CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JANUARY 20, 1961
WASHINGTON, D.C.
12:51 P.M.
“I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, do solemnly swear…” intones Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren.
The president-elect repeats those words back to the jurist. The two men stand on the east portico of the Capitol Building, watched by a crowd of nearly one million spectators. A severe overnight snowstorm forced the use of flamethrowers to clear the streets, and fourteen hundred cars stranded by the blizzard had to be towed from Pennsylvania Avenue this morning. Now, even at midday, the temperature, adjusted for windchill, is just seven degrees. Yet JFK does not wear an overcoat or hat for his swearing-in, preferring to depict an image of rugged youthfulness. After eight years under America’s eldest president, the seventy-year-old Dwight Eisenhower, the nation has now elected one of its youngest.1 As befitting that youth, both of the forty-three-year-old Kennedy’s parents are in attendance, a first in presidential history.
One mile away, in his office at the Justice Department on Constitution Avenue, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover watches the proceedings on television.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with President John Kennedy as Kennedy arrives to address graduates of the seventh session of the FBI National Academy. Washington, D.C., October 31, 1962.
Hoover is surrounded by several agents and their families. The mood is festive, despite the fact that Hoover’s personal choice in the recent election, Richard Nixon, was not triumphant. J. Edgar Hoover has now been in charge of the bureau in its many guises since 1925, and despite rumors that he may retire because of JFK’s election, Hoover has no plans to step down.
And John F. Kennedy will not remove him. “You don’t fire God,” Kennedy explained to his friends.
On this afternoon, Director Hoover is keeping a secret. He is well aware that vote tampering played a key role in JFK’s election. FBI wiretaps have provided Hoover with that information and a number of other things that will increase his power. For example, Hoover now has a thick file on Kennedy’s extramarital affairs, including detailed accounts of his philandering with Frank Sinatra as well as the new president’s ongoing relationship with Judith Campbell. After analyzing the voluminous material gathered by the FBI during the campaign, Hoover believes Sam Giancana and the Outfit in Chicago were able to falsify some votes in JFK’s favor. But rather than make these explosive allegations public, the director holds them in reserve to be used when it can benefit him most.
The truth is, J. Edgar Hoover does not trust the Kennedy brothers. He is angry with JFK’s decision to anoint his thirty-five-year-old brother attorney general. There is no way J. Edgar Hoover is going to answer to Bobby Kennedy.
The job of attorney general is usually given to someone with vast legal experience. But Robert Kennedy has never tried a case in court or even practiced law. In fact, RFK’s primary credentials are a sibling relationship with America’s new leader and the fact that Bobby successfully helmed JFK’s victorious presidential campaign.
So it is that Robert Francis Kennedy is now J. Edgar Hoover’s boss. Hoover has worked under five presidents and has been granted unrestricted access to the Oval Office. This has allowed him to undercut attorneys general, when necessary, in order to advance his personal agenda. But this will be impossible in the new administration. The two brothers will effectively run the nation as a team, with Hoover “outside the tent, pissing in,” to use an expression used by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson.
Even so, the director is trying to be optimistic about the situation. He recently delivered a five-page letter to the new attorney general, detailing the FBI’s investigations into Communism in America. Hoover believes this to be the greatest threat to the nation and hopes RFK will allow him to widen the scope of these “red” inquiries.
It is apparent that J. Edgar Hoover does not intend to be subservient. Tour guides at the Justice Department have been instructed to advise visitors that Hoover became head of the Bureau of Investigation the same year Bobby Kennedy was born. In addition, an agent is being posted at the door of the Justice Department gymnasium, ready to prevent access to anyone without official FBI identification—including the fitness-obsessed new attorney general.
But, for now, surrounded by friends and cronies as he watches John Kennedy complete his oath of office, J. Edgar Hoover is content. The Kennedy brothers may hold electoral power, but the thick dossier he possesses on JFK’s sex life is power of a far different nature. The documents are insurance that Hoover will remain director of the FBI for as long as he likes.
However, the files are not enough, as Hoover leaves nothing to chance. Anticipating Robert Kennedy’s arrival, the director has placed listening devices throughout the Justice Department. Hoover is so determined to undermine the new attorney general’s authority that he not only bugs RFK’s private elevator but also arranges for the speed of ascent and descent to be slowed so that the secret discussions can be recorded for longer periods of time.
