CHAPTER TWELVE
JUNE 30, 1958
OLD SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
9:00 A.M.
Jimmy Hoffa is no longer under pressure—at least not now.
The weather outside is sweltering, but air-conditioning keeps this cramped hearing room comfortable. Chief Counsel Bobby Kennedy is opening a new round of hearings into organized crime, using information gleaned from the Apalachin Summit. The lean attorney is seated at a long table between his brother John and Republican senator Barry Goldwater, facing those who will testify about the Mob.
Last August, it was Hoffa who sat opposite Kennedy, but the president of the Teamsters union is not the subject of today’s investigation.
“We intend to focus on the criminal group which held a meeting at the home of Joseph Barbara Sr., in Apalachin, New York, on November 14, 1957,” begins committee chairman John McClellan. “The discovery of this meeting by the New York State Police had the effect of revealing the scope of the interrelationships of some of the leaders of the national crime syndicate.”
With those words, McClellan publicly refutes decades of federal denial about the existence of the Mob. Millions of Americans are again watching him on television, where they will soon learn that the Mafia is not just a collection of well-dressed hoodlums but a systematic organization that controls many aspects of American life, ranging from entertainment to gambling, politics, and even law enforcement. From this day forward, it will be the policy of the American government not only to acknowledge but to try to destroy the Mob.
James R. Hoffa (right), Midwest boss of the Teamsters union, talks with Robert F. Kennedy, counsel for the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee in Washington, D.C., August 21, 1957.
McClellan turns the proceedings over to his chief counsel.
So it is that Bobby Kennedy once again takes charge. “The first witness will be Sergeant Edgar Croswell.”
The sergeant takes his seat at the witness table and begins answering Kennedy’s methodical questions in a slow and deliberate fashion. The trooper has been under intense pressure since the Apalachin incident, with praise and criticism directed at him in equal amounts. He has not managed the pressure well, growing even thinner than before, his peptic ulcer making it almost impossible for him to eat without pain.
But Croswell is an articulate and compliant witness, for which Kennedy is thankful.
The same cannot be said for Bobby Kennedy’s confrontation with union boss Jimmy Hoffa, which took place almost one year ago.
Jimmy Hoffa hates Bobby Kennedy, and the feeling is mutual.
The young Kennedy has evolved into a passionate opponent of organized crime. This is due in large part to forty-four-year-old James Riddle Hoffa, lifelong labor advocate and union leader. The two men sparred publicly during the first round of the televised McClellan hearings, with Hoffa very often coming out on top.
And for Bobby Kennedy, a man who hates to lose, this is completely unacceptable.
Hoffa, the five-foot-five, thickly muscled son of an Indiana coal miner, is the well-heeled lawyer’s polar opposite. Kennedy’s Harvard education alone gives him an advantage over Hoffa, a high school dropout. Both men are more alike than they will ever publicly admit—competitive overachievers who prefer to wear white socks with their dress suits and spontaneously drop to the floor for a quick set of push-ups. Kennedy drinks very little and Hoffa not all. Neither man smokes. Both are married family men. These many shared habits might have led to a friendship but, instead, their hatred for each other runs deep. As long as he lives, Jimmy Hoffa will publicly cheer every Kennedy setback, even as Bobby makes it his personal mission to send Hoffa to prison forever.
To most Americans, knowledge of union business is minimal, gleaned from movies like On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando. But Kennedy’s investigation seeks to expose a corrupt union world where bribery of government officials, collusion with known criminals, secret loans from union pension funds, kickbacks, and a plethora of other crimes take place on a daily basis—all while the unions pretend to be benevolent organizations.
Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa first meet three weeks after the McClellan hearings begin on January 30, 1957. The occasion is dinner. Kennedy and Hoffa are invited to the home of Teamsters lawyer Eddie Cheyfitz at the behest of union president Dave Beck. Hoffa’s job is to convince Kennedy to back off from any investigation of the Teamsters, promising to make internal reforms himself as second in command.
The night does not go well. Kennedy already has evidence that Hoffa is attempting to plant a spy within the McClellan Committee and is planning to have the FBI arrest the teamster.
