Did the Mafia Kill JFK?
Organized Crime and the Assassination of JFK?
Namebase: Sam Giancana
(1)
In his book, Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter
Dale Scott, wrote about James
Angleton and Sam Giancana.
In 1976, after his retirement, Angleton told
an investigator that he knew which mob figures, from the New
York and Chicago mafia families, had killed Sam Giancana.
He also blamed the Church Committee for causing the death
of Giancana and Rosselli, by demanding testimony concerning
topics on which the mafia code of silence could not be broken.
(2)
Anthony
Summers,
The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980)
Exner's
account cannot be dismissed. It is specific in dates and details
and supported by travel documents, by her annotated appointment
book, and by official logs recording three of her visits to the
White House. A credible source has said Exner told him the gist
of her story soon after the events in question. Giancana's half-brother
Chuck has also claimed to know of contacts between the mafioso and
Kennedy, and of the go-between role played by Exner.
Meanwhile,
a source far more likely to be believed has stated that Robert Kennedy,
supervising anti-Castro operations for his brother, ordered the
CIA to assign a case officer to meet with Mafia figures. Sam Halpern,
a former senior Agency official on the Cuba desk, said Kennedy himself
supplied the Mafia contacts.
If such
allegations - and especially Judith Exner's claims - are true, then
President Kennedy was playing a horrendously dangerous game. For,
throughout the presidency, his brother was vigorously pursuing his
investigation of the Mafia - not least of Giancana himself. Giancana
and other top mobsters evidently hoped for leniency under a Kennedy
administration, as a quid pro quo for their support during the election
that brought Kennedy to power. But Giancana would be overheard on
an FBI wiretap saying, "The President will get what he wants
out of you... but you won't get anything out of him."
If top
Mafia bosses now felt double-crossed, their law - the law of the
mob - might demand vengeance.
(3)
Godfrey Hodgson, The
Guardian (27th September, 1999)
Judith Campbell
Exner, who has died of cancer, aged 65, in a Los Angeles hospital,
became notorious in the middle 1970s when she claimed that she had
had an affair with President John F Kennedy from 1960 until 1962.
She said she and Kennedy made love in New York hotels, at Kennedy's
home and even in the White House. After her affair with the president
ended, she had a brief relationship with Sam Giancana, the capo
of the Chicago Mafia.
In her 1977
memoirs, My Story, she described how she arranged a meeting
between Kennedy when he was running for the presidency and Giancana
in April 1960, as a result of which the mobster sent an aide, Paul
"Skinny" D'Amato, to West Virginia to buy support for
Kennedy in the Democratic Party primary election there. She also
hinted that Giancana had helped Kennedy carry Illinois, which he
won by a few thousand votes in the Chicago area.
For many
years, rumours circulated that Judith Campbell had also been involved
in a plot hatched between her two lovers, Kennedy and Giancana,
to kill the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. In 1991 she came forward
and described how she had sat on the edge of the bathtub in a Chicago
hotel while the president and the Mafia don talked in the bedroom.
In April,
with Jackie Kennedy away in Florida, Campbell was seeing Kennedy
at his house on N Street in Georgetown, the upmarket Washington
DC suburb. One night Kennedy asked Campbell to put him in touch
with Sam Giancana, and within the week JFK was meeting the mafioso
at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach to arrange mob help with
his Democratic primary campaign in West Virginia. After the break-up
of her affairs with Kennedy and Giancana, Campbell was afraid for
her life and kept her archives under the bed at her house in Newport
Beach, California, guarded by a large dog, with a pistol under her
pillow.
Kennedy's
involvement with the Mob in a plot to kill the Cuban president has
often been put forward as one of the reasons for his own assassination
in Dallas in November 1963.
(4)
Robert
Maheu,
Next to Hughes (1992)
In the winter
of 1959-60, however, the CIA still thought it could pull off the
invasion (of Cuba). But it thought the odds might be better if the
plan went one step further - the murder of Fidel Castro. All the
Company needed was someone to do the dirty work for it. Professional
killers. A gangland-style hit.
