Ep 80: Mafia (Part 2)
- Matt Crumpton
- 3 days ago
- 13 min read
“There are some very important witnesses who simply have not been interrogated fully on this matter. Subcommittee was unable to do it in the time available and there are important leads that were uncovered in the investigation that clearly need to be followed up.” – Frank Church
“This report documents the failures of the U.S. Intelligence establishment in their investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination and their cover up to the Warren Commission.” - Senator Richard Schweiker[1]
We just heard from Senator Frank Church, who led a Senate Committee, in 1975 to investigate intelligence activities. The second person was Senator Richard Schweiker, who would go on to be a vocal critic of the official JFK assassination story.
While the Church Committee was organized to look into abuses of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS, there was a great deal of valuable information the committee uncovered that potentially touches on the Kennedy Assassination. In this episode, we look at what the Church Committee had to say about the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Cuban Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in partnership with the Mafia through cut-out Robert Maheu.
Robert Maheu Starts His Agency
Robert Maheu’s unique career began as a law student during World War II. In 1941, Maheu was recruited out of Georgetown Law to work for the FBI as a counterintelligence officer in Europe. After the war, Maheu worked for the FBI until 1947, when he opened his own private detective agency in Washington, D.C.[2]
One of Maheu’s main clients became the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, which kept Maheu on a monthly retainer.[3] Maheu said of the agency QUOTE “The CIA was my first steady client, giving me 'cut-out' assignments” which were the jobs where the Agency could not officially be involved.[4] According to historian, Evan Thomas, the television series, Mission Impossible, was based on Maheu’s detective agency.[5]
Maheu associate and former Washington Post reporter, John Gerrity, said that in 1954 he and Maheu were summoned to Vice President Richard Nixon’s office. During this meeting, Vice President Nixon gave Maheu approval to use various dirty tricks to sabotage a pending agreement between Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis, and the King of Saudi Arabia. These tricks included wire-tapping and planting derogatory stories in newspapers. (And, yes, this is the same Aristotle Onassis who would go on to marry Jackie Kennedy.[6])
Maheu had already been retained to break up the Onassis/Saudi deal by a direct competitor of Onassis – Stavros Niarchos.[7] The CIA supported Niarchos because they feared that if the Onassis/Saudi deal went through, the United States would lose its monopoly control of Saudi Arabian oil.[8] Nixon was so serious about not losing the oil monopoly that he reportedly told Maheu, QUOTE “And just remember, if it turns out we have to kill the bastard, don’t do it on American soil.”[9]
In 1955, Maheu was retained for the first time by reclusive billionaire, Howard Hughes. Hughes hired Maheu to look into a potential relationship between his fiance, Jean Peters, and another man. Maheu would continue to work for Hughes until 1970, when the two men had a falling out. During all of those years, Maheu never met Howard Hughes in person. The men corresponded with letters and telephone calls exclusively.[10]
Maheu Mafia Context
In the Summer of 1960, Robert Maheu continued to do regular work on behalf of both the CIA and Howard Hughes. It was around this time that the CIA requested Maheu to contact Johnny Roselli, a high ranking mobster with the Chicago Outfit, to ask about getting the mafia’s help to kill Fidel Castro.[11] Just a year earlier, Castro’s revolution toppled the government of Fulgencio Batista, which had been friendly to the United States.
The CIA and the Eisenhower/Nixon Administration were increasingly concerned about Castro’s Leftist politics. At the same time, the mafia, which had been able to operate freely under Batista, was now kicked out of Cuba by the Castro regime, costing the mob, and Santo Trafficante, specifically, a lot of money.[12] On top of that, after Castro took over, he kicked all of the CIA agents out of Cuba, which meant that the best American contacts left on the island were mafia associated.[13]
Bringing in Bob Maheu to contact organized crime was one of many plots by the CIA to kill Castro that were documented by the final report of the Church Committee.[14] At first, the CIA just tried to make Castro look bad so that he would be perceived as an ineffective leader. For example, they infused a box of cigars with a chemical that caused temporary disorientation, hoping Castro would smoke one before a speech and say crazy things. There was another plan to dust Castro’s shoes with thallium salts, which would cause his beard hair to fall out, making him appear too sick to lead. This tactic was tested, but not actually used.[15]
We’ll cover the other plots against Castro, involving both sabotage and assassination, when we get to the series on the Cuban exiles.
