eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The first-ever full account of Nixon's extensive ties to the American Mafia, from a veteran White House reporter.
Unbeknownst to most people even now, the election of 1968 placed the patron saint of the Mafia in the White House. In other words, Richard Nixon would go on to not only lead a criminal presidency; he would be totally indebted to our nation’s top mobsters.
By 1969, thanks in large part to his long-time campaign manager and political advisor Murray Chotiner, a lawyer who specialized in representing mobsters, Nixon had participated in secret criminal dealings for more than 20 years with sketchy figures such as Mickey Cohen, Mob financial guru Meyer Lansky, Teamsters union chief Jimmy Hoffa, and New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. And with Chotiner as one of his key behind-the-scenes advisors in the White House, Nixon's ties to the Mafia didn't end there. The Mafia’s President reveals a mind-blowing litany of favors Nixon exchanged with these sinister characters over decades, ranging from springing Jimmy Hoffa from prison to banning the federal government from using the terms “Mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra.”
Drawing on newly released government tapes, documents, and other fresh information, The Mafia’s President by Don Fulsom offers a carefully reported, deeply researched account of Richard Nixon’s secret connections to America’s top crime lords.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250119414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/14/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 305 |
| Sales rank: | 538,632 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Mob in the Age of Nixon
Unbeknownst to most people even now, the election of 1968 placed the patron saint of the Mafia in the White House. Richard Nixon would not only go on to lead a criminal presidency, but he would be totally indebted to our nation's most murderous gang lords. Without massive contributions from his Syndicate sponsors, Republican Richard Nixon might not have edged out Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
How much Mafia money financed Nixon's 1968 bid? Estimates range from $400,000 to $2 million — much of it under the table and unreported. (Official post-election reports put Nixon's total spending at $25 million in 1968 dollars; Humphrey's at $5 million.)
The Mafia has been one of the most widely known, feared, and influential criminal groups for much of American history. La Cosa Nostra, meaning "this thing of ours," was the American offshoot of the Italian Mafia and became the main target of the FBI by the latter half of the twentieth century. La Cosa Nostra was powerful and prosperous, to say the least, as the various families combined brought in billions of dollars a year.
While moneymaking is its main goal, the Mafia has always had a flair for political corruption, from which the FBI was not immune. In 2002, it came to light that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, from 1965 on, sanctioned the hiring of Mafia-connected criminals as informants while protecting them from prosecution, even in cases of murder. This was all in the name of bringing down the Mafia, as Hoover was perhaps overcompensating for ignoring its existence for so long. Yet it mostly resulted in murderers escaping prosecution and innocent men going to jail for their crimes.
Hoover's crusade against the Mafia was weak at best, but Richard Nixon treated the organization as if it were the fourth branch of government. While Hoover might have succumbed to the power of the Mafia, Nixon courted and pampered the crime machine. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Mafia developed its political tastes. It is now known that the CIA involved the Mafia in failed attempts to assassinate the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro during his early years in power. Vice President Nixon initiated and supervised the Castro assassination plots. In addition, historians now suspect that key Mafia-connected players were involved in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The mere existence of Mafia-plot conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's murder — whether accurate or not — points to the amount of actual and perceived power of organized crime at the time.
As Nixon accumulated political value during his vice presidency in the 1950s, Americans were becoming more aware of the Mafia's overwhelming influence. Senate Resolution 202 funded the Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce — known to the public as the Kefauver Committee. The panel's chairman was Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat. Starting in 1951 and lasting over one year, the Kefauver Committee traveled to at least 14 major U.S. cities to conduct interviews with hundreds of witnesses about organized crime.
In March 1951, the Kefauver Committee televised some of its hearings, and a record 30 million Americans tuned in to watch. The live coverage ensured that the committee's investigations on the Mafia became common knowledge among Americans. The committee interviewed important Mafia men, like Frank Costello, a notorious New York Mob boss. To the public, Costello epitomized the American gangster, so to see the U.S. government go after him was quite significant in the history of U.S.-Mafia relations.
