Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (25 page)

“Henry the Fourth. That’s my father,” Bobby told Lowell.

It was a legacy that Robert Kennedy seemed determined to make pure. If his father had sold his soul in pursuit of fortune and power, he would redeem the family name through his own righteous works. Even if that meant betraying his father’s partners in crime.

ON AUGUST 16, 1962,
FBI director Hoover sent Attorney General Kennedy one of the disturbing memos about his family that he delighted in waving in his face from time to time. They usually had to do with Jack’s reckless philandering. Like a loathsome troll tucked furtively under the castle drawbridge, Hoover had kept careful watch on the amorous comings and goings of the handsome Kennedy prince over the years. But this “personal memo” concerned the attorney general’s father and his organized crime ties. Joe Kennedy had courted the top G-man over the years, telling him with buttery flattery in 1958 that the FBI was “the greatest organization in the Government and you have performed the greatest public service of any man that I know.” Kennedy had prevailed upon his sons to keep the aging director in his post, figuring it was better to have Hoover and his secret files inside the administration tent than outside. This was how the FBI chief repaid the favor, now that the founding father was stricken and confined to a wheelchair.

“Before the last presidential election,” the memo read, “Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of President John Kennedy) had been visited by many gangsters with gambling interests and a deal was made which resulted in Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others obtaining a lucrative gambling establishment, the Cal-Neva Hotel, at Lake Tahoe. These gangsters reportedly met with Joseph Kennedy at the Cal-Neva, where Kennedy was staying at the time.”

Hoover could have told the attorney general more. He knew that in Joe Kennedy’s drive to ensure his son’s presidential victory, old Joe had conferred with some of the top Mafia leaders in the country, including some of those Bobby dragged before the Rackets Committee. One of these meetings took place at Felix Young’s restaurant in New York during the heat of the 1960 campaign. “I took the reservation, and it was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there,” recalled Edna Daultyon, who worked at the time as hostess at the restaurant. “I don’t remember all the names now, but there was John Rosselli, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans, the two brothers from Dallas, the top men from Buffalo, California and Colorado. They were all the top people, not soldiers. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.”

Through Frank Sinatra and other intermediaries, Kennedy also arranged deals with mobsters to help deliver the vote in the crucial West Virginia primary, where “walking-around money” traditionally played a key part in the outcome, and to pull off a landslide in Chicago (where the mob wards later skewed 80–20 for Kennedy) to ensure Illinois went Democratic in November. According to one witness, Kennedy went so far as to personally meet with Chicago godfather Sam Giancana in the chambers of an accommodating Cook County judge. This was the same snickering hoodlum with whom Bobby had clashed just months earlier in a headline-making exchange at the rackets hearings when he questioned the gangster’s manhood: “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”

Much has been written about the Kennedy effort to steal the 1960 vote. But what Joe Kennedy knew from his own hard-won experience in the trenches of politics and business is that American democracy is not the crystal vessel our textbooks hold aloft. It’s a roughly contested thing. Elections are often brokered, votes bought or stolen or uncounted. And in 1960, as Kennedy knew, the outcome of the presidential race would likely depend to a significant extent on corrupt machines and underworld bosses. JFK’s rivals had their own hoodlum backers—despite his father’s entreaties, Marcello supported Lyndon Johnson at the Democratic convention and Nixon in the general election, contributing $500,000 to the Republican candidate. And Hoffa predictably threw the full weight of the Teamsters against Kennedy, holding union meetings across the country to mobilize the vote for Nixon, and matching Marcello’s contribution with another half million dollars raised from other crime lords. In return for Hoffa’s support, which was credited with delivering Ohio into the GOP column, the vice president intervened with Eisenhower Attorney General William Rogers to sit on an indictment of the Teamster leader.