Enter Roselli
In August of 1960, Richard Bissell, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, asked Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the Director of the Office of Security, to find someone who could assassinate Fidel Castro. Edwards brought in the Chief of Operational Support, James O’Connell, to help with the project.[16] O’Connell had served as Maheu’s case officer since Maheu had been working for the CIA. He and Maheu were close friends.[17]
Maheu told the Church Committee that O’Connell asked him to contact his mafia friend, Johnny Roselli, to see if he would participate in a plan to kill Fidel Castro. Maheu had known Roselli since the late 1950s as the man keeping an eye on Las Vegas on behalf of the Chicago mob, which was led by Sam Giancana.[18] O’Connell also knew Roselli before approaching him about the Castro plot, because O’Connell previously had dinner with Roselli and Maheu at Maheu’s home.[19] That’s how close these guys all were before the plan was even in motion.
Maheu told the CIA that he was going to QUOTE “approach Roselli as the representative of businessmen with interest in Cuba who saw the elimination of Castro as the first essential step to the recovery of their investments.” But, in reality, Maheu gave up the cover immediately to Roselli. Maheu told Roselli that the mission was backed by QUOTE “high government officials.” Maheu then requested that Roselli help to recruit Cubans for the job.[20] He offered $150,000 (which is over $1.5 million in today’s dollars) to successfully accomplish the hit on Castro, but Roselli declined any payment.[21]
As a condition of enlisting his help, Roselli insisted on meeting someone with the government. In September of 1960, Maheu and Roselli met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City with James O’Connell, who Maheu identified to Roselli as the CIA’s Operational Support Chief.[22] This satisfied Roselli that the mission was legit, and Roselli then went to Florida to recruit Cubans for the operation. He told the Cubans that he worked for nickel mining interests on Wall Street who wanted to see Castro out of power.[23]
In October of 1960, a month after the New York Plaza Hotel meeting, Roselli introduced Maheu to two people he planned to bring in on the project: a man named Sam Gold and another man named Joe. CIA Support Chief O’Connell also attended the meeting under the name “Joe Olds.” The meeting was held at the luxurious Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.[24]
When he got back home, Robert Maheu saw an article about the 10 most wanted criminals in America in Parade Magazine. Looking at the pictures, he realized that Sam Gold was really Sam Giancana and that Joe was Santo Trafficante. O’Connell also saw the same magazine and recognized Giancana and Trafficante, which he relayed to Sheffield Edwards.[25]
Sam Giancana’s Extracurricular Wiretap
According to Maheu, Sam Giancana’s role was to find someone in Castro’s entourage who could accomplish the assassination. Ultimately, Giancana was not successful in that task because the Cubans Roselli ended up using were not the ones procured by Giancana.[26] While Giancana did not end up providing tangible assistance to kill Castro, he was successful in extracting a favor from Maheu that led to J. Edgar Hoover finding out about the CIA’s partnership with the Mafia.[27]
Giancana, Maheu, and Roselli stayed in Miami for several months in late 1960 in an effort to recruit Cubans for the plot. During that time, Giancana came to believe that his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was cheating on him. Giancana was upset about this prospect and threatened to drop everything he was working on for Maheu in Miami to go to Las Vegas and see for himself if she was cheating. In an effort to keep the project on track and keep Giancana in Miami, Maheu agreed to hire a private investigator to shadow McGuire.
The investigator who took the job attempted to install a wiretap on the hotel room phone of singer Dan Rowan, the man Giancana suspected his girlfriend was seeing. While installing the bug, the investigator was caught red handed. [28] It turns out, according to Maheu and O’Connell, that Colonel Sheffield Edwards himself approved placing the bug on Rowan’s phone line in order to appease Giancana.[29]
However, in addition to Maheu wanting Giancana to stay in Miami to finalize the plan to kill Castro, there is also an argument that the CIA independently wanted to tap Rowan’s phone because they wanted to see what Giancana had been telling his girlfriend about the Castro plot. We know from an October 18, 1960 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Richard Bissell that Giancana was telling people in several conversations that Castro would soon be assassinated by a girl dropping a poison pill in his drink. So, the CIA may have been concerned that Giancana was compromising operational security with his loose lips.