While the legislative outcomes of the Kefauver Committee were mostly cursory, the cultural effects were easily seen. Americans became much more concerned about the shady connections between their elected representatives and organized crime; the hearings illustrated just how many officials had helped or even profited from Mafia activities.
The Kefauver Committee's final report in 1951 stressed that the Syndicate had greatly transformed itself since Prohibition:
Where smaller local crime groups once specialized in bootlegging, bookmaking, prostitution or drug dealing, [today's] groups are multipurpose in character, engaging in any racket where there is money to be made. The Mafia ... has an important part in binding together into a loose association the ... major criminal ... gangs and individual hoodlums throughout the country.
Chillingly, the committee concluded that Mafia domination was based fundamentally on "muscle" and "murder. [It] ... will ruthlessly eliminate anyone who stands in the way of its success."
As Nixon was preparing for his first run for the presidency in 1960, a Senate committee called the Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management — in short, the McClellan Committee — examined Mafia-union connections from 1957 through the early 1960s. Somewhat ironically, Nixon's political rivals, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert (Bobby), the committee's chief counsel, did much of the questioning.
Bobby was especially relentless in grilling mobsters and union bosses as the brothers exposed sinister ties between the Mafia and certain American labor organizations. As Boston Globe reporters Bryan Bender and Neil Swidey observed: "[Bobby's] chief nemesis during these hearings was Jimmy Hoffa, the squat bull-faced leader of the Teamsters union. Bobby accused Hoffa of funneling millions in worker pension funds into a money-laundering scheme with Mob leaders. That alliance bought the Teamster leader muscle to silence his enemies and scare corporate leaders into submission."
The McClellan hearings are also often referred to as the Valachi hearings. Joseph Valachi was a low-ranking member of the Genovese crime family of New York, and he became the first Mafia member to testify for the U.S. government.
Valachi's often-sensational six days of televised revelations proved addictive entertainment for the American public. The mobster's most memorable moment in the witness chair was his discussion of La Cosa Nostra's initiation ceremony:
Then they called us [new recruits] one at a time ... there was a gun and a knife on the table ... I repeated some words they told me ... He [Salvatore Maranzano] went on to explain that they lived by the gun and by the knife and you die by the gun and the knife ... that is what the rules were, of Cosa Nostra ... then he gave me a piece of paper, and I was to burn it ... that is the way I burn if I expose this organization.
When he was through testifying, Valachi was granted special privileges and continued special protection within the prison system. He also had a $100,000 gangland price on his head. Attorney General Robert Kennedy praised the Valachi hearings and said they would give him added ammunition in his crusade to dismantle the Mob.
Mainly through the efforts of Bobby Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa was eventually locked up for jury tampering and fraud. But that didn't keep President Richard Nixon from granting clemency to the notorious union boss in 1971 — due to a massive Teamsters-Mob payoff in exchange for Hoffa's freedom.
While both the Kefauver and McClellan Committees were instrumental in defining the organized crime problem in the United States, they did little to weaken the Mafia's power and influence. The Senate committees made their wary conclusions surrounding the Mafia, but that didn't prevent La Cosa Nostra's favorite politician from seizing the White House.
An FBI agent investigating widespread Teamsters-Mafia deals told Jack Nelson and Bill Hazlett of the Los Angeles Times in 1973, "This whole thing of the Teamsters and the Mob and the White House is one of the scariest things I've ever seen."
When Richard Nixon became president, organized crime was raking in at least $70 billion a year. And the $1 billion Teamsters Central States Pension Fund was considered the prime source of working capital for the Mob. The Oakland Tribune said the fund was the "bankroll for some of America's most sinister underworld figures."
Nixon's longtime favors-for-money partnership with the Mafia hit its zenith during his presidency, and the godfathers ascended to their greatest era of power and profits.
CHAPTER 2
The Nixon-Mafia Relationship
At the height of the Nixon-Mafia relationship, the blood-drenched Mob "enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and capital acquisition, drawing an annual income of $100 billion and gaining control of 50,000 U.S. firms. Especially significant was its major penetration of banking and finance, resulting in a rash of U.S. bank failures ... and the estimated loss of $50 billion in stolen U.S. securities by 1973."
