UK-Sunday Press – Part 1 – How the Mafia murdered Marilyn Monroe
Title: UK-Sunday Press 2-23-92 – How the Mafia murdered Marilyn Monroe
Media: UK Sunday Press
Date: 2-23-1992
He was America’s Godfather, and he dreamed of controlling the most powerful office in the land. Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana spent millions and used muscle to help get John F. Kennedy elected President. Then the Kennedys turned against him, and so Kennedy had to be destroyed.
“Double Cross” is the exclusive inside story of the U.S. mobster Sam Giancana, told by his brother and Mob colleague chuck, and nephew Sam. It contains a shocking account of the Mafia’s involvement, together with elements of the CIA, in the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy.
Superstar Marilyn Monroe had long had connections with the Mafia, and she was the lover, first of John, then Bobby Kennedy. But by the summer of 1962 she had become a dangerous liability,, now it is claimed that the CIA ordered her killing, and that Sam Giancana planned to use her murder to trap the Kennedys.
How the Mafia murdered Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe had long been connected to the Outfit (The Mafia). Her first real break had come from a man Sam Giancana and his lieutenant Johnny Roselli knew well – Joe Schenck, the Hollywood producer convicted and imprisoned back in the forties.
Chicago quietly promoted her career and Schenck introduced the buxom beauty to another man Mooney said he often conducted business with, producer Harry Cohn. According to Mooney (“Mooney” was Giancana’s Mafia nickname) both Schenck and Cohn enjoyed Marilyn’s sexual favors in exchange for two-bit parts in films.
From what Chuck cold learn from his brother, in the late fifties and early sixties, Marilyn’s desire to achieve stardom, coupled with her childlike desire to please, was exploited by the Outfit and CIA, as well: her sexual charms were exploited by the CIA to frame world leaders –among them, President Sukarno of Indonesia. Mooney insisted that using Monroe as bait, the CIA successfully compromised leaders from Asia to the Middle East.
Throughout 1962, part-time Outfit-CIA operative Bernie Spindel’s wiretaps had recorded the lovemaking of Jack Kennedy. According to Mooney, he had all of Kennedy’s playthings – among them Judy Campbell and socialite Mary Meyer, as well as actresses Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe – under surveillance. Sometime that spring, Mooney said he’d learned that J. Edgar Hoover had confronted the President with FBI reports of the affair with Campbell and thanks to that, Judy’s effectiveness had waned. However, he also knew that Marilyn and the President had been connected romantically since the Democratic National Convention – and that in March 1962, Bobby Kennedy had become involved with her, as well. Marilyn, the orphan child of a dozen foster homes, now passed from one Kennedy to the other. And, she told friends over her tapped phones, she believed she was falling in love with the attorney general.
THE KILLERS WAITED FOR THE COVER OF DARNESS AND, SOMETIME BEFORE MIDNIGHT, ENTERED MARILYN’S HOME. SHE STRUGGLED AT FIRST, IT WAS SAID, BUT, ALREADY DRUGGED BY THE INJECTED SEDATIVE, THEIR RUBBER-GLOVED HANDS EASILY FORCED HER BODY TO THE BED.
The timing was perfect for Mooney. While Bobby and Jack were hurriedly severing their ties to their benefactors, they continued to believe that they…
By June of 1962, Marilyn’s film career was losing momentum; she’d become unreliable and deeply troubled. Early in that summer, Mooney told Chuck he’d had people working on Marilyn’s surveillance and in so doing had received a wealth of information about he starlet’s habits, her emotional state, and stormy love life. From what he’d learned, Mooney believed Marilyn’s use to Chicago and the CIA was dwindling.
Later, Chuck would surmise that Marilyn Monroe’s knowledge of CIA-Outfit collaborative efforts coupled with her increasingly severe emotional instability had become a dangerous combination. And that by July, thanks to a failing relationship with Bobby Kennedy, she had become not only expendable but – when Mooney received reports of her threats to Bobby Kennedy to “blow the lid of the whole damn thing: – a frightening liability, as well.
According to guys in the Outfit, it was at this time that the CIA, fearful of exposure by the vengeful, drug-addicted Monroe, requested that Mooney have her eliminated. And Mooney, smelling blood, seized on the CIA contract as a way to achieve another objective, as well. By murdering Monroe, it might be possible to depose the rulers of Camelot.
One week before her death, a distraught Marilyn Monroe flew in to Lake Tahoe’s Cal-Neva Lodge. Unbeknown to her, Mooney had orchestrated the invitation. Among the guests that weekend was a man Mooney jokingly referred to as “Peter the Rabbit” Lawford.
