Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (29 page)

The findings obliquely pointed out the FBI’s inability in the early 1960s to penetrate the criminal webs of Marcello and Trafficante as effectively as it had the borgatas of northern Mob leaders. The bureau had neglected to bug Mar-cello even once, and it had electronically eavesdropped on Trafficante only four times, without meaningful results. An unidentified FBI official conceded to the committee that Trafficante’s organization in Tampa and Marcello’s in Louisiana were “blind spots” for the FBI in the 1960s. Summing up the failure to investigate and eavesdrop on Marcello, the official said crisply, “He was too smart.” Congressional staffers privately evaluated the bureau’s agents in New Orleans as either incompetent or corrupt for ignoring Marcello’s Mob empire.

Sixteen years after the committee finished its work, more indirect evidence surfaced to buttress the belief that major mafiosi had roles in an assassination conspiracy. The new information came from Frank Ragano, a lawyer for Trafficante, Marcello, and Jimmy Hoffa, the teamsters’ union president, when Kennedy was killed. In an autobiography,
Mob Lawyer
, written with this author, Ragano shed light on the Mafia’s loathing of the Kennedys. Of greater importance, Ragano said that Trafficante, shortly before he died, made statements to him that amounted to confirmation that mobsters were involved in the assassination.

A Florida-based attorney, Ragano represented Trafficante over a thirty-year period, and for much of that time he was a close friend and confidant of the don. Their relationship was so warm that Ragano considered Trafficante his guiding star and the equivalent of an older brother. Ragano admitted that until late in his life he had struck a Faustian bargain with Trafficante that brought him financial riches. As a quid pro quo, he had forsaken his ethics and had become “house counsel” and “Mob lawyer” for a ruthless criminal boss and his organization. Through his intimate relationship with Trafficante, Ragano met
and partied with numerous southern and northern Mafia godfathers, capos, and soldiers. The experience gave him firsthand exposure to their twisted morals.

When northern Mob dignitaries vacationed in Florida, Trafficante entertained them at Capra’s, a favorite restaurant in Miami, and often invited Ragano. In the months before the assassination, Ragano said he heard Sam Giancana, the Chicago boss, lash out at Robert Kennedy and the FBI for harassing him and Phyllis McGuire, a popular singer with whom he had a highly publicized affair. At one dinner, Ragano recalled Giancana blustering that his organization won—or stole—the 1960 election for Kennedy by fixing votes in Cook County. “That rat bastard, son-of-a-bitch,” Giancana said. “We broke our balls for him and gave him the election and he gets his brother to hound us to death.”

Shortly after the assassination, Ragano was dining with Tommy Lucchese and other New York mobsters and their women friends when the topic of Kennedy’s murder came up. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Lucchese commented acidly.

Ragano was at the celebratory dinner with Trafficante in Tampa on the night of the assassination when the mobster was in a radiant mood. He was buoyant, Ragano said, convinced that the president’s death would end investigations of himself and Marcello, and of Hoffa, with whom both southern bosses had crooked deals. Previously, Trafficante had ranted repeatedly against President Kennedy for allowing Castro to remain in power, thereby blocking him from regaining his profitable casinos in Havana. He despised President Kennedy for withholding American air support from the anti-Castro forces in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and, in his view, dooming the operation. “We’ll make money out of this and maybe go back to Cuba,” Ragano remembered Trafficante saying happily the night John Kennedy was killed.

One of Ragano’s confidential roles for Trafficante and Marcello was acting as their conduit to Hoffa, camouflaging their relationship to the teamsters’ union head from the FBI’s prying eyes. They used Ragano to arrange Hoffa
’s
blessings for multimillion-dollar loans from the teamsters’ pension fund for projects in which they were behind-the-scenes partners or brokers.

It was through Trafficante’s intervention that Ragano joined Hoffa’s legal team. The lawyer said that he was never paid directly for his services to Hoffa. Instead, like the Mafia bosses, he was richly rewarded through Hoffa’s misuse
of the teamsters’ pension fund for real estate development deals. Ragano was paid off in brokerage fees and in direct profits for arranging union loans on favorable terms for himself, mobsters, and legitimate business people, which Hoffa speedily authorized. Lavish loans from the billion-dollar fund—at the time the largest union welfare pool in the country—promoted the development of Mob-backed casinos in Las Vegas. Although the pension fund was jointly administered by union and management representatives, Hoffa virtually controlled the authorization of loans that were intended to produce guaranteed profits.