Mob bosses had venerated Nixon for decades. He had been on the take from organized crime since his first run for Congress. His earliest campaign manager and political adviser was Murray Chotiner, a chubby lawyer who specialized in representing hoods — and who enjoyed dressing like them too. His wardrobe featured monogrammed white-on-white dress shirts with garish cuff links, and silk ties with jeweled stickpins.
Chotiner befriended a "Who's Who" of American mobsters — including the top boss in Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen. In 1946, thanks to Chotiner, Nixon held a hush-hush meeting with Cohenbehind a screened-in booth at Goodfellow's Fisherman's Grotto in L.A. Cohen later said that Nixon "was just starting to get his foot in the door, and Orange County, where he was from, was important to my bookmaking program."
In the cigar-chomping, wheeling-and-dealing Chotiner, Nixon had also found a below-the-belt political fighter — what Nixon White House aide Len Garment later called "his Machiavelli, a hardheaded exponent of the campaign philosophy that politics is war."
For over two decades before he became president, Nixon engaged in criminal dealings with some of the most notorious Mafia-connected men of the time, namely the aforementioned Cohen, mob finance man Meyer Lansky, Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, and even godfathers Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and Sam Giancana. Nixon's closest pal, Bebe Rebozo, was linked at the hip with top Mob figures. So it was no surprise that Nixon kept Chotiner as a secret adviser once he ascended to the White House.
Richard Nixon's close relationship with Murray Chotiner was always beneficial. In 1946, Nixon undertook his first political campaign, running as the anti-Communist candidate when he won a seat for the twelfth district in the California House of Representatives. This was in large part thanks to Chotiner, who was able to convince Mickey Cohen to contribute $5,000 to Nixon.
Then in 1950, again due to Chotiner, Cohen raised $75,000 at a Los Angeles event for Nixon, which would help the politician defeat Democratic representative Helen Gahagan Douglas in the race for the U.S. Senate. Later recounting the event, Cohen said that "everyone from around here that was on the pad naturally had to go ... it was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money. There wasn't a legitimate person in the room." According to Cohen, Nixon was present to address the shady crowd when Cohen announced that the exits would be closed until the full amount was raised. The quota was quickly met with major stacks of cash — and Mickey's cronies allowed the exit doors to be reopened.
Also in 1950, the generous gangster rented and personally supervised a campaign headquarters for Nixon in the Pacific Finance building at Eighth and Olive Streets in L.A. To quote Cohen: "We posted Nixon signs and literature, and I paid for the headquarters for three or four weeks in that building. During the period when I ran this Nixon headquarters, I contacted most of the gambling fraternity in Los Angeles County to tell them what their share of the contributions to the Nixon campaign would be."
Though, to be fair, Nixon's Senate victory over Douglas can also be blamed on Nixon's own nefarious tactics, as he painted Douglas as "pink right down to her underwear," implying that she was a Communist sympathizer.
Yet, amid all of this support, Cohen apparently had little respect for Nixon. Just before the 1968 presidential election, the then-imprisoned Mob boss sent journalist Jack Anderson a signed letter stating that Nixon was directly connected to the Mafia. Unfortunately, according to Anderson biographer Mark Feldstein, when that column was published, it was "largely dismissed ... and lost amid the end-of-the-campaign hoopla." In a subsequent letter to Anderson, after Nixon's election to the presidency, Cohen voiced his hope that there was a new Nixon:
In my wildest dreams [never] could I ever have visualized or imagined 17 or 18 years ago that the likes of Richard Nixon could possibly become the President of the United States. ... Let's hope that he isn't the same guy that I knew — a rough hustler [when he was] a goddamn small-time ward politician. Let's hope this guy's thinking has changed, and let's hope it's for the betterment of our country.
This is a sobering letter about the character of a president, considering it's from a man who controlled the Mafia's drug and gambling operations in California and who was subsequently arrested over 30 times — once for murder. Cohen also admitted that "the proper persons from back east," meaning Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, were the ones who pressured him to support Nixon.
