SCHEMERS IN THE WEB

With the advent of high technology for the acquisition and communication of knowledge, one might expect the work of the historian to become simpler. Writing history could be a task of summerizing journalism. With major events under the mass media magnifying glass, little could seemingly escape journalistic scrutiny.

But the ironic truth seems to be that much of modern history is little more than a series of unanswered questions. After nearly two years of journalistic and congressional obsession with Watergate, conclusive evidence finally came to light that President Nixon had engineered a cover-up of the break-in. But then Nixon resigned and was pardoned before a truly effective investigation could be conducted. Journalists, naturally, turned their attention to newer fast-breaking stories, leaving others to puzzle over what really happened.

The assassination of President Kennedy has been called "the crime of the century." It was investigated almost entirely by the FBI and the Warren Commission -- both of which brought ulterior motives to bear on their task. The results of those investigations left nearly everyone feeling very suspicious.

The public is thus subjected to a sequence of mysterious news events. The follow-up to each such mystery is the presentation of a new mystery rather than a solution. Jimmy Hoffa, a man who was one of the most powerful union leaders of the century, disappeared without a trace. Marilyn Monroe, whose name was synonymous with sex, died in a peculiar "suicide" which was covered-up rather than investigated. Howard Hughes, one of the wealthiest men of recent times, was not seen in public for over a decade -- and the corpse of his once six-foot four-inch frame weighed less than a hundred pounds. The powerful Senator Edward Kennedy was implicated in the death of a young woman under highly suspicious circumstances, yet a full and open investigation was not conducted out of respect for his "privacy".

The United States fought the longest war of its history in Vietnam. But few have a very clear idea of how or why it started. It took years before people were certain that it even was a war. More years followed of widely publicized directionless fighting and controversy. Then the war ended, almost as mysteriously as it had begun.

And behind the scenes of these public events there exist powerful and secretive forces. The most obvious of these are the CIA and the Mafia. The romantic images conjured up by these organizations more often produce sensationalism and speculation than sound historical analysis. Conspiracy theories abound, often giddying in their scope.

There have been conspiracies, to be sure, but many small ones -- not a single grandiose one. And apart from explicit conspiracy, the linkage and underlying relatedness of seemingly disparate events is phenomenal. In fact, the subject matter of this book is chosen on the basis of underlying relations. The book is written sequentially in such a way that each chapter can provide background for the ones that follow. The unsuspecting reader might imagine that the subjects are so unrelated that they can be read entirely independently and out of sequence. Such a reading plan will lose the underlying developmental threads and context. And yet each chapter is presented in such a way as to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject area, and material of intrinsic interest. (Unfortunately, the first chapter, with its "blizzard" of Italian names, is probably the most difficult chapter to follow. But the nature of the Mafia is that of an association of many persons, most of whom had a powerful but short-lived influence. Subsequent chapters will quickly demonstrate the importance of beginning with the Mafia.)

Much of the fascination of the subjects dealt with lies in the unexpected connections -- the intrigue and the surprises discovered. Yet few people could be motivated to read a book on the basis of vague promises. For that reason, it seems necessary to provide a general structure of the underlying themes covered here.

One could begin by asking, "What were the Watergate burglars after when they broke into the offices of Lawrence O'Brien, chairman of the National Democratic Committee?" A very likely explanation is that they were after information about Howard Hughes. For years Richard Nixon had been the object of scandal concerning a weakly secured "loan" from Hughes. O'Brien was receiving a large retainer from Hughes without many people knowing what services were being rendered. Nixon was very eager to turn the tables on the Democrats concerning politically embarrassing Hughes money. Moreover, there was, at the time, a power struggle going on within the Hughes empire. E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA Bay of Pigs veteran who engineered the break-in, was working out of the offices of a Mormon faction of the struggle -- while O'Brien's allies were on the other side, some of whom included well-known mafiosi.

Nixon's means of attempting to cover-up the Watergate break-in was by putting pressure on the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation. The means of pressure he sought to apply is not clear. But he made reference to the danger of the investigation re-opening the "Bay of Pigs thing," possibly exposing the then secret efforts the CIA had made to have the Mafia assassinate Fidel Castro. This was a highly sensitive area because many CIA officials feared that their attempts against Castro's life may have provoked the Cuban dictator to retaliate with the assassination of President Kennedy, as Castro had vaguely threatened in a public statement. It is no secret that Lee Harvey Oswald was a pro-Castro activist. To add to the irony, the man who formed the liason between the CIA and the Mafia in the assassination attempts against Castro later became chief executive of the Hughes empire. And one of the leading mafiosi involved in the CIA's assassination plan was apparently benefitting from the sexual favors of a woman who was simultaneously having an extramarital affair with President Kennedy. When an investigation of the Kennedy Assassination was reopened by Congress in the late seventies, the chief counsel of the House Assassination Committee concluded that the Mafia had killed the President. Few people doubt that the Mafia was behind the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.

Tradition dates the origin of the Mafia to several centuries ago when Sicily was occupied by the French. The death of a young Sicilian bride-to-be due to an assault by a drunken French soldier sparked a massive uprising throughout Sicily. An underground resistance movement in the form of a secret society came into being in the aftermath of this uprising. The society took its name from the slogan of the enraged Sicilians: "Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela!" (Death to the French is Italy's Cry!) or M.A.F.I.A.

The fundamental unit of the Mafia is the "family", a word more reminiscent of the loyalty given to blood-ties than the word "gang". In Sicily a father and son could not belong to the same Mafia "family" (although brothers could), but some "families" of American mafiosi no longer recognize this rule. The family was regarded as the only source of protection and morality. Devotion to the head of the family often exceeded that given to God or the State, and revenge was regarded as a family duty.

In the initiation ritual -- common to the Sicilian and American Mafia -- the initiate's middle finger would be pierced by a needle. Blood was drawn to soak a small paper image of a saint. The image would be burned after which the initiate would swear his loyalty holding the ashes in the palm of his hand. The oath of secrecy prohibits mafiosi from divulging Mafia activities to non-mafiosi.

Another secret society, the Camorra, achieved success in Naples. When the French left Italy, the Camorra continued to rob, but divided its loot with the clergy and the police. The Mafia, however, remained a government and a religion of its own, supported by tribute extorted from the people.

During the 19th and early 20th century more than a million Sicilians immigrated to the United States. The first known occurrence of warfare among Italian secret societies on American soil was in 1890, in New Orleans. After some mafiosi had set up a protection racket involving all cargo loaded or unloaded on the docks, the Neopolitan Camorra tried to muscle-in. Several murders were taking place every week. When the Irish police chief sought to investigate, he was shot to death.

The first grand jury investigation met a wall of silence from potential witnesses. The jury could only conclude that there was a conspiracy of silence and that the existence of "the Mafia has been established beyond doubt". Civic outrage and new pressures finally produced witnesses.

The subsequent trial followed a pattern which later became a familiar part of the American scene. The defendents hired some of America's top lawyers (including the former attorney general of Louisiana). At least half the jury was bribed or intimidated. As a result, judgement was suspended on three defendents and the rest were declared innocent.

A mass meeting was called by prominent citizens, with approval from the mayor and the city's two leading newspapers. Verbal outrage gave way to action when a number of people decided to march to the jail. An angry crowd milled outside the jailhouse until a giant black man hurled a boulder against the wooden door, smashing it to splinters. Two of the prisoners were lynched in the midst of several thousand people. Nine others were lined against a wall and shot to death.

In New York City, the turn-of-the-century saw the flourishing of Mafia extortionists who called themselves the "Black Hand". Their victims were mostly prosperous and hard-working Italians who understood Mafia methods. A stenciled black hand on a building or fence was a potent warning.

Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, a native of Italy and a detective of the New York Police Department, made the Black Hand his specialty. At his direction, the Italian Squad of the Police Department was created to support his work. Using several disguises, Petrosino was able to mingle with the Italian community and make seven hundred arrests in one year. He identified the boss of the Camorra and deported the man. He also identified a man called "Lupo the Wolf" as chief Mafia boss, but was unable to bring him to court.

Petrosino decided to make a trip to Italy where he could learn more of the Mafia's background and make arrangements for cooperation with Italian police. The New York City government was unwilling to finance this project, but private funds were raised. In Sicily, Petrosino was shot dead on a street. Sicily's Mafia chief boasted personal responsibility for the killing. The Italian Squad was eliminated by the New York Police Department on the grounds that it represented ethnic discrimination.

The most powerful gangsters in New York in 1920 were Jewish. One young pair of Jewish hoods who were destined to make names for themselves were Meyer Lansky and Ben "Bugsy" Siegel. Lansky was a skilled mechanic who could remove all identifying marks from a stolen car, changing its appearance so drastically that the owner wouldn't recognize it. "Bugsy" Siegel, who had gotten his name from the recklessness with which he would enter violent situations, cultivated the skills of auto theft. They expanded their business by contracting to haul bootleg booze, to protect bootleggers from hijackers and to hijack the shipments of rivals. Eventually the Bug & Meyer Mob became respected as trustworthy experts in controlled violence. By the late 1920s Lansky and Siegel were the country's top enforcers. One of their best customers was the Jewish Lepke Buchalter, a murderous extortionist in the garment industry.

Lansky, being more of a businessman than Siegel, was inclined to use persuasion rather than violence to encourage cooperation. He developed business contacts with the Jewish Cleveland Syndicate -- including Moe Dalitz -- which dominated the smuggling of booze from Canada over Lake Erie. He also worked well with the Italians Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano.

With the advent of Prohibition, there had been a huge boom in underworld activity. Gangsters who provided liquor to the American public were glorified. In New York City, the large influx of Italian immigrants created conditions in which both Jewish and Irish gangsters were forced to yield to the more numerous Italians.

After the 1920 imprisonment of "Lupo the Wolf" for counterfeiting, no supreme Mafia boss would emerge in New York City until the 1930s. A number of "Mustache Petes", steeped in traditionalism and Sicilian clannishness, vied for power. Chief among these were Joe "The Boss" Masseria (noted for ruthlessness and gluttonous obesity) and Salvatore Maranzano (an urbane gentleman who would spend hours studying Latin texts on the military exploits of Julius Caeser).

A younger and less powerful Sicilian mobster was Charles "Lucky" Luciano, a man of exceptional organizational ability. Although a knife wound had given his right eye a sinister droop, he dressed as well as any respectable businessman. Unlike the older "Mustache Petes", Luciano did not claim ethnic superiority to gangsters of non-Sicilian backgrounds. Among his closest friends were the Neopolitans Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis; the Calabrian Frank Costello; and the Jews Lepke Buchalter, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Luciano allied himself with Masseria, assuming responsibility for running a large part of Masseria's organization while maintaining his own operations on the side. When the most powerful Jewish gangster in New York City was shot by an unknown assassin in 1928, Luciano and Lepke assumed control of his narcotics business.

A working relationship began to develop among those younger members of the underworld who were more interested in business cooperation than in petty ethnic pride and vengeful mutual recriminations. This community of mobsters, who began referring to themselves as "the Combination", were primarily concerned with the business of booze: shipping, smuggling, production, distribution, protection and sale. From May 13 to 16, 1929, Mafia and non-Mafia members of the Combination met in Atlantic City to clarify problems of distribution, territoriality and competition in the roaring Prohibition liquor business. In attendence were Al Capone, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Lepke Buchalter and Moe Dalitz, among others.

But the older, powerful gangsters continued their violent ways oblivious to the Combination. Dutch Schulz used brutal methods to seize control of the numbers racket from blacks in Harlem. Schultz brought thirty Harlem independents into a single combine under his control.

By 1930 an out-and-out war had erupted between the most powerful Mafia chieftains: Masseria and Maranzano, representing Sicilians from eastern and western regions of Sicily, respectively. Under Masseria was his underboss, Lucky Luciano, as well as Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, Carlo Gambino and Willie Moretti. With Maranzano were Joe Profaci, and Joseph Bonnano. Luciano reached a secret agreement with Maranzano to end the war by killing Masseria.

Luciano invited his boss Masseria to share a bounteous and succulent afternoon meal at a Coney Island restaurant. Masseria regarded Luciano like a son so he didn't bother to bring his bodyguards. After the meal they began playing cards. At one point Luciano made a trip to the washroom. Several gunmen -- reputedly Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis -- entered the restaurant and blasted the life out of Masseria. When Luciano returned, he found Masseria clutching an Ace of Diamonds (which thereafter became a Mafia symbol of death).

