The Outfit (55 page)

It was a perfect deal. Joe Kennedy wanted to demonstrate his seriousness, and Mooney needed a getaway retreat, especially one with the added lure of subterranean passages. On September 20,1960, with Frank Sinatra fronting for him, Mooney purchased stock in the Cal-Neva for approximately $350,000 from Joe Kennedy’s friend Wingy Grober. It has been widely misconstrued that Grober et al. sold the Lodge outright to Sinatra and Giancana. However, a close reading of the application put before the Nevada Gaming Commission reveals that the Sinatra purchasers (Sinatra; his manager, Hank Sanicola; and Dean Martin) only obtained a 49.5 percent interest in the operation, while Grober’s group maintained a 50.5 percent controlling interest. Gaming board member Turner emphasized that “the operation would remain the same, that, in other words . . . the present controlling interest would remain as it is.” Board chairman Milton Keefer added the Sinatra group’s purchase “is not really a transfer, that it is a new acquisition of stock from the present 100 percent operation.” However, if Grober was actually a front for Kennedy, and Sinatra was a front for Giancana, then, in essence, Bobby Kennedy’s nemesis, Mooney Giancana, was now in partnership with Bobby’s father. In an account that echoed the Rix allegation, Peter Lawford’s biographer James Spada reported that Joe Kennedy’s son-in-law Lawford was another of the resort’s many silent partners, a disclosure that has led some to believe that Joe Kennedy staked Lawford in the deal, thus retaining even more interest in the business.

Connected people like Mooney’s future son-in-law Bob McDonnell have known all along of Mooney’s stake in the Cal-Neva. “Mooney Giancana backed Sinatra totally, put up all the money for the Cal-Neva,” McDonnell says emphatically. The FBI also believed that Mooney Giancana was the “silent” owner of the hotel. Rosselli’s friend Betsy Duncan Hammes says emphatically, “I know for a fact that Giancana put the money up for the purchase. Besides, Frank didn’t have that kind of money back then.” One of Mooney’s drivers recently disclosed how he personally took the money from Chicago to Nevada for the transaction.

The allegations of Byron Rix add to the drama of the purchase. If Rix is accurate, then the transfer of Cal-Neva stock to Mooney was Joe’s way of solidifying the deal with the Outfit to back Jack in the election. The secret meeting at the Lodge that year between Joe Kennedy and “many gangsters” may have indeed been, as Rix reported, another reason the hoods decided to support the Kennedy effort. Whereas some in Chicago believed that the reason Mooney brought the Kennedy request to them was a combination of his desire to get a marker on the G, and his groupie mentality toward Sinatra, it now appears that he had a third reason: Joe Kennedy had promised him a piece of the coveted Cal-Neva.

The transfer of Grober/Kennedy stock in the Lodge to Sinatra/Giancana may have been the show of sincerity Mooney and the Outfit needed to fulfill their end of the election bargain. But before that would occur, Giancana and Rosselli moved forward with their participation in Operation Pluto, a scheme that, even if unsuccessful, would ingratiate the Outfit with the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. It was classic hedge-betting.

On September 24, Rosselli, Maheu, and the CIA’s Jim O’Connell flew separately into Miami, which had been chosen as their logical base of operations. With O’Connell staying at another location, Maheu and Rosselli took adjoining suites at the Kenilworth Hotel. After a few days, “Sam Gold” arrived, and announced to Maheu that the Outfit was now an official partner with the government in its assassination endeavors against Fidel Castro. Gold, the actual Mooney Giancana, immediately moved the trio to the gang’s home away from home, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. There they were ensconced in a five-room suite (with the requisite kitchen) on the penthouse floor. The experience was an eye-opener for Maheu, who had never before experienced firsthand the style and charisma of men such as those from the Outfit. Maheu watched as Giancana had beluga caviar, from a gourmet shop in New York, and champagne delivered daily. The Chicago boss cooked high-cuisine meals while the trio plotted murder. In his autobiography, Maheu described Mooney as dynamic, prideful, and charismatic. “When Sam Giancana walked through the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel,” Maheu wrote, “it was like a king passing. People just made way.”

