Ep 82: Mafia (Part 4)

We’ve been looking at key mafia figures who were most likely to have been involved in a plot to kill President Kennedy. In the last episode, we talked about Jimmy Hoffa, Meyer Lansky, and Sam Giancana.

In this episode we pick up where we left off by studying Johnny Roselli and Santos Trafficante to try to gain an understanding of whether there is any truth to the idea that the mafia, or anyone affiliated with it, was involved in President Kennedy’s murder.

Johnny Roselli

Filippo Sacco was born in Esperia, Italy, and moved with his family to the United States, specifically, Boston, as a 6 year old. He began using the name John Roselli as an 18 year old in Chicago.^[1]

Roselli eventually made his way out to Los Angeles, where he was arrested for bootlegging in 1924. After being an independent hoodlum for awhile, Roselli met Al Capone while in Chicago to watch a boxing match in 1927. Capone invited Roselli to a party at the Metropole hotel, where he hit it off with the Chicago Outfit. This led to Roselli working with the Los Angeles mafia to monitor Capone’s investments in LA.^[2]

Roselli used his time in LA to forcibly take over off-shore gambling on a casino ship called Malfalcone. He also worked in the movie business, producing several gangster films. He cut his teeth working with the government as the de facto liaison between the mafia or any other criminals, and corrupt Los Angeles mayor, Frank Shaw.^[3]

While Roselli was serving in the Army during World War II, his past came back to haunt him. Roselli was convicted of extortion in 1943, resulting in an undesirable discharge from the service, and a 3 year stint in prison.^[4] Years later, when Las Vegas was taking off in the 1950s, Johnny Roselli became the official representative of the Chicago and Los Angeles mafia in Sin City. He made sure that all of the various organized crime interests got their cut of the skim from legal gambling.^[5]

Mafia Still Involved in CIA Plots

As we covered in Episode 80, when the CIA wanted the help of organized crime to kill Fidel Castro, Johnny Roselli was the go-between for CIA cut-out Robert Maheu and the mafia. According to what the CIA told the Church Committee, all cooperation between the CIA and the mafia, specifically, Johnny Roselli, ended in mid-February of 1963.^[6] But, Roselli was determined to stay involved, even though he was officially on the sidelines.

In an effort to get funding from Robert Kennedy, who had been handed the Cuba issue by his brother, Roselli put together a mafia backed Cuban exile group called the Junta of the Government of Cuba in Exile. CIA agent Bernard Barker, who was also working for Trafficante, helped to spread the word about the new organization among Cuban exiles. But, the group fizzled out in May of 1963 when it was discovered that its leader, Paulino Sierra, had been funded by Johnny Roselli.^[7]  

According to army officer, Bradley Ayers, Roselli was working with Cuban exiles long after Bill Harvey officially told him to let his Cuban contacts taper off. Ayers was sent to South Florida to help the CIA’s JM/WAVE station develop paramilitary capabilities. According to him, Johnny Roselli was right there in the middle of all of the Cuban exiles and CIA officers as they prepared various missions against Castro from the Florida Keys in the Summer and Fall of 1963.^[8]

Ayers knew him as Colonel Roselli and often saw him coming and going from the office of David Morales, as well as driving around the JM/WAVE complex with Gordon Campbell and David Atlee Phillips.^[9] According to the CIA’s office of Public Affairs, Ayers was detailed to work with the CIA from May of 1963 until December of 1964. That means the earliest that Ayers could have seen Roselli would have been after Roselli was supposed to no longer be involved with the exiles.^[10]

Roselli Murder

Years later, when the United States government attempted to deport Johnny Roselli, he asked the CIA for help. But, the agency refused to assist him. At that point, Roselli revealed the plot to kill Castro to columnist Jack Anderson. This led to Roselli being called to testify before the Church Committee, which was looking in to the actions and excesses of intelligence agencies.^[11]

Not long after his June 1976 testimony to the Church Committee, and not long after the June 19^th murder of Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli disappeared, on July 28, 1976. His dismembered body was found inside of a 55 gallon drum, which had risen to the surface as Roselli’s body decomposed in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay.^[12]

