The Outfit (53 page)

Kennedy eventually beat Senator Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia by a 60-40 margin. Humphrey complained, “I can’t afford to run through the state with a little black bag and a checkbook.” (Humphrey spent an estimated $25,000 compared to Joe Kennedy’s $l-$2 million.)

Covert Conclaves at Crystal Bay

The contacts between Joe Kennedy and Mooney Giancana appear to have continued throughout 1960. Jeanne Humphreys remembered, “We went to Mooney’s house in West Palm Beach in Florida, and there was a lot of conversation about it. Mooney was going out to California and meeting with Joe Kennedy, and it just kept evolving and evolving.” When Curly began the laborious task of coordinating his unions behind Kennedy, Jeanne wondered why he had to do all the work; after all, the idea had been Giancana’s. “I said, ’Where’s Mooney?’” Jeanne recalls. “Murray said, ’He’s taking care of his end, Blondie. He’s with Joe Kennedy in California.’ My husband didn’t go into great detail.” Although Jeanne was not privy to the “evolving” meetings in California, details have emerged about where they were likely held.

As one hoodlum friend of Joe’s told writers Denton and Morris, “Joe’s] ties to the underworld intersected at a hundred points,” and if the players in these intersections had a clubhouse where their furtive caucuses could be conducted, it was the Cal-Neva Lodge. Described in ads as “Heaven in the High Sierras,” the Lodge consists of luxury bungalows, a swimming pool, and a casino. This idyllic venue is set on a parcel of land that literally straddles the California-Nevada state line on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, a region known as Crystal Bay. When gambling was illegal in both states, the owners of the Cal-Neva Lodge confounded raiding police by merely pushing the card tables across the room - and the state line - the direction dependant on which locale was conducting the raid. When Open Gambling was approved in Nevada, the gambling paraphernalia found a permanent home on the Nevada side of the casino room. The Lodge had been built in 1926 and purchased two years later by the “Duke of Nevada,” real estate mogul Norman Biltz. In 1930, Biltz married Esther Auchincloss Nash, the aunt of Joe Kennedy’s future daughter-in-law Jacqueline Bouvier. During the 1960 campaign, Biltz canvassed the Vegas Strip, collecting some $15 million for the Kennedy war chest. Jack Kennedy himself had made it clear that he coveted secret Sin City contributors, writing a note to pal Frank Sinatra, “Frank - How much can I count on from the boys in Vegas? JFK.” The note hung in Sinatra’s “Kennedy Room” for four decades.

At about the same time as Biltz’s purchase, Joe Kennedy began frequenting the Lodge, a hunting and fishing escape that would be a lifelong getaway for him and his clan. Wayne Ogle, the longtime maintenance manager at the Lodge, has recalled how for years he would ship two ten-foot Tahoe pine Christmas trees from the Lodge’s property to the Kennedy home in Hyannis.

Joe Kennedy was not the only former bootlegger escaping to the sanctuary of the Cal-Neva. In recent years, Mooney Giancana had been using the bucolic setting to escape the G’s surveillance. According to both Mooney’s people and the G, Giancana had viewed the Lodge as a personal haven from the Bureau. Although agents would tail him as he moved about the Las Vegas casinos, it was later learned that Mooney and his driver would go to a movie matinee, sneak out the back door, and drive to Crystal Bay, where the don could either relax or conduct business.

The Lodge changed hands numerous times, with many of the purchasers underworld dwellers. For a time, Bugsy Siegel’s San Francisco partner, Elmer “Bones” Remer, took the helm; at another juncture, Bill Graham, who fronted for the Outfit at Reno’s Bank Club, owned the Lodge. In 1955, Joe Kennedy’s lifelong friend Bert “Wingy” Grober (so-named due to a shriveled left arm) took over the Cal-Neva. Grober, a sometime associate of Meyer Lansky’s in Florida, had previously operated Miami Beach’s Park Avenue Steak House, where his liquor and steak supplier was his pal Joe Kennedy. During Grober’s five-year tenure, it was commonly believed that he was fronting for the real owner, Joseph Kennedy. As seen in the case of Morton Downey, Joe frequently hid his business interests behind other owners of record. Las Vegas chroniclers Roger Morris and Sally Denton recently located sources who claimed to know of the secret arrangement. “Wingy was old Joe’s man there,” one of the locals recalled, “and he looked after his stake in the joint.” Another candidate for a Kennedy front was Charlie Bloch, Grober’s partner in the Park Avenue Steak House. Bloch, it turns out, was Joe Kennedy’s liquor distributor for the Southern region that included Miami and was believed by some to have been another of the Cal-Neva’s many silent partners.

