Nixon's Secret (22 page)

Mob activity for Kennedy on Election Day included nonexistent voters voting, registered voters being denied the right to vote, and manipulation of the count. Poll watchers for Nixon provided Polaroids of money changing hands for votes outside of polling places. Voters were intimidated and in many cases threatened, and bones were broken. There is no doubt that Sam Giancana and the Chicago outfit had stolen Chicago for JFK.

Giancana would also later be overheard on an FBI wiretap discussing the “donations” the gangsters had made during the vital primary campaign. John Kennedy’s lover Judith Campbell alleged years later that Kennedy took outrageous risks to enlist Giancana’s help, covertly meeting with him in person at least twice.

But the Mob played heavily on both sides. In his ground-breaking
Bobby and J. Edgar
, Burton Hersh wrote that Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters gave Nixon $1 million dollars while the Eastern Mob chieftains, like Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, rounded up another million for the Nixon cause. Hoffa was actually funneling cash for Mob bosses Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante. Hoffa had a particular interest in Nixon’s success: the Justice Department was breathing down his neck because of his old nemesis Robert Kennedy. Bobby targeted Hoffa when the young lawyer was counsel to the Senate Labor Racketeering Committee. Kennedy’s game was especially dangerous because his brother Robert was committed to the pursuit of organized crime and in particular to the downfall of Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked Teamsters leader. When he continued that pursuit as attorney general, the mob chieftains were so furious that some—including the House Assassinations Committee—would come to suspect the Mafia was among those behind the 1963 assassination.

Both Kennedy and Nixon solicited the help of the Mob. Kennedy’s father had made much of his fortune with gangsters during Prohibition, and compelling information indicates that he and his politician son used the Mob connection as a stepping stone to power in 1960. Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana would be overheard on an FBI wiretap discussing the “donations” the gangsters had made during the vital primary campaign. John Kennedy’s lover Judith Campbell alleged years later that Kennedy took outrageous risks to enlist Giancana’s help, covertly meeting with him in person at least twice.

Nixon was also vulnerable. Before the 1960 campaign started, an informant passed documentation to Robert Kennedy indicating that Meyer Lansky’s people had footed Nixon’s bill on a visit to Cuba. RFK made no use of the information, probably because his brother himself had been compromised in Cuba when Lansky fixed him up with women there.

Florida Mob boss Santo Trafficante, who was aware of that episode, despised Kennedy and favored Nixon. “Santo,” recalled his attorney Frank Ragano, “viewed Nixon as a realistic, conservative politician who was ‘not a zealot’ and would not be hard on him and his mob friends. The Mafia had little to fear from Nixon.”
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“We’ll contribute to Nixon, too . . . We’ll hedge our bets. Just like we did out in California when Nixon was running for senator . . . You don’t know what the hell Jack’ll do once he’s elected. With Nixon, you know where you stand,” said Giancana before the 1960 election, according to his brother Chuck. “Marcello and I,” Giancana allegedly added, “are giving the Nixon campaign a million bucks.”
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Carlos Marcello, Mafia boss of New Orleans who controlled the mob in Louisiana and Texas, also reportedly made a massive contribution to Nixon in September that year at a meeting in Lafayette, Louisiana. An informant told the FBI Marcello did so in September at a meeting in Lafayette, Louisiana. “I was right there, listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase filled with five hundred thousand dollars cash, which was going to Nixon . . . The other half was coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.” Five hundred thousand dollars at today’s values would be around $3 million.

Richard Nixon had always had his own arm’s-length relationship with the Mob. Hollywood gangster Mickey Cohen, who was Meyer Lansky’s top lieutenant on the West Coast, had funneled money through Myford Irvine, whose ranch was a big agri-business in Orange County, into Nixon’s 1946 and 1950 campaigns. Nixon campaign manager and mob lawyer Murray Chotiner asked Cohen to raise funds for Nixon’s 1950 effort. The Chotiner brothers’ law firm had defended a number of Cohen’s underlings for illegal bookmaking.