Maranzano, now the supreme power of the New York underworld, decided to divide New York City into five "families". The divisions he made have lasted over fifty years. According to the informer Joseph Valachi, the five original bosses were Charles Luciano, Tom Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, Joseph Bonnano and Vincent Mangano. Vito Genovese was the underboss of the Luciano family and Albert Anastasia the underboss of the Mangano family. (Valachi is apparently wrong on at least one point -- Joseph Adonis ruled Brooklyn for many years before Mangano assumed power.) Maranzano had himself crowned "Boss of Bosses" in an elaborate ceremony. Among Maranzano's "palace guard" was the young Joseph Valachi.

But Maranzano was probably concerned about the growing solidarity among the young Combination members. Valachi claims Maranzano gave him a list of sixty people to be eliminated, including Al Capone, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis and Dutch Schultz. But Luciano was way ahead of Maranzano.

On September 10, 1931 a number of Jewish men claiming to be either city detectives or federal agents entered Maranzano's headquarters with drawn pistols. They were actually members of the Bug and Meyer Mob. Maranzano, showing his willingness to cooperate with law enforcement officials, led the men into his office where they shot and stabbed him to death. During the next twenty-four hours some forty of the old "Mustache Petes" across the continent were executed in a ruthlessly efficient purge directed by Luciano that became known as "The Night of the Sicilian Vespers".

The passing of the old mafiosi resulted in the triumph of the Combination as the dominant underworld force. Although Luciano became widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent mobster, he disclaimed the title "Boss of Bosses". In the Spring of 1934 this victory was formalized by a conference which established a new "National Crime Syndicate". The United States was formally divided into spheres of influence for 24 families. Larger cities were divided along industry lines giving specific bosses authority for gambling, prostitution, labor racketeering, etc. Miami was declared an "open city" where anyone could operate. A presiding ruling commission was formed from 9 of the 24 bosses. It was agreed that all executions were to be approved by the ruling commission and carried out by a crack team of killers.

Thus there began an assassination squad which a journalist dubbed "Murder, Inc.". It was organized by Joe Adonis and led by Albert Anastasia. At 19 years of age, Anastasia had been in the Sing Sing death house for the slaying of a longshoreman. But when three witnesses died and the fourth (Anastasia's former girl friend) fled the city, charges were dropped. Anastasia went on to become top dog on the Brooklyn waterfront of a local of the International Longshoreman's Association. Murder, Inc. members would handle waterfront extortion and loansharking when not working on a "contract".

As Syndicate figures were finally beginning to make peace with each other, outside forces were providing a new source of disturbance. With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, mobsters lost much of their romantic appeal with the public. Law enforcement agencies became less corrupt and more aggressive. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Dewey (who later became a Presidential candidate) gathered evidence to get Dutch Schultz arrested on an income tax evasion charge. Schultz went into hiding and asked the Syndicate to have Dewey killed. When it was decided that such a move would create too much "heat", Schultz decided to do the job himself. The Syndicate, most of whose members regarded Schultz to be an uncooperative Jewish "Mustache Pete", sentenced him to death. Schultz was killed by some of Lepke Buchalter's gunmen.

Dewey's next target was Luciano himself. Luciano controlled many rackets, but his specialties were narcotics and prostitution. Dewey decided Luciano would be most vulnerable to charges of organized prostitution. In 1935 Luciano controlled two hundred New York City brothels containing a total of over a thousand prostitutes. Many of the women had been forceably addicted to heroin to make them compliant. Some of them had even been abducted off the streets. Dewey called 68 persons to the witness stand, 40 of them "ruined women" from Luciano's brothels. The three weeks of heart-wrenching testimony had a profound effect on the judge, the jury and the public. Luciano was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in prison, the longest sentence that had ever been given for compulsory prostitution.

In 1936 Lepke Buchalter went into hiding after he became aware that the law was hot on his tail. Four months later a grand jury indicted him for smuggling $10 million worth of heroin from Shanghai and Hong Kong. Lepke became the target of one of the biggest manhunts in history. One million "wanted" posters were distributed. Dewey, the FBI, the Federal Narcotics Bureau and various police departments pooled their forces to create an intolerable "heat" on the underworld.

While investigators combed the globe, Lepke was safely being hidden in New York by Albert Anastasia of "Murder, Inc.". Albert was obligingly giving orders to bump off witnesses as Lepke continued to run his industrial extortion rackets. But the National Crime Syndicate decided that the underworld would be better off if Lepke served time for narcotics.

Lepke was told that a deal had been made with J. Edgar Hoover that if he turned himself in to the FBI, there would be no state prosecution. Lepke submitted himself to Hoover only to discover that Hoover knew nothing (or claimed to know nothing) of any deal. Lepke was sentenced to fourteen years in prison on the narcotics charge.

Dewey, who hadn't known that Lepke was in New York until he saw it in the newspapers, felt that Hoover had betrayed him to steal all the glory. Nonetheless, he was able to get Lepke sentenced for another thirty-years-to-life on industrial extortion charges. Several years later new evidence was uncovered which qualified Lepke for the distinctive privilege of becoming the only boss of organized crime ever to be sent to the electric chair.

While the anti-gangster fever swept New York City in the mid-1930s, Brooklyn remained in the corrupt claws of Joe Adonis and his persuasive underboss, Albert Anastasia. When Adonis decided to go into the cigarette vending machine business, his high-pressure salesmen found thousands of potential customers who were eager to place his machines. Adonis was able to obtain a plentiful supply of cigarettes at a time when his hapless competitors were losing $6 million worth of their merchandise through cigarette-truck hijackings.

Not only did Adonis command a percentage of all the rackets in Brooklyn, he claimed (with good reason) to have political control of the District Attorney's office, thereby limiting his liability to prosecution. In 1940, however, an aggressive assistant District Attorney brought Brooklyn to the forefront of the war against organized crime. By selective application of pressure and of the granting of immunity, he followed a trail of petty informants to the person of Abe "Kid Twist" Reles. Reles was the "field commander" of Murder, Inc. His thugs were believed to have been responsible for a thousand killings across the nation in their capacity as enforcers for the Syndicate. "Kid Twist" had gotten his nickname from his special skills in wringing necks with his bare hands.

Reles was given immunity from responsibility for all murders about which he made a full confession of knowledge and complicity. If information were obtained elsewhere for a crime to which he did not confess, he could be held liable. He also knew that if he failed to implicate associates enough to cause their arrest, he might have to face them on the outside. Reles talked for twelve days straight. But the protection afforded by the District Attorney may have been inadequate. Although he resided in a hotel room with steel doors and guards, he plunged six floors from his bedroom window to the pavement below. The investigation of Reles' death lasted less than a day. "Wanted cards" for Anastasia and two of his henchmen disappeared from the police files.

During the 1940s Joe Adonis, with the assistance of Willie Moretti, concentrated his efforts on gambling casinos in New Jersey and in upstate New York. Brooklyn was left to the Mangano brothers.

World War II presented Lucky Luciano with an unexpected opportunity. Because the United States was at war with Italy, it was feared that Italians working on the docks might try to help the enemy. Through Luciano's close ally Meyer Lansky, Navy Counterintelligence sought Luciano's influence with waterfront racketeers to prevent sabatoge. Some critics have suggested that underworld figures who visited Luciano in his cell to converse in Italian were a means through which he could continue to control his empire while in prison. It has further been suggested that the absence of sabotage on the New York waterfront was more to the credit of the FBI, which effectively protected many American industries. After the war, however, a number of Nazi intelligence officers spoke of the hostile and violent waterfront Italians who thwarted their plans.

The Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) sought Luciano's influence with the Sicilian Mafia to lessen the resistance to an American invasion. The extent of Luciano's contribution to the war effort in Sicily is questionable, however, because Mussolini's government had conducted a campaign against the Sicilian Mafia which used torture-induced confessions on a scale comparable to the Spanish Inquisition. Thousands of mafiosi were in jail and others, hiding in the mountains of western Sicily, were only too ready to support the invading Allies.

After the war, Luciano petitioned New York Governor Thomas Dewey for executive clemancy on grounds of patriotic services. Cynics -- pointing to Governor Dewey's remarkable tolerance for Joe Adonis' gambling activities and accepting the idea that Dewey's anti-gangsterism had been a political stepping-stone -- tend to believe Luciano's claim to have greased the wheels of justice with a secret contribution to Dewey's campaign fund. Dewey approved Luciano's deportation to Italy, citing government policy favoring deportation over imprisonment.

Before long Luciano was directing the most important heroin route to America. Opium from Turkey was smuggled to Lebanon where the morphine (10% by weight of the opium) was extracted. The morphine was converted to heroin at night in the same Italian laboratories which manufactured legal heroin during the daytime. French Corsicans smuggled the narcotics down the St. Lawrence seaway to Montreal, where Carmine Galante (underboss of the Joseph Bonnano family, and the gambling kingpin for that city) forwarded it to the U.S. through Buffalo and Detroit.

Within a year of his deportation, Luciano flew to Cuba. His plan, evidently, was to make Havana the capital of the underworld. A Syndicate conference was called -- and attended by Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Joe Bonnano, Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Joe Profaci and Willie Moretti, among others. Ostensibly, the convention was held to honor the singer Frank Sinatra, for whom a gala party was held. Upon learning that Luciano was in Cuba, U.S. authorities threatened to embargo medical narcotics shipped to the island. Luciano was soon on a boat taking him back to Italy.

After a 1950 scandal exposed the role of an Italian pharmaceutical company in the manufacture of illegal heroin, Marseille, France became the new center for heroin synthesis. Ten percent of the population of Marseille is composed of Corsicans, many of whom demonstrate the kind of criminal clannishness for which Sicilian mafiosi are notorious. Corsican syndicates specialize in sophisticated criminal skills such as smuggling, counterfeiting, art theft, arms traffic and heroin manufacture. Their scope of operations is world-wide.

Cuba and the Carribean became major conduits for the flow of narcotics into the United States. Meyer Lansky may have been a major figure in shifting the flow of heroin to the south. He had moved to Miami in 1937 to set up gambling operations in conjunction with Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante, Sr. Lansky befriended Cuba's Fulgencio Batista for whom he acted as a money-manager and financial consultant. Together, Lansky and the Cuban dictator worked out a scheme for sharing the profits from Mafia-run activities in Cuba.

Shortly after Thomas Dewey had put Luciano in prison, he began working on a case against Luciano's underboss, Vito Genovese. Genovese was having problems silencing witnesses to a murder for which he was responsible, so he fled to Italy. This left Frank Costello in charge of Luciano operations and the most influential member of the Syndicate.

With his nonviolent and genial manner, there was little about Frank Costello which would cause people to see him as a hood or a thug. His main interests were business and politics. He ran a very successful bootlegging business during Prohibition and supervised a New York slot machine empire thereafter. His business took a downturn, however, when Jewish-Italian Fiorello LaGuardia became New York City Mayor on an anti-gangter, reformist platform. Soon after LaGuardia began dramatically striking Costello's slot machines with an ax, Costello withdrew thousands of his machines from circulation. Shortly thereafter, Costello was told by Huey "The Kingfish" Long that the slots were welcome in Louisiana.

Huey Long had become Governor of Louisiana in 1928. Long had campaigned as a populist opposed to Wall Street plutocrats and the wealthy oil interests of his own state. Once elected, he began a program whereby taxes on oil and gas consumption would provide schoolchildren with free textbooks. After investors built a toll bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, Long upheld the cause of poor folk by building a free public bridge alongside. Following his term as governor, Long became a Senator, but he continued to control the Governor's Office and the State's political machinery.

It was probably during his high-class binges of drinking and womanizing in New York City that he became a friend of Frank Costello. Responding to Long's southern hospitality, Costello and his associates formed the Pelican Novelty Company. Louisiana law made generous provisions for the company on the grounds that part of its slot machine profits would go to charity. Of the $800,000 profit earned in the first year, a $20,000 monthly payment was allotted for Huey Long's personal strongbox. $600 was given to widows and orphans.

New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello was well looked-after. He kept two-thirds of the profits from the slot machines he placed. He received a full pardon from the governor for an assault and battery charge. And he suffered no prosecution when he was arrested for marijuana trafficking or for beating up a newspaper photographer in front of a court house.

