KIRKUS REVIEW
A pulpy, precisely rendered account of the CIA’s
dalliance with organized crime in pursuit of Fidel Castro.
Former Newsday investigative reporter
Maier (When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, 2014, etc.) provides
fresh eyes and an urgent tone in this unsettling narrative. “Historically,” he
writes, “the CIA’s murder plot against Castro marked America’s first foray into
the assassination business….
The tradition of gentlemen spies engaged in gathering
intelligence…had now transformed into the killing games of covert operations,
carried out by gangsters and other CIA surrogates.” The author makes his
rendition of an oft-referenced tale compelling by focusing on statements by key
figures who fought to preserve their secrecy. Maier credits “recently
declassified files about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy”
for this verisimilitude.
The labyrinthine narrative veers from Castro’s 1959
revolution to Watergate and the 1975 Church Committee investigation of the
intelligence agencies. Essentially, CIA go-between Robert Maheu approached
Mafia members Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli to pursue assassination plots
against Castro.
Other CIA officers helped Roselli set up a formidable network of
training camps for Cuban exiles in Florida, but their plans were disrupted
following the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis. Roselli and
others defied Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s ban on further covert action,
continuing to scheme assassination plans and commit speedboat raids. Maier
focuses on the dramatic personalities of Giancana, the brutal head of Chicago’s
Outfit, and Roselli, a suave Hollywood “fixer” who claimed to have taken the
CIA’s assignment out of patriotic fervor.
The gangsters’ friendship with the
Rat Pack provided a back-channel and electoral assistance to JFK, and their
disappointment with his presidency would fuel conspiracy theories after his
assassination, though Roselli hinted at connections to a vengeful Castro instead.
Maier’s writing is approachable (if occasionally repetitive), almost breezy,
despite the dark undertones and the violence surrounding Giancana and Roselli,
both of whom were murdered in the mid-1970s.
As he has done before, Maier offers another deft translation
of murky American history, focused on dynamic, improbable protagonists.
Chicago’s ‘Mafia Spies,’ CIA Castro plot detailed in
book by ex-Sun-Times writer
Chicago Outfit boss Sam Giancana (center,
foreground) and his mob pal Johnny Roselli were recruited by the CIA during the
Cold War to kill Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro. | Skyhorse Publishing
By Thomas Maier
During the Cold War, Chicago’s top gangster Sam
Giancana and his mob pal Johnny Roselli were recruited by the CIA to kill
Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro — a plan that remained hidden from the public for
more than a decade. New details about this plot were revealed by the National
Archives when President Donald Trump ordered long-suppressed JFK assassination
documents released. But back in 1960, law enforcement had little idea of what
these two outlaw spies were up to with America’s spy agency.
This is the first of three parts excerpted from the
new book “Mafia Spies: The Inside Story of the CIA, Gangsters, JFK and
Castro” (Skyhorse Publishing, $25.99) by Thomas Maier, a former
Sun-Times reporter whose other books include “Masters of Sex,” which was made into a Showtime TV
series.
After several months, “Little Al” — named for Al
Capone — proved more valuable than a thousand spies.
The hidden microphone, planted illegally in the
downtown Chicago headquarters of Sam Giancana’s Outfit, yielded a wealth of
information for the FBI. More than any snitch, “Little Al” opened the eyes of
FBI chieftain J. Edgar Hoover to the Mafia’s widespread criminality around the
country in the early 1960s.
One recorded conversation between mob boss Giancana
and his senior consigliereTony Accardo seemed like an encyclopedia of La
Cosa Nostra. Sam explained what happened at a recent national commission
meeting, identifying all the regional dons and their brewing vice.
“It is difficult to understand just how excited we
were when we taped this conversation and then played it back, word for word,
many times in order to gain the full impact of what was discussed,” recalled
William Roemer, a top Chicago agent on the FBI’s aptly named Top Hoodlum Squad.