Back in 1946, Cohen convened a meeting at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel on North Ivar Avenue, Hollywood, to which he invited more than several hundred associates from the gambling business, some of whom flew in from Las Vegas. Cohen was later to say, “There wasn’t a legitimate person in the room.” Cohen would later write that the goal for the evening was $75,000 for Nixon’s coffers from his crime and gambling associates and that he ordered the doors locked when the group came up $20,000 short, refusing to let anyone leave until the financial goal was met.
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Nixon had met with Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles mob scene for Lansky while Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel watched Lansky’s business in the growing Las Vegas, as early as 1946 at Goodfellow’s Grotto, a fish restaurant in Orange County where the booths were private and politics could be talked about frankly. Cohen made it clear that the orders to help Nixon in 1950 came from “back East,” meaning New York boss Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, both of whom set up the National Mob Syndicate.
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With the support of the Chicago family secured, the family’s attention could turn fully to winning the Democratic nomination. The April 5 Wisconsin primary, which Jack Kennedy won by a disappointing 8 percent over Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, was a terrible setback for Kennedy’s campaign. After the Wisconsin primary, the country’s political focus turned to the May 10 Democratic primary in West Virginia—long seen as extraordinarily difficult territory for Kennedy because of its heavily Protestant electorate.
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Polls taken immediately after the Wisconsin victory showed Kennedy being trounced by at least 20 percent. The Windy City Mob again aided the Kennedy cause.

Even Mob troubadour Frank Sinatra recorded a Kennedy campaign song.

1960’s the year for his high hopes

Come on and vote for Kennedy

Vote for Kennedy

Keep America Strong

The original version of the song “High Hopes” was written by lyricist Sammy Cahn for the 1959 Sinatra movie
A Hole in the Head.
The revamped version, written as a Kennedy campaign song, was put on repeat and drummed into the heads of the West Virginia voting public.

W. J. Rorabaugh detailed the Kennedys’ prolific spending:

Humphrey spent no more that than $30,000 in the state. West Virginia television was cheap: Humphrey paid $2,000 and Kennedy paid $34,000. Overall, the Kennedys spent much, much more that Humphrey. Official estimates for the Kennedy campaign ranged from $200,000 to $400,000, but one private estimate ran as high as $4 million, which included the value of unpaid time for all the volunteers. Perhaps a more realistic estimate would be $1.5 to 2.5 million. About $150,000 went to Charleston, which was won narrowly; $100,000 was spent in Huntington, which was lost. About $100,000 went to Logan County, considered to be among the most corrupt. The campaign thus spent $350,000 for just three counties, and the state had fifty-five counties. One Kennedy operative who managed only part of one county recalled years later that he received $60,000 in cash from a courier from Boston. Another minor operative wanted $3,500, asked for “35” and got $35,000. In addition to slating, much of the money was used to make contributions to Protestant churches, especially black churches. Unlike in Wisconsin, Kennedy won the small African American vote in West Virginia. Joe Kennedy and Cardinal Cushing in Boston jointly decided which preachers would get $500 and which $1,000. Cushing gave Joe Kennedy $950,000 cash from the diocese’s Sunday collection plates, and in return Kennedy wrote a tax deductible check to the church for $1 million.
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West Virginia politics were perhaps the epitome of old-style machine politics at work. Various factions of the Democratic Party in West Virginia would put out “slate cards” in which the organization demonstrated to its members for whom they should cast their votes; these were distributed the day before any election. Some vestiges of this system continue to exist in the endorsements various organizations issue today; however, in the spring of 1960 the system was functioning at its most effective.
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The slate cards were determined not by the general membership of the union, interest group, club, etc., but rather by the group’s leadership. As such, the easiest way for a candidate to win the votes of a given group, particularly in as remote an area as rural West Virginia, was to win the endorsement of these party grandees. While theoretically this could be done by an impassioned campaign of issues, in reality this was often done through bribery, blackmail, and the promise of patronage following an election. This is illustrated in the story of Logan County Democratic Boss Raymond Chafin. The Kennedy clan simply asked Chafin how much he needed to deliver the votes. “Thirty-five,” was Chafin’s response, meaning $35,000.
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Later in life, Chafin would point out that this bribe only covered his faction in the county, and his was the smaller of the two major factions of the local Democratic Party. Logan County is only one, and a smallish one at that, of fifty-five such counties in West Virginia. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to deduce that if Kennedy was willing to spend at least $35,000 in Logan County, he was willing to spend hundreds of thousands and possibly even over one million, dollars on the campaign.