Costello remained in New York City to engineer a take-over of Tammany Hall. Ostensibly an organization to represent the common man, Tammany Hall was the powerhouse behind the New York City Democratic Party, at least from the time of "Boss Tweed" in the 1860s. A long chain of Democratic mayors assumed the dominance of their Party until the Republican LaGuardia took office. Once out of power, Tammany Hall leaders became even more dependent on graft money from racketeers. By 1942 Costello controlled enough Tammany executives to ensure his power over the organization.

When Vito Genovese had fled the U.S. in the 1930s, he went to Italy where he formed an alliance with Mussolini, contributing a quarter of a million dollars towards the building of the Fascist Party's central offices in Rome. In 1943 he ordered the killing of the editor of a New York City anti-fascist, Italian-language newspaper. Carmine Galante of the Bonnano family may have been the murderer insofar as he had been driving the car used by the killer. Though Galante was under surveillance at the time, he could not be followed because war-time economies had prevented the use of automobiles by parole officers.

Detectives learned from an informant that the murder had been ordered by Vito Genovese. Because Genovese and Costello were the top bosses of the Luciano family, the detectives decided that a tap on Costello's telephone might provide them with more information. It did, but not about the murder. They overheard Costello informing a New York State Supreme Court Justice nominee that bipartisan support had been arranged for his appointment.

With the return of Vito Genovese to the United States, Costello began to experience a long and slow erosion of his power.

In 1932 Genovese had fallen in love with a married woman, his fourth cousin. Twelve days after her husband was found strangled to death by a clothesline, Genovese and the widow were married. Returning from his honeymoon, Genovese was introduced to a gullible-but-wealthy merchant by a gambling racketeer named Ferdinand Boccia. Together Genovese and Boccia fleeced the merchant for $150,000. Rather than split the money, Genovese decided to economize and have Boccia bumped-off. After his two gunmen killed Boccia, Genovese paid one of them to kill the other. The would-be victim was only wounded, however, and he went to the police. Genovese fled the country, leaving Frank Costello in charge of the Luciano family -- and de facto "Boss of Bosses".

In Italy, Genovese befriended Mussolini and became a powerful member of the Camorra. His wife continued to run his "Italian lottery" racket in the US, periodically bringing portions of the take with her on trips to Italy. After the military defeat of Fascism in Italy, Genovese was arrested for hijacking American trucks and selling provisions on the black market. He was extradited to the US to face charges for the murder of Boccia, but the case was dismissed when a key witness was found dead of poison.

Genovese soon re-established himself in the rackets (concentrating on narcotics) and began working to displace Costello from Syndicate leadership. Costello had sought to discourage mob involvement with narcotics because of the "heat" it created, but in so doing he fostered an underworld within the underworld.

New Jersey boss Willie Moretti became an issue in the power struggle when mobsters began to fear that mental deterioration due to syphilis was loosening his tongue. Genovese convinced most Syndicate members that Moretti had to go, but Costello resisted because Moretti had been his boyhood friend and a loyal supporter. Genovese finally prevailed, enhancing his prestige -- and lowering the prestige of Costello. Moretti was shot to death in a restaurant.

Nonetheless, Genovese provided the Syndicate with an embarrassment of his own. Genovese had no inhibitions about having affairs with other women in front of his wife. When she protested, he would beat her and make threats on her life. Once, at a party, he knocked out two of her front teeth. A woman tried to break up the family quarrel, but Genovese hit her too. Finally, his wife sued for divorce, asking for a $350-a-week alimony payment. On the witness stand she testified in detail about the profits Genovese netted from his rackets.

But the government indirectly lent Genovese a hand in his struggle for power. A Senate committee investigating organized crime took a special interest in Costello's political connections. In the process of their investigation, Costello was sent to prison on a contempt of court charge.

At the same time, the Intelligence Division of the Internal Revenue Service went to work on building a case against Costello. His mail was monitored -- and his barber shop, his tailor and his favorite restaurants were investigated. But Costello had been scrupulous in covering up his illegal business dealings. Finally, in tracing his wife's checks, a clue was found in the form of a five dollar check to a flower shop. The florist had sent flowers to a cemetary in Queens where the agents discovered a cemetary plot Costello's wife had bought for $4,888 in cash. On the plot had been built an expensive mausoleum in the name of an elderly man who admitted to having been bribed for the use of his name. Costello was sentenced to five years in prison for conspiring to hide his income.

The National Crime Syndicate voted to cancel Costello's membership and take over his rackets. Costello was pacified somewhat when Meyer Lansky gave him a piece of the Tropicana Club in Las Vegas. But in 1957 Costello was released after the criminal lawyer Edward Bennett Williams showed that the conviction had been based on an illegal wiretap.

Shortly after Costello got out of prison, he heard a man behind him call out, "This is for you, Frank". As Costello turned his head, a bullet tore through his scalp behind his ear. The gunman fled and Frank was hospitalized. While he lay in the hospital, New York detectives went through the contents of his pockets. A scrap of paper detailed his wins from the Tropicana. Costello was sent back to prison for four years.

Vito Genovese faced another fierce competitor in his bid for power in the person of Albert Anastasia of "Murder, Inc.". Anastasia had assumed control of the Mangano family in 1951 when Philip Mangano was murdered and Vincent Mangano disappeared. Anastasia was rumored to be selling Mafia memberships in violation of Syndicate rules. As part of his bid for power, he was trying to free the Mafia from the control of the Jews on the National Crime Syndicate. In particular, he sought to convince his fellow Italians that Meyer Lansky was behind the attempt on Costello's life -- when, in fact, the gunman had been hired by Genovese.

Anastasia propositioned Santos Trafficante, Jr. with a plan to take over Lansky's operations in Cuba and Florida. Trafficante informed Lansky of the matter, and Lansky suggested that it might be a good idea to play along. To prove his loyalty to Lansky, Trafficante swore an oath of allegiance, a written copy of which he signed in his own blood.

Genovese approached Anastasia's underboss, Carlo Gambino, to discuss the career advancement possibilities of leaving Anastasia without his bodyguards at a critical moment. Then Genovese and Gambino went to Mafia boss Joe Profaci, an ally of Lansky and Trafficante, about obtaining assassins. On October 24, 1957, Anastasia met Trafficante for dinner. They discussed plans for getting control of a Havana casino. The next morning, while Anastasia was seated in a barber shop, his bodyguards disappeared and a couple of gunmen blasted him to death.

Three weeks after Anastasia's murder, in the Fall of 1957, the largest conference in the history of the Mafia gathered to discuss limiting Mafia involvement with narcotics by leaving street-peddling to minority groups -- among other issues. Genovese reputedly wished to see himself declared "Boss of Bosses". The conference was to take place in a small upstate New York community called Apalachin. But the large number of black limousines and suspicious-looking characters inspired the local police to make a raid. Over 60 mafiosi were arrested. Though they were all released, authorities began to realize how vast the network of organized crime really was.

For years FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had denied the existence of a nationwide Mafia because he didn't want his Bureau to be embarrassed by obvious evidence of ineffectuality. Although Hoover was well aware of the criminal stature of many mafiosi, he would not admit that they possessed any national organization which would bring them more under FBI jurisdiction. "They're just a bunch of hoodlums", he would say. Following Apalachin, Hoover informed the press that local police had long benefited from FBI information about organized crime.

In 1958 a narcotics-peddler-turned-informer provided information which led to the indictment of twenty-four persons including Carmine Galante, Joseph Valachi and Vito Genovese. By 1960 Genovese was in Atlanta Penitentiary to serve a fifteen-year sentence for narcotics smuggling. Valachi was in the same cell block as Genovese. Galante was sent to Lewisberg Penitentiary where he was placed in a cell block with Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Galante had been the chief underboss of the Joseph ("Joe Bananas") Bonnano crime family since the early 1950s. From his home in Arizona, Bonnano had initiated a plot to take over the whole Syndicate. He had put contracts out on the lives of several family bosses including Carlo Gambino. The National Crime Syndicate expelled Bonnano from the ruling council and appointed someone else as capo of the Bonnano family. A vicious splintering of factions resulted leading to "The Banana Wars". Galante remained loyal to Joe Bonnano and spent his time in prison plotting what he would do to Gambino and Genovese. Hoffa, who was seeking to regain control of his Teamsters Union, formed an alliance with Galante. Both Hoffa and Galante had fights with New Jersey Teamsters boss Anthony Provenzano (a captain in the Genovese family) when the latter passed through Lewisburg.

But when Galante got out of prison in 1974, Bonnano had retired and most of the disputes involved in the "Banana Wars" had been settled. Galante became "Top Banana" and deferred to Carlo Gambino who had become the undisputed "Boss of all Bosses". In this context, Galante had little interest in fighting battles for Hoffa.

The history of the Mafia in Chicago is so distinctive that it deserves a separate chronology. There is no more "romantic" a Mafia story to be told than that associated with Chicago and the roaring twenties. Nowhere else were profits accumulated so rapidly, was corruption so widespread or was bloodshed so torrential. During that period over 500 gangland murders occurred, with hardly a single conviction. Over 100 bombings took place in 1925 alone. Lucky Luciano described Chicago as "a real goddamn crazy place. Nobody's safe in the streets." A Chicago chief of police during the Prohibition years stated: "Sixty percent of my police are in the bootleg business".

Just prior to Prohibition, a major figure in Chicago prostitution and gambling was Big Jim Colosimo. Colosimo had started his successful managerial career by marrying a brothel madam. But with wealth and success came bomb-threats from extortionists who called themselves "The Black Hand". Colosimo asked his nephew, John Torrio, to come from New York to help out. Torrio was able to place some buckshot where it would do the most good, and soon was supervising Colosimo's brothels and saloons.

With the coming of Prohibition, Torrio felt the need for a freer hand to develop the bootlegging business. He called in a New York torpedo and had Colosimo eliminated. Another man Torrio brought from New York was Al Capone, who served as Torrio's bodyguard, friend and co-organizer. Together they battled the Irish gangs from Chicago's North Side until Torrio was gunned down in 1925. Once out of the hospital Torrio announced his retirement and turned all his enterprises over to Capone.

Capone was as aggressive with business as he was with violence. By 1928, at the age of 29, he achieved a personal income of $105 million, reportedly the highest income ever earned in a single year by a private citizen, to the time of this writing.

During the 1920s the Mafia was still dominated by Sicilians. Capone, who had been born in Brooklyn of Neopolitan parents, found it expedient to appoint Sicilian figureheads. This greatly displeased some of the "Mustache Petes", one of whom offered $50,000 to anyone who could kill Capone. Each of Capone's appointed Unione Siciliane presidents was assassinated after a short term in office. One Sicilian boss managed to have one of his assassins appointed president, but Capone's informants learned of the matter. Capone gave an honorary banquet for the new president. When the coroner examined the bodies of the president and his assistants he could hardly find a bone that wasn't broken. Capone had interrupted a toast to smash the president's head with a baseball bat.

Following the death of his would-be assassins, the Sicilian boss joined forces with Capone's arch-enemy Bugs Moran, leader Irish O'Banionites gang. Seven O'Banionites were slaughtered in the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Capone had left Chicago in December 1928 and, with Sicilians and Irish after his blood, thought it prudent to stay away.

Shortly after the 1929 Atlantic City conference of crime, Capone was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Since Capone had never filed an income tax return in his life, he was later sent to prison on income tax evasion charges. He later died of syphilis contracted from his teenage mistress (whom he had met in one of his brothels).

Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti and Capone's cousin Rocco Fischetti vied for control of the Capone organization. But they were soon supplanted by the more businesslike Paul Ricca, who had the support of the National Crime Syndicate. Nitti was indicted in 1943 for attempting to extort over a million dollars from several Hollywood studios. Indicted with Nitti was John Roselli who was later to become Chicago's top representative in Las Vegas and the West Coast. Nitti committed suicide during the prosecution, but Roselli spent several years in prison. By 1944 Ricca was in prison as well, leaving the Capone mob in the hands of Capone's ex-bodyguard Anthony "Big Tuna" Accardo.

Also in prison during the early 1940s was a young hood named Sam "Mooney" Giancana. Giancana had been given a deferment from military service by his draft board when he told them he stole for a living. He shared his cellblock with Eddie Jones, king of the numbers racket in Chicago's South Side Black Belt. The black gambler gave Giancana detailed descriptions of how the numbers racket worked in Chicago and offered to get Giancana started in a racket of his own.

