Senator Mondale: Now, you were asked to help join in an effort to kill somebody. Why did you agree to do that?
Mr. Roselli: It was a government project.
The long ordeal and myriad associations began with a phone call from Howard Hughes’ attorney on the west coast, Greg Bautzer. He had another another job for Robert Maheu, Hughes’ fixer: “Bob, how would you and your wife like to go to Las Vegas at my expense, with a bundle of cash?” The target was Beldon Kettleman, proprietor of the El Rancho Hotel in Las Vegas. One of Bautzer’s clients was looking to serve Kettleman with a subpoena; however, Kettleman was heavily guarded by his security in the hotel and was impossible to reach. Fond of attempting “impossible” tasks, Maheu took up the job. In a few years it would become his home, but in 1959 he knew little about Las Vegas and the Mafia figures reputed to run the place.
Maheu attempted to book a room at the El Rancho to get close to Kettleman, without success. The hotel was fully booked, as well as the Flamingo, the Desert Inn, and every other establishment he called. Desperate, he reached out to his friend and prominent lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who told him to sit still and wait. Within ten minutes, a man called, asking Maheu what he needed in Las Vegas. A room would be ready for him at the El Rancho the next night: Maheu was to show up at 9:00 pm. “I’ll be wearing a dark suit and I have gray hair,” the man explained. “And my name is Johnny.”
This mysterious “miracle worker,” despite the lack of availability, somehow managed to obtain a “beautiful bungalow, filled with flowers and fruit” for Maheu and his wife, all of it for free. At the appointed time, Maheu met the man, who looked Maheu up and down. “My name is Johnny Roselli,” he said; this name meant nothing to Maheu. Roselli thought that Maheu should meet the El Rancho owner, who was in hiding: “He’s playing it quite cozy these days, because they’re trying to drop a paper on him,” Roselli laughed. “They think they can get to him. It’s a big joke. They’ll never do it.” He proceeded to laugh some more. Maheu had no interest in explaining he had been sent to accomplish exactly that.
Roselli led Maheu to an inconspicuous corner of the casino, where Kettleman was sitting a table, drinking with actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor. Roselli proudly introduced Maheu, pushing him forward to Kettleman, and the two shook hands; all the while Maheu could only think of the subpoena burning a hole in his pocket. Making a split second decision, Maheu resolved that maintaining his friendship with Ed Williams was more important, expecting Roselli’s reaction to be fierce had he gone through with his assignment. He regretted having used his winnings at craps to purchase his wife a bracelet, money which could have been used to pay back Bautzer for the failure to successfully complete the work.
Upon returning to Los Angeles, Maheu explained to Bautzer over the phone why his fee needed to be returned. Rather than express frustration at Maheu’s failure, Bautzer could not stop laughing: “Do you know who Johnny Roselli is? It’s a damn good thing you didn’t serve that. If you had, you’d never have left Las Vegas.” Maheu was instructed to keep the money; the laugh he provided for his ignorant encounter with danger was worth it, according to Bautzer.
Maheu later discovered Roselli’s backstory: emigrating to the United States from Italy at the age of six, Roselli began his life of crime in his teenage years, working for bootleggers in the northeast and California. He first encountered Al Capone in 1927, which led him to working as a liaison between Chicago and the Los Angeles Mafia. Beginning in 1943, as a central mob figure in Hollywood, Roselli was sent to prison for an extortion racket against movie companies, where he remained until his release in 1947. By 1956, Roselli had become the Chicago and LA mob’s chief representative in Las Vegas, ensuring that mob bosses received their skimmed cut of the profitable gambling revenues. Days after Maheu’s recounting of his experience with Roselli, Bautzer repeated the story to Roselli himself at Perino’s restaurant in Los Angeles and Roselli also greatly enjoyed hearing the tale. Roselli provided his home phone number and expressed a wish to see Maheu again the next time he was in Las Vegas. Maheu was blown away at the bizarre situation in which he found himself: “One of the most powerful mob figures in the country wanted to take me to lunch.”
Roselli soon became “Uncle Johnny” to Maheu’s children, after many lunches they shared together over the ensuing years. Blissfully unthinking of what could go wrong at the time, Maheu could not believe he did not consider how a relationship with a mobster would eventually go sour. “To save his own skin years later,” Maheu wrote of Roselli in his memoir, “he opened his mouth once too often about one of the biggest secret operations in U.S. history.”