Also, Bobby Kennedy knows that Hoffa is associated with mobster Johnny Dio, an underboss for the Genovese crime family. Five months ago, it was Dio who ordered that sulfuric acid be thrown into the eyes of New York Daily Mirror correspondent Victor Riesel as retaliation for his many articles condemning union corruption. The attack blinded Riesel for life. There is suspicion that Dio engineered the assault at Hoffa’s request.
So as Bobby Kennedy sits down for dinner with Jimmy Hoffa, he understands the sort of individual with whom he is dealing. And yet, the union leader is a surprise, bragging continuously about his personal toughness, leading Kennedy to wonder if Hoffa has questions about his own manhood—“a bully hiding behind a façade,” Kennedy will later write.
Throughout the meal, RFK questions Hoffa continuously about Johnny Dio. Hoffa is candid. “I do to others what they do to me,” the union boss boasts without admitting any connection to the acid attack.
But even as Kennedy sizes up Hoffa, the same thing is being done to him. Despite his lack of formal education, the Teamster leader is an astute judge of character—and he thinks Bobby Kennedy is weak. “I can tell by how he shakes hands what kind of fellow I got,” Hoffa later states, referring to Kennedy’s soft grip. “I said to myself here’s a fella thinks he’s doing me a favor talking to me.”
And when the dinner finally ends shortly after 9:00 p.m., Hoffa confides to Cheyfitz, “he’s a damned spoiled jerk.”
Three weeks after the meal, in an FBI sting orchestrated by Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa is arrested for bribery—allegedly passing $2,000 in cash to an attorney as payment for spying on the McClellan hearings’ investigators.
“He stared at me for three minutes with complete hatred in his eyes,” Kennedy will recall of Hoffa’s midnight arraignment.
“Then somehow we got into a discussion about who could do the most push-ups.”
Hoffa’s recollections of the night are much different. “I said, ‘Listen, Bobby, you run your business and I’ll run mine. You go on home and go to bed. I’ll take care of things. Let’s don’t have no problems,’” Hoffa will later tell a journalist. The relationship between Kennedy and Hoffa was “like flint and steel” in the union leader’s words. “Every time we came together the sparks flew.”
The government case against Hoffa was so ironclad that Kennedy boasts he would “jump off the Capitol” if the charges don’t stick. But, to RFK’s dismay, not only is Jimmy Hoffa acquitted by a jury but he uses the publicity to actually mock Kennedy—who receives a package from the labor leader: a parachute and a one-word note, JUMP!
Hoffa then goes one step further in trumpeting his innocence. After the McClellan Committee’s investigation forces Teamster president Dave Beck to step down in disgrace for looting union pension coffers, Hoffa pledges to run for the vacant office.
An angry Bobby Kennedy is certain the union leader is crooked and is determined to prove it. He schemes of ways to put Hoffa behind bars. In August, the union leader is ordered to appear before the McClellan Committee. Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa” squad of researchers and attorneys has investigated every aspect of Hoffa’s life and is confident he will crack under interrogation.
The drama begins when Hoffa takes the stand. The two men of vastly different backgrounds engage in a verbal duel that comes to fascinate the American public. Kennedy is terse and direct, rattling off questions with a speedy cadence. In the gallery, his wife, Ethel, is heard to exclaim, “Give it to him!”
Hoffa never wavers. He appears relaxed, speaking in fractured grammar with a thick midwestern accent, deflecting questions with ease. He is fond of staring at Kennedy for moments at a time, a very direct reminder to the attorney that the labor leader is unafraid of the committee.
“How many times, approximately, do you think?” Kennedy asks Hoffa about his arrest record.
“Well, I don’t know, Bob,” Hoffa replies. “I haven’t counted them up. I think maybe about seventeen times I have been picked up, took into custody of the police, and out of those seventeen times, three of those times—in many instances were dismissed. But in three of those times I received convictions.”
“Now the first one was in 1940, was it?” Kennedy asks, already knowing the answer.
“I believe that was an assault and battery, is that correct?” answers Hoffa, playing dumb.
“That is not the one I was thinking of.”
Hoffa responds: “I am talking about the ones where I was simply taken off a picket line because of a disagreement with some so-called policeman.”