An October 24, 1978 Washington Post article suggests that Santos Trafficante may have been responsible for killing Roselli.^[13] The article says QUOTE “Twelve days before his death [Roselli] dined with Trafficante at the fashionable Landings restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is the custom in the mafia to wine and dine a wayward member before he is executed. Underworld informants told police that Roselli was lured aboard a private boat by his executioners. It is also the Mafia’s practice to give murder contracts to friends who the victim trusts.”^[14] Further, Santo Trafficante owned a home at 740 NE 155^th Street in Miami, which is not far from Dumfoundling Bay, where Roselli’s body was found.

Roselli made it clear to Church Committee counsel, Micheal Madigan, that he was afraid for his safety and was taking a major risk by testifying. Madigan noted QUOTE “I cannot recall Roselli saying who he specifically was most afraid of, but he declined to testify about Giancana (until after Giancana’s death), refused to identify any of the Cubans who were involved in the assassination plots, and was reluctant to mention Santos Trafficante by name. In fact, I cannot recall Roselli ever mentioning Trafficante by name….It is also my recollection that Roselli’s demeanor was visibly affected whenever testimony or interview focused or attempted to focus on Santos Trafficante.”^[15]

So, there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting the Trafficante may have killed Roselli, but it is not definitive. Trafficante is also the next mob boss we have on deck.

Santo Trafficante Background

First of all, this guy’s first name is pronounced with or without the S at the end all over the place. After waffling on this for awhile, until someone can persuade me otherwise, I am going with Santos Trafficante because that is what he told the House Select Committee on Assassinations his name was, as noted in the official transcript, from when he testified.^[16]

Santos Trafficante, Jr. was born in Tampa to parents who had migrated from Sicily.^[17] His father, Santos Trafficante, Sr. was the mafia Don in Tampa from the early 1940s until his death from natural causes in 1954. The elder Trafficante showed his son the ropes of the criminal family business. Santos, Jr. helped to create and maintain an international narcotics trafficking network with the Lucchese crime family out of New York.^[18]

In 1946, Trafficante, Sr. sent his son to Cuba to help operate a mafia owned casino. In 1950, both Santos Trafficante, Jr. and Sr. fled to Cuba to avoid being subpoenaed to testify before the Kefauver Committee on organized crime in the Senate. While they were gone two other mobsters, Jimmy Lumia and Charlie Wall, battled for control of Tampa. When the Trafficantes came back to Tampa, they had Lumia killed. Then, after Santos, Jr. survived an attempt on his life from Charlie Wall, the family eliminated Wall in short order, leaving the Trafficante crime family in charge of Tampa, once again.^[19]

When he took over after his father’s death, Santos Jr. became one of the most powerful American mafia bosses, doing business with many other families, and extending his influence to the Bahamas and the Caribbean.^[20] While his reach was global, Trafficante was especially keen on Cuba, which he knew well.

Trafficante in Cuba

In 1955, Trafficante, Jr. moved to Cuba where he met Meyer Lansky. At that time, under the Fulgencio Batista regime, Trafficante had an ownership interest in and helped to operate the Sans Souci Cabaret and seven different Cuban casinos, which included the Havana Hilton.^[21] The reality of operating in Cuba meant that Trafficante needed to have a local criminal infrastructure. Just like mafia schemes anywhere else, there had to be a chain of command with soldiers on the front line doing the dirty work.

For example, according to what an aide to RFK told authors Thom Hartmann and Lamar Waldron, Cuban exile, CIA asset, and Watergate Burglar, Bernard Barker was working for Trafficante before, during, and after his time with the CIA.^[22] This is notable because Barker worked for E. Howard Hunt, and Barker is the person who Dallas police officer, Seymour Weitzman, identified as the Secret Service agent on the grassy knoll.^[23]

As mentioned in Episode 80, CIA asset Tony Verona, was being bribed by Trafficante to ensure gambling, prostitution, and drug monopolies in Cuba if Castro could be ousted. Herminio Diaz Garcia worked for Tony Verona in Cuba. He would go on to become a bodyguard and hitman for Trafficante, while also participating in the CIA/Mafia plots, beginning in 1963.^[24]

As we’ll soon see, Barker, Verona, and Diaz Garcia were just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Cuban exiles working with the CIA who were aligned with Trafficante. There’s also an allegation, which very well may be true, that Jack Ruby met with Santos Trafficante in a Cuban prison. We’ll cover that claim when we revisit the life of Jack Ruby in just a few episodes.

