Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (28 page)

Magaddino was unaware that he was being bugged and that most FBI intelligence about the Mob was coming from unguarded conversations. On June 6, 1963, Magaddino was at it again, cautioning several of his men about the difficulties created by the Kennedys. “Here we are situated with this administration. We got from the president down against us. But we got to resist.” There was then a sound like a fist slamming a table.

That same month, the godfather admitted to one of his soldiers, Anthony DeStefano, that after a visit from FBI agents he was perplexed by the bureau’s ability to gather intelligence. “You see, the Cosa Nostra. The other day they made me become frightened. They know our business better than us. They know the heads of the families, the
capodecina
, the FBI does. Therefore, that’s why, the other day, I say be careful before you open your mouth. Because sometime, somebody could be a spy and you might think he is an
amico nostro.”

A
month before the assassination, on October 31, 1963, Magaddino’s son, Peter, a made man, heatedly told his father that the president “should drop dead.” The son added, “They should kill the whole family—the mother and father too.”

Early on in the Mob investigation, on February 9, 1962, FBI agents listened to inflammatory remarks in a gripe session between Angelo Bruno, the boss of the Philadelphia family, and Willie Weisberg, a trusted business associate. “See what Kennedy done,” Weisberg said. “With Kennedy, a guy should take a knife, like one of them other guys, and stab and then kill the fuck, where he is now … I’ll kill. Right in the fucking White House. Somebody’s got to get rid of this fuck.”

On the subject of Mob revenge, the congressional committee took a hard look at Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans potentate, and his malice toward the Kennedys. Robert Kennedy acknowledged responsibility for Marcello’s temporary deportation to Central America in 1961, maintaining the expulsion had been done in accordance with immigration laws. Before the assassination, the mobster repeatedly had vented his outrage against the attorney general for his humiliation. A troublesome issue that concerned the committee was a reported conversation in September 1962 between Marcello and Edward Becker, a wheeler-dealer with known business ties to underworld figures. Becker had various occupations: investigator for a private-eye firm headed by a former FBI agent; public-relations man; show business manager; television producer. He claimed that he heard Marcello pledge that he would get his revenge against Robert Kennedy for deporting him. “Don’t worry about that little Bobby son-of-a-bitch,” Becker quoted Marcello. “He’s going to be taken care of.”

In 1967 the FBI looked into the story of Marcello’s purported threat after learning that Becker had provided an account of it to Ed Reid, a writer on organized-crime subjects. An internal bureau memorandum based on an interview with Reid, said that Becker had recalled Marcello telling him that “in order to get Bobby Kennedy they would have to get the president and they could not kill Bobby because the president would use the Army and the Marines to get them.” Marcello allegedly told Becker that killing President Kennedy “would cause Bobby to lose his power as attorney general because of the new president.” Becker was dismissed by the FBI as disreputable and unreliable, so no effort was made by the bureau to interview him, or to adequately verify or refute his information.

A decade after the FBI turned a cold shoulder to Becker, he was questioned by House Assassination Committee investigators. He recounted that he had met three or four times in New Orleans with Marcello between September 1962 and January 1963, regarding a fuel-oil additive business that Becker and an associate of the Mob boss wanted Marcello to invest in. During the course of
one meeting at Marcello’s Churchill Farms estate in September 1962, Becker asked Marcello about pressure from Robert Kennedy’s investigation, and it was then that the Mob boss exploded in rage. Becker could not recall Marcello’s exact words, but said he “clearly stated that he was going to arrange to have President Kennedy murdered in some way,” and that someone outside of the Mafia would be manipulated to carry out the actual crime. Becker also asserted to committee investigators that Marcello made a reference to President Kennedy’s being a dog and Robert Kennedy the dog’s tail. Becker paraphrased Marcello as saying ominously, “The dog will keep biting you if you cut off its tail, but that if the dog’s head is cut off, the dog would die.” The shrill comments occurred during a minute or two of a business meeting that lasted more than an hour, Becker told investigators.

Marcello’s harangue disturbed Becker, but he was accustomed to hearing mobsters and other criminals routinely threaten adversaries, and he did not take them seriously. His fear of Mob retribution if he reported Marcello’s remarks to the authorities before or immediately after President Kennedy’s assassination had kept him silent for years.

