Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (23 page)

Even before he became attorney general, Kennedy knew how entwined American power was becoming with criminal forces. He learned, as the ruddy-cheeked, young chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, when a Mafia man brought in for questioning defiantly told him, “You can’t touch me. I’ve got immunity.” When Bobby asked him, “Who gave you immunity?” the gangster replied, “The CIA. I’m working for them, but I can’t talk about it. Top secret.” When Kennedy checked out the gangster’s story, he was sickened to find out it was true.

The CIA—and its predecessor, the OSS—had been using the Mafia to do their dirty work since World War II, when the government enlisted mob bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to help guard against enemy sabotage in the New York harbor and to supply intelligence from their contacts in Italy. Later, in postwar Italy, U.S. intelligence used Luciano and his notorious colleague Vito Genovese to help eliminate the growing Communist threat there.

Kennedy learned too about the merger of the underworld and overworld when distinguished senators and governors came before his committee to argue on behalf of organized crime despots, and when executives from Fortune 500 companies sheepishly testified about the deals they cut with burly gangsters to assure labor peace.

And Robert Kennedy learned as he was digging into the dirty history of racketeering in America, when he came across the name of his very own father. It was the buccaneering enterprise of Joseph P. Kennedy that had made possible his political career and that of his brother. His father’s aggressive climb to wealth and power illustrated with painful clarity for the younger Kennedy how ambitious families sprouting towards the sun often begin their journeys in the muck.

BOBBY KENNEDY CAME FACE
to face with a world that few young men of his class and privilege had to confront when he became chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. It was fall 1956 and he was just twenty-nine years old. His work on the Senate panel, better known as the Rackets Committee or the McClellan Committee after the Arkansas Democrat who chaired it, took Bobby down a hole into an underworld of cold-blooded killers, union thugs, crooked politicians, brothel queens, and pinstriped executives with tawdry secrets. It also introduced him to brave labor reformers, incorruptible cops and judges, and heroic newspaper reporters. With his romantic and religious frame of mind, Kennedy saw this colorful tableaux of human greed and turmoil as not just a struggle over who would control the nation’s economy, but a battle for the country’s very soul. He had missed World War II, where his older brothers had proved their courage, but this would become Bobby’s war.

Armed with a staff of thirty-five investigators, forty-five accountants, twenty stenographers, and assorted clerks—more than a hundred people in all—Kennedy ran the biggest juggernaut of federal scrutiny on Capitol Hill. It was a restless operation. The young counsel and his investigators did not remain hunkered down in their warren of offices below the street floor of the old Senate Office Building. They roamed the country in search of malefactors, as well as the honest witnesses and incriminating evidence they needed to put them away.

On a tip from a prisoner at Joliet, Bobby found himself one day digging in an Illinois farm field for the body of a newspaperwoman who the convict said had been killed by local mobsters. With Kennedy was one of his committee investigators, Jim McShane, the pug-faced former New York cop who would be called upon by Kennedy in many dire circumstances in the years to come. The two men shoveled away without finding anything, urged on by the con, who insisted he was telling the truth: “May I have syphilis of the eyes, and may my mother be a whore, if she isn’t buried here,” he declared. Kennedy later wryly observed that he knew little “about the man’s mother or his eyes, but Jim McShane and I both knew, after hours of digging, that the woman’s body was not there.” When the angry farmer whose fields were being excavated by the Senate investigators suddenly appeared with his three corn-fed sons, that settled it—Kennedy and McShane beat a hasty retreat.

On other occasions, McShane and his fellow investigators had guns drawn on them. Kennedy was offered bribes. A man mistaken for a Kennedy spy by Teamster goons in Detroit was hung out a tenth floor window of the union building by his heels. But the reform machine chugged forward, unearthing hundreds of eye-opening tales of corruption, violence, and abuse of power. Stories about men who were killed or savagely beaten or driven to suicide after standing up to tyrants like Hoffa. Men who had acid thrown in their faces, or cucumbers shoved all the way into their intestines. Walter Sheridan—the quiet, friendly investigator whose appearance Bobby described as “almost angelic”—would impress his boss by solving the mystery of an Indianapolis cab company owner who had vanished. There was nothing left of him to be found. Nothing but the records of the man’s final phone calls, which his wife handed over to the sweet-faced Sheridan when he knocked on her door. The calls were to Jimmy Hoffa and his henchmen.

