Bobby and J. Edgar Revised Edition by Burton Hersh

Author:Burton Hersh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

Part of the problem, Kennedy kept insisting, was that law enforcement was his job. If he started bending the rules for everybody his family knew, the press was guaranteed to demand his innards on a spit. The price of consistency could get high.

Another supporter who wound up overboard was Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, the supercool wiseguy who had helped Joe Kennedy out in a big way in West Virginia. D’Amato was the leading spirit in the celebrated 500 Club in Atlantic City. The Ambassador had taken $50,000 from Skinny and the boys and accepted their guidance to determine which sheriffs and county commissioners were worth the greasing. D’Amato was an intimate of several generations of Sinatras. Skinny thought he had an arrangement with the Ambassador which would permit the deported senior mobster Joe Adonis to return if Jack got elected. By 1961 it was plain that Bobby wasn’t going along with anything like the return of a gangland celebrity like Adonis. FBI wiretaps picked up Skinny D’Amato sounding off about moving cash from Las Vegas to solidify the election for JFK.

Sniffing blood, Hoover himself rushed transcripts of the wiretaps across the corridor to Bobby. On the spot, the attorney general agreed to authorize heavy coverage of D’Amato; before long the government indicted Skinny for failing to file a corporate tax return for his club. As it happened, the 500 Club had lost money the year in question so no return was required. The purpose was to discredit D’Amato, in case he continued to shoot his mouth off about helping the family, and load him up with IRS interest and penalty requirements he could never discharge.

What was all this about “Skinny being indicted on bullshit charges?” Sinatra’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, demanded of Steve Smith, the Kennedy brother-in-law who wound up looking after the money.

“Well, you don’t understand politics,” Smith said.

By then, Sinatra had retained D’Amato as his de facto resort manager and auditor at the Cal-Neva, and so the affable gangster the Justice Department was grinding underheel worked indirectly for Joe Kennedy. Skinny had become disposable, a fish the overworked attorney general abruptly found himself embarrassed enough to throw to the smug, expectant FBI Director.

Bobby’s brother the president, watching chunks of helpful, long-standing friends of the family fly by the windows as the attorney general proved there would be no fear or favor, attempted in his way to mitigate. JFK pointedly inquired of Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer: “What are you doing to my friend Frank Sinatra?” He was privately horrified at the tragedies which befell Igor Cassini’s family. He arranged for Bobby Baker to deal with his IRS problems by retaining Kennedy family lawyer James McInerney—who, as it happened, died a few hours before their scheduled appointment, run down by a teenager on Sixteenth Street.

Hoover kept careful track of the compounding carnage. He was very selective about whom he helped, whose interests were undercut and whose were protected. If there absolutely had to be a war on crime, Hoover intended to identify the criminals.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.