Maheu also bore witness to the other side of Mooney, the side that had seen him succeed on the mean streets of the Patch. The private detective described one exemplary scene at the hotel: “One time, we were all sitting by the pool when a good-looking man walked up and immediately started talking tough. Without even looking at the punk, Giancana grabbed his necktie and yanked him close. Sam stared right into the kid’s eyes and said, T eat little boys like you for breakfast. Get your ass out of here before I get hungry!’ “

Mooney and Johnny soon engaged a third accomplice, who was introduced to Maheu merely as Joe the Courier. Joe was, in fact, Florida Commission member Santo Trafficante, as Maheu would soon learn when he casually perused a Miami newspaper
Parade
supplement, which prominently displayed a photo of the Cosa Nostra boss. Maheu was informed that Joe’s cooperation was essential due to his extensive contacts in Havana.

Although an association with the G on official business had its practical benefits, there may have been an emotional component to the Outfit’s acquiescence regarding the plots. Appearing on an ABC News documentary in 1997, Maheu reflected on a subtle expression he noticed in the hoods during his time with them:

Rosselli and Giancana . . . had surveillances on them for years, they’ve known about it. They’ve suspected wiretaps by the federal government, they’ve known about it. And here, out of the clear blue sky, they are asked to help the government. Just think about that as a human being. This perhaps was the biggest compliment that had been paid them since they were in their teens. And I think to a degree that sparked maybe an innate loyalty that they wish had been there or that they had won a war someplace, or that they had been more cooperative with the government. That is the feeling they imbued in me.

Over the next few months, Mooney (Gold), Maheu, O’Connell (Olds), and Rosselli (Rawlston), made frequent return trips to Florida, where they linked up with Santo (Joe) to troll Miami’s “Little Havana,” seeking out exile accomplices. It had been decided to inform the exiles that a group of Wall Street businessmen with nickel interests in Cuba would pay $150,000 for Castro’s head.

In a bizarre irony, the increased surveillance the gang endured in Chicago had followed them to Florida; the FBI was not privy to the Outfit’s secret dealings with the CIA on Nixon’s behalf. It is not known if the hoods noticed their FBI tails, but veteran detective Maheu, who already knew his room phone was tapped, could not help but discern them. “One night at dinner,” Maheu wrote, “I noticed one agent following Rosselli into the bathroom. When Rosselli came back to the table, I went to the men’s room and cornered the operative. I put him in the kitchen.” Maheu was in the awkward position of not being able to disclose the operation to the FBI agents, but at the same time having to let them know they were found out, hoping that they would back off.

When Rosselli made return trips home, he also experienced the paradox. “I had to duck them [the FBI] in order to meet my contacts at the CIA,” Rosselli would later testify. “One day, right in front of the [Los Angeles] Friars Club, I noticed a man. I walked over and opened the car door. He was on the floor of the car. I said, ’What the hell are you doing?’ He said, ’Tying my shoelaces.’ So I took his license number. Then I found out he was an FBI agent. He was there to follow me from the club . . . I told [Maheu] every time I would catch one of those fellows.” And Rosselli showed great bureaucratic insight, later proven accurate, when he guessed at what it all meant. “I was beginning to feel,” he testified, “that this was a pressure on the FBI’s part . . . that they wanted to find out about the CIA.”

Maheu recently commented on the atmosphere, saying, “Here we are, on the one hand, trying to get involved in a project that is presumably in the best interest of the United States government, and our efforts are being jeopardized by another branch of the government.” Maheu decided to let the G in on the scheme. “I made sure that Hoover knew what I was doing,” Maheu recently admitted, “because, from then on, I made all the calls out of the [tapped] suite at the hotel, collect to CIA numbers.” It is not known if Maheu’s suspicion of tapped hotel phones was accurate, but the FBI was certainly beginning to pick up rumblings about the furtive anti-Castro plotting. Just days after his late-September meeting with Maheu, Giancana traveled to New York, where the notoriously indiscreet don bragged to an FBI informant that Castro would be “done away with” before the November election. FBI director Hoover quickly notified, of all people, Richard Bissell, the CIA’s director of covert operations, and one of the small circle aware of the secret assassination efforts. At the same time, Hoover was picking up rumors that gangsters had been seen meeting with unnamed CIA officers in Florida. And on September 26, Hoover fired off a confidential memo to Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, in which he informed Dulles that Miami-based Cuban exile (and future Watergate burglar) Frank Sturgis had been approached about mounting an operation against Castro. Hoover noted that the memo was classified “confidential” - “since [the] matter concerns a potential plot against the Castro government, the unauthorized disclosure of which could be detrimental to our national defense.” In classic Hoover-esque, the director was letting the Agency know he was wise to the plotting. Any details that had thus far eluded Hoover were soon to be revealed, thanks to Mooney Giancana and his celebrity-chasing.