Why would Meyer Lansky become a big fan of Richard Nixon? Senate crime investigator Walter Sheridan offered this opinion: "If you were Meyer, who would you invest your money in? Some politician named Clams Linguini? Or a nice Protestant boy from Whittier, California?"
In the 1950 race for the Senate, Nixon didn't confine his attacks on Helen Gahagan Douglas to his speeches. He put out an array of campaign pamphlets, the most famous of which — printed on pink paper — became known as the "Pink Sheet." It compared Nixon's votes (and those of left-wing Congressman Vito Marcantonio) on foreign affairs with those of Representative Douglas to prove that she was "soft on Communism." And to capture the latent anti-Semitic vote, a whispering campaign harped on the fact that her husband, actor Melvyn Douglas, was Jewish.
Though not a member of La Cosa Nostra, Lansky, Jewish himself, was the Mafia's financial genius. Known as the "Little Man" because he was barely five feet tall, Lansky developed Cuba for the Mob during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, when Havana was known as the "Latin Las Vegas." Under its towering palms, gambling and prostitution, as well as the illicit drug trade, netted the U.S. Syndicate at least $100 million a year — even after generous payoffs to Batista.
Meyer Lansky had a rare reputation of being an honest gambler. In his opinion, it was unnecessary to fix any casino tables in order to make money. As a result, in the mid-1950s, Batista gave Lansky unofficial discretion over the gambling scene in Havana. Lansky took his newfound power to heart and ordered the casino operators in Havana to "clean up, or get out." In return for the position, Lansky reportedly paid the Cuban dictator large sums of money quite frequently. Lansky associate Joseph Varon once said, "I know every time Meyer went to Cuba he would bring a briefcase with at least $100,000 [for Batista]. So Batista welcomed him with open arms, and the two men really developed such affection for each other. Batista really loved him. I guess I'd love him too if he gave me $100,000 every time I saw him."
Lansky did have his problems with the law elsewhere: to escape U.S. tax evasion charges, he fled to Israel in 1970. But in 1972, Israel sent him back to the United States. And, according to Lansky biographer Hank Messick, Meyer purposely timed his return to assist the re-election of his longtime secret partner in crime, President Richard Nixon:
So the wandering Jew of 1972 turned his back on the graves of his grandparents and flew across four continents to arrive in the land of the goyim some forty minutes before the polls opened on Election Day. And, eerily, the landslide he predicted so confidently [on his arrival in the States] came to pass and headlines proclaimed FOUR MORE YEARS.
After all, Lansky's devotion to Nixon — and vice versa — went way back: they'd become friends in Havana in the 1940s, where the mob boss gave Nixon free hotel accommodations. Meyer was also the first major criminal figure to recognize Nixon's crookedness and to start green-lighting tainted underworld cash in quid pro quo deals with the rookie California politician in 1946, and continued to do so in future Nixon campaigns.
In 1974, Lansky was acquitted of the tax charges and went on to lead a quiet, rather middle-class retirement (for a Mob boss the FBI believed had squirreled away a fortune) in Miami Beach. A many-pack-a-day smoker, Meyer Lansky died of lung cancer at the age of 80 in 1983.
But in his life, the Little Man saw to it that his friends were generous to Fulgencio Batista too. In February 1955, Vice President Richard Nixon traveled to Havana to embrace Batista at his lavish private palace, praise "the competence and stability" of his regime, award him a medal of honor, and compare him with Abraham Lincoln. He even hailed Batista's Cuba as a land that "shares with us the same democratic ideals of peace, freedom and the dignity of man."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Mafia's President"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Don Fulsom.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. The Mob in the Age of Nixon
2. The Nixon-Mafia Relationship
3. Dick and Bebe
4. Mobsters in Cuba
5. Nixon’s Mafia Web
6. Hoffa and Clemency
7. The Most Violent Man in the Oval Office
8. The JFK Assassination and the Warren Commission
9. Nixon and Ford
10. Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover
11. Nixon, Sparky, and Ozzie
12. Did Oswald Know Ruby?
13. Mob Assassination Connections
14. The Watergate-Assassination Connection
15. "The Bay of Pigs"
16. Blackmailing the CIA Chief