And when it came to stealing votes, Kennedy was certainly not the lone culprit in the 1960 presidential race. As political reporter Theodore H. White found out when he investigated the Illinois vote outcome, there was a good reason that Nixon did not challenge that state’s final count: “The Republicans stole as many votes as the Democrats.” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley knew how the game was played—his Democratic machine had to steal at least as many votes in elections as the Republicans did in downstate Illinois, where the GOP prevailed. Daley quickly silenced Republican protests over the 1960 Chicago vote by challenging the GOP to back a statewide recount. “He challenged them—he said he’d pay for half the recount statewide, and they said, ‘No, thank you,’” Daley’s son, William, recently recalled with a wry laugh. “Once you got out of Cook County, it was all pretty much rural Republican in those days. And they used paper ballots instead of the old machines we used in the city, so there was even more opportunity for fraud.”

Of course, politics were not pure in 2000 either, when Bill Daley ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign. There were many Democrats that year who wished Daley and his candidate had demonstrated the brawling political instincts of his father and the Kennedy family during the sordid Florida recount spectacle, when the bare-knuckled Bush machine humiliated the Gore team, as it clung proudly to its Marquis of Queensbury rules of political pugilism.

By contrast, the Kennedy family knew how to fight to win. And they were under no illusions about the back-alley cunning of Richard Nixon. The Kennedys were prepared to do whatever it took to outmaneuver their Republican opponent.

The difference between John Kennedy and his rivals is that after winning the 1960 election, a down and dirty contest during which both campaigns resorted to unsavory measures, he refused to pay off the political debts that he had incurred.

There is no evidence that Bobby Kennedy participated with his father in the underworld wheeling and dealing that took place during the campaign. Nor did JFK take the lead on these negotiations. The family founder seemed to be operating on his own typically brash initiative when he contacted his old associates in the criminal world to help deliver the election for his son. “If Jack had known about some of the telephone calls his father made on his behalf to Tammany Hall–type bosses during the 1960 campaign, Jack’s hair would have turned white,” Kenny O’Donnell later said. Still, Bobby and Jack were not naïve about their father; they were both too shrewd to be completely unaware of the levers he was pulling on behalf of the campaign. When a friend warned JFK, “You know, the old man is hurting you,” he replied, “My father is working for his son. Do you want me to tell my father to stop working for his son?”

What is certain is that no matter what special favors their father arranged in the underworld, once he and his brother took office, Robert Kennedy showed no reluctance in going after the Mafia bosses who had inserted themselves into American politics. On the contrary, the young attorney general unleashed a furious campaign against the crime lords, the likes of which they had never experienced. The message was brutally clear: You might give money to the Kennedys, but you can’t buy the Kennedys.

Hoffa could see it coming, right after the election. He knew that he “was in the soup worse than ever. Nobody had to tell me that [Bobby] was really going to go after my scalp now. I knew that my worst days were still in front of me.”

When he took over the Justice Department, Kennedy breathed new life into the organized crime unit and created a special task force under Sheridan to hunt Hoffa. He lit a fire under Hoover, who had famously denied the existence of the Mafia, prompting gangsters to laugh off the FBI as “Famous But Incompetent.” When Hoover proved an obstacle to Kennedy’s anti-crime drive, he simply went around the bureau, using agents from the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, and Narcotics Bureau as his shock troops. He offered incentive awards to his team of young prosecutors to come up with ingenious new ways to put mobsters and crooked politicians behind bars. The number of indicted gangsters shot up from 121 in 1961 to 615 in 1963—among them were such notorious figures as Carlos Marcello, Mickey Cohen, Teamster hoods Anthony Provenzano and Joey Glimco, as well as Hoffa himself. Kennedy’s crime-busters were also in relentless pursuit of Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancana. It was getting so hot for the criminal underworld that FBI wiretaps picked up mobsters’ conversations in which they talked of abandoning their line of work until the Kennedys were out of office.

The hard-charging attorney general seemed to pursue gangsters who were tied to the Kennedy family name with a special wrath. He ordered FBI agents to dog Sam Giancana’s every step—they trailed him into restaurants, shined their lights into his Oak Park home, and interfered with his golf game. Even when the mobster exploded at his FBI tormentors one day at O’Hare Airport, threatening that “one of these days we are going to tell all” about the Kennedys, the attorney general did not let up. Kennedy’s top aides flirted with authoritarian measures to bring down the Chicago godfather.