Recruiting Roselli
While planning the Bay of Pigs invasion in the winter of 1959-1960, the CIA decided that the odds of success would be better if Fidel Castro were eliminated. In searching for the right assassins, they came up with the idea of using the Mafia in “a gangland-style hit.” The gangsters could take care of the murder themselves; after all, they had a motive to do so since Castro had forced the Mafia out of Havana’s casino following his seizure of power in early 1959. “It was even rumored that Meyer Lansky had put a million-dollar bounty on Castro’s head,” Maheu wrote. Allen Dulles, the CIA’s Director, assigned the task of organizing the assassination to Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Bissell, who passed the baton to the CIA’s Chief of the Office of Security, Colonel Sheffield Edwards, who along with his CIA subordinate James O’Connell would soon turn to Maheu. In their view, Maheu knew a lot of people, was working in Las Vegas, and was likely familiar with the kind of criminal elements that could carry out this type of work. O’Connell recalled how he began involved through his boss: “they were looking for somebody that could handle a job for them, namely, it was to eliminate Mr. Castro...he wanted me to get in touch with Robert Maheu, because he was the asset that they thought would be best to recruit somebody of that type.”
Living in Virginia with his family, Maheu would often host “Maine-style clambakes,” full of “fresh lobsters, buckets of steamers, and plenty of booze.” At one such gathering, Maheu invited his law enforcement contacts from his days as an FBI special agent, as well as CIA personnel he knew, including Jim O’Connell and Sheffield Edwards. Johnny Roselli happened to be in town and Maheu invited him over at the last moment. In a corner of his backyard, Maheu could see Edwards engaged in a conversation with Roselli. “I don’t know what was said, but it must have been interesting,” Maheu thought. Castro was not a topic discussed at the time, but a seed was planted that would bring Roselli and Maheu into a highly sensitive CIA operation.
Edwards asked his team to investigate Roselli’s connections and they found that he had access to the top figures in the Mafia. Maheu was to be the cut-out of this operation to keep the Agency’s hands clean. Edwards phoned Maheu to see if he could get Roselli “interested in the Cuban situation.” Maheu knew immediately what Edwards was talking about: “Though I’m no saint, I am a religious man, and I knew that the CIA was talking about murder.” He was pitched to set aside his moral concerns by his CIA contacts, who presented a rationale of a “just war” and used a World War II analogy: “if we had known the exact bunker that Hitler was in during the war, we wouldn’t have hesitated to kill the bastard.” So went the thinking with regard to Castro: if he were killed, “thousands of lives might be saved,” Maheu was told.
The operation would have many personal implications for Maheu: he would have blood on his hands, it could put his family in danger, and if the operation failed and were exposed, he would be the “fall guy, caught between protecting the government and protecting the mob, two armed camps that could crush me like a bug.” To make a decision that night, Maheu locked himself in his recreation room, and put on his favorite album by 101 Strings, an easy listening orchestral group. As he pondered the implications, he wrestled with the request, but ultimately decided to approach Roselli on behalf of the CIA as they asked, for “if it saved even one American life,” he believed, “it was worthwhile.” Alternatively, O’Connell believed Maheu agreed to participate because of his past relationship and favors the CIA had provided him, including kick-starting his most recent career.
In August 1960, Maheu took a plane to Los Angeles, where he met up with Roselli at the Brown Derby restaurant in Beverly Hills. Roselli was smartly dressed as usual, his shoes gleaming and Maheu noticed his manicured fingernails as he approached. Watching the way Roselli walked, Maheu could see “a man sure of his power and his place.” Maheu waited until the end of the encounter, when the two were having coffee, to broach the topic of the real purpose of their get together. Maheu emphasized that the plan he was outlining had to be kept strictly confidential; even other areas of the U.S. government had to be kept in the dark and the CIA had to maintain total plausible deniability.
Roselli’s reaction was to laugh in disbelief: “Me? You want me to get involved with Uncle Sam? The feds are tailing me wherever I go. They go to my shirtmaker to see if I’m buying things with cash. They go to my tailor to see if I’m using cash there. They’re always trying to get something on me. Bob, are you sure you’re talking to the right guy?” Maheu tried to convince Roselli of the seriousness of the request. Roselli sat staring at him, pondering his response, tapping his fingers on the table with some apprehension.
Maheu emphasized the cut-out nature of the operation: “It’s up to you to pick whom you want, but it’s got to be set up so that Uncle Sam isn’t involved—ever. If anyone connects you with the U.S. government, I will deny it. If you say Bob Maheu brought you into this, that I was your contact man, I’ll say you’re off your rocker, you’re lying, you’re trying to save your hide. I’ll swear by everything holy that I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about.” Roselli recalled the nature of the request was for him to “try to recruit some Cubans…to assassinate Castro or get intelligence or whatever we could out of Cuba.”