It was
then that the CIA conceived the notion to let the mobsters do it
themselves. They'd had a grudge against Castro ever since he'd forced
them out of the Havana casinos. It was even rumored that Meyer Lansky
had put a million-dollar bounty on Castro's head. CIA Director Alien
Dulles passed the ball to his deputy director, Richard Bissell.
Bissell handed off to the CIA security chief. Colonel Sheffield
Edwards. And then I received the call...
Though I'm
no saint, I am a religious man, and I knew that the CIA was talking
about murder. O'Connell and Edwards contended that it was a war
- a just war. They said it was necessary to protect the country.
They used the analogy of World War II: if we had known the exact
bunker that Hitler was in during the war, we wouldn't have hesitated
to kill the bastard. The CIA felt exactly the same way about Castro.
If Fidel, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara were assassinated, thousands
of lives might be saved.
But in
my mind, justified or not, I would still have blood on my hands.
I had to think about it. The deal carried a pretty big price tag.
I kept thinking about my family. What kind of danger would it put
them in? If anything went wrong, I was the fall guy, caught between
protecting the government and protecting the mob, two armed camps
that could crush me like a bug....
Rosselli's
first response was laughter. "Me? You want me to get involved
with Uncle Sam? 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?"
When I
finally convinced Rosselli that I was serious, very serious, he
sat staring at me, tapping his fingers nervously on the table. I
didn't want to pull any punches with the man, so I was totally up-front
about the conditions of the deal.
"It's
up to you to pick whom you want, but it's got to be set up so that
Uncle Sam isn't involved - ever. If anyone connects you with the
U.S. government, I will deny it," I told him. "If you
say Bob Maheu brought you into this, that I was your contact man,
I'll say 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 hell you're talking about."
Rosselli
hesitated at first, but then agreed. Many people have speculated
that Johnny was looking for an eventual deal with the government,
or some sort of big payoff. The truth, as corny as it may sound,
is that down deep he thought it was his "patriotic" duty.
Understand
that the world was quite different then. The Cold War was raging.
Only months before, Francis Gary Powers had been shot down while
flying his U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union. The relationship
between Washington and Moscow was at an all-time low, with Soviet
Premier Khrushchev going so far as to openly call President Eisenhower
a liar on several occasions.
Once the
decision was made, it didn't take Rosselli long to put his plan
into motion. On October 11, 1960, we took off for what would be
the first of many trips to Miami. We booked ourselves into the Kenilworth
Hotel, selected because Arthur Godfrey did his TV show from there.
In Miami, Johnny introduced me to two men who would help us - "Sam
Gold" and "Joe." Sam was Johnny's backup man; Joe
would be our direct contact in Cuba. These weren't ordinary mob
lackeys. Johnny didn't bother to tell me that "Sam" was
Sam Giancana, his boss within the Mafia and the chief of its gigantic
Chicago operation. Or that "Joe" was Santos Trafficante,
former syndicate chief in Havana, and the most powerful Mafia man
in the South.
I later
learned that Johnny didn't just need a little help from these men,
he needed their okay. Trafficante was necessary to get Castro because
he had the connections inside Cuba, and Giancana was necessary to
get Trafficante, because Trafficante had the stature of a "Godfather,"
and only a man of equal stature - like Giancana - could approach
him for help. Johnny couldn't do it on his own. Both were among
the ten most powerful Mafia members - a fact I learned only after
seeing their pictures in a magazine soon after meeting them.
(5)
Jack
Anderson, Peace,
War and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (1999)
The CIA's Sheffield
Edwards was supposed to make the contact with the underworld. He
approached a former FBI agent and CIA operative, Robert
Maheu, who moved at the subterranean level of politics. Maheu knew
his way around the shady side of Las Vegas; he had been recruited
by billionaire Howard Hughes to oversee his Las Vegas casinos. Happily,
Hughes was a friend who owed me a favor. Intermediaries persuaded
Maheu to confide in me. He confirmed that the CIA had asked him
to sound out the Mafia, strictly off the record, about a contract
to hit Fidel Castro. Maheu had taken the request straight to Johnny
Rosselli.