Hoffa was candid with Ragano about the teamsters’ compacts with mobsters. In frank conversations, Hoffa rationalized that he and earlier IBT leaders had been compelled to use Mafia muscle in the 1930s and ‘40s to counterbalance brutal strikebreakers hired by companies fighting the union. Mob support was the keystone of Hoffa’s success. New York families created “paper” or nonexistent locals in New York that were vital to his election as IBT president. Defending the underworld alliance, Hoffa said that mobster influence had helped the union grow and obtain unparalleled wages, fringe benefits, and working conditions for its blue-collar workers. Hoffa was confident he could swing pragmatic deals with Mafia leaders without surrendering his or the union’s independence. Under his vigorous command, the teamsters’ membership swelled from 800,000 in 1957 to nearly two million by 1963, making it America’s largest union.

But the teamsters’ corruption scandals tarnished the entire American labor movement, and in 1957 the AFL-CIO expelled the Hoffa-led union on charges that it was widely infiltrated by gangsters. The Kennedy administration was also concerned; it feared that Hoffa and his Mafia bedfellows had the power to cripple the country’s economy through a nationwide trucking strike. In the summer of 1963, shortly before the assassination, Ragano claimed that Hoffa was consumed by Robert Kennedy’s intensive investigations of his activities and his organized-crime affiliations. Ragano met frequently with Hoffa at his headquarters near the Capitol in Washington, to discuss legal matters.

At a private session on July 23, 1963, Hoffa brushed aside Ragano’s questions about legal issues in a pending criminal trial that was prosecuted by Robert Kennedy’s staff. Instead, the union leader, with the authority of a drill sergeant,
had orders for Ragano. Hoffa commanded him to relay an urgent demand to Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. He wanted them to engineer the president’s assassination. “Something has to be done,” Ragano said Hoffa instructed him. “The time has come for your friend and Carlos to get rid of him, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy.”

Ragano said that he believed Hoffa was venting his spleen over criminal charges launched against him by Robert Kennedy and did not take the outburst seriously. The next day, however, Ragano had a prearranged meeting with Trafficante and Marcello at the Royal Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, to discuss an illicit loan contract they were working out with Hoffa. Although Ragano regarded Hoffa’s request for a hit on Kennedy as a bad joke, he dutifully relayed it to the Mafia godfathers. “You won’t believe this,” Ragano told them, “but he wants you to kill John Kennedy.” The two mobsters stared back in icy silence. Aware that he might have stepped into a minefield, Ragano quickly changed the subject.

On November 22, 1963, minutes after Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas, Ragano said, Hoffa telephoned him in his office. “Did you hear the good news?” the union president said exuberantly. “Yeah, he’s dead. I heard over the news that Lyndon Johnson is going to be sworn in as president. You know he’ll get rid of Booby.” (“Booby” was Hoffa’s derisive name for Robert Kennedy.)

Three days after the assassination, Ragano attended a meeting in Hoffa’s office in Washington with other lawyers to discuss his criminal cases. Declaring that the Kennedys had hounded him, Hoffa refused to allow the American flag on the building’s roof to be lowered to half-staff in mourning and respect for the slain president. After the legal strategy meeting, Hoffa pulled Ragano aside. “I told you they could do it,” Hoffa whispered. “I’ll never forget what Carlos and Santo did for me.”

For Ragano an epiphany about the assassination came almost a quarter of a century after Kennedy’s death. On a Friday morning, March 13, 1987, he said that he picked up Trafficante at his home in Tampa and, following the mobster’s wishes, took him for a drive in his own car. At seventy-two, Trafficante was seriously ill: his hands trembled continuously; dialysis kept his kidneys functioning, and he was about to undergo a second open-heart surgery. On the drive along Tampa’s scenic Bayshore Boulevard, Trafficante at first reminisced about their mutual friends and experiences before veering back to the subject of the Kennedys’ long-ago campaign against the Mafia.

Speaking to Ragano in Sicilian as he often did, Trafficante grumbled: “Goddamn Bobby. I think Carlos fucked up in getting rid of Giovanni—maybe it should have been Bobby.” To Ragano’s astonishment, Trafficante added: “We shouldn’t have killed Giovanni. We should have killed Bobby.” Ragano knew that “Giovanni” was John Kennedy.