Traps are being set.
Bobby Kennedy does not fear J. Edgar Hoover—nor is Communism his primary interest.
America’s new attorney general is eager to “hit the ground running,” and to RFK that means greater focus on destroying organized crime. His work during the McClellan hearings has exposed the many tendrils of the Mob that permeate American society. In his bestselling 1960 book The Enemy Within, Kennedy writes: “If we do not on a national scale attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us.”
In fact, the Wall Street Journal anticipates “the most sweeping campaign against gangsters, labor racketeers, and vice overlords that the country has ever seen.” In other words, the paper believes Bobby Kennedy will go to war with the Mob.
New Orleans underworld boss Carlos Marcello, scheduled to appear in Federal court after allegedly assaulting Federal Bureau of Investigation agent J. Collins at the New Orleans airport on Friday, October 7, 1966.
And he does. In April 1961, after just three months in office, he authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to hire a team of new agents to investigate the tax returns of known underworld figures.
And that’s just the beginning. In a display of ruthless aggression that demonstrates the extent of Kennedy’s zeal, he authorizes the deportation of Carlos Marcello, the feared head of the New Orleans crime family. Born in Tunisia, the silk suit–wearing Marcello came to America as an infant but, in adulthood, never applied for citizenship. Using this illegal alien status against him, the U.S. Immigration Service handcuffs a surprised fifty-one-year-old Marcello as he tries to renew his resident’s card. The feds then place him on a “black” flight to Guatemala, on which he is the only passenger. For reasons that remain unclear, Marcello had previously obtained a fraudulent Guatemalan birth certificate. This provides American officials legal authority to deport the mobster to that nation.
The United States has been trying for a decade to deport Marcello, but until now no country would take this legendary criminal. But this time is different. The process begins when the Justice Department learns through an informant that Marcello has arranged for a forger to doctor Guatemalan birth records. The Central Intelligence Agency, which has been active in propping up the Guatemalan military regime, receives orders to search for irregularities in the official recording of births in the San José Pinula region. There they find the phony register. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Agency then uses this “evidence” to obtain an official entry permit from the Guatemalan government.
Marcello’s woes do not end with his arrival in Central America. Not wanting him in their country, Guatemalan authorities apprehend the gangster for holding false citizenship papers. He is then driven into neighboring El Salvador under the cover of darkness, where he is released at a military camp. The soldiers quickly place Marcello on a bus to neighboring Honduras. After a lengthy journey through the jungle, chased by local men seeking to rob and perhaps murder him, Marcello finally reaches an airport, where he arranges a military flight to Miami through his good friend Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. From Miami, the gangster takes a commercial flight to New Orleans, where he is promptly rearrested for illegally entering the United States and also served with an $835,000 tax lien. But Carlos Marcello is allowed to remain in the United States as his lawyers fight the charges. All the while, Marcello seethes and plots against the Kennedy brothers, swearing he will get his revenge.
Bobby Kennedy is livid that Marcello is back in America, but as the New Orleans courts debate the mobster’s future, the attorney general has other things to do. Kennedy sends a team of fifty lawyers to Chicago as a special prosecution unit against the Outfit. In June, the Justice Department hands down thirteen gambling indictments. In July, RFK is successful in getting four anti-crime bills passed, which stiffen penalties against racketeering and illicit wagering. The attorney general is present in the Oval Office when his older brother signs the Interstate Wire Act of 1961 (also called the Federal Wire Act), allowing the feds to secretly monitor gambling activity. All of this, of course, is cutting into the Mob’s profits.
Behind the scenes, Bobby Kennedy’s hopes of establishing a national crime commission are opposed by J. Edgar Hoover. So Kennedy authorizes the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section to gather information on known Mob activities, bypassing the FBI. Data collected by twenty-seven government agencies is now controlled by Kennedy.
The results are almost immediate: in 1961 alone, prosecution of underworld figures nets eleven major convictions, including that of longtime Los Angeles boss Mickey Cohen. In addition, the Justice Department breaks up an international heroin smuggling ring known as the French Connection, winning eleven convictions in the process.2 Impressed by this success, Congress doubles the Justice Department’s budget for fighting organized crime.
J. Edgar Hoover does not like any of this and is especially offended when RFK visits the FBI field office in Chicago. The visit takes place in October 1961. Agents ask if the attorney general is interested in hearing wiretaps of local Mafiosi discussing a recent crime. Kennedy eagerly agrees.
