The Outfit (56 page)

The ploy worked, with a Gallup poll showing that viewers, by a 43-23 percent margin, believed Kennedy had won the gabfests. Before one sheds any tears over Kennedy’s treatment of Nixon, it should be remembered that Nixon’s own history of political chicanery is virtually unmatched in American history. Not only did Nixon begin his career by smearing his congressional opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a Communist, but he conspired with the South Vietnamese to stall the 1968 Paris Peace Talks until after his election
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and authorized virtual terrorism against political opponents in the 1972 contest.

Electing Jack

Back in Chicago, Curly Humphreys geared up for his role in the general-election push. Like his associates in Florida, Humphreys was placed in the contradictory position of carrying out a political function of international consequence while trying to evade the prying eyes and ears of Hoover’s G-men. Once again, Curly gave his wife the choice of whether to accompany him back into the Stevens for two critical weeks in October, adding that this time the work would be even more intense than before. Once again, Jeanne Humphreys chose the luxury of the hotel prison.

Only after the fact did Hoover’s eavesdroppers transcribe a gang conversation that noted Humphreys’ move to the Hilton Hotel. An October 28 report in Flumphreys’ FBI file notes the following secretly recorded recent conversation between Humphreys and underling Hy Godfrey in which Humphreys asked the aide to book him hotel rooms:

Humphreys: “How about this joint down the street?”

Godfrey: “Sheraton?”

Humphreys: “Yeah. See, sometimes it’s easier to get a two-room suite than it is to get one room. Go downstairs and call them. Ask for a one- or two-room suite for a week . . . This time I won’t check in under my own name. The hell with that.”

Godfrey: “Curly, there’s nothing available. Filled to capacity. Went to see [deleted] and [deleted] is there, and his contract is next to him. Also the Hilton [Stevens].”

Humphreys: “Get the Hilton. Get a two-room deal there.”

FBI Summary: “At the conclusion of the above conversation, Godfrey left apparently to get a two-room suite at the Hilton Hotel under a different name.”

The FBI mistakenly surmised that the purpose of the secret Hilton meetings was “to line up prospective witnesses in the defense of TONY ACCARDO.”

The second sojourn at the Stevens became so arduous that Jeanne Humphreys was conscripted into action, helping her husband transcribe his lists. Jeanne quickly noticed that security was even tighter than before, with Phil the maitre d’ personally escorting all visitors to the Humphreys’ suites. The couple’s workday started at six-thirty in the morning and concluded late in the evening. “Votes weren’t bought,” Jeanne wrote about what she overheard. “They were commanded, demanded and in a few cases cajoled.”

The transcribing and cajoling continued for two long weeks in late October. “After I made a legible list, Murray burned his copy,” Jeanne wrote. Although she had no idea what purpose the rewriting served, Jeanne toiled away. “It would have been easier to compile a list of politicians he [Humphreys] didn’t contact or meet with than otherwise,” Jeanne noted in her journal. She sarcastically asked again if she would be placed on the Kennedy payroll. Once again, the familiar names of Wortman, O’Brien, and Olf popped up repeatedly, with a new name added, Jackie Presser. At the time, the Ohio-based Presser was a Cleveland jukebox racketeer, and one of Hoffa’s key Teamster supporters. He would later succeed Hoffa as Teamster president. Curly had given up trying to convince Hoffa to back the Kennedy campaign. Considering all the characters working on bringing out the vote for Kennedy, the ever sarcastic Mrs. Humphreys noted, “It’s ironic that most of the behind-the-scenes participants in the Kennedy campaign couldn’t vote because they had criminal records.”

Watching her husband’s work ethic, Jeanne posed the obvious question: “How can you be so gung ho for something you think is a mistake?” Curly answered, “That’s what I do.” One night, however, Curly’s frustration surfaced as he spoke of Joe Kennedy, whose visage had just appeared on the hotel television. “That old man’s running things,” he said. “It’s his ball game. Mooney’s making a big mistake. Nobody’s going to control those punks as long as he’s alive.” Then, referring to Jimmy Hoffa’s alignment with Nixon, Curly added, “Jimmy’s right, I’m not going to push him [to switch].”

The self-imposed incarceration led to frayed nerves and occasional marital discord. On such occasions, Jeanne abandoned her list-making and stared at the TV. From her journal: “While millions of unsuspecting voters were debating which way to vote, the ’Fixer’ was holed up with a harpie whose only interest was trying to spot Jackie Kennedy in slacks. God Bless America!”

