"I told you that I was trouble,
You know that I'm no good..."
- Amy
"It had occurred to Mooney that Joe Kennedy, “the wily old bastard,” had had a brainstorm. By putting Bobby in charge of the Justice Department, it could only be one of two things: Either Bobby would put the clamps on Hoover and tell him to lay off the Outfit as Jack and Joe had promised or Bobby would be utilized as henchman, with a virtual army of FBI agents at his disposal to destroy all those to whom the Kennedys owed favors.
The former seemed hopeful but highly unlikely—it would be a behavior totally out of character for Robert Kennedy, the crimebuster of McClellan committee fame. Slowly, Mooney came to the conclusion that the man he’d envisioned slaving away behind a desk in some obscure legal office after the election was to be his nemesis.
Bobby Kennedy, it appeared, had been placed in the position of attorney general to systematically erase all markers, and Mooney knew he’d be on top of the list. “It’s a brilliant move on Joe’s part,” he said ruefully. “He’ll have Bobby wipe us out to cover their own dirty tracks and it’ll all be done in the name of the Kennedy ‘war on organized crime.’ Brilliant. Just fuckin’ brilliant.”
Just as he was coming to that conclusion, though, Mooney told Chuck that Jack Kennedy had done something completely baffling: Kennedy had started sending him copies of confidential FBI memos through Judy Campbell. Chuck would later learn from Mooney that the President used a young starlet and Marilyn Monroe as couriers between them, as well.
What documents these other two women carried, Chuck never knew—although, two decades later, when he heard sensationalized claims of women carrying correspondence regarding the Castro assassination between his brother and the President, he dismissed them as preposterous and laughable.
Mooney wasn’t one to correspond. Guys in the Outfit weren’t stupid enough to get their picture taken in compromising positions, nor did they write incriminating memorandums or keep damning tapes that proved their wrongdoing. Bureaucrats, they were not.
Studying the documents Mooney received from the President proved to be an eye-opener. Mooney was startled to learn that the G-men’s surveillance was highly detailed and incredibly extensive. He’d viewed the G-men as Boy Scouts, a nuisance, but basically nothing more. However, it appeared from the documents Jack was sending that the FBI was a bigger threat than he’d previously realized—there was at least one informant among his own ranks and extreme pressure to solicit more.
Mooney interpreted his receipt of the FBI memos, which were routinely conveyed from the White House, as evidence that his relationship with the President was solid, after all. He concluded—wrongly, as it turned out—that Hoover and his agents were merely present in Chicago now to “make it look good.”
He had Jack’s word he would be kept informed of the FBI’s operations and therefore would always be one step ahead of the game. Relieved, but still guarded and confused as to Bobby’s role in the scenario, Mooney dropped the notion that Jack Kennedy had turned his back on his preelection promises. Later, it would be discovered that Jack was sending Mooney only a carefully selected sample of the FBI memorandums issued daily to J. Edgar Hoover. Those Jack did send said nothing, for example, of the wiretaps that had by now been placed at Mooney’s favorite hangouts, the Armory Lounge and Celano’s tailor shop.
Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy, now ensconced as the attorney general, was orchestrating what would become the largest attack on organized crime in the nation’s history. The young Kennedy compiled a target list of the country’s thirty leading Mob bosses, and heading that list, just as Mooney had predicted, was the name Sam Giancana.
The attorney general demanded that J. Edgar Hoover intensify the bureau’s efforts, going after the mobsters with the same zeal the FBI had used against the Communist party. To further his cause, Bobby brought the IRS on board to prosecute tax evasion by underworld figures.
As Bobby Kennedy prepared for battle, Mooney, despite being comforted by the FBI reports, didn’t abandon his own surveillance of the Kennedys—nor did he ignore the traitor he’d learned of through the memorandums, a man he believed was William “Action” Jackson. He immediately put a contract out on Jackson and decided to increase his surveillance of the Kennedy brothers."
*****
"For months since the primaries, using technical assistance that could be traced back at least partially to the CIA, Mooney had gathered damning evidence of the Kennedys’ sexual exploits. And, in the weeks following his poolside proclamation of war to Chuck, he made it clear he fully intended to use this evidence, exposing the Kennedys’ tawdry hypocrisies to the entire world. The time was right, he said. He now had the muscle and the necessary connections to the media to destroy the Kennedy dynasty once and for all. But that would not be the case. There was one lingering problem with blackmail, a method Mooney longed to use.
The fact was that, in exposing the sins of the Kennedys, the exact nature of the relationship between the CIA and Outfit might be exposed—just as had been feared in the case of the Dan Rowan wiretapping. Grudgingly, Mooney agreed early that summer with the opinion of his CIA cronies: Blackmail was out of the question; any information gleaned from their surveillance of the Kennedys would be used in more oblique ways.
For several weeks, Mooney lamented this decision. Knowing he had enough smut to ruin the Kennedys forever and yet couldn’t use it, embittered him even further. But eventually, and Chuck thought somewhat portentously, Mooney brightened, saying they would just have to come up with another, more lasting solution to the Kennedy problem: a solution embodied in Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe had long been connected to the Outfit. Her first real break had come from a man Mooney and his lieutenant Johnny Roselli knew well—Joe Schenck, the Hollywood producer convicted and imprisoned back in the forties during the Browne-Bioff scandal.
