The Strength of the Wolf (46 page)

Marcello, however, had friends in high places in Central America and, in addition to receiving a free pass from the FBI, he probably enjoyed CIA protection. They certainly shared the same unsavory business partners. Marcello ran a counterfeiting scam in Nicaragua that required kickbacks to Anastasio Somoza, the brutal dictator who, on behalf of the CIA, harbored anti-Castro terrorists on one of his private estates. As we know for a fact, the CIA sometimes employed gangsters for its nefarious purposes, and the Agency probably arranged for Marcello's flight to Miami aboard a Dominican Air Force jet, “without either customs or immigration officials noting his arrival.”
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Considering that his re-entry occurred prior to Trafficante's exposure as a double agent, it's also likely that, in return for the favor, Marcello joined William Harvey's ZR/RIFLE project as a recruiter of assassins.

By 1960, the CIA was protecting Joe Bonanno for the same murderous reason. Having moved to sunny Tucson, Arizona, and started a legitimate
real estate company, he also formed a profitable regional alliance with his fellow racketeers, Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. Like his newfound friends, he bought protection from the CIA too. According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, during the winter of 1960 to 1961, Bonanno was “always calling” William Harvey's boss, Richard Bissell, on an outside line. He even wrote a letter offering to do what Bissell “wanted him to do” – in other words, having people killed.
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Bissell accepted the offer, and Bonanno's
caporegime
in New Jersey, Joseph Zicarelli, provided the services. With the assistance of CIA asset Robert Maheu, Zicarelli sold guns to Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, and Zicarelli's goon squad reportedly murdered one of Trujillo's political opponents in New York. Zicarelli's henchmen may even have switched alliances and served as the intermediaries in the 30 May 1961 assassination of Trujillo, which relied on guns that were provided to the victim's political opponents by the CIA, as part of Harvey's ZR/RIFLE Program.
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Zicarelli enjoyed political protection locally through his Congressman, Cornelius E. Gallagher; but it was his dirty work for the CIA that made him a million-dollar man – as mobsters with CIA or FBI protection are called – and granted him temporary immunity from prosecution on federal narcotics charges.
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This was an unfortunate development for the FBN, in so far as Zicarelli had replaced the recently incarcerated Carmine Galante as the Bonanno family's narcotics manager. Zicarelli was a suspect in the Cotroni and Rinaldo cases and, through a wiretap on a gun-store owner in New Jersey, the FBN knew that he had attempted to purchase 1,000 rifles for anti-Castro exiles in the CIA's employ.
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But Zicarelli, like Marcello and Trafficante, was light-years beyond the FBN's reach.