“My boss, [criminal division chief] Jack Miller, called me in one day,” recalled former Justice Department prosecutor Ronald Goldfarb. “I was the expert on the fairly refined area of law called contempt. They said to me: What do you think of this idea? The grand jury calls in Giancana and we offer him total immunity on everything he’s ever done in his whole life, as long as he agrees to talk about every crime the Mafia has ever committed. Of course he can’t possibly do that, so he’s got to go to jail, and the federal rule is you can only throw someone in jail for contempt for the life of a grand jury, which is eighteen months. But they had a plan: The day Giancana gets out of jail, they say, we call him back to another grand jury and ask him the same question. This goes on and on. Life imprisonment for Sam Giancana! So I think, oh my God, they’re really thinking of doing this—they’re going to take the Mafia leaders one by one and put them in jail indefinitely. And so they ask me, Can we do this? And I remember saying to them, ‘Yes, technically you could do that. But it would be outrageous, we’d be viewed as fascistic, overbearing prosecutors, it would take the law way too far. I strongly recommend against it.’

“So the notion that we were pulling our punches with people like Giancana because we knew that he had helped Kennedy’s campaign, or was hooked up with Sinatra, or was helping the CIA kill Castro—that’s just absurd.”

Goldfarb, a young Yale Law graduate, had defied his New York liberal friends—who were leery of RFK’s aggressive law and order image—to join Bobby’s crusade. He quickly fell under the attorney general’s spell, embracing his conviction that they were chasing not simply everyday criminals but “massively rich and powerful” corrupters of the American system—“perfect villains,” in Goldfarb’s description. “I felt so admiring of Kennedy. I thought, Wow, this guy is dead straight, he is totally supportive of us in every way. Every time I won a case, he would invite me to a restaurant, he was a nice guy. Incredible integrity. So nobody is going to tell me that he made us compromise or capitulate or anything like that, because I was there. It didn’t happen.”

But in later years, Goldfarb, author of a 1995 book that argued JFK was assassinated by the Mafia, would shake his head at Bobby Kennedy’s wild courage. “He was burning the candle at both ends, pressing the mob like he did even after his family had used them for favors,” the former Justice Department prosecutor told me. “How in God’s name he thought he was ever going to get away with this, I don’t know. But they were the Kennedys—they came from a family where the father had done all of that, and they still reached the absolute top. I couldn’t have slept at night knowing what Bobby did! But these people were different.”

It was not just his father’s unsavory associates who complicated Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department reign, it was his brother’s. On the afternoon of March 22, 1962 the ever-scheming Hoover arrived at the White House, where he was greeted by the president, who sat down with him for lunch in the Executive Mansion dining room. Hoover told Kennedy that he had evidence of the president’s madly indiscreet affair with a dark and curvy young beauty named Judy Campbell, who had been introduced to JFK by Frank Sinatra. Hoover also knew that Kennedy was sharing his mistress with none other than Sam Giancana. (Recent evidence suggests that Campbell might have been steered Kennedy’s way by the Mafia.) The president’s ever-watchful brother also knew everything. One of his investigators had come across the affair the month before while tracking a paper trail of racketeers’ phone calls and immediately told his boss, who informed his brother. Sending Hoover over to the White House might have been Bobby’s way of drilling into his sexually daring brother the urgency of stopping his liaison before it became a presidency-threatening scandal.

That summer, another Justice Department investigation prompted Bobby to again warn his brother to cut off a risky relationship, this one with Sinatra. A young Florida attorney named Doug McMillan, who had recently joined the Justice Department, had compiled a dossier on the underworld ties of the singer, who had helped swing the entertainment industry behind Kennedy’s candidacy and had been master of ceremonies at JFK’s inaugural ball. McMillan, fully aware of the family connection, was nervous about presenting his evidence to his boss. But the attorney general listened respectfully and then asked the young lawyer to put all the details in a memo, which he did, presenting it to his boss on August 3, 1962. Shortly thereafter, JFK famously cut Sinatra out of his life, to the singer’s volcanic rage. When the president had Sinatra notified that he would no longer be staying with him during his Palm Springs vacations, the singer reportedly took a sledgehammer to the helicopter landing pad that he had constructed in anticipation of the presidential visits.