An aging seventy-year-old man by the time Mooney said he bedded Marilyn Monroe, Schenck nevertheless was still powerful in Hollywood. Always on the lookout for potential stars through his relationships with producers such as Schenck, Roselli had been impressed by Monroe—and told Mooney so. From behind the scenes, 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, both Schenck and Cohn enjoyed Marilyn’s sexual favors in exchange for two-bit parts in films.
But by 1953, her two-bit days were over. After achieving household name recognition with her sensationalized nude calendar and the movie All About Eve, Marilyn catapulted to true stardom with the hit movie Niagara. Although Mooney said she’d been a good investment, he also admitted she was a sadly driven woman. More comfortable with her clothes off than on, Marilyn readily traded her body and soul for what she imagined was success and fame.
Hers was a fantasy filled with conquered men and white knights. And neither would be the case; for instead, she became the conquered, discovering to her endless sorrow that the men she envisioned as her saviors became, at last, her persecutors. Deceived countless times by countless men, Marilyn Monroe was the quintessential victim. From what Chuck could 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 the CIA, as well: Her sexual charms were employed by the CIA to frame world leaders—among them, President Sukarno of Indonesia.
Mooney insisted that using Monroe as bait, the CIA had successfully compromised leaders from Asia to the Middle East. And Marilyn, perhaps more because she enjoyed the attentions of the world’s most powerful men than for reasons of patriotism, had been a willing participant in the intrigue.
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 from Guy Banister that J. Edgar Hoover had confronted the President with FBI reports of the affair with Campbell and that, 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 of 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 timing was perfect for Mooney. While Bobby and Jack were hurriedly severing their ties to their benefactors, they continued to believe that they themselves were untouchable. With Marilyn Monroe, Mooney would show them just how truly vulnerable they were. By June of 1962, Marilyn’s film career was losing momentum; she’d become unreliable and deeply troubled. Early that summer, Mooney told Chuck he’d had a former FBI agent and a detective working on Marilyn’s surveillance and in so doing had received a wealth of information about the 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 off 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, Sinatra, and Lawford watched as Marilyn drank herself into near oblivion, pouring out her heart 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 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.
That night at the Cal-Neva, seeing Marilyn draped nude across her bed, her blonde hair in a frothy wave cascading over one eye, had been a beautiful, if disheveled, sight, Mooney said. He stood at the foot of her bed, looking on as she spread her legs for him, running her hands enticingly along her thighs. He’d accepted the invitation. He’d had her before, he said—plenty of times—but more than ever, he’d wanted her now. Wanted to know that he could take whatever the Kennedys might have.
Zipping up his silk trousers later, he’d laughed to himself. He’d had Marilyn Monroe’s body. What he didn’t tell Chuck was that he’d soon have her life. 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 at the Cal-Neva Lodge, Chuckie Nicoletti told Chuck that Mooney had received word from the CIA that Bobby Kennedy 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 Mooney just wanted to be nearby when it happened, hoped to see Bobby Kennedy’s face for himself when the nation’s attorney general was implicated in the scandalous suicide of a rejected starlet. Nicoletti said that three other planes also landed in California that week—in San Francisco—carrying four other men.
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—one 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 into her anus.
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.
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 through the anal membrane 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 hydrate quickly entered her bloodstream, rendering her totally unconscious. The men carefully removed the tape, wiped 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, love-scorned starlet would be exposed.
But what Mooney hadn’t counted on were the lengths Bobby Kennedy would go to 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. Kennedy and Lawford, unaware there were other intruders in Marilyn’s home that evening, seemed to believe Bobby and his doctor friend were to blame for her overdose and death.
From the wiretaps, Needles and Mugsy learned that Kennedy had panicked at the prospect of being charged with the starlet’s murder and implicated as Monroe’s sexual playmate.
He directed Peter Lawford and detective Fred Otash—ironically, one of the men involved in setting up surveillance of Monroe—to sweep the house before the authorities arrived. Thus, there were to be no discoveries of Bobby’s visit to Marilyn’s home earlier in the day, no love notes or damning phone numbers connecting either Bobby or Jack to the dead sex symbol.
Chuck would later hear that Marilyn’s diary had disappeared that night and that J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had confiscated the highly damaging telephone records, leaving little of substance that would implicate Bobby Kennedy.
Ultimately, Marilyn’s death was termed a suicide and Bobby Kennedy was not mentioned publicly as either her lover or unwitting murderer until years later. It had been easy for the public to swallow such a story. Suicide wasn’t surprising, given Marilyn’s known addiction to alcohol and pills. She was unstable—that was no secret—an emotionally disturbed woman who’d attempted to take her own life on numerous occasions. This time, she’d simply been successful.
Nicoletti told Chuck that J. Edgar Hoover’s men from the Justice Department eagerly stepped in to protect the attorney general. Like the underworld, the FBI had the President and the attorney general under surveillance.
But this was a coup for Hoover; Nicoletti said that Hoover thought he had the goods on the Kennedys and, from this point on, would call the shots. For years, there’d be whispered speculation about Marilyn’s death and, hearing countless theories, Chuck would always laugh cynically to himself.
Some, like that offered by Peter Lawford, who insisted that Marilyn had merely committed suicide, were, to Chuck, simply obvious attempts to protect the Kennedys. Typically, the closer a theory about the CIA and Outfit collaboration came to the truth, the greater the effort to discredit its proponent.
By October, the story of the starlet’s murder was old news.
That’s the way it was in the Outfit: Life went on.
You listened, didn’t ask questions, tried not to think about the unpleasantries. "
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