Hoffa’s answers are just as contrived as Kennedy’s questions, having spent hours practicing with his attorneys. “I sat down and put on paper everything I could think of they might ask me questions about. Then I got with the lawyers and went over every item. We’d rehearse what we thought Kennedy would do,” Hoffa will later write. “And we got it right damned near every time.”
Kennedy is relentless in his pursuit of Hoffa. He often eats a sandwich and drinks a glass of milk for lunch at his desk each afternoon and never leaves his office before midnight, even though he has five young children at home, and Ethel is pregnant with a sixth.
Jimmy Hoffa is no less determined. Each night as Bobby drives home, his route takes him past the Marble Palace, as the Teamsters call their Washington headquarters. One evening, traveling with his assistant Pierre Salinger at one in the morning, Kennedy spies the light on in Hoffa’s office. He immediately turns the car around. “If he’s still at work, we ought to be,” Kennedy tells Salinger, and returns to the office.
When Hoffa gets wind of what Kennedy did, he begins the habit of leaving his office light on all night long—whether he is there or not.
To Bobby Kennedy’s chagrin, Hoffa emerges from the hearings unscathed. It is Kennedy who looks flustered. Many times, as he launches into an elaborate question, Hoffa winks at him. This annoyance forces Kennedy to finally plead with committee chairman McClellan to “please instruct the witness to stop making faces at me.”
Eventually, some of the general public begins sympathizing with Hoffa, believing that Kennedy’s attacks are one-sided and unfair. Joseph Kennedy is taken aback by the intensity of his son’s questioning, even asking him to back off, lest organized labor fail to support John Kennedy in the next presidential election.
Bobby Kennedy refuses.
Among those inside organized labor, the national hearings make Hoffa a hero. Shortly after his Senate testimony, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters will elect Jimmy Hoffa as their new president. He garners an amazing 75 percent of the vote. Bobby Kennedy has made Jimmy Hoffa a legend.
“The outcome was an almost natural reaction of tough men in a tough industry,” the National Guardian will note, “who objected to being told how to run their affairs by an anti-labor Senate committee.”
Speaking about RFK, Hoffa will gloat: “He’s not the brightest fellow in the world, you know,” he says. “I … love to bug the little bastard.”
In the end, Bobby Kennedy fails on the national stage. Despite reams of evidence located by his army of researchers, he is outfoxed. He knows that Jimmy Hoffa has ties to the Mafia, authorizes beatings and murders, and accepts bribes in exchange for favors. While still vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, he consolidated IBT pension money from across the country into a singular robust fund. Now, as president, he loans the Mob cash to build new casinos in Las Vegas. But Kennedy has been unable to prove any of that. Thus, the corrupt Hoffa dances away.
In truth, the McClellan hearings benefited both Kennedy and Hoffa. Each day, the labor leader waltzes into his walnut-paneled office at the Marble Palace, where a personal chef serves his favorite lunch of cold lobster and crab, and where he sometimes takes a steam bath in the private basement gymnasium. Hoffa’s guile is turning into power and he knows it.
Although Bobby Kennedy remains angry, he and his brother John have gained enormous fame from the hearings. The Saturday Evening Post runs a story titled “The Amazing Kennedys” and Look features “The Rise of the Brothers Kennedy.”
One year later, Bobby Kennedy is set to begin the McClellan Committee’s second round of hearings. This time Hoffa is absent as the interrogation is aimed at mobsters detained at the Apalachin Summit in New York. Once again, Robert Kennedy will be watched by millions on national television.
This time, he cannot fail.
The criminals will not talk.
Those detained at Apalachin have been ordered to take the Fifth Amendment. Mob lawyers well understanding that their clients cannot be forced to testify against themselves.
So, Bobby Kennedy’s excitement about grilling major crime figures like Vito Genovese and Joe Profaci turns to frustration as witness after witness defies him by invoking their right to silence. The Justice Department is of no help to Kennedy, refusing to prosecute those criminals who take the stand, saying there’s not enough evidence to build a case.
Bobby Kennedy, whose emotions are always transparent, grows increasingly bellicose during the proceedings. He slowly comes to the realization that this committee is losing ground to “the enemy within,” as he refers to the Mafia.