Kennedy brought the characters at the heart of these lurid stories parading into the grand, dignified setting of the old Senate building’s Caucus Room, so America could see the rot and brutality that often lay beneath the jeweled thrones of power. It was the same ornate Beaux Arts room where other historic investigations had unfolded, including the probes into the Titanic disaster and the Teapot Dome scandal. Crystal chandeliers hung from the room’s high, richly detailed ceilings; carved eagles adorned its wooden benches. It was here, Kennedy noted, “where the star of Senator Joseph McCarthy rose and fell.” The young Senate counsel had once been drawn to the McCarthy crusade, but now he had discovered an “enemy within” that he believed was more threatening to the American way of life and more deserving of his fury than communism.

Sitting next to committee chairman John McClellan—a balding man three decades his senior with a hardscrabble Arkansas face and the deep, austere tones of a Southern minister—Bobby Kennedy seemed an unlikely crime-buster. He had the fresh-faced good looks and high-pitched voice of a Boston schoolboy. When he began questioning the hard-looking men who sat before him, men who had torn and scratched for their illegal slice of the American Dream, they found it hard to take him seriously. Hoffa winked at him. Sam Giancana giggled. But they soon realized they were in the crosshairs of a ferociously intelligent and doggedly prepared man who was determined to prove that he was tougher than they.

Kennedy brought his confrontations with these men vividly to life in his 1960 book,
The Enemy Within
. He accused Hoffa of “personalizing” their battle in his book. But Kennedy himself brought a razor-sharp eye for detail to his descriptions of Hoffa and the other crime bosses that was nothing but personal. Hoffa and his lieutenants were “often bilious and fat, or lean and cold and hard,” he wrote. “They have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jeweled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet-smelling perfume.” Kennedy returned to the subject of these men’s smell. It was feminine to him. It seemed to underscore how their brutality was the work of strutting bullies, not real men. “I was riding up in the elevator on my way to the hearing room when I was almost overcome by a heavy, sickly-sweet smell,” Kennedy wrote, describing a brush with a Hoffa hood named Joey Glimco. “I tried to remember what madam was testifying that day, until I got out and, walking down the hall with Glimco to the caucus room, realized that he was the source of the oppressive odor.”

Kennedy seemed to get a charge from sparring with these men. One day the notorious New York labor enforcer Joey Gallo, who controlled the city’s jukebox business, strolled into his office “dressed like a Hollywood Grade B gangster.” His shirt, pants, and coat were all black. He had long, pomaded hair curling down the back of his neck. He leaned over and felt Kennedy’s carpet: “It would be nice for a crap game.”

Kennedy was not amused. His committee had heard testimony from a jukebox distributor who had dared to resist Gallo’s crooked union. Gallo’s thugs jumped him after a meeting, cracking his skull open with steel bars. The man had shuffled into the Senate hearing room, a “thin, wan, pathetic figure,” still barely able to speak.

As Gallo reached out to shake hands with Kennedy that day, the young investigator said, “So you’re Joey Gallo, the Jukebox King. You don’t look so tough. I’d like to fight you myself.” The gangster demurred. “I don’t fight,” he told Kennedy.

Bobby’s older brother had sought to define himself with a lofty book about courage in politics. But
The Enemy Within
was a much grittier revelation of its author’s true character than JFK’s
Profiles in Courage
was of his. While John Kennedy chronicled the bravery of men he admired from a historical distance, Bobby wrote about men with whom he had personally clashed or whose life-and-death heroics he had passionately championed. He had climbed down into the underworld he was describing. He was part of the story.