What Trafficante Said Happened

As previously noted in Episode 68, FBI informant and Cuban Exile, Jose Aleman, says that he met with Santos Trafficante in September of 1962 and told him that he thought Kennedy would be re-elected, to which Trafficante responded QUOTE “you don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to get hit.”^[25]

Trafficante appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 and, while he admitted to meeting with Aleman about a Teamster loan proposal, he denied that he said anything about killing President Kennedy.^[26] However, years later, an associate at a law firm would go on to share everything the Tampa Don told the firm about the JFK Assassination.

Daniel Sheehan worked as an associate in the office of attorney F. Lee Bailey, whose name you may remember because he went on to be one of the lawyers for O.J. Simpson. The Harvard educated Sheehan also had an epic legal career, including working on The Pentagon Papers case, and suing the Reagan Bush Administration in a case that led to the discovery of the Iran/Contra scandal.

While Sheehan was working for F. Lee Bailey, he learned that the firm was on Index 4, a list of attorneys cleared by the CIA to defend agency-related clients on sensitive matters.^[27] Sheehan started working for Bailey in the Fall of 1972, a few months after the Watergate burglary.^[28]  Sheehan was brought in to help defend Watergate burglar, James McCord. Right off the bat, Sheehan had some questions. And this is where Trafficante comes in. Here’s Sheehan talking about his representation of McCord on the Julian Dorey show:    

Sheehan: If I’m being asked to participate in this, I need to find out what happened. What in the world are three of these Trafficante gunmen doing in the Watergate hotel? What does that got to do with anything? And I started investigating it and found out that Bailey was the attorney for Santos Trafficante and I said ‘Oh look, Trafficante obviously must know what his guys are doing in there. So lets find out what’s going on.’

So, we have Bad Andy Tooney, who was our chief investigator. He was the head of a thing called Moriarty & Associates. It’s got 40 class A licensed private investigators at our disposal at the Bailey Firm. He goes and sits down. Goes down to Tampa and over in Hank Gonzalez’s office, brings in Trafficante and brings him over to Hank Gonzalez’s house.

Dorey: This is when he’s the Don.

Sheehan: He’s the Don of Havana. He’s up in Tampa cause he’s fled back in January 1959 when Batista was overthrown. So he’s up there. They bring him over to Hank Gonzalez’s house. Bad Andy spends the weekend with him interviewing him in the guest house and gets the story about what’s happened here. And he ends up telling us what’s happened.

And what we discovered is that the reason in fact it had been Nixon himself that had personally ordered them to go into the Watergate hotel, it wasn’t just a brain fart or something on the part of the plumber’s unit. This was actually ordered by Nixon himself. Trafficante is very clear about this that it was ordered by Nixon himself. Because Nixon was terrified that Lawrence O’Brien had just become the new head of the Democratic National Committee that June and was going to be supervising the campaign against Nixon.

Turns out that Larry O’Brien, prior to being made head of the Democratic National Committee was the 20 year chief lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for Howard Hughes. And it turns out that Howard Hughes is the guy back in 1960 when Richard Nixon was the Vice President under Eisenhower and realized that he was going to be the nominee for the Republican Party for the presidential nomination in 1960 against John Kennedy, he reached out and contacted Howard Hughes, who was a secret consultant to the national security council of the Eisenhower/Nixon administration…..^[29]

“…Nixon reached out to him on the secure phone from the 54-12 Committee, which is the section of the National Security Act of 1947 that ostensibly authorizes them to engage in other activities from time to time at the behest of the president. And they deem that as being the source of their authority to engage in covert operations, what they call kinetic action….So, Nixon reached out on the secure phone to talk to Howard Hughes asking him to set up a political assassination team to kill Fidel Castro.”^[30]

