The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Joe Kennedy's goal, Tina said, was "to assure the wins in Illinois and West Virginia---you know, getting the numbers out, getting the unions to vote."

  Being a middleman seemed logical to her father, Tina said. "The notion that Joe would go to Sam Giancana was out of the question, for obvious reasons. Frank's affiliation with Sam Giancana and other mobsters---we all understand that. The Mafia was very smart. They knew that power and control would keep this country together. Now I don't think that they should have been out shooting each other, but they did. By the thirties and forties, when Dad was in the business, they were controlling the nightclubs. They were controlling the entertainment world. They were a motivated bunch. The power of an entertainer and the power of a mobster---it's all very much a part of America. They were all from the same neighborhoods. My dad grew up with gangsters next door. He was living with them. They were his personal friends, and he's not going to cast away a friend. The great vein through Frank Sinatra is loyalty. There is an absolute commitment to friends and family. It's very Italian and probably gave him a little more in common with the mob types."

  Furthermore, Tina said, "these weren't people that Joe [Kennedy] didn't know. He had these relations as well. My grandmother called him 'that rum-running son of a bitch.' They did use the underworld to put their Golden Boy over the top---conduit, Frank Sinatra. They [didn't] hesitate to ask for favors; the Kennedys were very able to ask for anything they needed. And I think they were accustomed to getting it. Everybody was duped," she added, when Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, targeted organized crime as eagerly as he had done for the Senate Rackets Committee.

  Frank Sinatra, Tina said, was enthusiastic about Jack Kennedy. "Dad felt that Jack Kennedy was a breath of fresh air. He said he hadn't been as excited about an election since Roosevelt, whom he also campaigned for." What is generally not known about her father, Tina Sinatra told me, is the extent to which politics was always a part of his life. "He was born into a family that was very politically motivated," she said, especially his mother, Dolly, who was a local Democratic campaign worker in Hoboken, New Jersey. "Dad says that he was carrying placards for candidates when he couldn't read what was on the signs. Politics were run out of the kitchens" in those days, Tina added. "I remember he taught me" about "potholder campaigns. They'd give gifts to the woman of the house, because she would be the one who would be making certain the voters voted."

  Jack Kennedy was special, Tina said. Her father was strongly attracted to Kennedy's "lifestyle. And his power. I know they had a lot of fun together." Both before and after winning the presidency, Kennedy especially enjoyed weekend visits to Sinatra's home in Palm Springs, with its routine womanizing. "It's not as though the president and Dad would meet to play golf," Tina said. "Their small circle of friends would come together and have a good time. It was a place to escape to. I was never, ever there. That was not a weekend you brought the kids into."

  Her father, Tina added, "was a happy bachelor-type guy. He was single. Jack Kennedy wasn't."

  J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had picked up some hints of the preelection bargaining between Kennedy and the Chicago outfit, but it could not make them public because of the way the information was gathered. Beginning in the late 1950s, FBI agents had begun installing bugging devices in organized crime hangouts across the nation, without any specific court authorization to do so. Three bugs were put in place in Chicago. One of them produced many conversations---sometimes in Sicilian dialect---both before and after November 1960, in which Sam Giancana talked about an election deal with Joe Kennedy. In his 1989 memoir, Man Against the Mob, William F. Roemer, Jr., who was a special agent in the FBI's Chicago office in the early 1960s, revealed that Giancana had been overheard on a still-unreleased FBI wiretap discussing a straightforward election deal: mob support in return for a commitment from the Kennedy administration "to back off from the FBI investigation of Giancana." Transcripts of these conversations, with the source concealed, were circulated, in some cases during the campaign, on a need-to-know basis throughout the Justice Department.

  Giancana also bragged, off microphone, about his influence. In My Story, a 1977 memoir by Judith Campbell Exner, the Los Angeles woman who was sexually involved with Kennedy in the early 1960s while also meeting with Giancana, the mob leader is quoted as telling her, "Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House."