Typical is this conversation between Kennedy and Sam Giancana, the flashy Chicago leader of the Outfit. At fifty, the widower Giancana is known as a playboy Mafioso, fond of the Las Vegas nightlife and palling around with entertainers like Frank Sinatra. He has also been arrested seventy times for acts of violence—including three times for murder. It is thought that he has authorized more than two hundred Mafia hits on his enemies.1
Giancana is listed in the State of Nevada’s Las Vegas Black Book, which shows the photographs of eleven suspected Mafioso who are not allowed on the premises of any casino. Which does not stop Giancana in the least. Frank Sinatra is known to hide the mobster in his dressing room at the Sands when FBI agents visit the casino. The two men often travel together, and Sinatra not only flies to Chicago to sing for free at Giancana’s Villa Venice club but also closes the shows with “My Kind of Town Chicago Is,” as a tribute to Sam Giancana.
Singer Phyllis McGuire and Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana in a London, England, nightclub in 1962.
The mobster repays the favor, showing his friendship by always wearing the sapphire pinkie ring given to him by Frank Sinatra. When the singer films the movie Some Came Running in a town near Chicago, Giancana is a regular visitor to the set, often bringing his Mafia underlings. Their nightly revelry amazed costar Shirley MacLaine. “I didn’t know who they were,” she would remember of the anonymous mobsters. “I only knew that the nightlife of poker, jokes, pasta, and booze went on until 5 a.m.”
“Frank wanted to be a hood,” singer Eddie Fisher will later marvel at Sinatra’s fascination with Giancana. “He once said, ‘I’d rather be a Mafia don than President of the United States.’”
The actor Peter Lawford, now married to Bobby Kennedy’s sister Patricia, knows Giancana through his friendship with Sinatra. “You better believe that when the word got out around Hollywood that Frank was a pal of Sam Giancana, nobody but nobody ever messed with Frank Sinatra. They were too scared. Concrete boots were no joke with this guy. He was a killer.”
Left unsaid in the committee room on this day is that John Kennedy is also a very good friend of Frank Sinatra and his band of fellow entertainers, nicknamed the Rat Pack. Sinatra and his crew often make jokes about their Mafia connections. In doing so, they turn the Mafia from the hoodlums depicted by Sergeant Croswell in his earlier testimony into glamorous mystery men.
The main event of the second McClellan hearing is Bobby Kennedy against Sam Giancana. The encounter does not go well for the government.
Mr. Kennedy: Would you tell us if you have opposition from anybody that you dispose of them by having them stuffed in a trunk? Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?
Sam Giancana: I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.
Mr. Kennedy: Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?
Sam Giancana: I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer might tend to incriminate me.
Mr. Kennedy: I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.
Sam Giancana will plead the Fifth thirty-four times. The man who privately boasts, “I own Chicago, I own Miami, I own Las Vegas,” admits nothing to Bobby Kennedy.
“The Fifth Amendment is for the innocent as well as the guilty. I can think of very few witnesses who availed themselves of it who in my estimation were free from [wrong]doing,” a weary Kennedy will admit. His frustration grows so great that he often turns off his microphone during hearings so that his words cannot be recorded. However, after yet another gangster pleads the Fifth, Kennedy’s verbiage is picked up loud and clear: “You’re full of shit.”
John F. Kennedy with Frank Sinatra in front of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, circa 1961.
Over the course of the McClellan hearings, Bobby Kennedy has authorized 253 investigations, served eight thousand subpoenas, called 1,526 witnesses, and compiled 150,000 pages of testimony. Public awareness about organized crime is at an all-time high—but by the end of 1959, Americans are growing weary of the exposition. It will now be left to law enforcement to complete the task of prosecuting the Mafia.
And in a strange turn of events, it is Bobby Kennedy—not the Mob—who is depicted as the villain. “No one since Joseph McCarthy has done more than Mr. Kennedy to foster the impression that the plea of self-incrimination is tantamount to a confession of guilt,” one law professor from Yale will write.