When the FBI found out about the illegal wiretap by Maheu’s investigator, the Bureau wanted to press charges against Maheu, Roselli and Giancana. But, when Maheu told the FBI about the nature of the operation, the CIA was able to convince Director Hoover to take no action due to the national security implications.[30]
Did the Plots Work?
Ok, so we know that the CIA worked with specific members of the Mafia, namely Roselli, Trafficante, and Giancana. But, what do we know about the actual plots?
Initially, the CIA wanted a gangland style killing where Castro would be gunned down, but Giancana said it would be too hard to recruit Cubans to do something so dangerous. Roselli expressed that he wanted to use an assassination method that was QUOTE “nice and clean, without getting into any kind of out and out ambushing.” Everyone agreed that poison pills would be the best way to effect the assassination.[31]
In February 1961, the poison pills, which had been tested and proven to be lethal, were given to Johnny Roselli by Support Chief O’Connell. The pills were then given to a Cuban for delivery to the island in advance of the planned Bay of Pigs invasion. By early March, the poison pills were delivered to an official close to Castro who had been bribed by the mafia. But, this official then lost his job with the Cuban government and his access to Castro, and did not move forward with the plot.[32]
After the first plan failed, Dr. Tony Verona, a leading figure in the Cuban exile movement, was approached to help.[33] Incidentally, Verona was on Trafficante’s payroll to ensure gambling, prostitution, and drug monopolies in Cuba if Castro could be ousted. Verona said he had a contact who worked at a restaurant frequented by Castro. In exchange for equipment and about $10,000 in cash, Verona agreed to help kill Castro and was given the money and a new set of poison pills when he met with Maheu, Roselli, and Trafficante at the Fontainebleau Hotel.[34] Like the first one, this plot was also aborted because Castro stopped visiting the restaurant where Verona’s friend was working.[35]
Enter Bill Harvey
After two failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro while working with Roselli, Giancana, and Trafficante, the operation, referred to internally by the CIA as the QUOTE “gambling syndicate operation,” was transferred from Sheffield Edwards to Bill Harvey. Harvey is a notorious and legendary figure in the CIA who many official story critics believe is at the heart of the assassination plot. His name will come up again in future episodes and he will get his own deep dive at some point.
In early 1961, Bill Harvey was tasked with creating the capability within the CIA to disable foreign leaders, including assassinations. This capability was known as Executive Action and was eventually given the cryptonym, ZR/Rifle.[36]
In April of 1962, Harvey asked Sheffield Edwards to put him in touch with Johnny Roselli. CIA Support Chief O’Connell then introduced Harvey to Roselli in Miami. Harvey instructed Roselli to maintain his Cuban contacts, but to avoid dealing with Maheu or Giancana, who Harvey believed were untrustworthy and unnecessary.[37] On April 21st, on the orders of Richard Helms, Harvey traveled to Miami with four poison pills, which he delivered to Roselli.[38]
Roselli was in touch with Tony Verona, the Cuban he worked with on the earlier unsuccessful attempt. This time, Verona requested guns, communications equipment and a boat radar. Bill Harvey and Miami JM-WAVE station chief, Ted Shackley, rented a U-Haul truck and personally delivered the arms and equipment to a parking lot and handed Roselli the keys to give to Verona.[39] The equipment, weapons, and poison pills arrived in Cuba in May and were supposed to be used by a three man team to kill Castro.