The House committee’s staff substantiated the objective facts of Becker’s story concerning dates and places that he met with Marcello, and found that the FBI had unjustifiably disparaged Becker and his information. “They made no attempt to impartially investigate what he had to say,” a committee lawyer reported. “All they did was shoot the messenger and discredit him.”

Called before the special House committee in executive session, Marcello became enraged when he retold how he had been “snatched” by Bobby Kennedy’s agents and dumped summarily in Guatemala. But he vigorously denied making the threatening statements attributed to him against President Kennedy. “No, sir, I never said anything like that. Positively not, never said anything like that.” With only Becker’s word to go on, the committee’s inquiry into Marcello’s possible involvement in the assassination came to a dead end. Ironically, on November 22, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was shot, Marcello was acquitted by a New Orleans jury of conspiracy to falsify his Guatemalan passport, one of the charges brought against him by Robert Kennedy’s prosecutors. He was never again deported.

A second Mafia luminary, Florida’s Santo Trafficante Jr., also was of particular interest to the committee. Trafficante, who had Mob rackets on both Florida coasts in Tampa and in Miami, worked closely with Marcello; their provinces comprised the Mob’s southern citadels. Before Castro’s revolution in 1959,
Trafficante was the dominant American mafioso in Cuba; he had investments in three casinos and was heavily involved in shipping narcotics to the United States. While most mobsters dashed back to America when Castro seized power, Trafficante, who spoke fluent Spanish, remained in Cuba, confident he could retain his lucrative casinos by bribing the new regime. He soon learned that he was mistaken. Castro’s government did not cooperate with gamblers or drug traffickers; it appropriated Trafficante’s holdings, imprisoned him, and threatened to execute him. There are two versions of how Trafficante escaped Castro’s revolutionary justice: he was kicked out after all his property was confiscated; or he bribed a prison official who released him without the knowledge of higher-ups.

Incensed by his losses in Cuba, Trafficante returned to Florida where he cultivated ties with the anti-Castro exile movement. His hatred of Castro and his links to the émigrés attracted the secret attention of U.S. spymasters. A year before the House committee began its work on Kennedy’s assassination, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975 disclosed an embarrassing intrigue by the Central Intelligence Agency; it employed Trafficante and other mafiosi in a ludicrous scheme to kill Castro.

An alliance with the Mafia was one of the eight conspiracies hatched by the CIA from 1960 to 1965 to eliminate Castro and topple his leftist government. In the summer of 1960, the CIA asked Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent with Mob contacts, to find mafiosi who could pull off a hit on the Cuban dictator. Maheu enlisted John Roselli, a Los Angeles hood, who brought in Chicago’s Sam Giancana and Tampa’s Santo Trafficante Jr. Of the trio, only Trafficante had intimate knowledge of Cuba and had close ties to anti-Castro exiles.

CIA operatives gave Maheu $150,000 to pass along to the putative assassins. During the planning stage, an internal agency review accurately described the Mafia participants as untrustworthy racketeers and emphasized that they were interested mainly in reacquiring “gambling, prostitution and dope monopolies” if Castro was overthrown. The cautionary red flag was ignored, and in late 1960 or early 1961, at a meeting in a room at Miami’s elegant Fontainebleau Hotel, Maheu gave Trafficante a briefcase crammed with CIA money. He also handed over lethal capsules to be used by the plotters to poison Castro when he dined at a favorite restaurant in Havana. The poison-pill comic-opera caper never materialized. A confidential CIA review was unable to pinpoint why the plan failed or whether it was even attempted. Neither the CIA nor the Senate committee could trace what happened to the $150,000 earmarked for the operation.

Of the hit team trio recruited by the CIA, only Santo Trafficante was alive to testify before the Kennedy assassination committee. Subpoenaed before the committee in 1978, Trafficante sketched a portrait of himself as an insignificant bit player and translator in the CIA attempt to murder Castro. CIA money? Poison pills? His memory was a total blank.