  Giancana was not exaggerating. In a 1997 interview for this book, G. Robert Blakey, a former special prosecutor for the Justice Department, said that the FBI wiretaps, many of which have yet to be made public, confirmed that the Chicago syndicate used all its muscle to support Kennedy. "There has been a problem with vote fraud in Chicago really since the turn of the century," said Blakey, who obtained access to the wiretaps in the late 1970s while serving as chief counsel to the House Assassinations Committee. The FBI bugs in Chicago, he told me, demonstrated "beyond doubt, in my judgment, that enough votes were stolen---let me repeat that---stolen in Chicago to give Kennedy a sufficient margin that he carried the state of Illinois." The electronic surveillance also showed that organized crime's control of the voting was far more extensive than has been previously known, Blakey said: Giancana was overheard before one election discussing the specific number of votes a corrupt Illinois congressman was to receive.

  "The surveillance in Chicago also establishes that money generated by the mob was put into the 1960 [national] election," Blakey told me. The funds traveled from the singer Frank Sinatra, who was a close friend of Sam Giancana's, "to Joe Kennedy. Can you say mob money made a difference?" Blakey asked. "My judgment is yes." In return, Giancana and his colleagues were convinced, Blakey told me, that "the Kennedys would do something for them"---reduce FBI pressure on their activities.

  No two men could have emerged from backgrounds more different than those of Jack Kennedy of Hyannis Port and Palm Beach and Sam Giancana of Chicago. But the men had much in common. Each was obsessed with women; each was fascinated by Hollywood and was found fascinating in return; each learned how to operate in secrecy; and each could rigorously compartmentalize his life. Giancana was a foul-mouthed Mafia murderer who took on a top-secret mission for the CIA in 1960 and 1961 and never talked publicly about what he did. Kennedy was a brilliant politician who could openly espouse the idealism of a New Frontier and the Peace Corps while being deeply involved in a world of secret escapades that could destroy his career.

  Giancana, born in 1908, began his criminal career as a hit man for Al Capone in the area known as Little Italy or The Patch, just west of downtown Chicago. By age twenty, Giancana had reportedly murdered dozens of men on his way to gaining control of the Chicago Mafia. His first conviction, for auto theft, came at the age of seventeen; he was arrested three times in connection with murder investigations by the time he was twenty. In all, Giancana was arrested sixty times during his career. By the late 1950s, his operation was skimming millions of dollars off mob-dominated gambling casinos in Las Vegas and in Havana, Cuba, and it had both political and economic control of at least six heavily populated wards in Chicago. The Chicago Mafia also exercised direct control over mobster and Teamsters Union activities in Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

  "Giancana was just a killer, that's all," Sandy Smith, the former chief investigative reporter for Time magazine who spent twenty years covering organized crime in Chicago, recalled in an interview for this book. "And he was proud of it. As a boss, if there was a problem, he'd listen to a very brief description and then say, 'Hit him! Hit him!' There were a lot of hits." The mob boss "couldn't really talk to you," Smith told me. "Giancana would curse and scream and howl and try to intimidate you. He was, in almost every respect, a savage."

  Nonetheless, Giancana was immensely popular in Hollywood. His biographers usually date his ties there to the mid-1950s, a time when the Chicago mob was migrating to the West Coast. Yet Giancana's daughter, Antoinette, in her 1984 memoir, Mafia Princess, told of
her 1949 trip to Hollywood as a teenager, during which a major producer fell all over himself giving her a guided tour of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. "I was treated with as much respect as if I had been one of the studio's superstars," she wrote. By the late 1950s, Giancana, often identifying himself as Sam Flood, was openly socializing in Las Vegas with the entertainers, who were paid enormous sums to perform at hotels whose casinos he controlled. His close friend was Frank Sinatra, and Giancana became a fixture among Sinatra's famed Rat Pack, the group of singers and comedians who moved easily through Hollywood, Democratic politics, and organized crime. The actor Peter Lawford, who married Patricia Kennedy in 1954, was a charter member of the clique. In 1960 Giancana began what would become a long-term romance with Phyllis McGuire, one of the three singing McGuire Sisters, then at the top of their career. Bill Woodfield, a Hollywood photographer who was on full-time assignment for Frank Sinatra, recalled in a 1995 interview for this book that during the heyday of Rat Pack glamour, Giancana began showing up almost every day on the set of a movie in which McGuire and Sinatra were starring. Giancana sat next to Woodfield, who was to shoot still photographs of each scene. "I never photographed Sam," Woodfield told me, "although I took hundreds of Phyllis. A photographer knows what not to shoot."*

