The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [25]
According to former Florida Senator George Smathers, “everybody knew” that Joe sold liquor. “But he wasn’t a bootlegger in the sense that he ran across state lines and carried illegal whiskey.”
Yet another credible witness to Joe’s activities is Zel Davis, a former Florida state’s attorney, whose uncle was the leading bootlegger in Palm Beach County. “Joe was having scotch sent into the Bahamas from England,” Davis says. “He was doing business with Roland Simonette, who became the first premier of the Bahamas in the late sixties. When Simonette was young, he owned shipyards and had boats. He ran one boat from Nassau to New York and New England. Joe also had connections with Palm Beach County bootleggers. That boat came from West End in Nassau to Palm Beach. They built warehouses to hold it.”
The most intriguing tale of all about Joe’s alleged illegal involvements was given in 1994 by ninety-three-year-old John Kohlert in a videotaped oral history interview conducted shortly before he died. As a young man in the twenties, Kohlert worked his way through college tuning pianos, including those in speakeasies and at the Cicero, Illinois, home of Al Capone. Kohlert, a Czech immigrant, knew little about Capone’s reputation as a vicious mobster and was delighted that Capone offered him work. “When I worked on his player piano, he said, ‘How would you like to stay for spaghetti?’ I tell you, I never had a spaghetti supper such as I had at Al Capone’s place. And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to have company.’ I said, ‘That’s fine.’ The company he had was Joe Kennedy. He introduced me to him. He said, ‘This is Joe Kennedy from Boston, and we have a little business deal to make at supper. I hope you don’t mind.’ I said, ‘Hell, no, I don’t mind.’ So while we had spaghetti, they made a deal.
“Al Capone owned a distillery in Canada. I’m not sure, but anyway, it was quite a prominent distillery, that made whiskey. And so they made a big deal of Capone selling whiskey and Kennedy selling Irish whiskey to Capone. And they made a deal to exchange it on Lake Michigan off Mackinac Island. That’s where the Kennedy ships and the Capone ships were going to make the exchange of the two whiskeys that they agreed to there at that spaghetti dinner.”
An obscure dying man in a short aside in a lengthy oral history has little cause to invent such an extraordinary tale, and little time to create such details. Patty McGinty Gallagher and Zel Davis have no reason to invent a family history so profoundly different from their own lives. Benedict Fitzgerald has no reason to exaggerate his extravagant life. There remains a maddeningly anecdotal character to this evidence and the allegations that have been made in other books, but the sheer magnitude of the recollections is more important than the veracity of the individual stories.
Joe’s grandson Christopher Kennedy suggests that it would have been impossible for his grandfather to have had such far-flung dealings, doubly so without leaving any record. “About ten years ago a Wharton MBA with a degree in accounting who had audited several of the East Coast’s wealthiest families conducted an audit of Joe Kennedy,” Christopher Kennedy says. “He transcribed to the dollar every source of income and use of cash, and every dollar is accounted for.”
That result strongly suggests, however, that Joe understood one of the fundamental rules of illegal dealing. The dealer does not get caught holding the goods. Joe occupied the enviable end of the business, away from the police and the riffraff, away from the parceling up and the danger. It is probably testimony to the sheer acumen of Joe Kennedy that no one has come up with any hard physical evidence linking him to bootlegging, but the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Joe was a financier and supplier of illegal liquor.
Joe agreed to supply the liquor for his tenth Harvard reunion in June 1922. During his college days he would no more have been associated with an illegal activity than he would have danced an Irish jig