In late October, Giancana decided to take the measure of Maheu’s loyalty. At the time, the boss feared that one of his best girls, singer Phyllis McGuire, was two-timing him with comedian Dan Rowan, who was appearing at the gang’s Desert Inn in Las Vegas. Giancana told Maheu that either he bug Rowan’s hotel room or he (Giancana) would have to abandon the Castro project and head to Vegas and straighten the matter out, Outfit style. Fearing not only Giancana’s desertion, but the potential for him to tell McGuire what he had been up to in Florida, Maheu agreed to ask a CIA superior, Sheffield Edwards, for advice. “Shef told me that the Agency . . . would pay up to a thousand dollars if I wanted someone to do the job,” Maheu later wrote. Maheu then enlisted a Miami private eye named Ed DuBois to install the bug in Rowan’s room. However, when Dubois’ technician was caught in the act, he told the police, and the FBI, that he had been hired by Maheu.

Eventually, Maheu had to admit to the Bureau the details of his secret plotting with the very hoods Hoover had been struggling to build a case against. Hoover supposedly hit the roof and quickly dashed off a series of memos to all key agencies in an effort to create a paper trail that would absolve the FBI in the event that the CIA’s collusion with the Outfit affected the Bureau’s ability to obtain convictions.

While the quartet worked the Miami streets, in Washington the CIA’s Technical Services Division experimented, often futilely, with nefarious potions for the Miami plotters to somehow have delivered into Fidel’s innards. Simultaneously, members of multiple branches of the U.S. military secretly toiled in Central America in a similarly futile attempt to coalesce a ragtag band of less than two thousand exiles into an effective invasion force. As is well-known now, neither the plotting in Miami Beach nor that in Central America would come to anything even remotely resembling success. But, in one way, that was beside the point, as the original purpose of the exercise was now moot: President Eisenhower refused to green-light the invasion in time for Richard Nixon to benefit in the November election. Now the operation would proceed under its own inertia, albeit with no raison d’etre.

On October 21, while Mooney, Rosselli, and Trafficante plotted with Maheu in Miami Beach, the two presidential candidates were taking stage in New York for their fourth, and final, television debate. Although Jack Kennedy appeared to have bettered Richard Nixon in the previous three encounters, it would soon become apparent to Nixon just how much Kennedy craved a knockout blow in what was still predicted to be a toss-up vote just two weeks off. At this point, virtually all the principals had sullied their hands in the muck of political foul play: Joe Kennedy had sought out numerous gangsters; Lyndon Johnson had obtained the support of New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello; for a $1-million payoff, Richard Nixon had jumped into bed with Jimmy Hoffa and his Eastern mob buddies; and even Bobby Kennedy had made a futile approach to Marcello. Now it was Jack Kennedy’s turn to deal from the bottom of the deck.

In the previous two months, candidate Kennedy had repeatedly been briefed on Operation Pluto, the Eisenhower-Nixon secret invasion plan for Cuba.
⁵
It is not clear if Kennedy was also advised of the accompanying assassination planning, currently under way in Miami. Two days before the last debate, Kennedy released a statement to the press that would not only jeopardize the invasion’s chances, but force Nixon to deny the existence of the operation in order to salvage any hope of success. Of course, Nixon’s denial would paint him as “soft on Communism,” exactly what candidate Kennedy wanted - an irony given that Nixon had created his political persona by assuming an arch-anticommunist stance.

“We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile . . .
Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government
[italics added],” Kennedy’s statement read. When the debate commenced, Nixon was unable to admit that the “fighters for freedom” were in fact being supported to the hilt by the incumbent administration. Nixon later wrote in his autobiography,
RN,
“I had no choice but to take a completely opposite stand and attack Kennedy’s advocacy of open intervention in Cuba. This was the most uncomfortable and ironic duty I have had to perform in any political campaign.” In his memoir
Six Crises,
Nixon added, “For the first time I got mad at Kennedy personally. I thought that Kennedy, with full knowledge of the facts, was jeopardizing the security of a United States foreign policy operation. And my rage was greater because I could do nothing about it.”