Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster by T. J. English

Author:T. J. English
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Organized Crime, Non-Fiction, Irish-American Criminals - United States - History, Social Science, Gangsters, True Crime, Gangsters - United States - History, Criminology, Fiction, United States, Criminals & Outlaws, Cultural, Irish American Criminals, Anthropology, Biography & Autobiography, Europe, General, Irish-American Criminals, Organized Crime - United States - History, History
ISBN: 9780060590031
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2006-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER # Nine

9. the patriarch

In the decade of the 1950s, America was in the throes of committee fever. Secret agendas, subterranean alliances, and subversive activities were a national obsession, and it appeared that the only way to root out the enemy within was through official governmental investigation. Hot on the heels of the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime and the Waterfront Commission’s public tribunal in New York came the anti-Communist witch hunts of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. The McCarthy Hearings were televised and, like the Kefauver Hearings, captured the public imagination. McCarthy was allowed to run rampant, making wild accusations and destroying careers, until he eventually overstepped his boundaries by taking on the U.S. Army.

Before Joe McCarthy’s vile and divisive subcommittee crashed and burned in December 1954, he appointed an eager young attorney named Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy as his assistant counsel. Kennedy was the seventh of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy, the well-known billionaire banker, tycoon, ex-movie mogul, and former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. The elder Kennedy was a friend and financial benefactor of Joe McCarthy’s. Over the years, the alcoholic senator from Wisconsin had occasionally been a guest at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, where he once almost drowned after falling from a sailboat into the bay. He was saved by another son of Joe Kennedy’s—John—at the time a congressman from Massachusetts, who dove into the water and helped pull McCarthy back into the boat.

On McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee, Bobby Kennedy served under Roy Cohn, the senator’s vicious and unscrupulous lead counsel. As the subcommittee became more wantonly unethical in its pursuit of phantom communists and subversives, Kennedy bolted, astutely surmising that McCarthy’s crusade was headed for disaster.

Bobby Kennedy may have recognized the flaws and public relations limitations inherent in McCarthy’s scorched-earth approach, but that did not mean he was against the notion of high-profile governmental committees. In late 1956, when Kennedy was approached by Senator John J. McClellan of Arkansas to take part in yet another major senate investigation—this one looked into the role of mobsters and labor racketeers in the Teamsters Union—the young lawyer jumped at the chance.

Officially, the investigation was to be called the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The committee and their investigators would be given the power to subpoena whoever they wanted. For Kennedy, thirty-two years old and looking to put his career on a par with that of his older brother John, the offer was irresistible. As chief counsel, he would be given the opportunity to square off with major mafiosi and corrupt union officials similar to ILA boss Joe Ryan and others of his ilk. Kennedy, notoriously competitive, relished the prospect.

When Bobby told his father that he had accepted the offer to become chief counsel for what would come to be known as “the McClellan Committee,” the patriarch of the Kennedy family was livid.

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