American Tabloid - James Ellroy [9]
Kemper caught his cue. “Sir?”
“I want you to infiltrate the Kennedy organization. The McClellan Committee’s labor-racketeering mandate ends next spring, but Bobby Kennedy is still hiring lawyer-investigators. As of now you are retired from the FBI, although you will continue to draw full pay until July 1961, the date you reach twenty years of Bureau service. You are to prepare a convincing FBI retirement story and secure an attorney’s job with the McClellan Committee. I know that both you and Jack Kennedy have been intimate with a Senate aide named Sally Lefferts. Miss Lefferts is a talkative woman, so I’m sure young Jack has heard about you. Young Jack is on the McClellan Committee, and young Jack loves sexual gossip and dangerous friends. Mr. Boyd, I am sure that you will fit in with the Kennedys. I’m sure that this will be both a salutary opportunity for you to practice your skills of dissembling and duplicity, and the chance to exercise your more promiscuous tastes.”
Kemper felt weightless. The limo cruised on thin air.
Hoover said, “Your reaction delights me. Rest now. We’ll arrive in Washington in an hour, and I’ll drop you at your apartment.”
Hoover supplied up-to-date study notes—in a leather binder stamped “CONFIDENTIAL.” Kemper mixed a pitcher of extra-dry martinis and pulled up his favorite chair to read through them.
The notes boiled down to one thing: Bobby Kennedy vs. Jimmy Hoffa.
Senator John McClellan chaired the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Management Field, established in January 1957. Its subsidiary members: Senators Ives, Kennedy, McNamara, McCarthy, Ervin, Mundt, Goldwater. Its chief counsel and investigative boss: Robert F. Kennedy.
Current personnel: thirty-five investigators, forty-five accountants, twenty-five stenographers and clerks. Its current housing: the Senate Office Building, suite 101.
The Committee’s stated goals:
To expose corrupt labor practices; to expose labor unions collusively linked to organized crime. The Committee’s methods: witness subpoenas, document subpoenas, and the charting of union funds diverted and misused in organized crime activities.
The Committee’s de facto target: the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the most powerful transportation union on earth, arguably the most corrupt and powerful labor union ever.
Its president: James Riddle Hoffa, age 45.
Hoffa: mob bought-and-paid-for. The suborner of: extortion, wholesale bribery, beatings, bombings, management side deals and epic abuse of union funds.
Hoffa’s suspected holdings, in violation of fourteen antitrust statutes:
Trucking firms, used car lots, a dog track, a car-rental chain, a Miami cabstand staffed by Cuban refugees with extensive criminal records.
Hoffa’s close friends:
Mr. Sam Giancana, the Mafia boss of Chicago; Mr. Santo Trafficante Jr., the Mafia boss of Tampa, Florida; Mr. Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss of New Orleans.
Jimmy Hoffa:
Who lends his “friends” millions of dollars, put to use illegally.
Who owns percentages of mob-run casinos in Havana, Cuba.
Who illegally funnels cash to Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista and rebel firebrand Fidel Castro.
Who rapes the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, a cash-rich watering hole rumored to be administered by Sam Giancana’s Chicago mob—a loan-shark scheme wherein gangsters and crooked entrepreneurs borrow large sums at usurious interest rates, with nonpayment penalties up to and including torture and death.
Kemper caught the gist: Hoover’s jealous.