On the tapes, the murder of a 350-pound Mob “Juice Man”—slang for debt collector—is discussed in detail by the men who did the killing. William “Action” Jackson is no saint. In the course of his work, he is fond of breaking into the homes of men who fall behind on their debts, then raping their wives as a reminder to pay up. He is arrested in the summer of 1961 while attempting to unload stolen electrical appliances in a warehouse. His five accomplices all manage to flee, but Jackson is too heavy to run. While in custody, the debt collector is asked to become a federal informant. As a lifelong member of the Outfit, Jackson refuses.
But the Juice Man’s story is not believed by his fellow mobsters, who in their paranoia think he’s an informer. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy listens to the killers brutally describe how Jackson is kidnapped and taken to a Chicago meat plant. The giant man is stripped. His hands and feet are bound with rope. A meat hook is inserted into his rectum. His kneecaps are broken with a baseball bat. Then his ribs. A sharp object is shoved into one ear, poking a hole in the drum. An electrical cattle prod is then shoved into his genitals.
Jackson still refuses to confess to being an informer. So his brutalizers use a blowtorch to incinerate his penis. Only then is he taken off the meat hook. The murderers leave the big man bound to bleed to death—a passing that does not take place for three long days.
In all his years of congressional hearings, Bobby Kennedy has never heard such depravity. He knows of murders and corruption, but this barbarity is too difficult for him to immediately process. The FBI agents will report to J. Edgar Hoover that a shocked Kennedy flushes with rage before he abruptly leaves their office.
As RFK flies back to Washington to continue his crusade against organized crime, he is well aware that the Outfit can murder almost anyone—at any time they choose.
Even Robert Francis Kennedy.
If 1961 is triumphant for Bobby Kennedy, the same cannot be said of 1962.
It is on December 11, 1961, that the success of the attorney general’s first year begins crashing down. J. Edgar Hoover writes a succinct memo to his boss, revealing the contents of a Sam Giancana wiretap. The mobster is overheard lamenting that his efforts to get John Kennedy elected have not resulted in less pressure on the Outfit. Nor has there been any significant attempt to get rid of Fidel Castro and return the Mafia to control of the Havana casinos.
In fact, because of Bobby Kennedy, the scrutiny of Mob crimes has intensified. Giancana then boasts that he will find a way to use his relationship with patriarch Joseph Kennedy to keep the Justice Department at bay, admitting on tape that he secretly—and illegally—funneled a large donation to the Kennedy campaign through the father to help JFK win the West Virginia primary. Frank Sinatra is one of the go-betweens delivering the cash.3
For the first time, the director of the FBI now has evidence that there is a connection between the Kennedy family and organized crime—at least in allegation form.
This is big. Sam Giancana’s criminal empire now dwarfs that of all New York’s five families combined. His enduring relationship with Johnny Roselli continues Giancana’s control of Las Vegas and Hollywood. Both Kennedy brothers would be disgraced and forced out of office if the American public knew that the most powerful crime boss in the country had influence over them.
Thus, J. Edgar Hoover’s memo to Bobby Kennedy is a cryptic threat that he could use the Giancana tap to bring down the Kennedys, should that become necessary. Hoover writes in the memo: “[Giancana] made a donation to the campaign of President Kennedy but was not getting his money’s worth.”4
This is the first time that Bobby Kennedy learns about any association between his father and Sam Giancana. Prior to this, the attorney general believed that Joseph Kennedy wanted him to avoid organized crime controversies in order to court the labor vote. Knowing that his father may be more involved with organized crime is deeply disturbing to RFK.
What happens next is unclear. Bobby and his father often have heated discussions about sensitive matters, such as their blowout over the McClellan hearings three years ago. So it is more than likely that after being briefed by Hoover, the new attorney general brings the Giancana issue to his father.
Joseph Kennedy is vacationing at the family compound in Palm Beach and Bobby is in Washington, so the discussion, if it happened, is by telephone.
On December 18, just one week after Hoover’s memo is sent to Bobby Kennedy, a severe stroke immobilizes the seventy-three year-old patriarch. Paralyzed on the right side of his body and afflicted with aphasia, the elder Kennedy will never speak again. A stroke is brought on by soaring blood pressure and ensuing blood vessel ruptures that cause a stoppage of blood flow to the brain. Whatever brought all that on, in Joseph Kennedy’s case, will never be known.
