The House of Kennedy(23)
In Jack’s ear is the voice of his friend Ben Bradlee, then reporting for Newsweek, “Do you really think—way down deep—that you can pull this thing off?”
“If I don’t make a single mistake, yes,” he answers.
Chapter 15
A man in a well-tailored suit struts into the darkened Chicago courtroom. The sound of his heavy footfalls echoes off the stone floor as he passes the jury box and witness stand. Both are empty. But Judge William Tuohy’s chambers are not.
The chief judge of Cook County Civil Court rises from his desk at the sight of the man whose face is obscured by a fedora and dark classes, taking the man’s entrance as his cue for departure.
Joe Kennedy, already seated in chambers when the man arrives, won’t be leaving. This is his meeting, and he’s guaranteed, through the mob lawyer Robert McDonnell, that the discussion will be “very, very private.”
Today’s meeting is between himself and a crime boss known by many names. “Mooney,” “Momo,” “Sam the Cigar,” and “Sam Flood,” are all aliases—the FBI would identify up to nineteen—for Salvatore Giancana, whose name appears in the Nevada Gambling Commission’s “Black Book” of top offenders, and who took control of the Chicago “outfit” in 1957.
There’s no safer place from the ears of the FBI than a judge’s chambers.
And no more dangerous person to proposition than Al Capone’s onetime “trigger man.” A Selective Service psychological evaluation had identified Giancana as a “constitutional psychopath with an inadequate personality.”
Double-crossing the Sicilian American is a certain death sentence, even for a businessman as powerful as Joe Kennedy. Joe’s got big assets in Chicago—in 1945, he bought the Merchandise Mart for just under thirteen million dollars. Under the management of Eunice’s future husband, Sargent Shriver, the original Marshall Field building was transformed into the world’s largest office building. Now, as the 1960 presidential election gets under way, the facility is valued at more than one hundred and fifty million dollars. But even Joe doesn’t have the clout Giancana does.
“I own Chicago. I own Miami. I own Las Vegas,” Giancana states to an FBI agent. Senator Jack Kennedy’s efforts to break this hold have made him the chamber’s second-ranked Democrat on Labor. He’s joined the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor Management Field, or Rackets Committee, supported by the group’s chief legal counsel—Jack’s younger brother Bobby.
In June 1959, Giancana and thirty-four-year-old Bobby Kennedy have a headline-making confrontation when Giancana is called to testify before the committee. Although Giancana has taken the Fifth Amendment, a legal protection against self-incrimination, Bobby reels off antagonistic questions for the record.
Since then, Giancana has been quietly building relationships with politicians and law enforcement and is well aware that an alliance with the next potential occupant of the Oval Office might protect his “outfit” from federal investigations.
Joe wants to capitalize on Giancana’s power over Illinois unions, whose votes in Cook County he believes are key to Jack besting the Republican presidential front-runner, Vice President Richard Nixon, in this winner-take-all state in the Electoral College.
McDonnell, who waits with Judge Tuohy in the jury box during Joe and Giancana’s meeting, later reveals to the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh how the handshake deal was executed. “There was no ballot stuffing…They just worked—totally went all out. He [Kennedy] won it squarely, but he got the vote because of what [Giancana] had done.”
The mobster shifts easily between the hard-driving urban labor contingent and the glitzy denizens of the Las Vegas strip, where from the shadows he controls such top-name casinos as the Sands and the Riviera. Giancana “had the most perfectly manicured hands and nails I had ever seen,” observes George Jacobs, who worked as Frank Sinatra’s valet.
Giancana’s close pals with Sinatra, the biggest headliner on the strip. Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, is the leader of the Rat Pack, a rotating cast of singers and actors that at that time included Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop. The British actor Peter Lawford is a recent addition, broadly dismissed as “the least talented member of the Rat Pack,” but the FBI has a theory about Lawford’s inclusion. Peter Lawford is married to a Kennedy sister: Patricia. Pat and Peter’s 1954 wedding had been a huge social event, attracting more than three thousand spectators outside St. Thomas More Cathedral in New York City. Rumors would also later surface of an affair between Pat and Sinatra.
But Sinatra is interested in a different Kennedy—Jack—and only Lawford can help him connect. “A well-known movie actor has been cultivated by Sinatra and they are now apparently close associates,” a New Orleans special agent for the FBI reports to Director J. Edgar Hoover in March 1960, the month before the Illinois primary.
“There was a joke at the time that ended up having a lot of truth to it,” cultural historian Steven Watts writes, “that in a way, Kennedy wanted to be Sinatra and Sinatra wanted to be Kennedy.” Judith Campbell Exner, a dark-haired Californian whose beauty “was in the Elizabeth Taylor category,” according to a Hollywood reporter, saw it happen firsthand. “They seemed to have a genuine mutual admiration society; Frank was in awe of Jack’s background and his power as [future] President and Jack was mesmerized by Sinatra’s swinging lifestyle.”