Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [149]
On the very day of the nomination, July 13, DeLoach received a summary of ‘highlights’ of the Bureau’s Kennedy file It included a reference to the Inga Arvad affair in World War II and to ‘affidavits from two mulatto prostitutes in New York.’ It also raised a factor far more ominous than the sexual allegations, yet inextricably linked to them – ‘the hoodlum connections of Senator Kennedy.’
John Kennedy, like his father before him, had apparently slipped into his own shabby relationship with organized crime. He was compromised by it, and not only because of sex – caught, even before the presidency began, in the tangle of intrigue that may eventually have led to his assassination.
Edgar, himself long since neutralized by the mob because of his homosexuality, would gradually discover the extent of the younger man’s folly.
The Kennedy connection with the Mafia had not ended with Prohibition. Joseph Kennedy had maintained personal and business ties to the mob. His Chicago agent in the forties was a Miami gangster – eventually shot dead following a deal with the syndicate. He had played golf from time to time since the thirties with Johnny Roselli, the Chicago mob’s man on West Coast.
John Kennedy followed the same perilous road. According to Meyer Lansky’s widow, Kennedy met Lansky when he visited Cuba in 1957 – even took his advice on where to find women. Not long afterward, in Arizona, he went to mass with ‘Smiling Gus’ Battaglia, a close friend of Mafia chieftain Joe Bonanno. Later, he met Bonanno himself.
In 1960, when the Kennedys were pursuing the presidency, Joe Kennedy had meetings in California with numerous gangsters. He mended fences with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, whom his son Robert – in sharp contrast to the father and the elder brother – had long been pursuing.
At the height of the campaign, Joseph Kennedy reportedly met with an assortment of organized crime bosses at Felix Young’s restaurant in New York. ‘I took the reservations,’ said Edna Daulyton, then working as a hostess at Young’s, ‘and it was as though every gangster chief in the United States was there. I don’t remember all the names now, but there was John Roselli, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans, the two brothers from Dallas, the top men from Buffalo, California and Colorado. They were all top people, not soldiers. I was amazed Joe Kennedy would take the risk.’
Thanks to a variety of sources, including FBI wiretaps and mob associates, it is now clear the Kennedys used the mob connection as a stepping-stone to power. They asked Carlos Marcello to use his influence to win Louisiana’s support for Kennedy at the Convention. He refused – he was already committed to Lyndon Johnson – but Chicago Mafia boss Giancana proved helpful.
Giancana and Roselli, Joe Kennedy’s golfing friend, would later be overheard on an FBI wiretap discussing the ‘donations’ they had made during the vital primary campaign in West Virginia. According to Judith Campbell, who became the candidate’s lover in the spring of 1960, John Kennedy himself took outrageous risks to enlist Giancana’s help. He met secretly with the Mafia boss at least twice and even sent Campbell to him as a courier, carrying vast sums of money in cash.
‘I felt Jack was entrusting me with something that was very important to him,’ Campbell recalled. ‘I didn’t know where the money was going to go when it left Sam, but I knew it had to do with the campaign … Someone was being paid off, something was being bought with this money.’
A mass of information suggests that is exactly what was going on. The Kennedy millions, along with contributions from the mobsters themselves, were used to buy votes both during the primaries and – in Chicago