What is known is that the patriarch no longer possesses the ability to dictate family strategy, leaving John and Robert Kennedy to chart their own paths for the first time in their lives.
Yet Joseph Kennedy is not dead—nor is the connection with organized crime that J. Edgar Hoover has in his possession.
On February 27, 1962, the director sends another memo to Bobby Kennedy, this time referencing the seventy calls made to the White House by one Judith Campbell. Gleefully, Hoover tells the attorney general that this twenty-seven-year-old beauty is a known companion of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. The FBI has long tapped the phone lines in Roselli’s Los Angeles apartment, where Campbell often stays when the gangster is out of town. The tap provides Hoover with transcripts of all conversations made from that apartment to the White House.
Bobby Kennedy knows he and his brother are in dangerous territory. Not only does the director of the FBI know that JFK is cheating on his wife, but he also knows that Sam Giancana says he helped get the president elected. Emboldened, Hoover places a call to an associate of Walter Winchell, the legendary gossip columnist. He feeds an anonymous item about Judith Campbell as “topic number one in romantic political circles.”
The Kennedy brothers get the message.
Under normal circumstances, a connection between a high-ranking individual and organized crime would warrant a criminal investigation. Instead, J. Edgar Hoover practices a form of blackmail. He places these nuggets of information in the personal file of John F. Kennedy. The director is sixty-six now, a year past suggested retirement age for civil servants. But the bureau is his life’s work and he has no intention of retiring. With these explosive files, Hoover believes he doesn’t have anything to worry about.
And while John Kennedy can be flippant about his private indiscretions, often acting as if they have no bearing on his presidency, he now takes immediate action to address Hoover’s memos. Two years after his first association with Judith Campbell, the president instructs his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, that he will no longer take Campbell’s phone calls.
Judith Campbell is out.5
So is Frank Sinatra.
The entertainer who arranged for both John Kennedy and Sam Giancana to share Judith Campbell claims to be one of the president’s best friends. Yet his allegiance to the Mob runs far deeper. In an attempt to gain even more influence with the Kennedys, the singer is now having an affair with Patricia Lawford—JFK’s sister and wife of fellow Rat Pack member Peter Lawford.
Sinatra still reveres Kennedy but is now in dangerous waters. The singer is insisting that JFK stay at his palatial Palm Springs home in the Tamarisk Country Club, with its orange furnishings, movie theater, and enormous swimming pool. In anticipation of the president’s arrival, Sinatra has even installed a new helipad, cottages for the Secret Service, and a telephone switchboard featuring twenty-five lines—fit for the most powerful man on earth.
But J. Edgar Hoover once again inserts himself into the situation, this time by playing Bobby Kennedy wiretaps of a conversation between Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra. The mobster is clearly disappointed with the singer, who promised to influence the Kennedy family to obtain more lenient treatment of organized crime. Giancana believes Sinatra has lied to him about his discussions with Bobby Kennedy and is actually considering a Mob-style murder as revenge.
“Don’t worry about it. If I can’t talk to the old man, I’m going to talk to the man,” Sinatra tells Giancana about Bobby Kennedy’s relentless attacks on the Mafia, making reference to Joseph Kennedy and then JFK. In fact, before the patriarch’s stroke, Frank Sinatra had met with him on three separate occasions to suggest that the president and attorney general back off from the Mob.6
But Sinatra’s efforts really didn’t matter. Only results would do. FBI wiretaps reveal that Giancana is deeply conflicted about having Sinatra murdered. If it was any other individual, the hit would be made immediately. But the Mafioso is so enchanted by Sinatra’s singing voice that he cannot imagine a world without it. “I’m fucking Phyllis [McGuire], playing Sinatra songs in the background, and the whole time I’m thinking to myself, ‘Christ, how can I silence that voice?’” Giancana admits to a fellow mobster.
So Frank Sinatra continues doing everything he can to please Sam Giancana. One FBI wiretap overhears the singer speaking in vulgar language as he displays his fealty toward the mobster, making it clear that Giancana is the friend he wishes to please most—even more than the president. Sinatra insists that he is taking extreme measures to obtain greater influence with the Kennedy brothers and their war on organized crime.
In addition, Sinatra tells Giancana about his affair with Patricia Kennedy Lawford and vows to “sleep with this goddam bitch until I get something going.”