  Further direct evidence about a deal between the Kennedy family and Sam Giancana was provided for this book by Jeanne Humphreys, the second wife of Murray Humphreys, a close colleague of Giancana's. Humphreys, a Welshman who died in 1965, was considered to be the brains and a dominant force behind the Chicago mob, but he was barred from formally becoming its leader because he was not Sicilian. Jeanne Humphreys, who now lives alone and under a different name in the suburbs of a major southern city, had been a teenage bar girl when she began an affair with her husband-to-be in the late 1940s. She was married to the dapper gang leader, who was famed among Chicago journalists for his style and intelligence, from 1957 until 1962. "Murray told me everything," Mrs. Humphreys said. "I was stuck in the middle of it all. He had to tell me.

  "I know all about the Kennedys---the election," she told me. "It consumed our lives that year [1960]." In her account, Humphreys initially resisted Giancana's pleas for a political commitment to Kennedy, essentially because Humphreys had himself done bootlegging business with Joe Kennedy during Prohibition and did not trust him. "Murray called him a four-flusher and a double-crosser," Jeanne Humphreys told me. Kennedy was involved in smuggling liquor from Canada into the Detroit area, Humphreys told his wife, "and hijacked his own load that had already been paid for and took it and sold it somewhere else all over again. He [Humphreys] never stopped talking about what a jerk [Kennedy] was."

  The question was finally put to a vote among Giancana, Humphreys, and three other Mafia leaders in Chicago---Paul Ricca, Anthony Accardo, and Frank Ferraro. Humphreys was the only one to vote against the commitment to Kennedy. "He hated having to go along with the outfit's vote to back Kennedy," Jeanne Humphreys recalled. "It was a constant source of aggravation for him. If he was outvoted on something, he was outvoted by the Italians. He'd say the spaghetti eaters and spaghetti benders stuck together. But he went along. The guarantee was that the investigators would lay off the outfit. That was the assurance [they] got from Joe Kennedy.

  "I was an airhead," Mrs. Humphreys added. "I didn't know then that a president could be elected on the whim of Chicago mobsters. In my ignorance, I thought majority ruled."

  The reminiscences of Jeanne Humphreys were confirmed by a handwritten diary she compiled during her years with Humphreys. The diary, made available in part for this book, provides a seemingly candid and often droll account of her husband's role in the 1960 election. "It's ironic," one entry noted, "that most of the behind-the-scenes participants in the Kennedy campaign could not vote because they had criminal records." Electoral politics, Jeanne Humphreys wrote at another point, "was a bunch of crooks run by a bunch of crooks."

  A previously unpublished FBI biography of Murray Humphreys covering the years 1957 to 1961 further supports her account. The FBI file, dated May 17, 1961, and also made available for this book, describes the little-known Humphreys as "being one of the prime leaders of the underworld in the Chicago area." By the mid-1950s, it adds, Humphreys, Giancana, and the voting mobsters were "members of what might be called the governing board of organized criminals in the Chicago area." Humphreys' areas of responsibility included "the maintenance of contact with politicians, attorneys, public officials, and labor union leaders in order to influence these people to act in behalf of the interests of the underworld." The FBI specifically noted Humphreys' close ties to the Teamsters Union and depicted him as "the go-between" for organized crime and the Teamsters in their joint effort to become entrenched in the lucrative Las Vegas hotel and gambling business.

  Sandy Smith, who interviewed Humphreys several times while working for the Chicago Sun-Times in the early 1960s, described him as "the fixer" for the Chicago syndicate. "Humphreys had the ability to go into a judge's chambers and talk to a judge," Smith told me. "He could go into the Department of Justice and talk to lawyers there. He could talk to the Internal Revenue Service. Humphreys was a hard guy to dislike."