Maheu explained that this was to be a one-time deal, as he had no interest in becoming permanently associated with the Mafia, and he promised to keep confidential any information he learned: “I won’t ever reveal the content of any private conversations I may overhear while I’m in your company. It’s none of my business or anyone else’s.” Roselli stared at him in silence, while Maheu considered the incredible scene: the Hollywood stars, producers, and agents who built fantasies for a living at the Brown Derby and who would never have believed the deal being arranged between the U.S. government and organized crime right under their noses.
Following his initial hesitation, Roselli eventually agreed to proceed with the assassination plot. While others believed that Roselli’s motives were to secure “an eventual deal with the government” or “sort of big payoff,” Maheu was firm in his belief that Roselli was motivated by patriotism, “as corny as it may sound.” With the Cold War in full swing, “the world was quite different then,” Maheu remarked. Roselli’s later actions would severely test Maheu’s theory. Maheu called O’Connell with the good news: “There is a fellow by the name of Roselli. I really don’t know too much about the fellow, but I have gotten to know him. And he seems to know everybody in Las Vegas.”
Maheu Operations
Roselli traveled to New York in September 1960 under the cover name of John Rawlston, a man supposedly from Oakland. “They had somebody made a reservation for me at the Plaza Hilton on Fifth Avenue,” he recalled. Castro happened to be visiting the United Nations in New York at the same time, Roselli remembering the tabloid press stories at the time stating that Castro “was in some hotel somewhere plucking chicken feathers.” Maheu was in attendance, along with O’Connell “and several other people.” O’Connell was introduced to Roselli as “one of Mr. Maheu’s associates" working on behalf of a client. O’Connell found Roselli to be “a very astute man...very sharp.”
By October 11, 1960, Roselli put the plan into motion and the group traveled to Miami’s Kenilworth Hotel, where they stayed for weeks working on the assassination. The hotel was selected for its cultural cachet: entertainer Arthur Godfrey was a co-owner and had broadcast his TV show from that location. Playing cribbage on the beach one day, Roselli turned to O’Connell and said: “Look, Jim, I know who you are, you are not kidding me. You are with the Central Intelligence Agency. I don’t want you to confirm that. You don’t have to tell me if it is true. I understand your situation. But I am very happy that this is the situation, because I really didn’t have any heart in it until I was convinced that this was the U.S. Government...I was not too happy doing this thing just for a client. If you people are the government, I owe this country a lot.” O’Connell was unaware that not only had Maheu already revealed the government’s involvement in the plot, but also that Roselli was holding a secret that could make his participation profitable to him personally in the long run.
Roselli introduced Maheu to “Joe” and “Sam Gold,” two men that would aid in their mission. Maheu was shocked to soon find out how high level these organized crime figures were after reading the paper one day. On a Sunday, O’Connell received a phone call at the nearby Florida Shores hotel, where he was staying since he was subject to government travel per diems (“I couldn’t live at the Kenilworth at their prices”). Maheu was cryptic in his delivery of his discovery, always conscious of telephone taps: “Have you gotten the Miami Times?” he asked. “No,” replied O’Connell. “You go downstairs and get the Miami Times and call me back.” Once the paper was in hand, Maheu instructed: “Look at the Parade supplement, page 6 or 7.” O’Connell scanned the page, recalling later what he saw: “there was an article on Bobby Kennedy showing his ten most wanted criminals. And leading the pack was my friend Sam Gold, who was Sam Giancana. And Joe turned out to be a guy by the name of Santos Trafficante.”
“My God, look what we are involved with,” Maheu lamented. That was the moment, O’Connell recounted, that they both knew “that we were really playing with the big time.” O’Connell was similarly cryptic when relaying this information to Edwards, explaining on the phone that he needed to look at a local paper which contained the same add-on feature: “We’re really using some high-powered people here…get last Sunday’s Post and look at the Parade supplement page. The first two are of great interest to us, as a matter of fact, they are Johnny’s close friends.”
Maheu and the CIA now knew these gangsters were in fact Santos Trafficante Jr., head of organized crime in Florida and Cuba, and Sam Giancana, head of the mob in Chicago. Maheu claimed that both godfathers needed to be involved given the high ranks involved: “only a man of equal stature—like Giancana—could approach [Trafficante] for help. Johnny couldn’t do it on his own.” They we were willing to work for free, given the gambling racket they had recently lost in Cuba. “We never paid them,” Edwards explained. “They were more anxious to get Castro than anybody else was.” O’Connell agreed: “Among other things they had lost their shirts down in Cuba, their investments went down the drain as a result of Castro taking over, and they were willing to put up a good amount of money if they could put Castro out of commission.”