The FBI tape is shocking. When informed of it by his brother, President Kennedy immediately cuts off Sinatra. He asks Peter Lawford to phone the singer and inform him that he will not be staying at his house in Palm Springs. Instead, he will spend the night at Bing Crosby’s Silver Spur Ranch, where actress Marilyn Monroe will be present.7
Upon hearing the bad news, a furious Sinatra steps outside his home, sledgehammer in hand. He then personally begins reducing the helipad to rubble, blow by blow.
John and Robert Kennedy know that J. Edgar Hoover can destroy them. But there is little they can do other than avoid Campbell, Giancana, and Sinatra.
Try as they might, the Kennedy brothers cannot definitively break the link to organized crime. And in the summer of 1962, the Mob connection becomes ever more outrageous. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy is quietly informed by officials of the Central Intelligence Agency that the government has enlisted the aid of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
The plan was not originally hatched during the Kennedy administration. President Dwight Eisenhower had advocated a Mafia hit on Castro years before. President Kennedy was told of the mission and gave his approval upon taking office. Bobby Kennedy is also aware of the plot and backs it enthusiastically. The Mob is the perfect group to manage such a killing, which would allow the Kennedy administration to disavow any participation.
Sam Giancana’s Outfit is so eager to see Fidel Castro dead that Johnny Roselli and Giancana initially turn down the CIA’s offer of $150,000 to perform the hit. The gangsters want to do it for free. They despise Castro that much.8
Initially, the CIA preferred a gangland murder utilizing gunfire, but no mobster would take the job on because the chances of escape are nonexistent. Instead, the Mob decides to use poison, based on the knowledge that Fidel Castro frequently drinks tea, coffee, and bullion.
“The operation had two phases,” the official CIA report will document, “the first ran from August 1960 until late April or early May 1961, when it was called off following the Bay of Pigs.”9
But that bungled CIA operation did not stop the plot against Castro.
Instead, it was a monumental blunder taking place in a Las Vegas hotel room.
It all begins when Sam Giancana suspects that his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, is having an affair with comedian Dan Rowan. Giancana asks former FBI agent Robert Maheu, who now works as the Mob’s liaison with the CIA, to place a wiretap in Rowan’s Las Vegas hotel room to confirm whether or not the affair is taking place.
Hoping to keep the mobster happy, the forty-four-year-old Maheu agrees. In the name of discretion, he does not do the job himself but arranges for a private investigator named Arthur Balletti to plant the bug.
Dan Rowan is staying at the Riviera Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Balletti successfully places the device and then spends the next week eavesdropping. But as he takes a lunch break one afternoon, Balletti forgets to hang the Do Not Disturb sign. A hotel maid, entering to clean Balletti’s room, grows suspicious when she sees a suitcase full of transmitters, wiring, receivers, and other listening devices. Notes detailing Rowan’s conversations are also left in the open. The Las Vegas Sheriff’s Department is notified, and Balletti is arrested. The next morning, Rowan requests that all charges be dropped. It is assumed he was coerced.10
But J. Edgar Hoover is now on the case. Seeking advantage, he asks to have Balletti prosecuted in open court for the federal offense of wiretapping. He believes there is evidence to implicate Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli—perhaps tying them to the Kennedy brothers.
The CIA steps in, protesting that Balletti’s behavior is a matter of national security. Simultaneously, the murder plan against Castro is quietly shut down.
But the CIA will not stop. In May 1962, the agency revives the assassination scheme. Director Hoover is still trying to prosecute Balletti, leading to tense negotiations among the CIA, FBI, and the Justice Department. On May 7, Bobby Kennedy is briefed about the situation.
“If you could have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness,” CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston will remember.
The attorney general’s dismay has little to do with the wiretap. He does not want Sam Giancana exposed in the Castro situation because he knows the mobster could implicate the Kennedys in all kinds of things.
“I trust that if you will ever try to do business with organized crime, with gangsters, you will tell the attorney general,” Bobby Kennedy orders the federal agents who have come to brief him on the Las Vegas matter.
RFK quickly covers his tracks by drafting a memo stating that the Justice Department must no longer participate in any CIA activities.
Two days later, Kennedy meets with Director Hoover to express his “astonishment” about the CIA aligning with the Mob.
But the damage is done.
And there is more to come.
Sam Giancana has another plan.