 So, according to Sheehan, Trafficante said it was Richard Nixon who ordered the CIA to work with the mafia. Sheehan’s story from Trafficante about the Maheu connected plots largely confirms everything we covered in Episode 80. As already noted, many of the Cubans who were working with the CIA against Castro were on Trafficante’s payroll. One major difference from Trafficante’s account is that he said Sheffield Edwards, the Director of Security for the CIA was present at the Fountainblue Hotel in Miami. The Church Committee report said that Jerry O’Connell, a lower official within the CIA, was the highest ranking government representative.^[31]

The most significant addition to the official Church Committee story is that, after meeting with Sheffield Edwards, Trafficante, who had been operating in Cuba for decades at this point, was given the green light to create what he called the S-Force. Here’s Sheehan talking about how Trafficante put the team together:

Santos Trafficante then picks 15 guys that are his former gunmen from Havana, who have been recruited. He wants to make sure all the guys he recruits into this S-Force he called it, are people that are working with the Central Intelligence Agency now in a thing called Operation 40. Operation 40 was this covert operation that was being mounted out of five paramilitary bases that had been established all through the Southeastern United States: one on Swan Island, one on No Name Key, one in the everglades, and then two of them at Lake Ponchatrain over in Lousiana.

Anyway, and they’re all set up and they’ve got CIA liaison people functioning to them, but they’re made up of a lot of the anti-castro, pro-Batista, right wing Cuban organized crime guys that were working with Trafficante in all the different gambling casinos and houses of prostitution and heroin trafficking they had going through Havana under Batista. So, these guys are all operatives now working with the Central Intelligence Agency in a thing called Operation 40.

Come the election time, after setting all this up in June, they set up a scheme for financing the training of this S Force that they were taking a skim off the casinos, off the two major mob casinos. I think one was the Flamingo and one was the Sands. And they were skimming cash off. And they were putting them in these brand new expensive suitcases and putting them in the trunks of Cadillac automobiles and then driving them down from Las Vegas through New Orleans, where Marcello would do the audit on what the cash was that was coming off the skim. Then, they would pack them back up and take them to Miami and put them in the Miami National Bank of Meyer Lanksy. The bank down there. And what they would do is they would wire some of that money down to a bank account down in Banco International in Mexico City and they would put this cash into this bank account of lawyer by the name of Manuel Aggario.

And they put the money in there and that money was used to finance the training that was taking place of this triangular fire team base that was down in Oaxaca Mexico on the ranch of Clint Murchison, Jr.”^[32]

Sheehan says that Trafficante flat out admitted helping to assemble the assassination team that killed President Kennedy, but Trafficante claims that he did not order the hit:

He said, look, I, Santos Trafficante, am the one who put together the assassination team that killed President Kennedy. But, I didn’t put it together to kill President Kennedy. I did it to kill Fidel Castro. I was first contacted in 1960, when Nixon was the Vice President under Eisenhower. Under Section 54-12 of the National Security Act, the office of the president could engage in covert operations. Nixon led the 54-12 committee of the national security counsel, which coordinates CIA covert operations under section 54-12 of the National Security Act of 1947…”^[33]

So, what does all of this have to do with Watergate and Sheehan’s client, James McCord? The FBI found sequentially numbered hundred dollar bills in the pockets of all of the Watergate burglars. The bills were able to be traced back to the bank account of Manuel Aggario at the Banco International in Mexico City. According to Sheehan, the Watergate burglary was really about Nixon sending in his operatives to bug the phones and plant listening devices at the DNC headquarters because Nixon was worried that Howard Hughes’ old lobbyist, and the new DNC head, Larry O’Brien, knew that Nixon was the one who first reached out to Hughes to work with the Mafia, which, Trafficante says, led to the creation of the assassin team that killed President Kennedy. Nixon was apparently worried that O’Brien would use that against him in the campaign. Here’s Sheehan again:

4 “It turns out that the account at Banco Internationale in Mexico City of Manuel Aggarrio is the same account through which they passed the money that was being taken from the off the 3 casinos in vegas in 1960 and paid to the triangular fire team training base in Oaxaca, Mexico that was owned by Clint Murchison, Jr, where the assassination team was trained by Carl Jenkins, whom I’ve spoken with at length. This is where they were being trained. What it means is that if, in fact, that bank had been investigated by Mark Felt and found out that the money from the burglars in Watergate had come directly from the same account that paid for the assassination base down in Oaxaca, Mexico, that would’ve come out. And that’s what the problem was here.”^[34]

This story that Sheehan lays out, as told to him by Trafficante, is one of intermingling between the mafia, the CIA, and Cuban exiles. There is much more to this story, especially the details around Nixon and the CIA, which we’ll revisit in the future.

We are putting a lot of faith in the word of one man for this story. But, Daniel Sheehan isn’t just some guy. He’s a bona fide legal legend and a man in the arena. I’m not saying that the case has been solved. But, we certainly have to consider Sheehan’s claims. We’ll keep what Sheehan said in mind, and revisit the details of Trafficante’s story as relayed by Sheehan, when we get to the Cuban Exiles.

NEXT TIME ON SOLVING JFK: We wrap up our study of mafia bosses with a look at Carlos Marcello, including alleged links between Marcello and Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marcello’s alleged jailhouse confession.

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roselli

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roselli (Sam Giancana once said of Roselli, QUOTE “He’s perfect for Hollywood. The Screen Actor’s Guild isn’t like the other unions. The others are animals. Out there you have class. And Roselli’s smooth as fuckin silk.”)

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roselli

^[4] Id.

^[5] Id.

^[6] Church Committee Report at 84-85.

^[7] Lamar Waldron, The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, at 205; see also https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/part-1c.html at 133-134.

^[8] Id. at 57.

^[9] Id. (Roselli wasn’t the only Chicago Outfit representative in the Cuban Exile millieu at that time. According to the Miami Herald and United Press International, hit man Charles Nicoletti was also involved in the CIA/Mafia plots. In 1962, a Senate hearing brought to light Nicoletti’s modified vehicle with QUOTE “a hidden compartment behind the front seat that was fitted with brackets to hold shotguns and rifles….” You may recall Nicoletti because he was shot to death on the same day that George de Mohrenschildt was found dead.)

^[10] Bradley Ayers, The Zenith Secret, at Inside Front Cover.  

^[11] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062601467.html

^[12] https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32423624.pdf at 7

^[13] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R000300510010-5.pdf

^[14] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R000300510010-5.pdf

^[15] https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32423624.pdf  at 16

^[16] https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol5/pdf/HSCA_Vol5_0928_1_Traffican.pdf at 346.

^[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_Trafficante_Jr.

^[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficante_crime_family

^[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficante_crime_family

^[20] David Scheim The Mafia Killed President Kennedy, at 58; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficante_crime_family

^[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_Trafficante_Jr.; https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32301903.pdf, at 3

^[22] https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Many_US_Government_Files_about_JFK_and_King_Assassinations_Still_Secret.html ; https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=16413#relPageId=13

^[23] https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Many_US_Government_Files_about_JFK_and_King_Assassinations_Still_Secret.html ; https://www.solvingjfkpodcast.com/post/ep-9-dealey-plaza-part-1

^[24] https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKgarciaH.htm ; Waldron at 233.

^[25] https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=220140#relPageId=164&search=jose_aleman%20FBI%20trafficante

^[26] https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol5/pdf/HSCA_Vol5_0928_1_Traffican.pdf, at 371.

^[27] Danny Sheehan at 2024 JFK Lancer Conference, at 15:29.

^[28] Danny Sheehan on Julian Dorey Show at 1:10 - https://youtu.be/CGzCegE99K0?si=5k96ZWaY5G5E20Nj

^[29] Id. at 12:15.

^[30] Id. at 16:15.

^[31] Id.

^[32] Sheehan 2024 Lancer Conference at 32:43.

^[33] Id.

^[34] Id. at 29:40.