Two years after the fact, the FBI was told by a former New York-based federal prohibition agent named Byron Rix of a secret election-year liaison at the Lodge between Joe Kennedy and “many gangsters.” Rix, who was personally acquainted with the Kennedy family and later worked in the Las Vegas gambling business, learned from numerous unnamed sources that Joe Kennedy had a nefarious meeting in 1960 at the Cal-Neva. In 1962, the FBI summed up Rix’s information in a memo to then Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, noting that “this memorandum is marked ’Personal’ for the Attorney General and copies are not being sent to any lower echelon officials in the Department in view of Rix’s remarks concerning the Attorney General’s father.” The memo summarized Rix’s story thus:

Before the last presidential election, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of President John F. 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.

The Cal-Neva was uniquely equipped to cater to gangland gatherings, according to a Lodge hairdresser from the 1970s who set up her shop in Sinatra’s old bungalow. When she took over the singer’s gatehouse cabin, the hairdresser discovered that it concealed an extensive tunnel system that interconnected the various cabins and the main lodge, and which had allowed the stars and “underworld” bosses to come and go without being seen.

The Nevada Gaming Commission would later learn that one of the “others” in on the deal was Mooney Giancana. And, as will be seen, the group Rix mentioned would indeed buy the Cal-Neva from Wingy Grober (or the likely actual owner, Joe Kennedy) and install everyone’s buddy, Skinny D’Amato, to run the casino.

By July, with the West Virginia primary behind them, the Outfit, at Mooney’s request, escalated its electioneering efforts on behalf of Sinatra’s friend young Jack Kennedy. Curly Humphreys, already fatigued from his regular duties, undertook the onerous chore of helping the son of the distrusted Joe Kennedy win the presidency. “[Murray] hated having to go along with the Outfit’s vote to back Kennedy,” Jeanne Humphreys recalls. “It was a constant source of aggravation for him.” But, like it or not, Humphreys was a team player and thus once again settled into his role as the gang’s political mastermind.

Luckily for history, Curly Humphreys decided to allow his wife, now the only living witness to the politicking, into the inner sanctums of the Kennedy effort. Jeanne remembers how one day in early July, Curly told her to pack her bags. “I thought perhaps Murray was lamming it again, and we’d be on our way to Key Biscayne, or God knows where.” To Jeanne’s dismay, she was informed that she had a choice: either hole up with Curly in Chicago or go alone to Key Biscayne or Vegas. When she was told that Curly would be in seclusion at the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue for at least two weeks, Jeanne chose to stay with him, writing in her journal: “Realizing he would be alone practically across the street from the 606 Club and a few blocks from all those willing strippers, I opted to stay at the hotel. What I said was, ’I’ll do my time at the hotel.’” The couple abandoned their Marine Drive apartment and found two suites waiting at the Hilton, reserved for Humphreys in the name of “Mr.

Fishman,” a joke since Jeanne had developed an obsession for fishing in the Keys. Curly explained that what he was about to do had to be kept secret from the G-men, who were monitoring the gang’s homes and regular meeting places. “They were looking for us everywhere,” Jeanne recalls. “This was very secret.” Once settled in, Jeanne wondered where the rest - Joe Accardo, Gussie Alex, etc. - were. “Murray said they were busy keeping Roemer and the G looking for them elsewhere, while we were getting things done.” Getting what done? Jeanne wondered. As she quickly learned, her husband’s big secret was the work of fixing Jack Kennedy’s election.

Jeanne soon found herself a virtual prisoner at the swank hotel, which the locals still knew by its previous name, The Stevens, for two weeks, bored to tears while her husband worked himself to exhaustion. From Jeanne’s journal: “I felt like the Prisoner of Zenda, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, Napoleon on Elbe, and Byron at Chillon. Murray said I was more like a bird in a gilded cage.” One of Curly’s gophers, Eddie Ryan, was the first to arrive, running errands for both his boss and Jeanne, who occasionally needed a change of clothes from home.