Once out of prison, true to his word, Jones bankrolled Giancana with $100,000. Giancana opened a small saloon in addition to counterfeiting gas and food ration stamps. It had been more than ten years since Dutch Schultz had taken over the Harlem rackets, and Giancana's first maneuver to emulate Schultz was to kidnap Jones. Jones was returned to his family after a ransom was paid. Soon thereafter Jones moved to Mexico with his wife and children. Giancana finished his take-over of the Chicago numbers racket using bombs and beatings.

Accardo was impressed enough to make Giancana his chauffeur. The relationship contributed greatly to Giancana's education. By 1955 Accardo was involved in a full-time battle with federal income tax authorities. Giancana became the operating head of the Chicago mob.

Giancana lived in a modest home with his wife and three daughters, but made lavish vacation trips to Miami and Las Vegas. In the circles of mutual attraction between mobsters and show people in Las Vegas, Giancana became buddies with singer Frank Sinatra.

Las Vegas has been called a city built by the Mafia. The basis for this idea can be traced to Meyer Lansky's former partner in the Bug and Meyer Mob, Bugsy Siegel. In the late 1930s, Siegel went to California where he took control of the bookmaking wire services. He became friends with the actor George Raft, who apparently benefited from the association by learning the mannerisms of a professional criminal. (Raft had been a beer-runner before becoming an actor. After he had passed his prime in Hollywood, he worked in Lansky's casinos in Havana and London.)

When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, most of the casinos opened in Reno. Siegel had a dream of making Las Vegas a new gambling center. He began building an enormous casino-hotel, The Fabulous Flamingo, virtually in the middle of the desert. To achieve this end he borrowed large quantities of money from other members of the Syndicate -- eventually to the tune of $6 million.

Siegel's famous girlfriend, who he secretly married, was Virginia Hill. Virginia was one of ten children of a poor Alabama mule-trader. She sought her fortune in Chicago beginning with a bookmaker in the Capone mob. From there, the ladder of success included relationships with the Fischetti brothers, Anthony Accardo, Frank Nitti, Carlos Marcello, Joe Adonis and finally Bugsy Siegel. In an executive session of a Senate investigating committee she was asked why so many men gave her expensive presents and money. "Senator", she replied, "I'm the best goddamned cocksucker in the world."

Siegel, like Genovese, was noted for chasing other women in the presence of his wife. When Virginia slugged one of Siegel's girl friends in the jaw, Siegel took a swing at Virginia. Virginia swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Before the Flamingo was completed, Siegel began to feel the urgency of making money to pacify the Syndicate members who were providing him with funds. He held a grand opening of the casino on December 26, 1946. George Jessel was master of ceremonies. Jimmy Durante was the feature attraction, and George Raft was on hand as well. After losing $100,000 in two weeks, the casino closed.

Siegel opened the Flamingo again in the Spring when the hotel was more nearly completed. It lost money for two months and then suddenly showed a profit. Meanwhile, the Syndicate learned that Siegel had squirreled away $600,000 for the presumed purpose of disappearing if the bad business continued. The National Crime Syndicate gave orders for him to be executed. When Virginia learned of Bugsy's death, she downed another handful of pills. Again her suicide attempt failed, but years later she was ultimately successful.

Las Vegas was declared an "open city", like Miami. It was built by Syndicate representatives from all over the country. After Siegel was murdered, his Flamingo Hotel was placed in the hands of a Syndicate representative. In 1948 Lansky backed the Thunderbird Hotel and in 1950 Cleveland's Jewish Mayfield Road Gang opened the Desert Inn. Morris "Moe" Dalitz moved from Cleveland and was later to become the major mobster owner-operator of Las Vegas casinos and hotels. The Rhode Island Mafia boss opened the Dunes, the Sahara was opened by an Oregon gambling-bookmaking organization and, in 1957, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello opened the Tropicana Hotel.

The Chicago mob was the best represented in Las Vegas. Huge revenues in cash which could not be rigidly accounted for, served as an excellent cover for "laundering" money acquired in more illicit activities. Chicago was represented by John Roselli, who became a powerful man in the city. It was Roselli who was later to become most deeply involved in the CIA's plan to have the Mafia "hit" Castro.

By 1960 massive loans for financing mob-controlled casinos and hotels in Las Vegas were coming from the Teamster's Central States Pension Fund. Much of the money went to Dalitz who financed the Stardust, the Fremont Hotel and the Desert Inn. Money also went to the Dunes (which by then was controlled by Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer), the Landmark, the Four Queens, the Aladdin, the Circus Circus and Caeser's Palace. The Teamster's Fund also loaned a quarter of a million dollars to Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, to build a golf course. The Fund was controlled by Allen Dorfman, a man with close ties to the Mafia and who helped to make the Teamster's Pension Fund a virtual "mob bank".

James ("Jimmy") R. Hoffa joined the AFL Teamsters Union Detroit Local 299 when he was a warehouseman for a food company. Fired in 1936 for "rabble-rousing" on the loading dock, Hoffa was hired by the union as a joint council organizer. His hard work and skill as a negotiator soon made him a very respected member of the union.

A few years earlier, Hoffa had had an affair with a clerical worker named Sylvia Pagano. In 1934 she moved to Kansas City where she married Sam Scaradino, who worked as a driver for a local gangster-politician. Scaradino changed his name to "Frank O'Brien" and died shortly after their child was born. When Sylvia returned to Detroit she began an affair with Frank Cappola, one of the most powerful mobsters in the city. Through Sylvia, Hoffa met Cappola and Santo Perrone. Perrone, a "Mustache Pete", was the chief union buster in Detroit. (Much later, Sylvia and her son, "Chuck O'Brien", moved into Hoffa's home with his wife and children where they all lived as an "extended family" for many years.)

Mob figures had been widely known to sell their services to employers during labor conflicts. Several crime families had begun buying into the trucking industry and Perrone, for one, became owner of a steel and scrap handling business. Hoffa apparently prevailed upon Perrone to see the value of allies on the union side because when the 1937 strike came along, the mob remained neutral. (In later years Perrone turned to extorting protection money from companies by the use of bombing. Unlike most extortionists, Perrone would bomb first and ask for money later.)

In 1941 the Detroit Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union declared war on the AFL Teamsters. The CIO hoped to drive the less numerous Teamsters out of the city so as to monopolize Detroit union interests. Fights between rival union members became a commonplace sight on the streets. One CIO organizer, who later became a Teamster local vice president, identified Hoffa as one of four men who "beat me up with chains".

Another man to be reckoned with on the Teamster side was Rolland McMaster, a six-foot-five, 245-pound hulk of muscle who was later characterized as Hoffa's bodyguard. Seeing a couple of CIO men sitting in a car on the street, McMaster crashed his hands through the window, grabbed the driver by the hair and pulled him through the shattered glass. Then he opened the car door, tore out the gearshift handle and beat on the other union man until three motorcycle policemen with guns brought the episode to a close.

The tide turned when Hoffa prevailed upon Perrone and Cappola to lend a hand to the Teamster's side of the struggle. By the end of the year, the CIO had been almost completely driven out of the city. The very next year Hoffa was being indicted for an extortion racket against a grocery association which hauled its goods with non-union labor. Using his friends in the mob, Hoffa was forcing the association members to buy "permits" from the Teamsters.

Perrone's steel and scrap hauling business led Hoffa into association with Paul (Red) Dorfman who was president of the syndicate-controlled Chicago Waste Handlers union. Dorfman, a former Capone henchman, had long been a key figure in the labor rackets, having taken over the union when the president was shot in 1939. (Among those the police picked up for questioning was the local's secretary, Jack Ruby, who later achieved notoriety by killing Lee Harvey Oswald.) Hoffa had used Perrone to establish contacts with Dorfman and other Chicago hoods involved in union activity.

In 1949, when Hoffa set up the Michigan Conference of Teamsters Welfare Fund, Paul Dorfman and his son Allen created the Union Casualty Agency to supply the insurance needs of that fund. This arrangement provided Hoffa with access to Dorfman's many contacts in the underworld. As Hoffa's Welfare and Pension plans grew over the years, they became a virtual bank national Syndicate figures. The Dorfmans made more than $4 million for commissions and services during the first ten years of fiduciary management.

When Detroit laundry truck drivers of Teamsters Local 285 began planning a strike in 1949, the laundry owners turned to Moe Dalitz. Dalitz was not only the owner of a string of laundries and a mobster, but he had "connections" with Hoffa. Through Dalitz a meeting was arranged between Hoffa's representatives and the laundry owners. At the meeting it was decided that a cash payment of $17,500 would be made to Hoffa and that there would be no strike. Dalitz was later to become the foremost mafioso in Las Vegas.

Hoffa also collected protection money from businesses in exchange for assurance that the workers would not be unionized. Those who refused were firebombed. Hoffa's "torch" was the Teamsters "business agent" Frank Kierdorf. Kierdorf had been hired immediately upon his release from prison, where he had been serving time on an armed robbery charge.

One evening, when he was setting a firebomb at a Detroit dry cleaning store, Kierdorf accidently caused the bomb to ignite prematurely. His body was burned beyond recognition. Hoping to gain information about Hoffa's rackets a Prosecutor told Kierdorf, who was lying bandaged in a hospital bed, "You have only a few hours to live...You are about to face your Maker, your God. Make a clean breast of things. Tell me what happened." Through charred lips Kierdorf whispered, "Go fuck yourself." He died about an hour later.

Another hood whose name was to be associated with Hoffa's was John Dioguardi ("Johnny Dio"). Dio, a member of a prominent Mafia "family", was an experienced labor racketeer in New York's garment industry. He had been sent to Sing Sing in the thirties by Thomas Dewey for the bloody beating of an independent trucker. By the 1950s he was the owner of several cheap nonunion dress manufacturing factories. At the same time, Dio was director of the New York United Auto Workers Union, AFL, thanks to a charter issued through the influence of Paul Dorfman.

In order to gain power in New York, Hoffa decided his allies needed to win the elections for Joint Council 16 held in February 1956. Hoffa had charters for seven New York Teamster locals issued. These new charters were given to Dio and his associates. Two of these locals were then "staffed" by forty men who between them had a record of 178 arrests and 77 convictions. The other five remained "paper locals" (with no members) which were controlled by the mob.

When a Hearst labor columnist began exposing Johnny Dio's labor racketeering, Dio hired a hood to throw acid in the columnist's face. The acid blinded the columnist. Upon learning that an important person had been his victim, the hood decided that he should be paid $50,000 rather than $500. Instead he received four bullets in the back of his head. The case against Dio was dropped when all potential witnesses refused to talk.

In 1954 Hoffa's Detroit Local 299, in conjunction with another Teamsters Detroit Local, provided loans to initiate Sun Valley, Inc. Lots of land costing $18.75 each were purchased in Florida and resold for prices ranging from $150 to $550. Movies of land supposedly in Sun Valley were shown at Teamster meetings to members who were told they could buy lots at "cut-rate prices" as a retirement investment. In fact, much of the land was not accessible by road, and some of the lots were underwater. When the project required additional financing, Hoffa placed $500,000 of Teamsters funds in an interest-free account with the Florida National Bank to induce the bank to loan $500,000 to Sun Valley, Inc. About two thousand lots were eventually sold, mostly to Teamster rank-and-file. A few naive union officers, including Johnny Dio, also got burned by making purchases. Placed on the witness stand, Hoffa was asked why he had authorized the large interest-free loan of Teamsters funds to the Florida bank. His reply: "Because I wanted to".

In 1957 Hoffa (the new national Teamsters president) sent his key organizer and bodyguard, Rolland McMaster, to establish Teamsters Local 320 in Miami. McMaster was assisted by David Yaras (an assassin for Sam Giancana who had previously been a racketeer for Capone). They chose a former member of "Murder, Inc." to be the head of the new local. Florida mafioso Santos Trafficante was given an office in the union hall.

The following year the Teamsters took over the Miami National Bank. By that time McMaster had established himself as Hoffa's liason with Trafficante in the south, the Genovese mob in New York, and the Dorfmans in Chicago. It should be noted that 1957 was also the year that the newly-amalgamated AFL-CIO formally expelled the Teamsters because of "corrupt control". Responsible union leaders were seriously concerned that Hoffa and his Mafia cronies were giving the labor movement a bad name.