Sam Giancana was murdered in his home the night before he was scheduled to be questioned in 1975 by the Senate committee investigators looking into the CIA’s ventures in Cuba. He was shot at close range in the back of the head and in his mouth and throat. For Mafia analysts, the method of execution imparted a clear message. In a traditional Mob hit, bullets in the mouth or throat signify that the victim has been “talking” and that he will never “rat” again.

John Roselli vanished in 1976, shortly after secretly testifying before the Senate committee and two days after a dinner date with Trafficante in Fort Lauderdale. Two weeks later, Roselli’s legless corpse was fished out of a 55-gallon oil drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay in North Miami. The manner of Roselli’s murder also fit a Mafia pattern. Mutilation and torture before he was strangled meant that he had already violated the oath of
omertà
or that he was about to.

Trafficante, of course, maintained that he knew nothing about the slayings of his collaborators in the CIA-Castro escapade. Concerning knowledge of Kennedy’s slaying, Trafficante was equally evasive before the House committee. The panel had evidence that he knew Jack Ruby, and that Ruby had worked for the Mob before Castro’s takeover, apparently smuggling money out of Cuba for Trafficante and other mobsters involved in Havana casino and prostitution rackets. The Florida godfather’s memory again failed him when it came to his dealings with Ruby. Asked about meetings or associations with Ruby, the mobster’s answers were “I don’t remember,” or “I don’t recall.”

Before the public hearings began, the committee came across another tantalizing Mob threat against John Kennedy, this one presumably uttered by Trafficante. A prominent Cuban exile leader, José Alemán, informed investigators in a private interrogation that in 1962 Trafficante had told him that President Kennedy was “going to be hit.” But called before the committee in a public session, Alemán was a reluctant witness, indicating that he feared for his life and requesting government protection. On the intriguing issue of Trafficante’s “hit” statement, Alemán radically altered his original version. He testified that he had understood Trafficante to mean that if Kennedy sought reelection, he was
going to be “hit by a lot of votes” and that there had been no implied threat on the president’s life. Alemán’s 180-degree turn led to another blind alley for committee investigators searching for clues to an old mystery.

The committee’s final report in 1979 raised doubts about the Warren Commission’s most consequential conclusion fifteen years earlier—that only one shooter, Oswald, had been responsible for President Kennedy’s death. The congressmen did agree with the commission that there had been no conspiracy involving Cuba, the Soviet Union, the CIA, or any other federal agency. They nevertheless gave great weight to compelling circumstantial evidence that more than one gunman fired at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza. But the committee conceded that its two-year investigation had failed to turn up sufficient evidence to implicate anyone except Oswald.

G. Robert Blakey, a former aide to Robert Kennedy and the committee’s chief counsel and principal drafter of the report, asserted that “organized crime had a hand” in the assassination. There was ample evidence from the bugs, he believed, that Mafia leaders were at least thinking about removing President Kennedy and his brother. Blakey’s analysis specified a powerful motive for the murder of the president: his death would derail Robert Kennedy’s sustained and comprehensive assault on organized crime.

In its report, the committee suggested that the Mafia leaders most likely to have conspired against Kennedy were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr. The committee explored another enticing angle: Oswald’s move to New Orleans in the spring and summer of 1963. Shortly before the assassination he lived for a time with his uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, a bookmaker in Mar-cello’s organization. The committee questioned whether Oswald might have been inveigled into being used as a hapless fall-guy shooter by Marcello or someone in his borgata. But it reached no definite conclusion. There was also a tangential Marcello linkage to Dallas, part of his Mafia empire. There, Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club had been a watering hole for local mafiosi, many of them working for Joe Civillo, Marcello’s underboss and guardian of his interests in Texas.

An essential part of the committee’s investigation was its independent combing of FBI records of the electronic surveillance of mobsters before and after the assassination. The tapes produced no smoking gun, no concrete evidence, of a Mafia plan to kill the president. But after reviewing the FBI’s overall
conspiracy investigation, the congressmen and their investigation staff branded it as “seriously flawed.” They rebuked the bureau for having concentrated narrowly on Oswald as the only suspect; for failing to pursue fresh and worthwhile leads about organized-crime involvement; for disregarding Becker’s allegations about Marcello’s threats; and for withholding from the Warren Commission vital information, including evidence from the secret bugs reflecting the Mafia’s animosity to the Kennedy administration.