US – Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Organized Crime and National Politics
Title: Organized Crime and National Politics
Newspaper: The Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: April 5, 1992
By Deloris Tarzan Ament
Whatever suspicions you may have harbored about the roll of organized crime in American politics, they weren’t dark enough, if you believe Sam and Chuck Giancana, godson and brother of the late Chicago mob boss Sam “Mooney” Giancana.
Before Mooney was executed mob-style in 1975, his brother was his sometimes confidant. In their book, Chuck and the namesake godson reveal Mooney’s version of events ranging from the Bay of Pigs to the death of Marilyn Monroe.
Severely abused as a child, Mooney graduated from abusing his own younger siblings to rule by terror over organized crime – eventually over national politics. Among Giancana’s contentions:
- The CIA and organized crime worked closely together as to be sides of the same coin.
- President Kennedy’s assassination was a coup d’etat by the mob and CIA, paid by “wealthy, right-wing Texas oilmen” in conspiracy with Lyndon Johnson and “the Bay of Pigs Action Officer under Eisenhower, Richard Nixon.” In this scenario, Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent with ties to the New Orleans mafia; Jack Ruby, also long connected to organized crime, eliminated Oswald to cover the plot.
- Bobby Kennedy was killed in retaliation for his crackdown on organized crime and to settle a score with the Kennedy’s. Assassin Sirhan Sirhan owned the mob money.
- Marilyn Monroe was killed with a specially doctored Nembutal suppository. From her liaison with JFK and Bobby, she knew too much about mob-CIA connections; depressed by her failing relationship with Bobby, she threatened to “blow the lid off this whole damn thing.” The suppository was fast-acting, left no marks and nothing in her stomach that could be pumped out.
The Giancanas say the mob orchestrated JFK’s narrow victory of Nixon after Mooney made a deal with Joe Kennedy: in return for getting his son elected, the elder Kennedy promised Mooney would have his ear in the White House. JFK failed to live up to the pact, and especially enraged Mooney by refusing to throw American military weight behind the mob-CIA orchestrated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which was intended to restore the mob’s lucrative gambling operations there.
JFK was sufficiently rich that bribes couldn’t touch him; his weakness was women. The Giancanas say Mooney used Frank Sinatra to set up liaisons for JFK with a series of women in a Nevada casino suite, where all was filmed and recorded for possible blackmail. In the end, Mooney deemed blackmail too weak a weapon.
“The hit in Dallas was just like any other hit we’d worked on in the past,” Mooney is quoted as saying. “We’d overthrown other governments in other countries plenty of times before. This time we just did in in our own backyards.”
The book’s closing is chilling.
“There are some men… if we are to believe Mooney’s tales of Mafia-CIA counterintelligence activities, who’ve prospered and remained free,” the Giancanas write. “Amassing incredible power from careers deeply rooted in the CIA, these men have reached America’s loftiest position of authority, from which they continue to influence world events.”