The most powerful Teamster-mafioso was Anthony Provenzano ("Tony Pro"), of New Jersey Local 560, who was also a capo in the Vito Genovese family. Provenzano's strong-arm tactics were directed not only against company owners, but against union "reformers", many of whom were beaten or killed. In 1959 Provenzano was elected to the presidency of the 100,000 member New Jersey Joint Council 73, which controlled ten percent of all the Teamsters in the United States. Hoffa made him an International Teamsters vice-president.

In February 1963 a Local 560 meeting, attended by 375 of the local's 14,000 members, voted Provenzano a $50,000 raise in appreciation of his services. This brought his total salary to nearly $95,000. A few months later he was convicted of extorting money from trucking company owners in exchange for labor peace. He was sentenced to 20 years in a federal penitentiary.

Jimmy Hoffa's "nemesis" was, without question, Robert Kennedy. It is worthwhile to begin tracing the relationship between the two men by giving Kennedy's background.

Upon graduating from law school in 1951, Robert Kennedy's first job was investigating Soviet agents for the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department. The next year, Robert quit this job to help his brother John win the Massachusetts race for the Senate. Then father Joseph tried to use his influence with the up-and-coming Joe McCarthy (an Irishman and recent "friend" of the family) to get Bobby a job with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee. Upon checking the size of Joseph's campaign contribution, McCarthy made Robert assistant council. After six months of McCarthy's unpopular inquisition, Robert quit his job. The Korean War added fuel to McCarthy's flame, but by 1954 McCarthy's star had fallen. John McClellan became the new Chairman of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee for which Robert Kennedy was the new chief councel. From Robert's point of view, the investigations of communists became more effective than they had been under McCarthy.

By 1956 it was evident that the striking growth of trade-union welfare and pension funds, combined with the convenience of unions as a front for shakedown and bribery, had attracted many mobsters. Labor racketeering became a new subject of attention for the Permanent Subcommittee. Joseph Kennedy stringently warned his son that such investigations could make Robert appear anti-labor. But the subject of inquiry became the Teamsters, who had supported Eisenhower and many other Republicans in 1956.

Kennedy's first major discovery was that Teamster president Dave Beck had built a lakefront house with union funds, lived in it for two years, and then sold it to the union for $163,000. After it became evident that Beck had taken at least $370,000 from the Western Conference of Teamsters treasury, he was convincted for larceny and income tax evasion.

Hoffa watched the litigation against Beck with equanimity insofar as it contributed to his own rise to power. But when Kennedy turned his attention to Hoffa, a titanic struggle began which was to last many years.

Hoffa quickly attempted to hire a lawyer named John Cheasty to act as a spy in the McClellan committee. Cheasty told Kennedy about Hoffa's offer and agreed to act as a double agent. When Hoffa handed Cheasty two thousand dollars under the observation of FBI agents, Kennedy thought he had an open-and-shut case. Nonetheless, Kennedy did not make a good showing in court against the expert criminal lawyer Edward Bennett Williams.

Williams charged that it was Kennedy who was using Cheasty as a spy. Williams claimed that Cheasty and Kennedy had contravened legal ethics in betraying the confidential lawyer-client relationship which had been established between Hoffa and Cheasty. Under cross-examination Williams established that Cheasty had not turned all of Hoffa's money over to Kennedy as had been agreed -- thereby challenging Cheasty's honesty and reliability as a witness. Williams also questioned the allegation that the McClellan Committee's files were as necessarily "confidential" as they claimed.

Insofar as the jury of 12 had 8 black members, there were charges that the defense used racial issues to gain influence. Hoffa's record of opposition to segregation within the Teamsters was discussed and Williams cross-examined Cheasty about whether he had been investigating the NAACP in Florida. Paul Dorfman arranged for the boxing champion Joe Louis to be sent out from Chicago. In the courtroom Louis and Hoffa put their arms around each others' shoulders and chatted. Whether the jurors were influenced by these tactics remains open to question. Black and white alike voted 12 to 0 to acquit Hoffa.

Kennedy was furious and this failure only intensified his resolve to do battle. In his book on the death of Marilyn Monroe, Robert Slatzer mentions this entry in the actress's diary: "Bobby told me today, 'I want to put that SOB Jimmy Hoffa into jail, no matter how I do it.' " In 1959, Hoffa was subpoenaed to produce all books and records of the Teamsters Union for the period from January 1, 1945 to the current date, including all cash receipts, letters and interoffice memoranda. Not only would these materials have filled no less than a hundred freight cars, but to surrender them would have left the Teamsters utterly incapable of conducting its business.

Time and again Kennedy called Hoffa to the witness stand for cross-examination. Although Hoffa never used the Fifth Amendment, Kennedy found the Teamster President to be suffering from a shocking case of amnesia. On one occasion Hoffa testified, "I can say here to the Chair that I cannot recall in answer to your question other than to say I just don't recall my recollection." It was not until he became Attorney General in 1961 that Kennedy mustered the resources to prosecute Hoffa as he pleased.

A unit in the Organized Crime Section of Kennedy's Justice Department became known as the "Get Hoffa Squad". Kennedy appointed a former FBI man to head this unit. Hoffa claimed his mail was opened, his offices were bugged and his phones were tapped. Hoffa himself had been under indictment by Kennedy for wiretapping (on the basis of evidence gathered through a government wiretap). Under Kennedy authorized wiretaps rose from 115 in 1960 to 244 in 1963, though he claimed none were used against the Teamsters.

Back in 1948 Hoffa had settled a damaging strike against a Detroit trucking firm in the company's favor. Soon thereafter, a truck-leasing business was incorporated in Nashville by a group of persons, one of whom was Mrs. Hoffa using her maiden name. The truck-leasing corporation did an active business with the Detroit firm causing Hoffa to make several hundred thousand dollars over the course of many years. In 1962 a Nashville grand jury indicted Hoffa on charges of violating the Taft-Hartley Act. In his defense Hoffa stated: "Leasing trucking equipment to truckers was no more ominous, to me, than, say, selling gasoline to truckers...I know several pharmacists and doctors who own stocks in drug-manufacturing companies, and no one complains. I even know of a doctor who owns an interest in an undertaking establishment."

Kennedy's Get Hoffa Squad made a deal to spring Edward Partin from a Baton Rouge, Louisiana jail if he would act as a spy in the Hoffa camp. Partin agreed, and his reports were carefully screened using lie-detector tests. The trial ended in a hung jury, but Kennedy was able to use Partin as the key witness on a new charge of jury tampering. Lawyer Edward Bennett Williams reportedly remarked that only Hoffa could escalate a misdemeanor into a felony.

Partin, although President of the Baton Rouge Teamsters local, was a man with an extensive criminal record. Convicted to prison in the early 1940s for breaking into a restaurant, he twice escaped from jail. Once free, he joined the Marines, but was dishonorably discharged. As a Teamster boss he was indicted on thirteen counts of falsifying union records and thirteen counts of embezzlement. Additionally, he was being indicted for manslaughter in a hit-and-run case and was under indictment for a "kidnapping" involving one of his henchmen's two children who had been in the legal custody of their mother.

Although it would have been a violation of federal law for Kennedy's men to hire Partin as a paid informant, the government found indirect means to compensate Partin for his services. Bail was supplied for Partin's release from jail and the indictments for embezzlement, manslaughter and kidnapping were suspended. Partin's wife received $1,200 in cashier's checks wrapped in plain paper, and mailed to her without receipt. Partin was "forgiven" $5,000 in income tax evasion charges.

Most of Hoffa's defense efforts during and after the jury-tampering trial were centered on attempts to prove that the government had used bugs and wiretaps against him. Hoffa himself had, through Johnny Dio, earlier solicited the services of wiretap expert Bernard Spindel to tap the phones of subordinates in the Detroit Teamsters offices. Hoffa invited Spindel to come to the jury-tampering trial. Spindel shipped a thousand pounds of electronic equipment by air freight and was met by FBI agents when he arrived at the Nashville airport.

Hoffa was being kept under constant surveillance by 25 FBI agents directed by a radio command post. Spindel intercepted the radio messages, but would have been in violation of the Federal Communications Act if he had divulged the contents of FBI radio communications on the witness stand. Instead, he submitted transcripts to the Judge in a sealed envelope. The Judge asked Spindel if the transcripts were being submitted for "disclosure" of their contents and later refused even to look at them.

A sample interception included the following:

"...the two occupants with the man (Jimmy Hoffa) and the ex-boxer (Chuck O'Brien)."

"That's a 10-4-correct. Is the car parked on the 11th Street side?"

"That's confirmed. The light beige Chevrolet right there in front of the hotel, is that a 10-4?" ...

"What's all that noise?"

"I think we're tuned in."

"That's probably Bernard." ...

"Hi-ya, Boin. Doing fine, making lots of money working for Mr. H?"

Although Hoffa was sentenced in March, 1964 to eight years in prison, he was able to continue fighting for appeals for three more years. Hoffa's supporters offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Hoffa's phones had been tapped during the jury-tampering trial. William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire also offered $100,000 for such evidence. Loeb himself supplied an affidavit of a conversation he had with the Assistant Chief of the FBI during which he was told that Edward Jones had done the wiretapping for the Justice Department. Loeb said he had also been told that any attempt to publicize the matter would result in a public denial. He challenged the FBI man to take a lie-detector test and offered to take one himself. Edward Jones had earlier been subpoened to testify concerning allegations that he had tapped Hoffa's wires as an employee for the McClellan committee. Jones had refused to answer on the basis of Senate Rule XXX by which no Senate employee can be compelled to reveal information without the consent of the Senate.

Federal wiretapping became a national issue. By late 1966 J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy were publically making charges and countercharges at each other concerning FBI wiretap authorization. Though Kennedy denied knowledge of "microphone surveillance" during his service as Attorney General, Hoover was able to submit an authorization for such surveillance bearing Kennedy's signature. Against the allegation that Kennedy had signed the authorization without reading it, Hoover supplied two other memoranda from Kennedy aides which reported on Kennedy's interest in the matter. Hoover also had a memorandum signed by Robert Kennedy which had authorized telephone taps of the civil rights activist Martin Luther King.

John and Bobby Kennedy had met with King in Washington urging him to end his association with two men accused of having affiliations with the Communist Party. Confronted with FBI evidence that King had not ended his associations, Bobby approved wiretaps for King's home, office and any temporary residence. Whether or not evidence was obtained to indicate that King had communist leanings, Hoover learned a great deal about King's extramarital philanderings. (When Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover took the opportunity to send King's wife a tape of excerpts of recordings from electronic bugs which had been placed in her husband's hotel rooms.)

The national furor over wiretapping did not help Hoffa in his bid for a court victory, however. His third motion for a retrial was supported by affidavits from four prostitutes swearing to have had sexual relations with jurors. One of the prostitutes swore she had also had relations with the Judge, thereby learning of his prejudice against Hoffa. She later recanted her affidavit, however, and one of the other prostitutes was convicted of perjury.

Though Hoffa fought his jury-tampering conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, he was ultimately defeated, with only Chief Justice Warren dissenting. Warren objected to the tactics of the Justice Department and noted that Partin was "facing indictments for charges far more serious (and later including one for perjury) than the one confronting the man against whom he offered to inform... Certainly if a criminal defendent insinuated his informer into the prosecutions's camp in this manner he would be guilty of obstructing justice." It has been noted that Hoffa was so accused in the Cheasty case. A critic recalled the words of a former Attorney General: "In such a case it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him..."

During the time Hoffa was fighting to appeal the jury-tampering trial, he was tried in Chicago on charges of conspiring to defraud the Teamsters Pension Fund. A businessman testified that a $3,300,000 loan had been given to the Everglades Hotel in Miami on the condition that $300,000 of that money would be given as a kickback to men running the Sun Valley project. He admitted that he had lied to the McClellan Committee and to the Sun Valley grand jury about the loans, but said that he had feared his life would be endangered if he had implicated Hoffa.

Testimony was given concerning a $500,000 loan made by Hoffa for the addition of a fourth floor in the construction of the North Miami General Hospital. One of the partners of the construction firm responsible was shown a recent photo of the three-story hospital and asked to explain. His reply was, "The fourth floor of the building is also the ceiling of the third floor. It is not the roof in the usual sense, but it is acting as a roof".