Maheu found Giancana to be “charismatic,” “small in stature,” but “in top physical shape” with a surprising sentimentality given his line of work. His eyes would well up with tears when listening to “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,” a popular tune released as a single by Dean Martin just over a week prior to their arrival. The song held special significance to Giancana, who said to Maheu: “Someday I’ll explain it to you.” He never did. Watching Giancana in action made Maheu understand the appeal of the Mafia in American culture. More so than “presidents” or “sheikhs,” Mafia dons had an “almost palpable sense of power” that far exceeded anyone else Maheu had witnessed firsthand. In the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Maheu watched in awe as passersby made way for Giancana, as if a king were walking through: “People just made way.”
The Inaugural
In November 1960, Howard Hughes was caught off guard by the election John F. Kennedy. He had been preparing for Richard Nixon’s victory and now had to play “catch-up,” in Maheu’s words. Though he suspected that Hughes had a conflict with Joe Kennedy back in his days in Hollywood, Hughes was now a “Kennedy man” and wanted Maheu to make a large contribution to Kennedy’s inaugural and for everyone to know about it: “no expense was to be spared.” He passed on part of the task to Washington lawyers Gillis Long and Bob Collier, who booked seats at the swearing-in ceremony, nearby hotel suites, an all-day buffet for watchers of the inaugural parade, and limousine arrangements for the inaugural ball dances to be held in several locations across Washington, DC. The inaugural gala, led by Frank Sinatra, was to take place on the eve of the inauguration and feature an array of stars. Sinatra phoned Greg Bautzer, inquiring as to whether Hughes would like to donate a TWA jet from his business to transport the celebrities from Los Angeles to Washington and back. The cost would amount to $40,000 ($425,000 today), a minor expense to Hughes. To get around the illegality of the political contribution from an airline, the Democratic National Committee provided a solution: Hughes would buy four $10,000 box seats at the gala, which would allow the DNC to charter the jet. Hughes accepted the proposal and sent Maheu to accompany the celebrities to Washington.
Still in the midst of planning an assassination, Maheu was not in the mood to make this trip; however, the CIA permitted his travel and he ended up enjoying the flight: the comedian Milton Berle provided in-flight entertainment, accompanied by the Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra, who happened to have played with Dean Martin on Sam Giancana’s favorite song. The plans were somewhat ruined by a powerful snowstorm that hit the capital the day before the inauguration. Eight of inches of snowfall caused massive traffic jams, with drivers abandoning thousands of cars on the road. Hughes’ guests were stuck in their hotel rooms, the box seats remained empty, and Maheu was late to a dinner he and his wife were to host, arriving only in time to pay the bill. He had to reflect for a moment the incredibly bizarre situation he found himself in: ushering in a new U.S. President in the shadow of planning an assassination of Castro.
Maheu returned to the CIA’s assignment, with Giancana booking the conspirators a top-floor five-room suite at the Fontainebleau in Miami, replete with kitchen and dining room. Upon entering, Maheu was greeted by a surly Giancana: “Okay, smart-ass. You’ve been bragging about your cooking. This is going to be an opportunity for you to either satisfy my taste…or I’m going to throw your butt out of the goddamned window.” He took Maheu into the kitchen, showing him the special kettles he had procured and handed him a notepad. Maheu was to write down whatever was needed to feed Giancana and Roselli over the next three days; they were not to leave the suite. Giancana wanted spareribs and Maheu found out how he liked them prepared. The trio drank champagne and ate gray beluga caviar flown in daily from New York. Giancana enjoyed the spareribs, calling the dinner that night “the biggest meal he’d ever had in his life.” His cooking deemed satisfactory, Maheu’s life was spared.
Maheu got to observe the duality of Giancana’s personality. There was the tough Mafia boss: once by the pool, “a good-looking man walked up and immediately starting talking tough.” Giancana had no patience for “young Mafia punks” and grabbed the man by his tie without looking at him, and then stared into his eyes: “I eat little boys like you for breakfast. Get your ass out of here before I get hungry!” In private, there was the childlike Giancana: when his caviar, the most expensive variety, arrived daily from a New York gourmet shop, he would receive a phone call from the front desk. “It’s on its way!” Giancana would exclaim excitedly, running from room to room in his shorts, stopping at the refrigerator to gather the necessary ingredients to go along with his favorite snack, which Maheu catalogued: “the chopped white and yolk of a hard-boiled egg, finely chopped white and green onion, plus sour cream.” His joy made it difficult for Maheu to fathom that Giancana had already spent six years in prison and was arrested over 50 times in his youth. Maheu was also shocked at his audacity: while eating dinner at the hotel, Giancana would notice a man entering with a beautiful woman and “pat her on the rear as she passed.” No one dared confront Giancana; however, he was less understanding when it came to the idea of someone touching his mistress, and it was their relationship that would put the entire operation into serious jeopardy.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Memory Hole to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.