The Outfit put great value on trust, and terrible retribution sometimes followed when their trust was broken. Rage against the Kennedy family became a popular theme among the mob connected and mob adjacent, and we heard a lot about it when Dad’s pals visited in the early 1960s. Certainly, President Kennedy was not a popular figure among the people in our world. As children, we couldn’t understand the anger directed at our nation’s handsome, young leader and his beautiful camera-ready family. Of course, we didn’t know that President Kennedy’s victory had been made possible in part by fraudulent votes in Chicago, a fraud perpetuated by Sam Giancana in collusion with Joe Kennedy. Fake Chicago votes tipped the Illinois Electoral College into Kennedy’s Democratic column and turned the election away from a pasty-faced, beady-eyed Republican Richard Nixon. It amazes us now to realize that people we knew changed history. Our small world sometimes had a long reach. The trouble with the Kennedys started a few years earlier. An ill-wind blew in from Washington, D.C., when the Outfit came under a legal microscope in the late 1950s. The storm started gathering force a few years earlier when the Kefauver Committee made it clear to America that organized crime did indeed exist – despite J. Edgar Hoover’s repeated insistence to the contrary. An embarrassed Hoover jumped on the bandwagon and started biting the Outfit hand that had been feeding him tips on fixed horse races. The John McClellan Committee began investigating organized crime in 1957, with Chief Counsel Robert F. Kennedy again trying to make a name for himself. One can only marvel at Kennedy’s audacity given the fact that his family’s fortune traced back to the sordid days of bootlegging and its wealth directly related to old Joe’s connection to organized crime. Opinions about Bobby Kennedy were never very high. Conservative activist John Roche called Kennedy “a political mechanic who couldn’t distinguish a principle from a fireplug.” Former Congressman and Vice President Adlai Stevenson referred to Bobby Kennedy as “the Black Prince.” Lyndon Johnson observed that Bobby had “the bad judgment to have disgraced himself as one of [Senator Joseph] McCarthy’s toadies.” Entitled, arrogant and supremely hypocritical, Kennedy felt certain he had the power to shut down the Outfit. Over a period of thirty-months, the Committee focused on allegations regarding the theft of union funds (true), the union history of racketeering (also true), and examined the inner workings of the Outfit and its top bosses. Want to know what they proved after thirty-months of bullshit? Nothing. Political grandstanding at its finest. In one of the most dramatic moments, Sam Giancana faced a frothing Bobby Kennedy. As Kennedy battered Giancana with questions, the unflappable mob boss could only laugh. At one point, Kennedy tried to bait Giancana. Responding to the Outfit boss’ laughter at his questions, Kennedy remarked, “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.” Mr. Sam kept laughing and ultimately exercised his Fifth Amendment right thirty-four times, the legal equivalent of giving the finger to that buck-toothed prick. Sam Giancana’s brother Chuck shed some light on one of the most infamous government and mobster interactions ever caught on film. He alleged that the night before his brother appeared before the Committee, Sam met privately with the Kennedys to discuss political backing for Jack Kennedy’s planned presidential candidacy. The next day, Bobby Kennedy went on the attack in public. The cameras caught Giancana laughing at the staggering hypocrisy of this defender of American virtue. Two years later, an unabashed Joe Kennedy would reach out to Sam Giancana for help getting Jack elected President, which the Outfit will provide. Joe Kennedy promises that with Jack Kennedy in the White House, the Outfit could look forward to a cornucopia of lucrative government contracts, appointments, and a blind eye to their operations.
Perhaps Giancana should have known better than to trust a Kennedy. Joe seemed to feel no compunction about screwing over anybody. They didn’t come much filthier than Joe Kennedy – anti-Semite, bootlegger, racketeer, rapist, crook, coward, adulterer, and according to Gloria Swanson, (the mistress he ruined financially), a premature ejaculator. Joe Kennedy’s subsequent double-cross of Giancana would be a contributing factor to the fatal – and very public – consequences for two of his sons. Outside the committee room, the Outfit bosses openly mocked Bobby Kennedy, calling him a “bagman” for his family. But business is business, and in 1960 Sam Giancana put aside his loathing for the little Kennedy with the whiny, adenoidal voice and helped Papa Joe rig a presidential election. Kennedy again assured Giancana that after the election things would quiet down, and everyone could get back to the business of making money on booze, betting, and whores. When that didn’t happen, the bosses fumed over the betrayal. First, they lost the lucrative Cuban casino operations when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Then a plan to invade and retake Cuba turned into a fiasco when Jack Kennedy’s last-minute waffling and failure to provide adequate military backup sent the plan into a military tailspin and created a public relations disaster. The embarrassed President then used the CIA as a scapegoat and threatened to splinter the Central Intelligence Agency “into a thousand pieces.” On top of that, Bobby doubled down on his efforts to destroy organized crime (outside his own family’s). Some have suggested Jack Kennedy’s assassination was a joint CIA/Outfit operation aimed at settling the score as well as protecting the CIA and the Outfit. Chuck Giancana fingers mob-connected Chicago cop Richard Cain as JFK’s actual shooter. Chuck Giancana also asserts most startlingly that Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson were fully apprised of the assassination plans, as was Texas Governor John Connally. Hatred toward the Kennedys grew stronger as Bobby Kennedy’s investigations into organized crime picked up steam – and started racking up convictions. Never mind that the Kennedys were perhaps the nation’s oldest organized “crime family” in the literal sense. In the heady days of Camelot, when the media turned a willfully blind eye to the playboy President’s antics, none of the Kennedy dirt made its way to the front page. Most Americans lived in a bubble of delusion, where the cops were always the good guys in white hats, and the villains were snarling devils. The truth turned out to be a lot more complicated. Depending on whose account one chooses to read (and believe), the corrosive influence of organized crime went all the way up to the Office of the President of the United States long before Jack Kennedy. Chuck Giancana alleges that Joe Kennedy paid Franklin Delano Roosevelt $120,000 to be appointed head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later paid the same amount to FDR for an appointment as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James in England (a position Kennedy ran from as quickly as his spindly legs could take him when the Nazi bombs started dropping). He also claims the Outfit colluded with the CIA to assassinate JFK after he and his father double-crossed the Outfit. True or false? Who knows? What Michael and I heard when Dad’s friends visited suggested the “lone gunman” theory was the stuff of fiction. We heard names other than Oswald and Ruby. Chuck Giancana isn’t alone in his assertion that the Chicago Outfit, with help from Carlos Marcello in Louisiana, picked Lee Harvey Oswald as the fall-guy for the Kennedy hit, and designated Jack Ruby for clean-up duty. Both Oswald and Ruby spent time on the FBI and CIA payrolls. This connection between law enforcement and criminals is extensively documented, most notably in Burton Hersh’s acclaimed biography Bobby and J. Edgar, which documents the poisonous relationship between the Kennedy family and Hoover’s FBI. |
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