The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [267]
Exner arrived in Jack’s room that evening looking like a privileged young woman of wealth and bearing. “It was a wonderful night of lovemaking,” Exner recalled. “Jack couldn’t have been more loving, more concerned about my feelings, more considerate, more gentle…. The next morning he sent me a dozen red roses with a card that said, ‘Thinking of you … J.’”
A week later Exner flew to Miami, where she said Sinatra had invited her to attend his performance at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Although her host had supposedly viciously insulted her, that did not prevent her from attending the farewell party for the last evening of Sinatra’s show. It was there that she says Sinatra introduced her to “a good friend of mine, Sam Flood,” one of the many aliases of Sam Giancana, the leader of the Chicago mob. The next evening Exner said that she had dinner with a group that included Giancana, still, by her admission, knowing neither Flood’s real name nor his profession.
Exner may have known far more about Giancana than she admitted. Jeanne Humphreys, the wife of Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, a leading mobster associated with Giancana, tells a different story in her unpublished memoirs. “Johnnie Rosselli [sic] who had been taken back into the fold was becoming a frequent visitor to Chicago bringing gossip about Mooney [Giancana] and his reveling with the ‘ratpack.’ He [Rosselli] said he had fixed [Giancana] up with a party girl that he’d taken to Florida when [his mistress] Phyllis [McGuire] wasn’t looking. I said the last girl I’d seen him [Giancana] with was named Judy and she was from Chicago. He said he meant Judy from California.”
Giancana was attracted to Exner in part because he had a constant need for variety. The mobster could be as generous as a pasha to his amours, but there was always a price, even if it was not obvious at first. One of his lovers at the time was Marilyn Miller, a showgirl at Chicago’s Chez Paree. She bragged to her girlfriends that Giancana had spent over one hundred thousand dollars on her. A friend who had offended the mobster asked Miller to intercede with the syndicate chieftain. She tried to talk to Giancana, but he told her to be quiet. Soon after the nude body of the man was found in Chicago. Another woman Giancana was seeing at the time was Patricia Clarke, a Florida woman with four children. Although Giancana was generous to the single mother, Clarke made the mistake later that year of telling him that she was also seeing Angelo Fasel, a bank robber, and that she intended to marry him. Within a few weeks Fasel disappeared, and Clarke was told not to ask about him anymore.
Exner flew from Miami to New York, where she apparently stayed with friends before traveling to Washington on April 6. That evening she took a taxi from the Park Sheraton Hotel to Jack’s house at 3307 N Street, N.W., in Georgetown. In Exner’s 1977 autobiography, she described the evening as another gloriously romantic encounter. A decade later, in a 1988 People magazine cover story for which she was paid $50,000, and subsequently in other books, magazine articles, and television interviews for which she was almost inevitably paid substantial fees, Exner told a dubious tale about Jack and the mob.
Exner claims that Jack asked her to “quietly arrange a meeting with Sam for me” during their hours together because he thought he might “need his help in the campaign.” Jack allegedly asked Exner to set up a number of meetings with Giancana and gave her a satchel containing “as much as $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills” to deliver to the Mafia kingpin. Exner believed that Jack had chosen her because “I was the one person around him who didn’t need anything from him or want anything. He trusted me. I had money from my grandmother.”
Exner’s story is an anomaly among the many unverified tales of mob