About ten days into the stay at the Stevens, the Humphreys received word from Eddie Ryan that Jeanne’s brother Bob had called on “our (safe) emergency number.” Bob was distraught over recent IRS harassment of Jeanne’s family, not only in Florida, but now also in St. Louis, where Jeanne’s aunt was in tears. Curly told his wife to go and comfort her family, but that she would not be able to return to the Stevens. Curly enlisted Maurie Shanker, one of St. Louis’ top criminal attorneys, to assist his wife’s family. (According to its Humphreys file, the FBI verified five months later Humphreys’ stay at the Stevens/Hilton: “During the fall of 1960, [DELETED] advised that MURRAY HUMPHREYS resided during the latter part of October, 1960, under the name FISHMAN in the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago.”)

In Norman, Oklahoma, Curly’s first wife, Clemi, received a call from her former spouse, with whom she maintained a cordial relationship. After hanging up the phone she turned to their daughter, Luella, and nephew Ernie Brendle. “Father called,” Clemi said. “He and the boys have agreed to support Kennedy. He said to tell the family.” This came as a surprise, since up until this point, Curly had been pro-Nixon. Curly’s niece Brenda Gage recently recalled, “Uncle Lew [her nickname for Curly] said he knew Kennedy would win. He was so sure about it long before the election. Later, I just thought he was so wise to know that.” However, outside the family unit, the fix was to be tightly held.

As the election neared, knowledgeable insiders were tempted to parlay their awareness of the fix into a personal windfall at the Nevada bookie parlors. “I remember going to Vegas that year,” recalls Jeanne. “I told Murray I was going to bet on Kennedy in the election. He became angry, saying I couldn’t do it.” Curly cautioned his young wife, “If we’re seen betting on them, everyone will know what’s going on.” To which Jeanne now playfully adds, “I was only going to bet two dollars anyway.” Joe Kennedy, however, was not so discreet. Legendary sports promoter/ bookie Harry Hall recently said, “I know for a fact that Joe [Kennedy] went to L.A. and put down twenty-two thousand, to win, on his boy,” remembers Hall. “I knew Joe’s bookie. Frank [Sinatra] and Dean [Martin] made big bets also.” Las Vegas historians Morris and Denton located sources that recalled how Jack’s brother Teddy Kennedy had a friend get down an election night $10,000 wager with the Outfit’s Riviera Casino boss, Ross Miller. Hours later, as recalled by oddsmakers such as “Jimmy the Greek,” Teddy apparently enhanced the wager when he had aide Stephen Smith phone up Wingy Grober at the Cal-Neva just before the polls closed and had him lay down an additional $25,000 on brother Jack. All this insider wagering seemed overly bold to the bookies, who rated the contest a virtual toss-up, “six to five, too close to call.”

November 8, election day, brought continued behind-the-scenes manipulations. While Curly labored on the national front, Mooney Giancana worked hard to deliver his key city wards to the Democrats, an effort that not only aided Kennedy, but also worked against crusading state’s attorney Bennie Adamowski. Scores of Giancana’s “vote sluggers” or “vote floaters” hit the streets to “coerce” the voters. Giancana’s biographer William Brashler wrote, “The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election played into Giancana’s hands . . . the master vote counters of the city’s river wards worked feverishly to deliver their man.” According to G-man Bill Roemer, there is no doubt that Giancana lent his considerable influence to the Kennedy effort. In 1995, Roemer recalled, “We had placed a microphone in Giancana’s headquarters right after the election. There was no question but that Giancana had been approached by Frank Sinatra before the election to help the Kennedys.”

The Outfit bosses were not the only ones working behind the scenes to fix the presidential contest. In Nevada, real estate mogul (and Kennedy insider by marriage to Jack’s wife’s aunt) Norman Biltz was rumored to have imported black voters from out of state, bribing them to cast illegal ballots for Kennedy. Biltz had employed the tactic years earlier when boosting the career of the seminal Nevada senator of the thirties and forties, Pat McCarran. In Texas, Kennedy running mate Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic machine made its own contribution to the 1960 election fraud. Nixon biographer Earl Mazo wrote, “The election shenanigans [in Texas] ranged from ballot-box stuffing and jamming the Republican column on voting machines to misreading ballots cast for Republicans and double-counting those for Democrats.” Mazo points out that in one county, the official tally had 148 for Kennedy-Johnson, and 24 for Nixon-Lodge, although only 86 people voted. The skullduggery proved critical to the Texas outcome, and likely the national tally. In a state where its favorite son should have led the ticket to a huge majority, Kennedy-Johnson managed only a 1 percent edge. It was not the first time Johnson’s clique had been implicated in election fraud.
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And there was more. In Alabama, Kennedy’s popular vote was counted twice, as reported by Neal R. Peirce in his study of the electoral college,
The People’s President.
If even just the Alabama totals had been accurate, Nixon would not only have won the state, but the nation as well.