Bobby Kennedy, like Harry Anslinger, could not be bought. He was a rich man bent on destroying organized crime's corrupting influence on American society. And yet, just a few months after he had taunted Sam Giancana during televised hearings before the McClellan Committee (he said that Giancana “giggled like a girl”), his father, on 29 February 1960, met with Giancana at a restaurant in New York. Joseph Kennedy was there, with Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Mario Brod (James Angleton's liaison to the Mafia) to negotiate the terms by which the Mafia's constituents in Illinois would vote for JFK in the upcoming presidential
election. The hoods were trying to decide whether to support JFK or Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who was backed by Carlos Marcello, through Joe Civello, in his bid for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Family patriarch Joe Kennedy argued that Giancana's organization would fare better under a Kennedy administration, which had many financial holdings in Chicago, and he asked the hoods to contribute $500,000 to JFK's campaign. For practical business reasons the money was forthcoming, despite Giancana's hatred of Bobby.
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Then the inexplicable happened. Sometime in October 1960, while plotting with the CIA to murder Castro, Giancana came to suspect that comedian Dan Rowan was putting the moves on his girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire. Rather than use his considerable muscle to resolve the matter privately, Giancana asked CIA asset Robert Maheu for help, and Maheu, breaching CIA security, sent an employee to spy on Rowan in Las Vegas. In another departure from standard security practices, Maheu's private detective left his listening post in the room next to Rowan's, ostensibly to watch a Vegas floorshow, and while he was gone a chambermaid found his tape recorder running. She called the hotel manager, who called the police; they called the FBI, the FBI eventually called the CIA, and the case was buried eighteen months later, on 7 April 1962, when CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston explained to Herbert J. Miller, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, that the Agency had employed Giancana in its assassination plots, and that prosecuting him would harm national security.
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What's important about this botched bugging incident – assuming that it wasn't intentional, and that Bobby Kennedy had no knowledge of his father's meeting with the mob – is that Bobby didn't know that Giancana was a million-dollar man until April 1962, when Hoover finally told him about Giancana's role in the CIA's assassination plots. Hoover had known, since October 1960, about the role the Chicago hood played in the CIA's plans to kill Fidel Castro, and his long delay in notifying Kennedy was a clear indication of his hostile intentions, as well as his partisan political support for Richard Nixon.
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Giancana had exposed his CIA connection simply as an insurance policy – but Maheu, like Hoover, had assisted him on behalf of Nixon. The future president had been party to the Castro assassination plots from their inception during the Eisenhower administration, and Maheu, at the time of the Vegas bugging blunder, was handling public relations for billionaire Howard Hughes, one of Nixon's biggest financial backers.
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The CIA and FBI had one thing in common – neither was anxious to help Bobby Kennedy, and it wasn't until 7 May 1962 that the CIA finally
told Bobby about its Cuban escapades. And even then, CIA security chief Sheffield Edwards and General Counsel Laurence Houston lied; they said that their assassination attempts had ended with Trafficante's exposure as a double agent, and they promised to warn Bobby if they ever dealt with gangsters again. The smirking CIA officers then slinked away, knowing full well that Maheu had introduced Johnny Roselli to CIA assassination chief Bill Harvey on 8 April 1962, without the Attorney General's knowledge, and that Harvey had delivered poison pills and weapons to Manuel Varona, the anti-Castro politician Trafficante had brought in to assist in the conspiracy. “The Attorney General was not told that the gambling syndicate operation had already been reactivated, nor, as far as we know, was he ever told,” the CIA casually admitted in an inspector general's report dated 1967.
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In yet another telling sin of omission, James Angleton, who deeply resented Bobby's interference in CIA counterintelligence operations, would neglect to tell Bobby about Mario Brod, his liaison to Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, until 1963.
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Yet another million-dollar man, Roselli was assisting Hoover as well as the CIA in the conspiracy to sabotage Bobby Kennedy. Through an FBI wiretap on Roselli, Hoover was aware of some seventy phone calls between Jack Kennedy and pretty Judith Campbell, a mob courier in the mold of Virginia Hill, but without Hill's stature. Roselli had introduced Kennedy and Campbell at a swinging Frank Sinatra campaign party in Vegas, while Campbell was romantically involved with Sam Giancana (who experienced no irrational fits of jealousy this time). Suffering from terminal satyriasis, Kennedy continued to see Campbell until 22 March 1962, when Hoover confronted him with his indiscretion.
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At this meeting, he also let the president know that he was aware of the deal that Mario Brod, on behalf of James Angleton, had brokered between Giancana and Joe Kennedy.

Hoover tried to blackmail him, but Jack Kennedy wasn't intimidated; and after the revelation that top CIA officers had encouraged ultra generals in Algeria to mutiny against French president Charles de Gaulle, he stunned the Establishment by firing the popular and much admired Allen Dulles – at which point the most powerful people in the CIA and the military started skirting the White House, leaving Jack and Bobby to defend themselves.

While CIA assassinations were flourishing under Bill Harvey's ZR/RIFLE Program, Bobby Kennedy launched three of his own Mafia-related plots
to kill Fidel Castro. The first, incredibly, involved drug smuggler Norman Rothman. As Rothman reported to his FBI masters on 26 June 1961, Bobby's aides had invited him to the White House a few days earlier, and had offered him leniency in a gunrunning case (in which he was caught smuggling arms to Castro with former Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras) if he would arrange to kill Castro. Rothman said he refused, and maybe he did; but the point is that his information certainly made a beeline to Hoover, supplying the devious FBI director with yet another dirty little secret to use against his nemesis.
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Putting Hoover's petty intrigues to one side, we should ask when, if ever, the FBN learned that the Attorney General was offering a major drug smuggler immunity to commit a political assassination, and how much the Bureau might have known. If anyone was in a position to know, it was Charlie Siragusa. Bobby's approach to Rothman occurred five days after Siragusa had denounced Santo Trafficante as a double agent. That vital piece of information undoubtedly reached Bobby immediately, in view of his deep personal involvement in Cuban affairs. Siragusa may have delivered the message himself. At the time, July 1961, he was working closely with Bobby in an effort to ransom David Christ, a CIA officer who'd been captured in Cuba while trying to bug the Chinese News Agency. He was also managing the MKULTRA pad in New York, and he'd been asked to help the CIA recruit gangsters for its political assassination plots. Charlie was involved in almost every important counterintelligence activity, so it's very likely that Kennedy, or one of his aides, consulted him about Rothman.