On May 7, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was told about the euphemistically named “gambling syndicate operation” for the first time by the CIA. Prior to this briefing, RFK had no knowledge of any plots involving the CIA and the mafia working together.[40] According to Sheffield Edwards, the attorney general was very upset when he heard that Giancana was involved.[41] The CIA lied to RFK and told him that the operation had been terminated. But, the reality was that it was still ongoing. RFK’s response was to order that the mafia should never be used again without the administration’s knowledge and consent.[42]
Four Months after the attorney general was told that the operation was over, Roselli was still trying to work with Cubans to kill Castro. But, as of September 1962, there had been no action. Roselli told Harvey that a second team had been send to Cuba to use the supplies that were already on the island. It was around this time that Harvey lost faith in the operation and told Roselli, QUOTE “there was not much likelihood [the operation] was going anyplace or that it should be continued.”[43]
In Mid-February, 1963, Harvey formally terminated the operation with Roselli at a meeting in Los Angeles. He told Roselli to taper off his communications with the Cubans. Roselli followed Harvey’s instructions. However, he never told the Cubans that the $150,000 bounty on Castro’s head had been withdrawn. For their part, none of the mafia leaders who worked on the plot, not even Roselli, were ever compensated by the government.[44]
In the end, the result of the Mafia’s dalliance with the Central Intelligence Agency was a handful of failed attempts and a get out of jail free card for the wiretapping of Sam Giancana’s girlfriend’s new beau. According to the Church Committee, the plan to work with the mafia was put into action by the CIA, through official channels, essentially because it was what the CIA thought the president wanted, even though it was not explicitly ordered.[45]
However, author Don Fulsom claims that the Vice President at the time, Richard Nixon, directed the plan for the CIA to work with the Mafia because he wanted to use the Mafia’s contacts who were still in Cuba. Nixon had personal knowledge of these contacts because he had been to Havana to gamble at a Casino controlled by Santo Trafficante in 1952.[46] Fulsom’s story is backed up by what former JFK Press Secretary, Pierre Salinger, says Robert Maheu told him. Salinger said Maheu QUOTE: “said he had been in contact with the CIA, that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project . . . It was Nixon who had [Maheu] do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.[47]
One possible reason Nixon may have wanted to work with the Mafia is because they were already bribing him, according to Edward Grady Partin, a Baton Rouge union member who became a government informant against Jimmy Hoffa. Partin said that he was at a meeting between Hoffa and Carlos Marcello where Marcello provided a suitcase with half a million dollars cash to Hoffa, which was to be delivered as a bribe to Richard Nixon. This was just the first of two equal payments according to Partin.[48] On the other hand, author Jim DiEugenio notes that Partin was not a particularly reliable witness and he became an informant only to save himself. Also, there is no other corroboration for this alleged bribe.
It would make sense for Nixon to hand pick Maheu because he had worked with him on two other successful operations, including the Aristotle Onassis deal subterfuge. Also, Maheu’s main client, Howard Hughes, was a political backer of Nixon, who had met with Nixon not long before the operations began.[49] According to what Santo Trafficante told F. Lee Bailey’s investigator, Nixon reached out to Hughes - who was a defense industry contractor - directly to solve the Castro problem. And Hughes then delegated the project to Maheu.[50]
NEXT TIME ON SOLVING JFK: We continue our study of the relationship between the Mafia and the JFK Assassination by looking at the Kennedy Administration’s actions against the mob and what the HSCA had to say about organized crime involvement. Then, we begin zooming in on mafia figures like Meyer Lansky, Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, Santo Trafficante, and Carlos Marcello.
[4] Bayard Stockton, Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey, at 171.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_Onassis; https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/nixons-bay-pigs-secrets/
[9] Id.
[12] Church Committee Report at 10; https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-94755-v.pdf
[13] https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/november-2007/how-the-cia-enlisted-the-chicago-mob-to-put-a-hit-on-castro/
[14] Church Committee Report at 71; https://ia800503.us.archive.org/10/items/ChurchCommittee/Church%20Committee%20Interim%20Report%20-%20Alleged%20Assassination%20Plots%20Involving%20Foreign%20Leaders.pdf
[15] Id. at 72.
[16] Church Committee Report at 74; see also https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062601467.html
[17] Id. at 75.
[19] Church Committee Report at 75. O’Connell denied to the Church Committee that he told Maheu to contact Roselli and said that Maheu contacted him on his own.
[20] Id. at 76.
[21] Id. at 75.
[22] Id. at 76.
[23] Id. at 76.
[25] Church Committee Report at 77.
[26] Id. at 77.
[29] Church Committee at 78.
[31] Church Committee at 80.
[32] Id. at 81.
[34] Church Committee at 81.
[35] Id. at 82.
[36] Id. at 83.
[37] Id. at 83.
[38] Id. at 83-84.
[39] Id. at 84.
[40] Id. at 131-132.
[41] Id. at 133.
[42] Id. at 133-135.
[43] Id. at 84.
[44] Id. at 84-85.
[45] Id. at 313-317.
[48] Id. at 131-132.
[49] Waldron at 128.
[50] Id. at 129.