Rosselli
had a reputation inside the mob as a patriot; he was quite willing
to kill for his country. But as he told me, there was an etiquette
to be followed in these matters. Santo Trafficante was the godfather-in-exile
of Cuba after Castro chased out the mob. Rosselli couldn't even
tiptoe through Trafficante's territory without permission, and he
couldn't approach Trafficante without a proper introduction. So
Rosselli prevailed upon his boss in Chicago, Sam "Momo"
Giancana, to attend to the protocol. Since Giancana had godfather
status, he could solicit Trafficante's help to eliminate Castro.
The project appealed to Giancana who had commiserated with other
dons over the loss of casino revenues in Havana. Killing Castro
for the government would settle some old scores for the mob, and
it would put Uncle Sam in the debt of the Mafia.
Maheu had
been ordered to keep a tight lid on the involvement of the U.S.
government. The CIA was ready with a cover story that the Castro
hit had been arranged by disgruntled American businessmen who had
been bounced out of their Cuban enterprises by Castro.
On September
25, I960, Maheu brought two CIA agents to a suite at the Fountainebleau
Hotel on Miami Beach. Rosselli delivered two sinister mystery men
whom he introduced only as Sicilians named "Sam" and "Joe."
In fact, they were two of the Mafia's most notorious godfathers,
Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, both on the FBI's ten-most-wanted
list. They discussed the terms of Castro's demise, with Giancana
suggesting that the usual mob method of a quick bullet to the head
be eschewed in favor of something more delicate, like poison.
The wily
Giancana was less interested in bumping off Castro than in scoring
points with the federal government, and he intended to call in as
many chips as he could before the game was over.
(6)
Charles
and Sam Giancana, Double Cross (1992)
From Chicago,
Mooney brought in Richard Cain, Chuckie Nicoletti, and Milwaukee
Phil, all having worked previously on "the Bay of Pigs deal".
Mooney said that both Cain and Nicoletti were actual gunmen for
the hit, being placed at opposite ends of the Dallas Book Depository,
In fact, he asserted it was Cain, not Oswald who'd actaully fired
from the infamous sixth story window.
(7)
Frank
Ragano,
Mob Lawyer (1994)
Of the
Mafia trio, only Roselli testified before the State committee. On
July 19, 1975, the night before he was going to be questioned by
committee members, Sam Giancana was preparing a supper... when a
person he evidently trusted and had invited to share the meal ended
his life by firing a .22 caliber handgun equipped with silencer
into the back of his head. The killer followed up by discharging
six more rounds into Giancana's neck and mouth.
Some organized-crime
experts theorized that Giancana's murder was unrelated to the Senate
inquiry, and that he was killed by rivals to stop him from regaining
supremacy of Chicago's Mafia clan. From what I had picked up over
the years about mob executions, the nature of Giancana's death contradicts
that theory. In a traditional Mafia hit, a bullet in the throat
signifies that the victim had been 'talking,' and a bullet in the
mouth means he will never 'rat' again. Undoubtedly, Giancana was
murdered to prevent him from talking about the CIA-Castro plot or
any other Mafia secret.
Almost exactly
on the first anniversary of Giancana's death, another layer of mystery
was added to the coincidence of his slaying and the Senate's CIA
investigation. After years of seemingly cooperating with congressional
committees and talking rather freely with newspaper columnists about
Mafia affairs, Johnny Roselli became extremely cautious, almost
reclusive...
In late
July 1976, Roselli made a dinner date. He was seen with his old
friend Santo Trafficante at The Landings, a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale.
Two days after dining with Santo, Roselli disappeared.
Twelve days
later, on August 7, 1976, a fifty gallon drum containing the legless
body of a silver-haired man... The corpse was Johnny Roselli.
The manner
of Roselli's death also fit a Mafia pattern. He was beguiled to
his death by someone he trusted. The dumping of his body in the
bay was another message: The killers either wanted to give the impression
that he had deliberately vanished or they wanted to punish his relatives
for his misdeeds, perhaps his violation of omerta...