“Little Al” was so successful that the FBI finally
decided to go ahead and install a second bug in Giancana’s suburban hangout the
Armory Lounge, a Forest Park bar and grill with a giant neon, flashing sign in
front.
The federal government’s initial constitutional
worries about illegal eavesdropping now gave way to more practical concerns.
Chicago FBI agents fretted over how to place a hidden microphone in the Armory
without getting caught. Most patrons were Giancana’s gangland associates. They
knew the awful penalty for talking to the feds.
With fellow hoodlums, Sam insisted on omerta, the
Mafia’s code of silence, and the vital importance of keeping their eyes open
and lips sealed. “You see that f—ing fish?” Giancana once barked at a nosy
associate, calling attention to a swordfish trophy hanging from the wall. “If
he’d kept his mouth shut he wouldn’t have got caught.”
Giancana’s mob hideaway, not far from his home in
Oak Park, was more isolated and protected than the Outfit’s downtown
headquarters. Though miles from the South Side slaughterhouses — and pungent
odors that gave Chicago its title “hog butcher for the world” — this “command
post” had a gritty, industrial park appearance that compounded the grayness of
winters and made sunny places like Vegas, Miami and Havana so appealing.
While the Armory Lounge was used to greet visiting
hoodlums and friendly entertainers like Frank Sinatra, it also could be a
fortress of paranoia. Through a window, Sam sometimes peered with binoculars at
the empty parking across the street owned by the U.S. Navy. He kept staring
ahead, hoping to catch in the shadows some spy watching him. FBI records show
Giancana “apparently feels this lot is being used continually for surveillance
purposes of his activities.”
Eventually, federal agents came up with a
masterstroke of deception. They confronted the Lounge’s night janitor with an
FBI “wanted” poster of a suspect that looked vaguely like him. The G-men asked
the janitor to come down to headquarters to clear up the matter. The janitor
reluctantly agreed.
Arriving downtown, the agents asked the janitor to
empty his pockets before going off to another room to be fingerprinted. Over
the next several minutes, while the janitor was rolling each inky finger onto a
print card, an expert locksmith secretly made a copy of the Armory Lounge keys.
Soon after, in the wee hours before dawn, the FBI
entered the Armory Lounge. They placed a large, pineapple-shaped microphone
behind a wall where Giancana kept an office. Then the agents strung a
connecting wire down a wall to the basement and eventually outside, where a
signal would be transmitted to the FBI.
The new listening device, nicknamed “Mo” for the
Lounge’s most prominent habitué, helped Roemer and the FBI sleuths learn of
another startling and previously unknown mystery.
Along with conversations about the Mafia’s national
commission and deals with corrupt local politicians, the FBI heard Giancana
discussing plans to kill Fidel Castro.
Hoover and his G-men had no idea of the CIA’s
top-secret assassination plan featuring the two Mafia hoodlums in prominent
roles. Details from the listening devices, however, connected the dots to this
puzzle for the FBI agents. As Roemer recalled, “Very soon we learned why Sam
had been so knowledgeable about Cuba.”
On Oct. 18, 1960, Hoover alerted the CIA. His memo
claimed Giancana knew all about a murder plan against a foreign leader, Fidel
Castro. On its face, the claim seemed outlandish and, if successful, sure to
cause an international incident.The FBI director based his report on “a source
close to Giancana.” Hoover didn’t reveal to the CIA whether his source was a
hidden microphone like “Little Al” or some secret informant.
But FBI records, released publicly decades later,
show the first tip about the Castro murder plot apparently came from John W.
Teeter, a businessman then married to Christine McGuire, part of the
then-famous singing trio the McGuire Sisters. A few months earlier, Christine’s
sister, Phyllis McGuire, had begun dating the grizzled but charismatic Giancana
— an affair that made headlines around the world as if it were a modern-day
“Beauty and the Beast” tale.
Privately, Teeter approached the bureau in July 1960
about the family’s deep concerns that Phyllis had fallen under the sway of a
gangster and couldn’t be talked out of the troubling relationship.