A Florida masonry worker admitted that he had signed receipts for $650,000 for work which he did not do for the non-existent "Black Construction Company" which had received a loan from the Pension Fund. The worker actually received a weekly salary of $125 for his "services".

After months of similar testimony, Hoffa was found guilty and sentenced to serve five more years in prison in addition to his eight-year jury-tampering sentence. Realizing that he could not stay out of jail forever, Hoffa rewrote the Teamsters constitution to create the office of "General Vice-President", whose occupant would run the union while Hoffa was in jail. The man Hoffa chose for this job was Frank Fitzsimmons who had distinguished himself in the Teamsters by his utter subservience to Hoffa's will. Ultimate control of the Teamsters Pension Fund was transferred from Hoffa to Allen Dorfman. In March, 1967 Hoffa went to prison, where he was to remain for five years.

When Hoffa went to prison, Frank Fitzsimmons became the "temporary" president of the Teamsters. While Fitzsimmons made a public display of struggling to get Hoffa out of jail, privately he was consolidating his power. By the 1970s Fitzsimmons was well connected with the Mafia and the Nixon Administration. Even Hoffa's old buddy Rolland McMaster was helping Fitzsimmons to fight the remaining Hoffa loyalists.

The Teamsters were engaged in other battles, however. In 1967 the independent truckers had grown to such numbers that they staged what amounted to a full scale insurrection. (During the 1974 shutdown there were bombings, beatings and shootings -- and trucks were being smashed and sabotaged all over the country. The violence was so bad that a Standard Oil Company subsidiary hired armed members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang to escort tanker trucks leaving Refiners Transport in Cleveland). Hoffa, who had bitterly fought the independents most of his life, began to champion their cause.

After Fitzsimmons told Nixon's political aide Charles Colson that a Las Vegas Teamster had learned that a couple of show girls could provide derogatory information about Senator Edward Kennedy, E. Howard Hunt was sent to interview Fitzsimmons. In March, 1973, when Fitzsimmons was unable to prevent the Teamster's attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, from representing the the Democratic Party in the Watergate break-in case, Williams was fired. The $100,000-a-year contract as attorney for the Teamsters went to Charles Colson, who had just left the Nixon Administration to set up a private law practice.

On December 23, 1971, Nixon granted Hoffa's release from prison, ostensibly on the grounds of Mrs. Hoffa's poor health. But the Hoffa release contained a proviso that he could not engage in union activities until 1980. (Over five years later, Time magazine reported that the Justice Department was investigating an FBI report that the clemency and proviso was given in exchange for a million dollar payoff to Nixon arranged by Frank Fitzsimmons and Anthony Provenzano.) Hoffa blamed Colson for the restrictions on the commuted sentence.

When Hoffa got out of prison, he had few friends either in the mob or in the Teamsters. But he began an autobiography to expose the fraud in the Pension Fund which he claimed he would eliminate once he got back into the union.

Among Hoffa's "old friends" was Anthony Giacalone, a former numbers runner for a Detroit mobster. Giacalone owned the Home Juice Company which had fallen into the hands of racketeers when the original owner was unable to pay a gambling debt. Thanks to Hoffa, the company had received a $630,000 loan from the Central States Pension Fund. In the early 1960s Giacalone began an affair with Sylvia Pagano Paris, who was living in Hoffa's home. His visits were almost daily. After a while he began to bring a friend so that Mrs. Hoffa could have some companionship. Soon the foursome were double-dating, but Hoffa was reluctant to make a direct confrontation because he was having an affair with a union secretary. Not long after Hoffa became aware of the situation, the mob called Giacalone and his friend to a "sitdown" during which they were given explicit orders to end their affairs.

By 1975 Hoffa appeared to be making a comeback in his bid for union power. Pro-Hoffa rebels were holding $15-a-plate dinners attended by nearly 1500 people each. The Attorney General reportedly advised President Ford that the prohibition against Hoffa engaging in union activity was illegal. Hoffa was gearing up to challenge Fitzsimmons for the presidency of Teamsters in July, 1976.

On July 30, 1975 Hoffa had an appointment with Anthony Giacalone at a restaurant seven miles north of Detroit. Giacalone was reputedly trying to be a liason between Hoffa and Mafia-Teamster Anthony Provenzano, who was also expected to be at the meeting. But Hoffa disappeared. Completely. By the next day Hoffa was Missing Person Number 75-3425. Giacalone had been at a health spa. Provenzano had been playing cards at the Local 560 union hall in New Jersey. Both denied any knowledge of a meeting.

A car owned by Giacalone's son was impounded by the FBI. Chuck O'Brien, Teamster business agent and a virtual "son" of Hoffa, admitted to having driven the car on July 30. Tests conducted by federal investigators on the back seat of the car yielded "definite signs of Hoffa's blood, hair and skin in that car...We know for sure he was in the back seat."

Rolland McMaster said that Teamsters are not killers and speculated that Hoffa "ran off to Brazil with a black go-go dancer". But when McMaster appeared before a grand jury, he took the Fifth Amendment, as did Giacalone and Provenzano. (Provenzano was later convicted of having abducted and murdered a rival Teamster hoodlum who "disappeared" in 1961.)

William Bufalino, who formerly had been an attorney for Hoffa, represented all of the suspects in a grand jury inquiry into Hoffa's disappearance. Under Hoffa, Bufalino had taken control of a Detroit teamster local. Bufalino's wife was the niece of a leading Detroit mafioso. And Bufalino's cousin, Russell Bufalino (belived to be the coordinator of the abduction), was the Mafia capo in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

A Chicago syndicate contract killer, who later became a government informant, said that Hoffa had been killed by the same mob leaders who plotted to murder Castro for the CIA. According to the informant, "Hoffa is now a goddam hub cap...His body was crushed and smelted." The FBI suspected that Hoffa's body had been completely destroyed in a trash shredder, compactor or incinerator at Central Sanitation Services (a company owned by two Detroit crime figures). Hoffa's disappearance remains a mystery.

Joseph Patrick Kennedy, born in Boston in 1888, lived a life of success which would exemplify the fondest hopes of "the American Dream". Though he was a campus baseball hero at Harvard, his Irish Catholic background excluded him from many campus activities. He proclaimed he would be a millionaire before he was thirty so that he could "piss down" on the Protestant "bastards".

After working as a bank examiner for two years, he bought enough shares (with money borrowed from his father and his father's friends) to gain control of a neighborhood bank and make himself president. The same year (1914) he married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of the recently ousted Mayor of Boston.

In 1917 Kennedy quit banking and became a production executive of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, later became a trustee of the Massachusetts Electric Company and in 1919 became branch manager of an investment bankers company. In the early 1920s he moved to Wall Street to become an independent stock manipulator and speculator.

As a nondrinker, Kennedy thought booze was "only for fools". But there is evidence that it played an early role in the growth of his fortunes. Kennedy's father had owned three saloons before Prohibition, and was reputedly the silent partner of several illegal speakeasies. Mafioso Frank Costello claimed to have been a business associate of Joseph Kennedy's during the first years of Prohibition. According to Costello, Kennedy shipped English Scotch and gin across the Atlantic to the twelve-mile limit where Costello would load the liquor onto fast, small boats. The Kennedy family has denied that this is true. (It was Kennedy who supplied the booze for his tenth Harvard reunion.)

Motion pictures was a newly booming business in the Roaring Twenties. Joseph bought an interest in a chain of thirty New England movie theaters. In 1925, deciding that big money was being made in Hollywood, he left his wife Rose to take care of their seven children while he went west. If he had engaged in discreet philandering previously, he was not discreet in Hollywood. He went to nightclubs with stars such as Jean Harlow, Anita Page and Greta Garbo. He virtually took control of Gloria Swanson's life. He started a profitable company known as "Gloria Productions". According to Swanson, he tried to pull strings in the Catholic Church to obtain a dispensation which would allow him to set up a separate household with her. The church refused.

Kennedy produced low budget films at the rate of one per week. He used his banker's savvy to finance studios that needed money for the new "talkies". He speculated in the stock of movie companies and arranged for the consolidation of independent companies. Kennedy made five million dollars in Hollywood over a period of thirty-two months.

In 1928 Kennedy began selling his interests in Wall Street. By August of 1929, three months before the crash, Kennedy had sold all of his stock. With the advent of the Depression, Kennedy feared a Bolshevik take-over. He felt that Franklin Roosevelt was enough of a reformer to prevent revolution. He convinced publisher William Randolph Hearst to get eighty-six delegates at the Democratic convention to support the nomination of Roosevelt.

Shortly after Roosevelt's election, Kennedy went to Britain with Roosevelt's son and made arrangements to become the American agent for Gordon's Gin and Dewar's Whisky. He obtained "medical permits" from the Roosevelt administration to import and stockpile huge quantities of gin and Scotch. When Prohibition ended, Joseph Kennedy made yet another fortune.

In 1934 Roosevelt appointed Joseph the chairman of the newly-formed Securities Exchange Commission, over the protests of liberals who claimed that Kennedy had been one of the worst stock manipulators on Wall Street. Three years later Kennedy was made American Ambassador to England. His diplomacy with the British Royalty might be indicated by the fact that he once told Queen Elizabeth that she was "a cute trick". His outspoken opposition to helping Britain with its war effort finally led to his removal as Ambassador in 1940.

Joseph Kennedy was a man with remarkable ambitions. He was also remarkable in fulfulling so many of them. And his ambitions extended to his family. He had to borrow money for a down payment on his first house, and the birth of Joe, Jr. created real financial problems. Yet he pledged at that time that each of his children would receive a million-dollar trust fund when they reached twenty-one years of age. By 1940 he had accumulated a fortune of roughly one-quarter of a billion dollars. The trust fund each child ultimately received amounted to ten million dollars.

Quite probably Joseph hoped (or expected) that more than one of his four sons would take a turn at the Presidency. It would be the beginning of a dynasty, with the Kennedys as America's Royal Family. He also wanted his sons to enjoy life, wealth and women as he had done. He told them "Wives are for looking after you, mistresses are for you to look after them, but in the end the wife is a man's true strength".

Joseph's highest hopes were pinned on his eldest son, Joe, Jr. Joe made a name for himself at Harvard as an athlete and a lover of women.

In World War II he distinguished himself by flying some fifty missions in Europe as a Navy bomber pilot. Due to the heavy antiaircraft fortifications around V-2 rocket-launching sites and German submarine nests, military officials decided upon an experiment in which Joe agreed to participate. A bomber would be loaded with 22,000 pounds of TNT and guided to its target by automatic controls after Joe and his co-pilot bailed out. But the plane exploded in the air while still over England. Joe's body was never found.

The death of his eldest son was a blow from which Joseph Kennedy never fully recovered. The next oldest son John ("Jack") would be the one to carry the political standard, but he seemed much less qualified. John had been a child of frail health whom Joseph expected would become a writer or a journalist. Jack had not distinguished himself as an athlete at Harvard as his brother had done, but his senior thesis was developed into a best-selling book, Why England Slept with the help of Joseph's friend on staff at The New York Times. Jack was attractive to women, however, and he had maintained a competition with brother Joe over their sexual conquests.

Jack was rejected by the Army because of his bad back. Joseph prevailed on the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence to help get John into the Navy. John was immediately commissioned as an ensign and assigned to work six weeks before Pearl Harbor. Naval Intelligence had broken the Japanese code enough to be expecting an attack, but no one knew where it would be.

During this period there was an attractive Danish journalist in Washington who was suspected of being a Nazi spy. A former Miss Miss Europe, she had conducted a series of exclusive interviews with Hitler during the 1936 Olympic Games. FBI microphones in her bedroom and wiretaps on her phone revealed the torrid affair she was having with John Kennedy. Kennedy was transferred to South Carolina, but continued to see her intermittently for years. She later told her son that she suspected John, rather than her husband, was his true father.

After receiving PT training in Rhode Island, John was sent to the Pacific to command the PT-109 and a crew of twelve. Quite likely due to Jack's lack of experience, the boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer which cut it in two. Kennedy led the six survivors to an island, eventually pulling an injured sailor by a life belt strap between John's teeth. John made periodic swimming excursions, despite a badly injured spine, until the group was rescued. The incident involving Joseph's son was well-publicized and John received a medal for heroism.

