Reclaiming History (377 page)

^*
In particular, RFK led the assault on Jimmy Hoffa, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ president since 1957, and his union, the nation’s largest and most powerful union at the time, establishing that organized crime had helped Hoffa control and dominate the Teamsters, being complicit in the beatings and perhaps murders of Hoffa’s opponents in the union. RFK’s Justice Department ultimately convicted Hoffa in 1964 of jury tampering and defrauding the union’s pension fund out of almost $2 million. His thirteen-year prison sentence, which he started to serve in 1967, ended four years later when President Nixon signed an Executive Grant of Clemency. Actually, the Teamsters had been the subject of scrutiny by the Senate’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee as early as December of 1956, when the committee’s chief accountant, Carmine Bellino, and chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, looked into the misuse of Teamster funds by Hoffa’s predecessor, Dave Beck, resulting in Beck’s conviction and removal from office. (McClellan,
Crime without Punishment
, pp.3, 13, 14; Kennedy,
Enemy Within
, pp.3–4, 24; Sheridan,
Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa
, pp.3, 7, 32–33, 210)

^*
It was common knowledge that Joseph Kennedy was spending whatever was necessary out of his fortune to get his son into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and JFK would facetiously deflect criticism about this. For instance, during his campaign for the presidency in 1960, he told the press at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., that “I have just received the following wire from my generous daddy: ‘Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’” (Parmet,
Jack
, p.439)

^*
The HSCA added, however, that “an individual organized crime leader who was planning an assassination conspiracy against President Kennedy
might well have
avoided making the plan known to the commission or seeking approval for it from commission members. Such a course of unilateral action seemed to the committee to have been particularly
possible
in the case of powerful organized crime leaders who were well established, with firm control over their jurisdictions” (HSCA Report, p.167). But all of this is not only pure speculation, but extremely unreasonable speculation at that. The HSCA came up with only one leader in the history of organized crime subsequent to the establishment of the national commission in the early 1930s who acted in matters of murder without first seeking commission approval. In 1957, New York mob leader Vito Genovese engineered the assassination of fellow mafioso Albert Anastasia while he was seated in a barber’s chair near Central Park, and six months earlier a Genovese hit man had shot at and attempted to murder Mafia leader Frank Costello without the knowledge or consent of the commission. (Genovese did seek and obtain commission approval for the murder and attempted murder after the fact.) (HSCA Report, pp.167–168) But this clearly was highly exceptional behavior—by just one leader in one year. More importantly, one can’t begin to compare (as the HSCA did without appropriate comment) killing a fellow mafioso without commission approval, an act that would not bring any retribution by the U.S. government against organized crime, with killing the president of the United States, which, as previously indicated, would bring a retaliation against them by the federal government of an unprecedented magnitude.
In any event, the only two mob leaders the HSCA could think of who might possibly act unilaterally were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, and the committee proceeded to say that it was unlikely that either had done so in this case (see later discussion).

^*
Not that there weren’t loose and meaningless ventings before the assassination by individual mafiosi—the type you could expect to hear from thousands of everyday Americans who have a deep hostility for a particular president. On October 31, 1963, an FBI bug picked up the following conversation between Peter Magaddino and his brother Stefano, the mob boss in upstate New York. Peter: “President Kennedy, he should drop dead.” Stefano: “They should kill the whole family, the mother and father, too.” And on May 2, 1962, an FBI bug picked up Michelino Clemente, a member of the Vito Genovese family in New York City, saying, “Bob Kennedy won’t stop today until he puts us all in jail all over the country. Until the commission meets and puts its foot down, things will be at a standstill.” Around this same time, an unidentified Genovese family member is heard saying, “I want the President indicted because I know he was whacking all those broads. Sinatra brought them out. I’d like to hit Kennedy. I would gladly go to the penitentiary for the rest of my life, believe me.” (Davis,
Mafia Kingfish
, pp.315–316)

^*
The author of a book on the Sicilian Mafia said that the list of political figures mobsters have killed “is staggering” (Pantaleone,
Mafia and Politics
, p.202).