One fact,
however, was indisputable: Santo Trafficante was the only survivor
of the three mobsters recruited by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro.
(8)
Matthew
Smith, JFK: The Second Plot
(1992)
The Mafia had strong
reasons for wanting Kennedy dead. They had lost their huge gambling
interests in Havana when Castro seized power, and had been standing
on the touchline waiting for action by die Kennedy administration
which would reverse the situation and give them their casinos back.
It never happened. Instead they watched their government embrace
a policy of détente towards Castro's Cuba with growing dismay
and anger. Nor was this the only reason for their disenchantment
with Kennedy. John appointed his brother, Robert, Attorney General,
and Robert had opened up
an all-out war against the Mafia. Never before had such success
been obtained by the forces of law against mobsters who, for years,
had evaded prosecution. It had also a gathering momentum, for law
enforcement agents in many cities in the United States were so impressed
by Robert Kennedy's campaign they began bringing cases against their
local mobsters which past experience of failures had made them reluctant
to prosecute. The local success rate also boomed, and the Mafia
were shaken. Their instincts were to kill Robert Kennedy, but they
knew that this would only cause the President to increase the pressure,
leaving the only way to kill the President. If the President was
removed, the Attorney General would be replaced, since the appointment
was one of patronage.
Chicago
mobster, Sam Giancana, was high on Robert Kennedy's hit list, and
he was well aware of it. He claimed to have had connections with
the Kennedy's father, Joe, who made his fortune as a bootlegger
in the days of prohibition. His dealings with Joe Kennedy, he claimed,
earned him privileges from the President rather than the persecution
to which he was being subjected. In a book. Double Cross: The
Story of the Man Who Controlled
America, published
in Britain in 1992, Sam Giancana's brother and nephew sought
to establish that Giancana had rigged the Presidential election
vote in Cook County
on John Kennedy's behalf, which effectively gave Kennedy the election.
This was to ensure a 'relationship' between the President and Giancana,
on which the President reneged, and Giancana killed the President
for his double
cross. It is a spicy, imaginative tale for which no substantiation
is provided at
any level.
(9) Matt Wood, UIC Professor Debunks Chicago JFK Theory (21st March, 2006)
A favorite theory of many JFK assassination buffs is that the mob, led by Chicago boss Sam Giancana (pictured right), ordered a hit on the president as payback for double-crossing them after they helped him win the 1960 presidential election. When Kennedy won Illinois, many Richard Nixon supporters claimed that then-Mayor Richard J. Daley's political machine in Chicago had fixed the city election, thus helping Kennedy carry the state. But others, most notably investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, have claimed that instead of mere dirty politics, JFK, or more likely his father Joseph, a former bootlegger, made a deal with Giancana to swing crucial wards in the city. Giancana's son and grandson make a similar claim in their book, Double Cross, and of course, Oliver Stone could never make enough connections between the mob and the assassination in his film, JFK. After he was elected, JFK's brother and attorney general Bobby started a campaign against organized crime, enraging mob leaders like Giancana who thus wanted to see him dead.
Why the history lesson? Well, Chicagoist loves a good JFK assassination theory, so we perked up when we saw the Sun-Times reporting that UIC finance professor John Binder recently analyzed vote totals from in the 1960 general election in city wards where Giancana supposedly had clout to see if the mob really did swing the election. And he found that the mob-controlled areas in the city, as well as Cicero and Chicago Heights, voted no differently than others. In fact, Democratic vote totals remained about the same in those wards for Kennedy in 1960 as they were for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Binder also disputes the notion that Giancana helped Kennedy win the state of West Virginia, and that the mob influenced citywide votes via union support.
So if JFK didn't owe Giancana any favors for helping him win Illinois, would Bobby's crusade against the mob still have angered them enough to order a hit on the President? Maybe. But if not, conspiracy nuts always have a host of other favorite suspects, including anti-Castro Cubans, some guy named Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviets, Texas oilmen, and Lyndon Johnson himself. The parlor game never ends no matter how bizarre the idea. But if Professor Binder is right, you can take some of the major Chicago ties out of the equation.