John was elected to Congress in 1946, to the Senate in 1952, and to the Presidency in 1960. Throughout most of his career he pursued women with an energy and enthusiasm which is probably unmatched by those who have held the top offices in American politics. Until the mid-1970s, these affairs were carefully kept from the public eye by the tactful censorship of political journalism. Due to the extraordinary complications which the sexual exploits of Jack and his brothers produced, it is worth describing their impact on American history.

Both before and after marriage Jack had innumerable sexual experiences with secretaries, airline stewardesses, nightclub singers and lady journalists, among others. But the press looked the other way when confronted with evidence of these adventures. For example, Pamela Turnure was a twenty-one-year-old secretary in Kennedy's Senate office with whom John had an affair. One Summer night in 1958 he threw pebbles at the window of her Georgetown apartment attracting the attention of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Kater. The Katers eavesdropped on that and subsequent visits, going so far as to tape-record the lovemaking. They finally accosted and photographed Kennedy on his way to her apartment.

Mrs. Kater, a devout Catholic, presented her evidence to Cardinal Cushing of Boston, but the Cardinal told her he could do nothing. When The Washington Star decided the story was too personal to publish, Mrs. Kater picketed the Star and later the White House with a placard telling her story. Early in her struggle for public attention, Mrs. Kater received a phone call from Joseph Kennedy's attorney warning her that publicity might mean unemployment for her husband.

On the campaign trail Jack often had to rely on campaign workers and airline hostesses to fulfill his sexual needs. On the afternoon of his October 13, 1960 debate with Nixon, Jack was so tense (according to journalist Jack Anderson) that one of his aides arranged an interlude with a shapely brunette. But during much of the Presidential campaign Kennedy took his comfort from a San Francisco socialite, Mrs. Joan Hitchcock Lundberg, who went on the campaign trail with him. Kennedy provided her with money for her living expenses, for the support of her children and for an abortion -- making her one of the few full-fledged mistresses he ever had. Their relationship ended suddenly when Jack became President.

But John Kennedy was not a man to let the Presidency interfere with his sex-life. While Jackie was away, the President had nude swimming parties in the White House pool, under the watchful eyes of Secret Service men. Naked girlfriends streaked through the hallowed halls of the White House into the Presidential bed.

Jackie sought to remain as ignorant of her husband's philanderings as she could, and she did not speak about things she already knew. Finding a pair of women's panties tucked into a pillow case, she is reported to have told John: "Would you please shop around and see who these belong to? They're not my size." Jackie often absented herself from the White House. She suffered such extreme depression at times that she underwent electro-shock treatment, a fact which was kept a secret -- even from family members.

After Mary Meyer divorced her husband, a high-ranking official in the covert operations section of the CIA, she attended many parties at the White House with her brother-in-law Ben Bradlee, then with Newsweek. Mary's romance with the President began in early 1962. She visited him at the White House as much as two or three times a week until his death. She said they smoked some joints of marijuana together two weeks before a White House Conference on narcotics. A few months after Kennedy's assassination, Mary was shot to death while jogging on a towpath. The murder remains unsolved. Her diary was personally burned by James Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton was probably concerned that Mary's diary would reveal information about her ex-husband's CIA activities.

Through Jack's sister, Pat Kennedy Lawford (wife of actor Peter Lawford), the President had the opportunity to establish close contacts with some of Hollywood's superstars. Two of these were none other than the biggest sex symbols in America, Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. Jane and Jack had a few trysts together in various hotels, but the relationship quickly ended when Jane realized that Jack could not be as easily controlled as the many other men she kept on a string. Marilyn was enthusiastic about Jack's sexual prowess, but her complaints about the presence of Secret Service men and her competative attitude towards Jackie forced John to end that relationship.

Of all the Kennedy boys, Bobby was the most sexually monogamous. As a young man he had considered the priesthood, but when he married he was intensely loyal to his wife who bore him eleven children. Yet the charm of Marilyn Monroe may have been too much for Bobby to resist.

The relationship between Marilyn and Bobby began during a party at the Lawfords. It became very close and intimate, but Bobby was so discreet about the circumstances of their get-togethers that solid evidence of a sexual connection is hard to come by. Few could believe that a relationship with America's sex-goddess would be platonic. Marilyn's emotional attachment to Bobby was undeniable, however, and she told a friend about her expectations of one day being Bobby's wife.

The death of Marilyn Monroe in August 1962 (officially a "probable suicide") raised questions which have yet to be answered. Marilyn was found stretched out naked in bed on top of her telephone. Her blood contained high levels of barbiturates. Yet there was no evidence of barbiturate or capsule residue found in her stomach, nor was a hypodermic needle found in her room. People suffering from barbiturate overdose die in contorted positions and invariably show signs of vomiting. Marilyn's legs were parallel and no signs of vomit could be found on the sheets, her rug or in her nose, mouth or throat. This suggests either that she received an injection from someone else or that her stomach was pumped.

During the week before her death, Marilyn made many attempts to phone Bobby. He changed his private number at the Justice Department and refused to accept her calls through the regular switchboard. Bobby had just learned that Hoffa hired Bernard Spindel, one of the top wiremen in the country, to tap Marilyn's phone. Bobby was probably equally distraught at the actress's growing sense of emotional need and vindictiveness. She told a friend, "If he keeps avoiding me, I might just call a press conference and tell them about it..." Peter Lawford insists that Bobby was in the East on the weekend of Marilyn's death, but there is good evidence to indicate his presence in both San Francisco and Los Angeles during that weekend.

The evidence surrounding Marilyn Monroe's death is so suspicious and conflicting that a coroner's inquest or a district attorney's investigation would be expected. Yet the Los Angeles Police Chief labeled the death a "probable suicide" and closed the case. The first police officer to arrive on the scene stated, "She was murdered by needle injection by someone she knew and probably trusted... This was the cover-up crime of the century..." The Deputy Coroner who signed Marilyn's death certificate made the statement, "An original autopsy file vanished, a scrawled note that Marilyn Monroe wrote and which did not speak of suicide also vanished, and so did the first police report."

Whatever the circumstances of Marilyn's death, it cannot be doubted that any extensive investigation of the case would have proven exceedingly embarrassing to the Kennedys. It was Bobby, more than any other Kennedy, who struggled to keep scandal out of the White House. At a White House party, upon seeing the bisexual writer Gore Vidal dancing close with Jackie, Bobby pushed Vidal away from her with the words "Don't you ever dance with the First Lady like that again. You make me sick." Despite the fact that Jackie and Vidal had shared the same stepfather, it was the beginning of the end of Vidal's association with the White House.

When Jackie's sister Lee became the playmate of Aristotle Onassis, Bobby tried to get Jackie to stop the relationship. Only a few years earlier Lee had divorced her first husband to marry a Polish prince. To avoid scandal, an annulment was sought from the Catholic Church. The annulment was granted, but only after Lee had sworn that her six-year marriage had never been consummated, and a $50,000 payment had been made to the Vatican.

Edward ("Teddy"), the youngest of the Kennedy boys, came closest to fulfilling his father's hope that one of his sons would be a Harvard football hero. Standing at six foot two and weighing two hundred pounds, Teddy showed potential on the Harvard gridiron during his first year. Academically, he was in trouble, however. He obtained a C-minus grade for his work in Spanish during his first term, but it seemed evident that he would fail his final examination and thereby disqualify himself from varsity football the next Fall. One of Teddy's athlete friends who was proficient in Spanish agreed to take the exam in Ted's place. When the stand-in was recognized by a proctor, both Teddy and his friend were expelled. After a stint in the army, Teddy was readmitted to Harvard where he was later able to please his father by making a touchdown pass against Yale.

Sexually Teddy was inclined to imitate his brother Jack. He worked hard to achieve a comparable record of sexual conquests, even after his marriage in 1958. Nor was he above accepting Jack's hand-me-downs. One such woman was an Eastern Airline stewardess with whom he maintained a relationship for over a year, 1960 to 1961. His most disastrous liason, however, occurred on the island of Chappaquiddick in the Summer of 1969.

On that small secluded island Teddy gave a party he described as a "gesture of gratitude" for a group of young women who had helped his campaign. Teddy's wife (who was two months pregnant) was not present. The party was attended, however, by six single women, all of whom were in their twenties. There were also five other men (all in their thirties and forties) only one of whom was not married.

Ted later was to testify that he left the party early with Mary Jo Kopechne to drive her back to her apartment on the mainland. In doing so he was leaving ten people with only one small car for transportation. Mary Jo left her purse and room key at the party. The road from the location of the party to the ferry was paved. At one point the road to the ferry veered sharply left while an unpaved road leading to a secluded little beach veered sharply right. Kennedy, who had been going to Chappaquiddick since he was seven years old, "mistakenly" took the right-hand turn, overlooking the large reflector arrow pointing the way to the ferry. He reputedly drove seven-tenths of a mile and then onto a wooden bridge which must be crossed to reach the beach. Instead of crossing the bridge the car drove off the side into the water. There were no heavy skid marks to prove that brakes had been applied.

Senator Kennedy was able to save himself, but did not retrieve Mary Jo from the car. The police scuba diver who recovered her body said that her head was pushed up into the footwell where she was obviously seeking trapped air. He stated that "she died of suffocation in her own air void. But it took her at least three or four hours to die". Police and firemen could have been on the scene within half-an-hour after notification (as happened the next morning) and Miss Kopechne would have been rescued within another half hour.

It is doubtful that the Senator was considering this possibility as he walked back to the party. Of the six houses he passed, four of them had lights on all night -- and four of them had telephones. Nor did his lawyer friends phone the police when Teddy returned. Teddy "impulsively" swam the channel to the mainland. He did not report the accident until he returned to Chappaquiddick the next morning. Teddy later hired a New England consulting firm to do a study of the accident. The firm declared that any breathable air quickly escaped from the vehicle. An autopsy of Mary Jo's body was never performed.

Senator Kennedy made a radio and television speech to the people of Massachusetts in which he denied that he was "driving under the influence of alcohol." He asserted that it was "indefensible" that he had not reported the accident immediately to the police, despite his doctor's claim that he suffered from cerebral concussion as well as shock. "I was overcome, I'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions, grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock," he said, and he had wondered, "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys, whether there was some justifiable reason for me to doubt what had happened and to delay my report." He asked for the advice, opinions and prayers of his constituents as to whether he should remain in office. A massive influx of mail urged him to remain in the Senate. Many members of the press questioned the objectivity of Teddy's mass media referendum. With the passage of time, public opinion polls showed an increased skepticism over the Kennedy version of the Chappaquiddick story.

There were still legal consequences, but the justice system was not unkind to Teddy. The police chief covering the area including Chappaquiddick island told reporters, "when you have a U.S. Senator, you have to give him some credibility." Seventeen hours before the public inquest, the Massachussetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered a postponement over the question of whether a public hearing would violate Kennedy's constitutional rights. Four months later a private inquest was held, with the record of the proceedings impounded.

A charge of manslaughter under Massachussets law requires "willful or wanton" conduct. Kennedy was only charged with the misdemeanor to which he had pleaded guilty: leaving the scene of an accident. He was given a suspended sentence of two months in jail. Kennedy was spared imprisonment on the basis of a plea from the Prosecutor that "the reputation of the defendant is known to the court, and to the world."

Nine months later, however, the judge who had been presiding at the inquest released a report which concluded that "Kennedy and Kopechne had not intended to return to Edgartown" and that Kennedy's turn onto the unpaved road had been intentional. Kennedy immediately issued a public denial.

Because Peter Lawford was a brother-in-law to the "Kennedy boys", his parties were the most natural liason for the Kennedys with the sexually swinging Hollywood crowd. Frank Sinatra, perhaps the most sexually cosmopolitan and sought-after stud in America (and a close friend of Lawford's) lived a life of continuous partying. So it was not unnatural for Sinatra to become a friend of the family and an enthusiastic Kennedy fund-raiser. It was Sinatra who organized and sang at John's Inaugural Ball.

During the early 1940s, when "Frankie" was driving bobby-soxers into orgasmic adulation, he had ostensibly been a family man. In 1951 he ended his fourteen-year marriage to marry Ava Gardner. Wooing Gardner from the arms of Howard Hughes had not been difficult, but the new marriage proved to be a tumultuous one. Three years later, Sinatra was one of the swingingest bachelors on the continent.

