter Martin Tolchin that under his supervision, and on orders of Johnson confidant and South Texas political boss George Parr, Salas stuffed the “Box 13” ballot with “votes of the dead, the infirm, the halt, the missing, and those who were unaware that an election was going on.” When Stevenson attempted to have the election investigated, he was forestalled when Johnson’s lawyer, Abe Fortas, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Johnson later returned the favor when, as president, he appointed Fortas to the highest court. The Box 13 episode earned Johnson the hated nickname later utilized by Bobby Kennedy to get under his skin, “Landslide Lyndon.”

  8. When Adamowski ran for county assessor ten years later, he ripped into the gross undervaluation of the Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart. Although Kennedy friend Cook County assessor P. J. Cullerton set the behemoth’s worth at $16 million, independent studies put the figure closer to $100 million. Deputy County Treasurer Peter Piotrowicz added that as a result of the undervaluing of the Mart and other Loop offices, the residents of Chicago faced a 17 per cent realty tax increase.

  18.

  The Kennedy Double Cross:

  The Beginning of the End

  Clark Clifford was speechless. Clifford, the legendary adviser to Democratic presidents for five decades, was assisting President-elect Kennedy with the transition when he was told of Bobby Kennedy’s imminent appointment as attorney general. It was just days after the election when Jack Kennedy approached Clifford poolside at the Kennedys’ Palm Beach retreat.

  “I listened in amazement,” Clifford later wrote about the impending announcement. Jack Kennedy explained, “My father said, I want Bobby to be attorney general. He’s a lawyer, he’s savvy, he knows all the political ins and outs and can protect you.’” Clifford had just finished warning Jack that an inexperienced attorney general could place him in great jeopardy, as had happened in numerous previous administrations. Jack agreed and asked Clifford to speak to “the Old Man.” Clifford flew to New York and attempted to convince the patriarch of his ill-advised suggestion. “I made a carefully prepared presentation,” Clif
ford wrote in his memoirs, “of why it wras not in the interests of the new President, the Kennedy family, the entire administration, and Bobby himself to take the post.” After what he thought was a persuasive argument, Clifford waited for Joe’s response.

  “Thank you very much, Clark,” Joe said. “I am so glad to have heard your views.” Then after a brief pause, Kennedy looked Clifford in the eyes and added, “I do want to leave you with one thought, however - one firm thought. Bobby is going to be attorney general.” Clifford noted that there wras no rancor in Kennedy’s voice, but that “he was simply telling me the facts. For a moment I had glimpsed the inner workings of that remarkable family, and, despite my admiration and affection for John F. Kennedy, I could not say I liked what I saw.”

  Jack Kennedy also enlisted a family friend, Senator George Smathers of Florida, to try to talk to the father, again to no avail. In Smathers’ presence, Joe Kennedy called young Jack over and upbraided him. “Jack! Come here!” Joe ordered. “By God, he deserves to be attorney general, and by God, that’s what he’s going to be. Do you understand that?” The president-elect responded like a scolded child, “Yes, sir.”

  Even Bobby, who had worked so tirelessly as his brother’s campaign manager, resisted the idea. Although an arch-moralist, Bobby had tired of the grind from his tenure on the McClellan Committee. “I had been chasing bad men for three years,” Bobby later said, “and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” And just as brother Jack had been warned by Clark Clifford, Bobby was likewise cautioned by columnist Drew Pearson: “You would handle so many controversial questions with such vigor that your brother in the White House would be in hot water all the time.” (Those words would come to haunt Bobby three years later, when his intemperate handling of Cuban intrigues tragically backfired on his beloved brother.)