  Humphreys had been one of attorney Abe Marovitz's clients in the years before Marovitz became a Chicago judge. "He was like a good businessman," Marovitz told me. "His talk was different than most hoodlums. He wasn't a vulgar guy. He controlled unions, lots of unions," and "they gave substantial money to folks in politics." But Humphreys' influence was not based on his appearance, the retired judge noted: "It was strictly muscle. Either you went along with him, or you found yourself shot in the head or someplace. It was just one of those tough things in those days."

  Jeanne Humphreys' firsthand descriptions of her husband's attempts to corrupt the electoral process are consistent with Smith's view and the FBI file. In her account, the mob's endorsement of Jack Kennedy and its determination to get him elected led to two two-week meetings in Chicago: one in July, before the Democratic convention, and one in late October, before the election. During those meetings, Humphreys and his wife were sequestered in a suite at the Hilton Hotel, as Humphreys coordinated the politicking. "We weren't staying there," Mrs. Humphreys said of the Hilton. "We were stuck there---two weeks at a time. I was not allowed to go out, as we were sure we were being surveilled. This was very secret. Murray's phone rang off the hook. Always politicians and Teamsters.

  "This was the whole country," she added. "The people coming to the hotel were Teamsters from all over. The Chicago outfit was coordinating the whole country---Kansas, St. Louis, Cleveland. They were coming in from everywhere, then fanning out across the country." The mob-dominated union officials were coming to the hotel suite, Mrs. Humphreys explained, "to get instructions from Murray. When we went back in October, it was just a follow-up, to see that everything went the right way. They got Kennedy elected."

  A diary entry provided more detail of Humphreys' careful planning. "Lists were everywhere," Mrs. Humphreys wrote.

  Murray was arranging lists in categories of politicians, unions, lawyers and contacts.... I could see the list had at least thirty to forty names.... I didn't have time to think or care about the election. It was a foregone conclusion anyway and I didn't doubt that Murray's endeavors would succeed. He was so confident and low key about electing the president that I adopted the same attitude.... He didn't expect any accolades and was content to see Mooney [Giancana] bask in the glory and praise.

  Government files released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI learned almost immediately that Humphreys had registered, under the name of Fishman, at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago in late October 1960, just as Jeanne Humphreys recounted. Humphreys, aware that he was constantly being monitored, seemed to go out of his way to be misleading. In one telephone call intercepted while he was at the Hilton, the FBI quoted Humphreys as casually telling an associate, "Since I heard all the Irish are voting for Kennedy, I'm voting for Nixon, the Protestant." N
othing in the FBI documents, as made public, linked Humphreys with the Kennedy campaign.

  Jeanne Humphreys, who was in her late sixties when she spoke to me and being treated for cancer, said she first learned of the Kennedy connection when she accused her husband of "partying with the celebrities" while on a trip to the West Coast. He told her, "No, we're working. Sam is golfing with Joe Kennedy. They're doing business." Frank Sinatra had been the "middleman" in arranging the Kennedy-Giancana golf dates. Humphreys told her that Joe Kennedy had promised "to lay off the mob" in exchange for political support from the Giancana outfit.

  Mrs. Humphreys recalled that various locals belonging to the Teamsters Union, headed by Jimmy Hoffa, were under pressure to help get out the vote for Kennedy, legally and otherwise. At the time, Hoffa had been instrumental in putting the huge assets of the Teamsters pension fund behind the Chicago outfit's expansion into the gambling and hotel business in Las Vegas: millions of dollars had been lent to organized crime front men, with millions more in the pipeline. But Hoffa, who became an avid supporter of Richard Nixon, posed a special problem for Humphreys during the election campaign because he became convinced that "by loaning union money to the outfit ... he was contributing" to the election efforts of the hated Kennedys. Mrs. Humphreys overheard Hoffa indignantly complaining to her husband after one meeting in Florida that "my members' money is ... going to get that son of a bitch elected." Humphreys later told her that Hoffa "is a hard man to sell. I have to sell that Robert Kennedy to Hoffa."