From Humphrey Bogart, Sinatra inherited the leadership of "The Rat Pack", later known as "The Clan". The Clan was characterized by drinking, hell-raising and a unique language of "in" jokes and jargon. Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis, Jr. (who Sinatra sponsored to stardom after seeing him in a Harlem night-club) were among the most notable and durable members.

Sinatra was also notorious for the pleasure he took in rubbing elbows with mobsters in the playgrounds of America. The association apparently dated from the time when his career was just beginning. Frank had made friends with New Jersey Mafia boss Willie Moretti shortly after leaving his native Hoboken to play the roadhouses. Later Frank found his career being stifled by a five-year contract with Tommy Dorsey, which Sinatra had signed before his popularity rocketed far above Dorsey's. According to one story, Sinatra bought the contract (possibly with Mafia money) for a large sum. But a popular Mafia version is that Dorsey decided one dollar was a fair price for the contract when he discovered Willie Moretti's gun in his mouth instead of a trombone.

Italian police found a gold cigarette case in the apartment of Lucky Luciano which bore the inscription: "To my dear pal Lucky, from his friend, Frank Sinatra." In 1963 Sinatra became a Director of the Mafia-owned Berkshire Racetrack in Massachussetts. And a regular member of Frank's Florida entourage was Joseph Fischetti, a cousin of Al Capone and a significant figure in the Chicago mob. Sinatra was to vehemently deny the significance of these associations in later years.

In the course of Frank's partying in Miami and Las Vegas, he became acquainted with John Roselli and Sam Giancana. Sinatra and Giancana became good friends, a friendship which was put to the test for Frank more than once. The Nevada Gaming Control Board circulated to all casinos, a blacklist of eleven gangsters (including Giancana) who were not allowed on the premises. Frank Sinatra owned half of the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe. Because Giancana was a guest at the Cal-Neva the State Board revoked Sinatra's gambling licence. Rather than take on a legal fight, Sinatra sold all his Nevada holdings, including $380,000 of stock in the Sands Hotel.

Innumerable women passed through Sinatra's life in a continuous stream. One such woman was Judith Campbell, later known as Judith Exner. Shortly after meeting Sinatra, Judy vacationed with Frank and his crowd in Hawaii where she was his sexual partner. They got together again in California. As Exner tells it, once, when they were in bed, a naked black woman entered the room and began performing oral sex on Sinatra. Frank had hoped Judy would become inspired to make it a threesome, but instead she chilled to the idea of any further intimate relationship with him. He chided her for being "straight" and a tenuous "friendship" remained thereafter.

On February 7, 1960, at the Sands lounge in Las Vegas, Frank introduced Judy to John Kennedy. Judy had dinner with Peter Lawford, Gloria Cahn, John Kennedy and his brother Edward. Later Judy gave Teddy a tour of the Las Vegas casinos. Ted tried to get her to go with him to Denver. He acted "childishly temperamental", she said, when she made it clear that she preferred keeping a luncheon date with brother John.

After their lunch together she didn't see John for another month, due to the pressing schedule of his presidential campaign, but he phoned her every day. She said that between March 7 and April 12, she had sex with John on three occasions. He invited her to visit him during the Los Angeles Democratic National Convention in July. There, sitting on the end of a bed with him, she saw a thin woman smiling at her from the other end of the bedroom. When John suggested that the three of them go to bed together, Judy began to cry. She left feeling very hurt, but she later accepted his apology. She continued to feel she had a very personal love with John and had no thoughts that there were other women in his life apart from his wife. She visited him at the White House and elsewhere as his schedule would permit.

Not long after her introduction to Kennedy, Exner was introduced by Sinatra to Sam Giancana at a party in Miami Beach. Her relationship with Kennedy did not prevent her from seeing Giancana or, for that matter, John Roselli, with whom she also became intimate.

In the Fall of 1960, Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the presidential election by two-tenths of one percent of the votes cast. Nixon could have been the victor with a switch of 4,500 votes in Illinois, where an avalanche of Democratic votes in Cook County had turned the tide. Among those charging election fraud were FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as well as the editors of the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Tribune. According to Exner, Giancana (who was the Mafia chief in Chicago) bragged that "if it wasn't for me, your boyfriend wouldn't be in the White House." Giancana may have had hopes that his friends Frank Sinatra or Judith Exner would provide him with a hot line to the Democratic Administration. If so, he was soon disillusioned when Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General.

Bobby's crusade against the underworld assumed epic proportions, and the number of convictions was unprecedented. Of no small benefit in his work was the testimony of Joe Valachi. In 1962 Vito Genovese was serving time in the federal prison in Atlanta on a narcotics trafficking charge. In the same cell block Joseph Valachi was serving a life sentence for murder. Because Valachi was constantly being interviewed by narcotics agents, Genovese became convinced that his Mafia underling was a stool pidgeon. Genovese gave Valachi the "kiss of death" which marked him to be killed. Valachi later struck and killed a man he thought to be an assassin. Facing a death penalty, Valachi agreed to talk in exchange for life imprisonment. Soon Valachi was detailing his experiences about the organization he called La Cosa Nostra ("our thing") to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby referred to Valachi's information as "the biggest single intelligence breakthrough yet in combating organized crime and racketeering in the United States".

One of the mobsters Bobby was determined to put in jail at any cost was none other than Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. FBI agents followed him to church, to bars and even on the golf course where he claimed they snickered when he missed a putt. (The agents noted that Giancana would kick his ball out of the rough into the fairway when his opponents weren't looking.) Giancana sent a message to the Attorney General's office: "If Bobby Kennedy wants to talk to me... he knows who to go through." This has been interpreted as a reference to Sinatra.

When Giancana sued in a federal court he was probably the first mobster ever to initiate a court action. He hired a black lawyer who had handled cases for the Black Muslims and who was a specialist in civil rights. He also hired detectives to watch the FBI agents. The detectives and FBI agents took turns posing for photographs. Giancana took motion pictures of the agents on the golf course. The judge ordered that no more than one FBI surveillance car could be parked within one block of Giancana's home and that the FBI agents play golf at least two foursomes back from Giancana. But later the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision.

Exner's relationship with two very busy men like Kennedy and Giancana still left her with much time on her hands. When Jerry Lewis offered her a job in Hollywood, it seemed like the solution Judy had been looking for. Soon, however, Jerry was in a tizzy because a private investigator had evidence which would implicate him in a divorce suit. Jerry was fearful that his wife and his public would desert him so he asked Judy if Giancana could help. Ultimately, Roselli put the screws to the private investigator to destroy the evidence.

According to Judy, as soon as the heat was off Jerry resumed his amorous advances towards her, finally firing her for rebuffing him. Later Giancana phoned Lewis for an explanation, holding the receiver up so Judy could hear Jerry's whining voice.

Because Giancana was under heavy surveillance by the FBI, it no doubt came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover that Exner was seeing both the mobster and the President. Exner claims to have met with the President at the White House about 20 times in 1961. White House logs show that she spoke on the phone with Kennedy about seventy times after he was inaugurated. The last phone contact was on March 22, 1962, a few hours after the President had a private luncheon with Hoover. Exner said that her relationship with Kennedy continued a few more months after that time, however. In any case, Hoover had been briefed on the Giancana-Exner relationship shortly before the luncheon, and there was considerable anxiety among those who knew of the connection concerning the potential for blackmail or scandal.

Giancana's friendship with Frank Sinatra represented another political problem for the Kennedys. Giancana was not a member of "The Rat Pack", but he was frequently a guest of Frank's and he enjoyed Frank's notorious sport of throwing cherry bombs. Giancana told Exner of rolling a couple of cherry bombs under the chairs of Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford: "They jumped so high their heads nearly hit the ceiling. Why not? One's a nigger and the other's a fruitcake. Gave them a little thrill."

Giancana occasionally stayed at Sinatra's home in Palm Springs, the same home Frank hoped the President would visit as a guest. Prior to a trip to Palm Springs in early 1962, John Kennedy phoned Peter Lawford insisting that, despite his fondness for Sinatra, he could not stay in Sinatra's home at a time when Bobby was handling the Giancana investigation. Sinatra was deeply hurt when Kennedy stayed in the Palm Desert house of the Republican singer Bing Crosby. Sinatra had even added an annex to his mansion solely to accomodate the Kennedys. He had called it the Kennedy Wing, but later he changed the name to the Agnew Wing. He also terminated his associations with Lawford.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was established in World War II to deal with the clandestine aspects of fighting that war. It was to gather information on enemy military and political developments, to support sabotage by resistance movements, to monitor and undermine enemy intelligence and to foster confusion by promoting false rumor or false information ("disinformation").

The OSS was not unlike most modern intelligence agencies in terms of its division of labor. "Intelligence" is concerned with the gathering of information about enemy strategies and capabilities through the use of agents and spy equipment. "Analysts" in the home offices, who collect information from agents, try to form a coherent picture through the use of supplementary material such as newspapers, maps, telephone books, high school yearbooks, history texts, etc. "Counterintelligence" relates to the monitoring and infiltration of enemy intelligence agencies while protecting one's own intelligence apparatus from enemy penetration. "Clandestine services" (or "covert operations") handles sabotage, bribery, assassination, "black propaganda" and paramilitary operations. A technical support staff invents or supplies such materials as false teeth containing a tiny camera, a cigarette case containing a tape recorder, forged passports, counterfeit money or poison toothpaste.

To head the OSS, Roosevelt chose one of his Columbia Law School classmates, William "Wild Bill" Donovan. Although Donovan was a millionaire Wall Street lawyer and a Republican, the OSS became a refuge for people of all political persuasions (unlike the more conservative FBI). Working in the OSS Research and Analysis Branch were Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, who were to become spokesmen for the "New Left" in the 1960s. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Arthur Goldberg, both of whom became foremost figures in American Liberalism, held important positions in the OSS. American Communists who had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War proved to be effective in working with the European underground (much to the displeasure of FBI men who demanded that the communists be fired). Donovan is reported to have remarked, "I'd put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler".

Many of Donovan's conservative business cronies also joined the OSS as officers and managers. The speed, secrecy and efficiency with which the OSS legally and illegally obtained untraceable foreign exchange for use by undercover agents is a testiment to the subtle skills of Donovan's financial wizards.

For most of the War, intelligence operations were dominated by the British, who were vastly more experienced in the matter. The British did not hesitate to manipulate American agents towards preserving the British Empire. Not until late in 1944 did the OSS begin to assert a certain pre-eminance, and this was largely due to British reluctance to risk infiltrating agents into Germany, who could be captured and forced to disclose information.

World War II conflicts between the communist and non-communist resistance forces were rampant throughout Europe and Asia -- considerably undermining the war effort. This was seen especially in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, China and Southeast Asia. OSS men working in those countries developed such intense loyalties that the partisan warfare contributed to bitter factionalisms within the OSS itself.

In Italy, leftist partisans accused the OSS of preferentially supplying right-wing guerrillas. In fact, certain OSS officers were of the opinion that the communists were burying arms for use after the war of liberation was over. Factionalism between Italian royalists and Italian communists suddenly ended, however, when Moscow granted official sanction to the royalist government.

One of the most famous cases of partisan underground conflict in Italy related to an OSS team which was infiltrated into the Italian Alps. The team was headed by a Major Holohan and included an Italian-American OSS man named Aldo Icardi. Pursued by the Nazis, the team was aided by communist and non-communist partisans alike until Icardi allegedly murdered Holohan. Icardi's motives were purportedly that he had stolen the operational funds of the team, or that he was a devout Catholic who wanted the right-wing partisans to receive a large share of the supplies, or that he wanted to assume leadership of the OSS team.

Italian courts found Icardi guilty of murder in absentia, but due to the ill-defined legal jurisdictions he was not brought to trial in the US until 1956. The Defense Department maneuvered Icardi into testifying his innocence, thereby justifying a Congressional Investigation on a perjury charge. Icardi was defended by the lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who made a special trip to Italy (accompanied by the private investigator Robert Maheu) to gather evidence. Williams and Maheu were able to prove that the communist partisans had covertly murdered Holohan and framed Icardi.

The liberation of Paris proved to be a critical focus of partisan conflict. The Paris underground was firmly in control of the communists. DeGaulle feared that if the city were liberated from within, the communists would dominate post-war politics. Eisenhower planned to bypass Paris, stranding the 20,000 German occupation troops and avoiding a costly direct attack. When the barricades went up in the streets,