In 1996, Jeanne recalled for the first time what she witnessed at the Stevens/Hilton, scenes that were corroborated by her own contemporaneous writings. “Lists were everywhere,” she wrote in her journal. “Murray was arranging lists in categories of politicians, unions, lawyers, and contacts . . . I could see that one list had at least thirty to forty names on it.” Once the lists were developed, Humphreys began making contact with the power brokers whom he could order to back Jack. “Murray’s phone rang off the hook - always politicians and Teamsters,” Jeanne says. Soon the contacts began arriving at the Stevens from around the country to receive their marching orders from Humphreys. Among the regular visitors were Murray Olf, the powerful Washington lobbyist, Teamster official John O’Brien, and East St. Louis boss of the Steamfitters Union, Buster Wrort-man. “The people coming to the hotel were Teamsters from all over the country - Kansas, St. Louis, Cleveland, Vegas,” Jeanne recently said. “They were coming in from everywhere, then fanning out again.”

Although Jeanne knew no specifics about how the labor leaders were going to guarantee Kennedy’s election, it is not difficult to deduce what was going on. At the time of the Kennedy-Nixon contest, the millions of unionized American workers tended to follow the dictates and endorsements of their leaderships. Although most Teamsters complied with Hoffa’s endorsement of Nixon, tens of thousands of other non-Teamster unions across the nation were just waiting for the word from above. In a close election, these votes could make all the difference. Jim Strong, the
Chicago Tribune’s
labor reporter for twenty years, including 1960, recently spoke of the other weapons (besides the members’ votes) that organized labor brought to the table. “With its nationwide links, the Outfit could reach out across the country,” Strong says. “When the various locals endorsed a candidate, their modus operandi would be primarily to set up phone banks, get out the vote by driving voters to the polls, and write checks. That’s how they did it.” Factoring in the immense number of locals controlled by Humphreys, it becomes clear how he would be overworked at the Stevens.

Not allowed to go out due to the FBI’s surveillance, Jeanne Humphreys tried to occupy herself by reading. Her best friend became Phil Itta, the hotel maitre d’, who kept her supplied with crossword puzzles, books, newspapers, and treats from room service. Itta, a trusted friend of Humphreys’, swept the rooms for FBI bugs, handpicked the room-service waiters, and installed new tamper-proof locks on the suites’ chests of drawers.

While Curly was holed up in the Stevens, his upperworld alter ego, Joe Kennedy, was likewise ensconced at Marion Davies’ mansion in Los Angeles, his base of operations for maneuvering the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in the City of Angels. As one of his first moves, Kennedy brought in Chicago “backroom” pol Hy Raskin to deliver the convention delegates for Jack. Raskin was the number two man in the Democratic National Committee, legendary for his extensive Windy City contacts. By now, Joe Kennedy and other Washington insiders knew that Jack Kennedy’s Democratic rival, Senator Lyndon Johnson, had already lined up the support of New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello, much as Nixon had done with Hoffa.
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When the convention convened in L.A., Joe was conspicuously absent on the night of his son’s nomination speech. His non-attendance didn’t go unnoticed by the crowd, many of whom queried, “Where’s Joe?” Randolph Churchill called it “a lovely party, but where’s the host?” The perception was that Joe did not want his personal history to mar this night with controversy. But that was only part of the rationale. As he watched the proceedings from the Los Angeles home of Marion Davies, eleven miles from downtown in Beverly Hills, Joe met with party bosses, and old friends who owed him favors. Besides Raskin, others, such as popular Southern author William Bradford Huie, were enlisted to distribute cash to various influential politicians on Jack’s behalf.
¹⁵
Longtime family friend Judge Francis X. Morrissey wrote, “It was Ambassador Joseph Kennedy who made sure that the votes for the various delegations in the big key states, like New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New Jersey, all went for Jack.” It may never be known what promises were made by Joe on Jack’s behalf, but it is a matter of record that Joe’s promises to the underworld were among those that would severely handicap his son’s administration.

When Jack successfully snared the nomination, Mort Sahl, the political satirist, attempted to put a humorous spin on the underhanded politicking, wiring the patriarch: “You haven’t lost a son, you’ve gained a country.”