The Mob boss remains angry that his secret payoff to get JFK elected has done nothing to ease pressure on the Mob. Giancana is also still of the belief that sleeping with a man’s lover gives him personal power over that individual. Giancana now sets his sights on bedding another Kennedy consort—thirty-five-year-old actress Marilyn Monroe. Frank Sinatra has assured Giancana that the president is sleeping with the troubled Hollywood star.
On May 19, 1962, at a gala Madison Square Garden celebration, Marilyn Monroe publicly—and somewhat scandalously—serenades John Kennedy with a breathy version of “Happy Birthday.” The actress is just months removed from divorcing playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband. Dressed in a backless sequined dress so skintight that she had to be hoisted into it, and wearing absolutely nothing beneath the gown, Monroe’s slinky performance is a very public signal of her desire for the president.
The display reaffirms Monroe’s sex symbol status at a time when age and her personal addictions are slowing a once-promising career. She has, in fact, risked her livelihood to be in New York City. Monroe abruptly took time away from filming the movie Something’s Got to Give! to fly from Hollywood, much to the consternation of its producers.
Famously self-destructive, fond of mixing alcohol with pills, Marilyn Monroe returns home to Hollywood and begins a steady downward spiral that lasts well into July. She will be fired from the motion picture upon her return and sued for damages. Marilyn will never again make another film.
To some, this sad decline engenders sympathy. But to Sam Giancana, it presents opportunity. Making the actress even more desirable to the mobster is innuendo that Bobby Kennedy has become an ardent admirer.11
So four months after the Palm Springs falling-out between JFK and Sinatra, Sam Giancana sets a trap.
Among the mobster’s personal land holdings is a resort on the state line dividing California and Nevada. Appropriately, the casino is named Cal-Neva. But Giancana’s name is not listed on the deed. Instead, it is Frank Sinatra who publicly owns this gambling den on the shore of Lake Tahoe. In addition to having an affair with Patricia Kennedy Lawford, the singer has ended his relationship with her Rat Pack husband, Peter, over the Palm Springs–JFK fiasco. And yet, for reasons unexplained, Sinatra now thaws that relationship and invites the Lawford couple to spend a few summer days at Cal-Neva.
Patricia Lawford knows that Marilyn Monroe has been quietly informed to stay away from the Kennedys by Bobby and other top insiders. She refuses. The president no longer takes her phone calls, but the actress still has limited access to RFK. Monroe is upset about JFK ending the affair and there are fears she will damage the 1964 reelection campaign by speaking to the press. Patricia Lawford hopes to calm Marilyn down. So now, at the behest of Frank Sinatra, she invites the actress to join her at Cal-Neva.
Marilyn Monroe had stayed there a year ago, while filming The Misfits with Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable in the nearby Nevada desert. The film would be the last for the legendary Gable, who died soon afterward. Monroe herself flirted with death during the production—her dependence upon barbiturates so strong that filming was stopped for a week so she might detox.
The actress’s return to Cal-Neva is anything but restful. “I was there in ’62,” Las Vegas boss and partner of Meyer Lansky, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, will recall. “Peter and Frank were there with Monroe. They kept her drugged every night. It was disgusting.”
Eyewitnesses will state that a photographer recorded much of the activity, with Monroe so completely under the influence of narcotics that she appears to be passed out. They will also describe the actress leaning over a toilet, covered with vomit, as Sam Giancana kneels behind her, grinning for the camera.
FBI agent William Roemer of the Chicago office will later listen to wiretap recordings of Giancana and Roselli discussing the goings-on in Bungalow 52. “There, I had put together, she engaged in an orgy. From the conversation I overheard, it appeared she may have had sex with both Sinatra and Giancana on the same trip,” Roemer will conclude.
Confirming that Sam Giancana had his way with Monroe, then bragged about it, FBI wiretaps will record Johnny Roselli’s incredulous response to Giancana’s relentless boasting “You sure get your rocks off fucking the same broads as the brothers, don’t you?”
One week later, Marilyn Monroe ingests a lethal overdose of chloral hydrate and pentobarbital in the bedroom of her Los Angeles home. The barbiturates slow her heart and lungs until they stop altogether. By 10:30 p.m. on August 4, 1962, Marilyn Monroe is dead.
Sam Giancana seems to have gotten away with yet another atrocity.
But his luck is all about to change.