His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [180]
By appointing his thirty-five-year-old brother to the nation’s top law enforcement position, Kennedy sounded a clarion call to attack organized crime on a national scale. As chief counsel to the McClellan committee, Bobby had exposed corruption in fifteen unions and fifty corporations, helping convict labor leaders like Dave Beck, Jr., president of the Teamsters Union. Now, as attorney general, he rallied Justice Department lawyers to “the conspiracy of evil” that he said was organized crime, and he declared that it would be his major concern. He quadrupled the staff and funding of the organized crime section and appointed Edwyn Silberling to compile a list of top racketeers to be targets of prosecution. Included were some of Frank Sinatra’s closest Mafia friends: Sam Giancana, Mickey Cohen, Johnny Roselli, Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo, Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Carlos Marcello. So driven was Bobby Kennedy in his pursuit of gangsters that he prosecuted Joey Aiuppa of the Chicago mob for violating provisions of the Migratory Bird Act. “Bobby’s instructions were: ‘Don’t let anything get in your way,’ said Henry Petersen, a senior aide in Kennedy’s Justice Department. “ ‘If you have problems, come see me. Get the job done, and if you can’t get the job done, get out.’ ”
During one of many meetings the attorney general held with his bright young staff, one lawyer stepped forward to complain about the President’s friendship with Frank.
“We are out front fighting organized crime on every level and here the President is associating with Sinatra, who is in bed with all those guys,” he said.
The attorney general said, “Give me a memorandum and give me the facts.”
A series of three reports were prepared on Frank in 1962. They showed that he had repeated and personal associations with ten of the leading figures of organized crime, detailing the times and dates these gangsters telephoned Frank at home, using his unlisted number. The report also enumerated special favors that Frank had performed for these men over the years.
“Sinatra has had a long and wide association with hoodlums and racketeers which seems to be continuing,” stated the Justice Department report. “The nature of Sinatra’s work may, on occasion, bring him into contact with underworld figures, but this cannot account for his friendship and/or financial involvement with people such as Joe and Rocco Fischetti, cousins of Al Capone; Paul Emilio D’Amato, John Formosa, and Sam Giancana, all of whom are on our list of racketeers. No other entertainer appears to be mentioned nearly so frequently with racketeers.
“Available information indicates not only that Sinatra is associated with each of the above-named racketeers, but that they apparently maintain contact with one another. This indicates a possible community of interest involving Sinatra and racketeers in Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Florida, and Nevada.”
The part that disturbed Bobby Kennedy the most detailed Sam Giancana’s repeated visits to Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs.
Bobby had become even more alarmed on February 27, 1962, when he received a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: While investigating Johnny Roselli, agents had found many calls to Judith Campbell. A check of her telephone records disclosed several phone calls to Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s personal secretary in the White House, as well as to Sam Giancana. Bobby did not know then that Frank Sinatra was the link between Judy Campbell and the President, and Judy Campbell and Sam Giancana, but he did have enough information about Sinatra’s connections to organized crime to dissuade his brother from accepting Frank’s hospitality as planned in March 1962. Bobby immediately stepped up surveillance on Giancana as well as on Judith Campbell, and dispatched J. Edgar Hoover to give the FBI reports to the President while he called Peter Lawford to cancel the President’s weekend stay at Sinatra’s house.