The rackets investigation defined Bobby the way World War II had defined Jack. And it made the two men brothers in arms. When Bobby talked his brother into joining him on the McClellan Committee, to make sure it was politically balanced enough to prevent Republican senators from declaring open season on organized labor, it afforded JFK one of his few displays of genuine courage during his Senate career. The experience would also help shape the Kennedy presidency. The young, dedicated investigators and reporters Bobby gathered around him on the committee—O’Donnell, Salinger, Sheridan, Seigenthaler, Guthman—would become the heart of his brother’s administration. It was fitting that JFK would announce his campaign for president in the Senate Caucus Room, where he and his brother had done battle with what Bobby bluntly called a “conspiracy of evil.”

But Joseph Kennedy worried that his two sons had made a horrible error. In late December 1956, when Bobby went to Hyannis Port to celebrate Christmas with his family, his father confronted him about the labor rackets hearings, which had just begun. Joe Kennedy didn’t think the family should get mixed up in something like this. Bobby’s sister Jean later reported that the two men clashed with a kind of fury she had never seen erupt between them. Their father feared that Bobby’s investigative work would hurt Jack’s presidential chances by turning the labor movement against the Kennedys, Jean recalled. But there was clearly something more behind this unprecedented father-son tempest. Joe Kennedy was deeply alarmed by the path that his son was taking. What demons would Bobby stir up as he went crashing about the underworld with his avenging angels? “The old man saw this as dangerous,” recalled longtime Kennedy family crony Lem Billings. “He thought Bobby was naïve.”

Joe Kennedy loved his sons more than anything else in life. His dominating presence in his children’s lives is part of American lore. But less appreciated is the Kennedy patriarch’s ever-watchful love. This paternal attentiveness shines through in the flurry of correspondence he dashed off to his offspring, particularly his sons, as he traveled the globe in his empire-building days. He instructed them on everything from manners and grooming to global affairs; he comforted them when they were homesick and dispirited at boarding school; he inspired them with grand visions of their future if they worked hard enough. Joe Kennedy was not just a tower of protective male strength in his children’s lives, he was a nagging, nurturing mother hen, who constantly instilled in them a sense of family pride and self-worth.

“After long experience in sizing up people, I definitely know you have the goods and you can go a long way,” Joe pep-talked a seventeen-year-old Jack. But he needed to apply himself. Joe worried that his son was gliding a little too nonchalantly through his adolescence. Bobby, at sixteen, needed a different kind of love from his father. He lacked Jack’s easy self-confidence, he brooded about things. “I wouldn’t be too discouraged about the football team,” his father bucked him up. “After all, the value of playing football isn’t primarily playing on the first team—it’s the opportunity to meet a lot of nice boys and to get the practice of playing teamwork.”

As the Kennedy brothers prepared to challenge the gods of the underworld—who, unmolested by the FBI, were enjoying a golden reign in post-war America—their father feared for his sons’ safety, and for good reason. Joe Kennedy knew these sorts of men, he had done business with them, they had helped him make a fortune in liquor distribution, both during and after the bootlegging days. He knew what they were capable of.

Kennedy was precisely the type of predatory capitalist whom his son would summon before the Rackets Committee, a shrewd, law-skirting entrepreneur who took his business opportunities and his partners where he found them. He was a master at exploiting the wildly profitable frontiers of American enterprise, from his days as a Wall Street speculator to movie baron to whiskey bootlegger. Running liquor during Prohibition brought the kind of windfall profits the drug trade does today. But it also meant doing business with the Mafia if you valued your life, and Kennedy went right to the top to ensure the security of his business. He forged a partnership with Frank Costello, the dapper, politically wired “prime minister of the underworld” who began each day after leaving his fashionable Central Park West penthouse by getting groomed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel barbershop. By the late 1940s, as Jack began the political career his father had urged upon him, Kennedy had cashed out of the liquor business, selling his distribution company, Somerset Importers, to New Jersey mobster Longy Zwillman. But the stain on the Kennedy name would remain an indelible part of the family’s folklore.