Moments later, Ragano said that Trafficante talked to him about another fateful event in their lives: Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. Ragano had been on Hoffa’s defense team in 1964, at two trials when Robert Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa Squad” succeeded in winning convictions on jury-tampering, fraud, and conspiracy charges. Hoffa was serving a thirteen-year prison term when his sentence was commuted in 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon. Later, Ragano asserted that Hoffa and one of his top aides admitted to him that the commutation was obtained through a million-dollar contribution secretly funneled to Nixon supporters, presumably as a contribution to the Republican Party’s reelection campaign for Nixon in 1972.

But after Hoffa’s release from prison, Trafficante told Ragano that the belligerent union leader had alarmed the New York families by announcing that he was writing a book that would expose the Mob and that he wanted to regain control of the teamsters’ union. Trafficante related to Ragano that he had warned Hoffa that the northern Mafia believed he had become an uncontrollable, disruptive force who could endanger their financial interests in the union.

On their ride in Tampa, Trafficante gave Ragano his version of Hoffa’s abduction and slaying in 1975. He was lured to a garage in the Detroit suburbs, supposedly for a peaceful sit-down meeting to discuss his attempt to regain power in the union with Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, a high-ranking Detroit mafioso. In the garage, Hoffa was knocked unconscious and strangled by a hit team assembled by Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a teamsters’ union head in New Jersey and a Genovese capo, who had a long-festering feud with Hoffa. Trafficante added that Hoffa’s body probably would never be found.

Under guidelines established when he first represented Trafficante, Ragano said he was obligated to listen to whatever Don Santo wanted to divulge to him but he was prohibited from ever asking incisive questions. Under those rules, he was unable during that talk with Trafficante to get him to amplify his revelations about the murders of President Kennedy and of Hoffa—and the disposition of Hoffa’s body. Four days later, on March 17, 1987, Trafficante died while undergoing heart surgery.

From his earliest days as a lawyer, Ragano kept detailed notes and diary descriptions of meetings and conversations with clients. The yellowed, sometimes crumpled records, combined with hotel receipts substantiating Ragano’s whereabouts, tend to support his accounts of business and social sessions with mafiosi and with Hoffa. His records included a note that he said he jotted down a day after his farewell conversation with Trafficante. In it Ragano wrote about the mobster’s alleged knowledge of the murders of President Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa.

Afterward, Ragano came to believe that Trafficante, an amateur student of history and a voracious reader of biographies of important men, had confessed to him out of perverse pride. Trafficante, he speculated, may have wanted the world to know that he and his Mob partners had masterminded the elimination of a president, outwitted the government’s top law-enforcement agencies, and escaped punishment.

To stay alive during three decades as a Mob attorney and as a confidant to Trafficante, Ragano maintained his own strict oath
of omertà.
His legal and social affiliations with Trafficante and other mobsters, however, put him in the thick of Robert Kennedy’s campaign targeting professional aides of major mobsters. The intense scrutiny of Ragano by the FBI and by the 1RS led to two convictions on relatively minor income-tax-evasion complaints. He served ten months in prison in 1993 on the second conviction.

Through his book Ragano broke his long vow of silence. All of the disreputable Mafia clients he had served were dead and his lawyer-client obligation of silence had ended. Moreover, he was ill and realized that his own end was approaching. To many of Ragano’s relatives and friends, his public confessions about his checkered past and his aggressive ambition and quest for wealth were signs of Catholic remorse, repentance, and atonement for a misspent career. At age seventy-five in 1998, Ragano died in his sleep, apparently suffering a heart attack.

Although not categorically conclusive, Ragano’s assertions are among the starkest signs implicating Mafia bosses in the death of President Kennedy. G. Robert Blakey, an unsurpassed authority on the assassination and on organized crime, characterized Ragano’s information as plausible. “It has the ring of truth,” he added.

The Cosa Nostra’s own warped moral code rejects violence against honest officials, and John and Robert Kennedy should have been immune from Mob
retaliation. But the FBI’s electronic spy tapes and Ragano’s testimony show that Mob bosses believed that Joseph Kennedy had made a commitment for his sons, and, wittingly or unwittingly, the sons had violated it. The bosses felt they had been double-crossed. By reneging on what the Mafia considered an ironclad bargain, the Kennedys might have been viewed as fair game for their savage vindictiveness.