At dinner that evening, Mooney and Lawford watched as Marilyn drank herself into near oblivion, pouring out her hear to an uncharacteristically sympathetic Mooney Giancana. She sobbed to Mooney that Bobby Kennedy had refused her phone calls – she’d even tried to reach him at his home in Virginia, something that sent the attorney general, recently hailed nationally as “Family Man of the Year”, into a towering rage. She was obviously crushed by the possibility that she was, as she put it, “nothing more than a piece of meat” to the two brothers.
One week later, Marilyn Monroe lay dead. It was all over the news that she’d committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates – a tragic end to an already tragic life. But Chuck heard another, more sinister story circulate among the Outfit guys who frequented the Thunderbolt lounge.
The week following Mooney’s tryst with Marilyn Monroe at the Cal-Neva Lodge, Chuckie Nicoletti told Chuck that Mooney had received word from the CIA that Bobby would be in California on the weekend of August 4. That was what Nicoletti said Mooney had been waiting for. Mooney immediately flew to Palm Springs, California – ostensibly to attend a party. But in truth, Chuck imagined his brother just wanted to be nearby when it happened, that Mooney hoped to see Bobby Kennedy’s face for himself when the nation’s attorney general was implicated in the suicide of Marilyn Monroe.
Mooney had selected a trusted assassin, Needles Gianola, to coordinate the job. Needles, in turn, brought his sidekick, Mugsy Tortorella, on board and two other professional killers – on from Kansas City and one from Detroit. The four men had gone to California under Mooney’s orders, to murder Marilyn Monroe.
Eavesdropping nearby, where the electronic surveillance equipment had been set up by Bernie Spindel, the killers patiently waited for the attorney general to arrive.
Bobby Kennedy finally did appear at Marilyn’s home, late on Saturday, accompanied by another man. Listening in on the conversation, Mooney’s men ascertained that Marilyn was more than a little angry at Bobby. She became agitated – hysterical, in fact – and in response, they heard Kennedy instruct the man with him, evidently a doctor, to give her a shot to “calm her down”. Shortly thereafter, the attorney general and the doctor left.
The killers waited for the cover of darkness and, sometime before midnight, entered Marilyn’s home. She struggled at first, it was said, but already drugged by the injected sedative, thanks to Bobby’s doctor friend, their rubber-gloved hands easily forced her nude body to the bed. Calmly, and with all the efficiency of a team of surgeons, they taped her mouth shut and proceeded to insert a specially “doctored” Nembutal suppository. Then they waited.
The suppository, which Nicoletti said had been prepared by the same Chicago chemist who concocted the numerous chemical potions for the Castro hit, had been a brilliant choice.
Marilyn’s murder and how Bobby covered it up
A lethal dosage of sedatives administered orally, and by force, would have been too risky, causing suspicious bruising during a likely struggle, as well as vomiting – a side effect that typically resulted from ingesting the huge quantities necessary to guarantee death. Using a suppository would eliminate any hope of reviving Marilyn, should she be found, since the medication was quickly absorbed directly into the bloodstream. There’d be nothing in the stomach to pump out. Additionally, a suppository was as fast-acting as an injection but left no needle mark for a pathologist to discover. In short, it was the perfect weapon with which to kill Marilyn Monroe.
Indeed, within moments of insertion, the suppository’s massive combination of barbiturates and chloryl hydrates quickly entered her bloodstream, rendering her totally unconscious. The men carefully removed the tape, whipped her mouth clean, and placed her across the bed. Their job completed, they left as quietly as they had come.
It was at this point that Mooney had hoped “Act Two” of the drama would begin – that next, Bobby Kennedy’s affair with the distraught, loved-scorned starlet would be exposed. But what Mooney hadn’t counted on were the lengths Bobby Kennedy would go to cover up the affair. Nor could Mooney assist in the attorney general’s exposure by providing damning evidence of a compromising relationship with the starlet, due to the risk such an act posed to his own clandestine affairs with the CIA.
Nevertheless, Mooney had expected that hordes of police would be called in – Monroe’s neighbors and housekeeper questioned, her home searched, and the scandalous discovery made that Bobby Kennedy had been there just hours earlier. In the wake of the investigation it might also be suspected that the attorney general, along with a confederate, had administered a lethal dose of sedatives into Marilyn Monroe’s bloodstream. That, to Mooney, would have been the ultimate victory. But that was not to be.
Instead, the killers listened over their wiretaps in the hours following the murder as a series of phone calls alerted Bobby Kennedy to Marilyn’s death and ultimately mobilized a team of FBI agents to avert the impending disaster that Mooney had anticipated would follow.
