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By Root 1373 0

and was within reach of the refined upper-class world where he sought to live. But Joe saw an opportunity. That he saw it and acted upon it is one of the most extraordinary facts of Joe’s entire life. His father had for decades been a major wholesaler and importer of liquor, and it was probably through him that Joe had contacts in Canada and England. Testimony suggests that Joe had the best of it, for the most part delivering the merchandise offshore to bootleggers who brought the liquor into the United States. In 1926 the Canadian Customs Commission looked into liquor export taxes that were not being paid and found the name “Joseph Kennedy” on many documents. Although the commission never definitively linked the name to the young Boston businessman, there is no other Joseph Kennedy whose name has been prominently linked to bootlegging.

Joe did not enter this illegal business as some desperate expedient. He took no more risks than he did with some of his early gambles on Wall Street. If anything, liquor was another part of his portfolio; he was a businessman spreading his risks. Joe kept such distance from the business that his name was never formally linked to bootlegging. Cartha DeLoach, the former deputy director of the FBI, recalls that “there was a great deal of suspicion concerning his being possibly involved in smuggling in the early days. But as it is in America, you overcome these things.”

Joe chose his partners as cannily as he chose his part of the business, one of them being Thomas McGinty, an Irish-American known as “the King of Ohio Bootleggers.” “Joe brought the liquor to the middle of Lake Erie, and the boys picked it up,” recalled McGinty’s daughter, Patty McGinty Gallagher.

McGinty had been a flyweight boxing champion, and he was a man armed with Irish blarney as well as a steel fist. He went on to become the leading Irish presence in the Jewish-run Cleveland syndicate. He founded the famous Mounds Club outside Cleveland, ran racetracks, managed the casino at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, and became a hidden owner of the mob-controlled Desert Inn in Las Vegas, all the time maintaining a relationship with the Kennedy family. His daughter Patty, in the bar in her home in Palm Beach, Florida, has a picture of her father and a smiling Jack Kennedy taken in Havana in the 1950s.

Another witness is Benedict Fitzgerald, an attorney who not only knew the Kennedys intimately but also represented Owen Madden, a gangster who controlled leading nightclubs in New York City. Fitzgerald says that Joe was involved in bootlegging deals with Madden, a view confirmed by Q. Byrum Hurst, another of Madden’s attorneys.

Madden, though English-born, was of Irish blood, a son of Erin brought up in Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan slum that bred little but disease, despair, and crime. Madden spent a term in Sing Sing, the upstate New York prison, for a killing he vowed he did not commit. Madden was a dapper dresser whose manner may have been appropriated by his friend George Raft in his screen portrayals of gangsters.

Madden’s pathway was greased with ample payoffs to cops and Tammany Hall that allowed him to be one of the three biggest importers of bootleg booze along the East Coast. He moved from criminal deals to entertainment, backing his lover Mae West in her Broadway debut and running the celebrated Cotton Club, the Harlem boîte. He moved into the world of sports, managing the career of Primo Camera, the giant heavy-weight boxer. In Madden’s world there was a seamless journey from crime to politics to sports to entertainment, and Joe was now embarking on that journey. It was a world in which politicians acted like criminals, and criminals such as Madden acted like politicians or sports heroes. In this world a man like Joe Kennedy was just another player.

Madden was forced out of New York and took up residence in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he reputedly controlled much of the gambling and vice. Even then, Fitzgerald says, Joe maintained a business relationship with Madden. “I know that Joe gave him some finances while he