When the results rolled in on May 10, the national press was shocked. Kennedy had defeated Humphrey by a devastating margin of 61 percent to 39 percent. There are some who say that money cannot solve all problems; however, its effect in West Virginia may have disabused more than a few of that notion. Through the shocking aftermath of the West Virginia primary, money had made Kennedy the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. The Chicago family took notice. FBI wiretaps would later show that they believed their money had paved the way for Kennedy’s victory. “Your boyfriend wouldn’t be in the White House if it wasn’t for me,” Giancana said to Judith Campbell, a woman shared carnally by the Chicago mobster and the president.
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It is also important to note what it is that made the Chicago mob so much more important and influential than other families. When most of us hear of the Mafia, we think New York City’s “Five Families,” made famous by Francis Ford Coppola in his film adaptation of the aforementioned novel
The Godfather
. There are, indeed, five families in New York City, which divide the city and influence between themselves as part of an often-fractious relationship. What set Chicago apart was that in 1960, unlike the dysfunctional multipolar world of East Coast mafiosi, the Chicago family ruled with a united front, holding complete and total control over one-third of the city of Chicago, no fewer than four Las Vegas casinos, a close relationship with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and control of two congressmen, and the head of the Illinois Department of Revenue was one of their own.
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Within their territory the Chicago family was an unparalleled political machine, capable of running up electoral margins of victory greater than 90 percent. This political power was what Joe Kennedy was after when he brought Giancana into the fold with the $500,000 donation. Illinois in 1960 was a key electoral target, comprising the fourth-highest number of electoral votes; and unlike today, Illinois was a state both sides could reasonably foresee winning. As such, the Kennedy camp knew that winning a historic victory in metropolitan Chicago would likely be necessary to carry Illinois, and its twenty-seven electoral votes. Giancana and Mayor Daley were the keys to finding that margin, and both expected a Kennedy victory to be a substantial boon to their own empires.

Still, the vote-stealing in Chicago was breathtaking. Few have reported on this with as much detail as W. J. Rorabaugh in
The Real Making of the President:

In 1960 Daley put pressure on the precinct captains and ward bosses to produce fixed vote margins for each precinct and ward for Kennedy. Any member of the organization that failed to produce was likely to lose both his political party post and his city job. Efficient precinct captains identified voters, made sure they were registered, and got them to the polls on Election Day. In 1960, Chicago had an impressive 89.3 percent turnout, far above the national average.

Many tricks were used in Chicago. Republicans were removed from the rolls, a fact that they only discovered when they tried to vote. One turned out to be an irate columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
. Persons who had been dead for years often were found to have voted. In Ward 4, Precinct 31, both a dead man and a son who had taken care of the man and then moved away performed their civic duty. Rolls could be padded in other ways. In Ward 5, Precinct 46, registration closed with 636 voters listed. But on Election Day the poll book contained 751 names, the extra 115 names having been added at city hall. Of these fraudulent registrants, 49 voted. Democrats paid cheap boardinghouses one dollar per head for each resident who voted. Managers also got an additional twenty-five dollars to fifty dollars to keep Republicans from entering to talk with the tenants. Bans carried “floaters” from precinct to precinct to cast multiple votes, electioneering sometimes took place inside polling places, and votes were bought just outside the door.

Many precincts had fake Republican election judges. In Ward 4, Precinct 6, the “Republican” judge tried to assist a Republican voter in voting a straight Democratic ticket. The judge had to be physically restrained from casting the ballot for the voter on the machine. Final results were Kennedy 451, Nixon 67. In Ward 6, Precinct 38, the voting machine at 10:15 A.M. showed 121 votes, but only 43 voters had signed in. The final total was Kennedy 408, Nixon 79. In half a dozen precincts, the number of votes counted exceeded the number of registered voters by more than 75.