From his Massachusetts home, Joe Kennedy continued to work the powerful Daley front via Marty Underwood, a Chicago consultant working for the mayor. Underwood, who would be brought to work in Washington after the Kennedy victory, was originally brought into the fold early on by Kenny O’Donnell as an election adviser. “The old man [Joe Kennedy] wanted to maintain contact with Daley, but didn’t want the phone calls traced,” O’Donnell recalls. “I was dispatched to Minneapolis on election night to route the calls from Hyannis Port to Chicago.” Underwood recently recalled an election night incident in which a Daley aide reported to the mayor that he wasn’t able to retrieve all the “votes” from a Chicago cemetery, as some of the tombstones were overturned. Daley barked, “Well, lift them up, they have as much right to vote as the next person!” Underwood was thus a witness to a ploy that has been recounted by, among others, the longtime JFK friend from Palm Beach, Patrick Lannan. Lannan told author John Davis’ literary agent, “Mayor Daley ’and friends’ went to work stuffing ballots and resurrecting the voters from the dead.” The 1960 election resurrected not just the dead, but an old Windy City proverb: “Death does not mean disenfranchisement.”

It would later turn out that Hoover’s FBI was spying not only on the Outfit, but its friend in the mayor’s office, an undertaking that shed more light on the mayor’s role in the 1960 vote-fraud wars. When Richard Daley’s three-hundred-page FBI file was released in 1997 to the
Chicago Tribune,
the following passage was included: “on 11/18/60 [DELETED] advised that he had learned from [DELETED] . . . that a Chicago attorney . . . had told [DELETED] that Mayor Daley had paid for thousands of votes in the 11/8/60 election but had not received 25,000 of the votes for which he had paid.”

Like his old friend Joe Kennedy, Los Angeles-based Frank Sinatra maintained an open phone line to Chicago via ward boss and Democratic national committeeman Jake Arvey, a known close friend of Mooney Giancana’s. Arvey updated Frank every half hour on the Chicago tallies.

Back in Washington that night,
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee was at dinner with his friend John Kennedy. He remembered his conversation with the candidate: “Over dinner he told me how he [JFK] had called Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley while Illinois was hanging in the balance to ask how he was doing. ’Mr. President,’ Kennedy quoted Daley as saying, ’with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois.’ Later, when Nixon was being urged to contest the 1960 election, I often wondered about that statement.”

All night long, Illinois, and the nation for that matter, was a toss-up. At eight-thirty on Wednesday morning, Ann Gargan, Joe Kennedy’s secretary, arrived to inform Jack that he had won Illinois. “Who says so?” inquired the exhausted candidate. “Your father says so,” replied Gargan.

As it turned out, the election was so close that without Humphreys’ union work, and the other noted machinations, Richard Nixon would certainly have prevailed. In Chicago, Mayor Daley held back his county’s vote totals until the final tally was received from the Republican-stronghold farm belt in southern Illinois. It was common knowledge that the Republican pols in that region were counting thousands of uncast votes; Daley merely waited to see how many votes he would need to negate the downstate fraud. As the night wore on, Daley calculated that he needed to deliver a 450,000 vote advantage to Kennedy to carry the state; Kennedy took Cook County by 456,312 votes.

When the final count was tallied, out of almost seventy million votes cast nationwide, Jack Kennedy had won by a scant 113,554, less than one tenth of 1 percent of the total, and less even than his margin in just Cook County. Most pertinent, in the states where the Outfit had a strong union presence, Kennedy squeaked to gossamer-thin victories: in Illinois (+.2%), Michigan (+1%), Missouri (+.6%), and Nevada (+1.3%). These states accounted for a decisive 63 electoral votes, which, if given to Nixon, would have changed the outcome (269 were needed to elect; Kennedy obtained 303). With Curly Humphreys’ charges ordered to get out the Democratic vote, which included the all-important ferrying of invalids to the polls, the Outfit’s contention that it “elected Jack” is not without merit.