^*
One conspiracy theorist is not satisfied having Marcello merely being “behind” the assassination. In his book
The Elite Serial Killers of Lincoln, JFK, RFK, and MLK
, author Robert Gaylon Ross writes that there were eleven members of the “death squad” at Dealey Plaza, but the “control point” was on the second floor of the Book Depository Building, where he says Carlos Marcello was one of three gunmen firing at Kennedy (Ross,
Elite Serial Killers
, p.103).

†As just one example of the help I received from so many people in the writing of this book, I knew I couldn’t write intelligently about Becker without talking to him personally. But how would I go about locating someone like him? If anyone knew how, I knew who it would be—Chicago’s Jim Agnew, the former publisher of
Real Crime Book Digest
who had helped me many times in the past. Jim is almost a character out of fiction who looks exactly like you would expect an Irish cop walking the beat on a New York street in an old Bing Crosby movie to look. Whatever is going on in this country that’s being written about, particularly in the area of crime, Jim somehow knows about it. And he has many contacts who can get him all types of information. I called Jim and asked him if he could locate Becker for me. A half hour later, Jim called back with Becker’s unlisted home phone number, no less, in Las Vegas.

^*
The U.S. government had been seeking to deport Marcello (true name, Calogero Minacore), who was born in Tunis, North Africa, to Sicilian-born parents and had never become a naturalized American citizen, since 1953. But a 1953 order to deport Marcello as an “undesirable alien” wasn’t implemented until Attorney General Robert Kennedy did so on April 4, 1961, the INS arresting Marcello when he walked into an INS office in New Orleans on a regular visit to report as an alien, and flying him in an INS airplane to Guatemala, from which he illegally reentered the United States less than two weeks later. (9 HSCA 62, 71–72; 1953 deportation order: Davis,
Mafia Kingfish
, p.176)

† Inasmuch as the sequence is so critical here, it was reassuring to me when I later played an old
Frontline
documentary in which Becker was one of several people interviewed by host Jack Newfield. Newfield: “Did he [Marcello] actually say that he was going to get a nut to do the assassination so it can’t be traced to him?” Becker: “Yeah, yeah. Well, I said to him [that if Kennedy were killed] ‘right away they know it’s you. I mean, you’ve got everything going for you. The one that hates him. Everybody knows it.’ He said ‘Don’t worry, you get a nut to do this thing and nobody’s looking at you.’” (“JFK, Hoffa and the Mob,”
Frontline
, PBS, November 17, 1992)

‡ One step conspiracy theorists say Marcello would not have had to take is to get permission from the national commission of the Mafia to kill the president. As indicated earlier, the first “family” of the Mafia came from Sicily and settled in New Orleans in 1875. A “highly reliable source” told the FBI in 1972 that “inasmuch as this ‘family’ was the predecessor of all subsequent ‘families,’ it has been afforded the highest respect and esteem, and because of its exalted position, the New Orleans ‘family’ could make decisions on its own without going to the ‘Commission’” (FBI report, October 24, 1972, La Cosa Nostra file, Bureau No. 92-6054-3176; HSCA Report, p.172). Patrick Collins, an FBI agent who investigated Marcello and his organization in the 1960s, formed the same view, telling the HSCA that the New Orleans Mafia family “was unique among all the mobs” in that it “didn’t have to consult the commission in the same way as the other families did. There was a unique independence of sorts” (9 HSCA 66; HSCA staff interview of Patrick J. Collins on November 15, 1978). However, on a crime of the monumental magnitude of murdering the president, I think we can assume that Marcello, if he had had such thoughts, would know that his privileged exemption from reporting to the commission would not apply.

^*
Even assuming Becker is telling the truth, he has made contradictory statements—probably out of confusion or lack of memory—about one point. He told HSCA investigators that he never told the FBI about Marcello’s Kennedy threats because he was “afraid” Marcello or his associates might learn he had done so (9 HSCA 83). This makes sense. And in my first conversation with him on August 13, 1999, he told me the first time he had ever told the authorities about Marcello’s threats was to the HSCA in 1978. But in a later conversation he said he
did
start to tell the FBI about the threats, “but they weren’t interested. They were agents who were only working on the Billie Sol Estes case.” In any event, none of the FBI reports of interviews with or about Becker make any reference to Marcello’s threats against Kennedy, and all deal with the Billie Sol Estes case.