The nature of Siragusa's relationship with Bobby Kennedy raises several questions about the thrust of federal drug enforcement. Specifically, is it conceivable that Siragusa did not tell Bobby about Rothman's long-standing association with Meyer Lansky, financier of international drug smuggling? Or that Rothman co-owned the El Morocco club in Havana with Corsican drug lord Paul Mondoloni, or that Mondoloni had been selling 50 to 150 kilograms of heroin every few months to Rothman and Trafficante since 1955? Or that Rothman had invested with Genovese family member Charles Tourine in Havana's Capri Casino, and that Giuseppe DiGiorgio, a card dealer at the Capri, was one of Trafficante's two major narcotics couriers, and an associate of Sal Maneri from the Rinaldo–Palmieri case? How could Siragusa not make these connections known to the Attorney General – especially when Bobby had, at the time, aimed his first drug strike force at the defendants in the Rinaldo–Palmieri case.

In the year since Rinaldo and Palmieri were busted, Siragusa had been closely tracking Lansky, Trafficante, Mondoloni, and Rothman – four men
at the top of the international drug trafficking conspiracy. He knew that Mondoloni had been in Havana in January 1960, and had met in Acapulco in April 1960 with drug smugglers Lucien Rivard, Marius Cau, and Rosario Mancino. He was aware that Mancino was the Sicilian supplier of ill-fated Albert Agueci in Canada. Did he tell Bobby about this aspect of the Rinaldo–Palmieri case? Did he seize the opportunity to pump Rothman for information about these interrelationships?

Or was Rothman the ultimate million-dollar man? Remember, he would avoid imprisonment with Pepe Cotroni and Pittsburgh Mafioso Sal Mannarino (whose brother Gabriel was Trafficante's partner in Havana's Sans Souci casino) for attempting to sell $8.5 million worth of stolen securities. The reason, as explained in
chapter 12
, was that Rothman had used the money to ship guns to Cuba, in what was obviously a CIA-sponsored criminal conspiracy.

Rothman was never investigated for drug smuggling, either. By the summer of 1961, Castro had closed the last of Cuba's casinos, and the international drug lords were making new political arrangements in Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere. Rothman was privy to their plans and could have explained their intentions. If Siragusa did not corner Rothman in this regard, so that Bobby Kennedy could proceed in his assassination plots, then he had abandoned his personal commitment to drug law enforcement and had condemned the FBN to failure, at the exact same time Lee Speer was conducting his integrity investigation in New York.

On the other hand, if – given the chance – Siragusa did tell Bobby the facts, then it was the Attorney General who chose to abandon his war on crime, simply for a chance to kill Castro. This seems to be the case, in so far as Bobby launched a second assassination project in early 1962, using CIA officer Charles Ford (a veteran of the Far East Asia Division) to contact Mafia bosses in America and Canada for the sole purpose of finding someone to kill the Cuban prime minister.
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Bobby's third Mafia-related assassination plot, Operation Mongoose, was activated in March 1962. Managed by the National Security Council's Special Group under the direction of General Edward Lansdale, Mongoose included William Harvey's ZR/RIFLE unit, now dubbed Task Force W. In league with Harvey, Lansdale conjured up thirty-three often bizarre ways of destabilizing the Castro regime, including the introduction of cheap marijuana into Cuba and falsely accusing Cuba of drug trafficking.
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There were plans to assassinate Castro too, and in one remarkably explicit memo to his staff, Lansdale suggested that, “Gangster elements might prove the best recruitment potential for actions [murders] against
police G-2 [intelligence] officials.” Lansdale added that, “CW [Chemical Warfare] agents should be fully considered.”
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