Teeter “remarked that Phyllis McGuire is a
headstrong know-it-all type who is unable to be controlled in situations such
as this” and is receptive to Sam’s money and very expensive gifts, an FBI memo
described. Apparently Phyllis had no idea of her brother-in-law’s cry for help
to the fed.
Two months later, the stakes intensified. Teeter
alerted the FBI that Giancana had shared details about a Castro assassination
plot during dinner together in New York City. The McGuire Sisters were in town
on business. The two couples — Sam and Phyllis, sister Christine and her
husband John Teeter — gathered at an Italian restaurant. When the leisurely
conversation turned to Cuba, Sam declared he had some inside information. At
first, Phyllis and Christine expressed doubts, especially when Sam confidently
claimed Castro would “be done away with very shortly.”
Giancana wasn’t deterred. As waiters and other
customers swirled around them, he spelled out the killing scheme being launched
in Florida. Stunningly to Teeter’s ears, Sam used the term “assassin.”
According to Giancana, he met with the
would-be-assassin on three occasions. The last took place on a boat docked
outside the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Sam boasted that “everything
had been perfected for the killing.” Under the plan, the unknown assassin had
arranged with a mystery “girl” to drop a poison pill into Castro’s food or
drink.
Acting on this tip, Hoover’s warning to the CIA
appeared urgent because Giancana “assured those present” that the Castro
killing would take place in November 1960 — a few weeks away.
The bureau took swift action. Records show Hoover
directed FBI agents to report immediately if Giancana flew to Miami, to monitor
his long-distance calls and see whether he met with any “anti-Castro elements.”
Hoover also instructed agents in Florida to find out the “identity of the
person who allegedly met with Giancana at a boat docked at Fontainebleau
Hotel.”
To protect Teeter’s identity, the FBI instructed
undercover agents to be “discreet so as not to jeopardize New York source.”
When conducting surveillance, Teeter warned, agents should remember that all three
McGuire Sisters could “read lips from any distance” and were “expert” at it.
Who did Giancana have in mind in referring to
Castro’s “assassin?” Congressional investigators later suggested Richard Cain,
the corrupt former Chicago cop under Sam’s control, was working at that time
with “a mistress of Castro to accomplish the deed.” The unsuccessful Cain
assassination plan was an independent Mafia enterprise, the investigators
concluded, not the CIA’s pending conspiracy.
Unaware of the CIA’s involvement with the Mafia,
Hoover dispatched his October 1960 memo to America’s top spy agency. He
repeated Giancana’s boast that Castro was “to be done away with very shortly.”
Hoover’s missive landed with a proverbial thud on
the desk of Richard Bissell, the second-in-command at CIA to director Allen
Dulles. The overseer of the agency’s anti-Castro campaign had no intention of
stopping, regardless of the FBI director’s warning.
“Hoover’s rivalry with the CIA was one of long
standing,” observed CIA historian Thomas Powers. “This [memo] should have given
Bissell pause, but he went ahead with the plan anyway, a fact which ought to be
taken as tacit confirmation of the pressure Bissell felt to ‘get rid of
Castro.’ ”
Years later, Bissell’s recollection was murky. But
Bissell admitted he did share Hoover’s warning memo with Shef Edward, the CIA’s
head of security. “I am sure I referred it to Mr. Edwards who was the
individual in the Agency directly in charge of that liaison with Giancana,”
Bissell testified, “and I probably asked Mr. Edwards whether this represented a
threat to the security of the whole relationship.”
Little exists in declassified documents about the
CIA’s reaction to Hoover’s warning. Apparently there was never a formal
response to the FBI chief.
In reality, the spy agency didn’t want to draw
attention to its ongoing use of Giancana and his Mafia pal Johnny Roselli as
“patriotic assassins” in the covert war against Castro.
The Author Thomas Maier in Cuba
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