In the summer of 1959, Bobby Kennedy resigns from the McClellan Committee. If there is an upbeat moment for the exhausted chief counsel, it is Vito Genovese’s conviction in a New York courtroom on charges of drug trafficking. Prosecutors there succeeded where Kennedy did not, with a jury finding Genovese guilty of conspiring to import and sell narcotics. Never one to forget a grudge, the exiled Lucky Luciano allegedly struck back at Genovese all the way from Italy, arranging for a Puerto Rican drug dealer to implicate Vito Genovese in the sale of narcotics, leading to the fifteen-year sentence. Genovese will continue to run his crime family while serving his time at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, even ordering executions of several of his enemies.
Little else has changed.
The five families still run New York. Sam Giancana and the Outfit have never been more powerful in Chicago. Las Vegas is more firmly than ever in criminal hands.
But in Mob-infested Cuba, there is a new story. In 1959, Communist rebel Fidel Castro seizes control of the corrupt island nation.
On January 1, Castro’s rebel band captures Havana. The Mob-run casinos had long been a source of anger to the Cuban people, for the wealth within their walls contrasted so sharply with their poverty. So one of Castro’s first orders is the destruction of the casinos. Meyer Lansky’s brand-new Riviera Hotel, which the mobster spent millions to construct, is the scene of broken windows, smashed and burned slot machines, and even pigs set free to run loose in the hallways as a symbol of capitalist gluttony. Lansky had sensed that Castro would be successful in controlling Cuba. So on New Year’s Eve, which should have been one of the busiest nights of the year, Lansky made the quick decision to close the Riviera and move all cash on the premises to a safe place. One week later, Meyer Lansky fled Cuba for the safety of the Bahamas, having lost a fortune due to Castro’s revolution.
In July 1959, an FBI team led by agent Bill Roemer sneaks into Celano’s Custom Tailors on Michigan Avenue under cover of darkness. To their relief, the building is unguarded.
Roemer leads the FBI’s organized crime investigation squad here in Chicago. The second-floor office the team soon enters belongs to Jimmy Celano, who makes a substantial portion of his living selling fine suits to members of the Outfit. The room features a large sofa, easy chair, desk, well-stocked bar, and a safe. Roemer has learned that Celano loans out the room to the local Mob each afternoon for private meetings. Agent Roemer hopes to conceal a microphone within the office so that federal investigators can listen in.
The task is not simple. The microphone is the size of a softball and not easily concealed. The agents must also run a wire from the microphone outside the building, then find a way to connect it with their headquarters five miles away on Clark Street. All the while, J. Edgar Hoover has informed Roemer and his team that he will disavow any knowledge of their actions should they engage in gunfire with local Mafioso or be arrested as burglars by the Chicago police.
Working quickly, the agents succeed in concealing the microphone behind a radiator. Connecting the wire is not so simple. The team is forced to return to Celano’s office on six different occasions—always a Sunday morning before dawn—before finally running the wire outside and down the building, then connecting it with the local telephone mainframe.
It is July 29—the birthday of Agent Roemer’s wife, Jeannie—when the bug becomes active. Code-named Little Al, for the Outfit’s connection to Al Capone, the secret microphone is the first wiretap in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The “bug,” as it is known, is illegal, and evidence gained through these transmissions cannot be used as evidence in court.
Yet due to overheard conversations between Sam Giancana and other mobsters in Jimmy Celano’s office, the FBI can finally confirm the names of the top bosses of La Cosa Nostra and the fact that a national organized crime body known as the Commission has been in existence since 1931.
With the planting of a single microphone, the FBI learns more about the Mafia in six weeks than Bobby Kennedy’s McClellan hearings established in three years.2
Back in Washington, Jimmy Hoffa is not much concerned with Fidel Castro. His obsession remains with Robert Kennedy. He secretly meets with likely Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon late in 1959 to offer a Teamster endorsement of his candidacy, knowing this could severely impact John Kennedy’s hopes of winning the presidency in 1960.
Subsequently, the Hoffa-Nixon relationship will be sorely tested as the presidential campaign unfolds.
Meanwhile, the privately reckless JFK will soon do something that will appall his younger brother.
Senator John Kennedy, relentless in his pursuits of women, will involve himself with a young lady named Judith Campbell—who will soon become the mistress of the very dangerous Sam Giancana.