^*
An example of “mob talk,” from a federal wiretap of a telephone conversation between gangster Johnny Formosa and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana over the failure of Giancana’s friend Frank Sinatra to have President Kennedy stop the authorities from prosecuting Giancana: Formosa: “Let’s show ’em. Let’s show those [obscenity] Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys. [Peter] Lawford and that [Dean] Martin, and I could take the nigger [Sammy Davis Jr.] and put his other eye out.” Giancana: “No…I’ve got other plans for them.” (Kelley,
His Way
, pp.296, 531)

†The other mob boss the FBI found difficult to penetrate was Santo Trafficante, but the bureau was able to conduct some electronic eavesdropping on him (HSCA Report, p.175). A Cuban exile, José Aleman, claimed that Trafficante (who admitted, in his testimony before the HSCA, to participating in the unsuccessful CIA conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro) told him that Kennedy was “going to be hit.” The HSCA investigated the claim and concluded that “the relationship between Trafficante and Aleman, a business acquaintance, does not seem to have been close enough for Trafficante to have mentioned or alluded to such a murder plot.” In addition to there being no evidence that Trafficante, or Marcello, or any other mob figure, had actually had the president killed—as opposed to uncorroborated allegations that they talked about doing it—the HSCA said that “as with Marcello, the committee noted that Trafficante’s cautious character is inconsistent with his taking the risk of being involved in an assassination plot against the President.” (HSCA Report, p.175) For a more in-depth discussion of the Aleman-Trafficante issue, see the FBI conspiracy section.

^*
Life
magazine reported in 1967 that Marcello controlled “illegal but wide-open gambling casinos in Jennings, Lafayette, Bossier City, West Baton Rouge and Morgan City, Louisiana” (Smith, “Carlos Marcello,” p.94). None of these, by the way, were within New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s jurisdiction. Marcello was believed to be worth in excess of $25 million from his gambling enterprises. Like so many on the wrong side of the law have demonstrated, they can possess some traits that more on the right side should have. For instance, among Marcello’s charities,
Life
reported that he contributed $100,000 to agencies helping victims of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and gave $10,000 to the Girl Scouts. When New Orleans was looking for a site to build a domed stadium for its new NFL team, the Saints, Marcello offered to give the city (in return for the parking concession) two hundred acres of his Churchill Farms estate to build the arena. The city declined.

^*
If Marcello liked to scare people in the absence of being actually violent, he also wanted people to believe he had more power than he did. There’s no evidence to support the degree of power and influence he suggested in several of the aforementioned BRILAB tapes while talking to undercover FBI agents and his friend and attorney Vincent Marinello: “It takes time to get where I’m at. To know all these people—governors, business, the [state] attorney general, they know me”; “Yeah, I got ’em all where I want ’em”; “I had [Louisiana] Governor McKeithen for eight years”; “Maybe I can make a phone call to the attorney general. Now I’m not saying I can do it. I gotta man can do it”; “We own de teamsters”; “I got the only man in the United States can tell ’em [the Teamsters leadership] what the fuck to do”; “No matter who gets in there, you know I’m a find a way to get to ’em.” (Davis,
Mafia Kingfish
, pp.577–578)

^*
When I say “other than,” is this analogous to “other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?” No. Booth ruined everything, whereas as sophomoric and irresponsible (because it was essentially foundationless) as the fourth-bullet conspiracy conclusion of the HSCA was, the HSCA still did a commendable job overall under Blakey’s counsel.

^*
In November of 1992, Ragano told essentially the same story to a national audience in a
Frontline
TV special, but he said the conversation took place not at the Marble Palace Hotel but in Hoffa’s office at the Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C. Marble Palace Hotel? Jimmy’s office? Better make up your mind, Frankie. (“JFK, Hoffa and the Mob,”
Frontline
, PBS, November 17, 1992)