Camp Gagnon - CIA Hired MOB BOSS To Kill A President

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Thomas Maier is an investigative journalist and the author of a book Mafia Spies and its accompanying series on Paramount+ and Showtime. 🕵️‍♂️📺 Thomas is an expert on a top-secret mission by the CIA, Operation Mongoose, that involved hiring the Italian Mob to take out Fidel Castro in the 1960’s. He’s here to tell us the wild tale of notorious mobsters Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, the intricate details of the US government's attempts to conceal the CIA plot and every crazy story invol...

There's always been this rumor that the U.S. government, specifically the CIA, had contracted two Italian-American gangsters to assassinate Fidel Castro. So tell me about Operation Mongoose and how did this story come together. Well, one of the ways they tried to kill was to enlist a woman named Marita Lorenz. She winds up in a bedroom with Fidel Castro. She opens up a jar of capsules with poison in them. She comes out of the bathroom. And there's Fidel on the bed.

He's going to kill her. He says, no, he says, you were going to kill me, weren't you? The U.S. government doesn't like Fidel taking over because he's now working as a satellite for the Soviets. Just before JFK was killed, Castro essentially said, I know you're trying to kill me. And two can play this game. Uncle Sam wanted to get rid of Castro. But so did the mafia, in particular Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean Conner.

What were they looking to leverage? These Italian mob guys. In Monopoly, they call it a get out of jail free car. Mm-hmm. So what happens with Gene Conno and Roselli? To this day, both the Sam Giancana's murder and Johnny Roselli's murder remains officially unsolved. I do in Mafia's spies. Kind of indicate who I think probably had a hand in both those murders. Thomas.

Mark, how are you, sir? Very well. Thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really, really excited to talk. You have written a book a couple years ago that has been turned into. an amazing series that touches on all of the things that I love. Somehow they have all combined

into this beautiful little menagerie. I'm so excited to unpack it with you. So just for context, there's always been this rumor, I guess, in American history all through like the 60s, 70s, 80s, that the U.S. government, specifically the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, had contracted two Italian-American gangsters to assassinate the communist leader of Cuba. This sounds like a crazy theory and it's obviously a dumb conspiracy. There's no way that this could be true that the CIA would try to get mobsters to kill Fidel Castro. That's just insane. And then in 2007, these documents were released that maybe proved that this plot actually did take place and that these meetings did happen.

And then you have collected all the documents to write B-defining book on this story. So tell me about Operation Mongoose and how did this story come together where the U.S. try to kill Fidel Castro with Italian gangsters. Sure. Well, you have to picture America in the late 50s. We had won World War II. We were very much on top of the world. And there's two things that happened, two satellites, if you will, that occurred.

One was an actual satellite called Sputnik. And it was the Russians who sent Sputnik up into space. They were the first ones into space. So that really rattled things in Washington. And then two years later, another satellite happened. Cuba became a satellite to the Soviet Union when Fidel Castro led a revolution. He overthrew the dictator Batista at the time. And he threw out all of the U.S. business interests in Havana, Cuba.

And he closed down the casinos that were run by the mafia there, including the two. two main proponents of protagonists in my story, Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean-Connor. Can you paint the picture of what Cuba looked like at this time? I grew up in Florida, so obviously I grew up around a lot of Cuban. Some would say too many, okay? I wouldn't say that. I would say it was the perfect amount. Oh, yeah. But they're, you know, Cuba is this tiny little, you know, island off the coast of Florida, and they make so good baseball players. But I think for the most part, people that have lived in America, you know, since like the 80s, 90s, they don't really know anything about Cuba. They just know you can't go there. They have cigars, but that's not

always the case. And in the 60s, 50s and 60s, Cuba was a very different place. Absolutely. Before Las Vegas, there was Havana, Cuba. It's so like, particularly in the wintertime, people who lived in the Northeast, people in the Midwest, you said, oh, I want to go someplace, something exotic, a place where there's casinos where you can gamble for free. That was Havana. And that was Havana from like the 20s, 30s, 40s, up until Castro takes power and throws all the Americans out of Cuba. So it was an extraordinary, beautiful place to go. What also happened there was the Americans and the gangsters, the American gangsters, became part of the financial elite in Cuba. And so there was an underclass in Cuba.

and that helped fuel Fidel Castro's revolution. Interesting. Yeah, there's so crazy stories of Cuba in that time that people going down there to do drugs and to gamble and to party. Apparently a young John F. Kennedy as a senator apparently went down there. Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, all the rap back down. Only Bennett, even, all these, that can call a lot of American entertainers went down there. It was Las Vegas before Las Vegas.

Las Vegas, bear in mind, didn't really take off. off until after World War II. So it's a late 1940s, early 50s. Havana was the place to go in the wintertime if you wanted to have that type of fun. So now Fidel's revolution has created a couple different enemies that have a sort of a common interest to get rid of him, right? The U.S. government doesn't like Fidel taking over because he's now working as a satellite for the Soviets in a very pivotal time in U.S. history.

Yeah, that's really like the first. crazy aspect of a very crazy story. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about Smore Camp. Yes, join Smore Camp. What is this? This is the inner sanctum. This is for the diehard camp folk, all right?

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I enjoy putting it together. Check it out in the description. Let's get back to the show. So we had the U.S. government, Uncle Sam, who wanted to get rid of Castro, but so. did the mafia, in particular, my two gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean Conner. They had a casino on the outskirts of Havana called the San Suu Kyi, but there were other mobsters who owned other casinos in Havana. So the mob overall was really upset about being thrown out. They lost millions of dollars. And so these two interests joined together of both the U.S. government

and the mafia in trying to get rid of Castro. I'm curious, and most of these revolutions, you know, outside of like a color revolution or something, there's normally violence and death. Why didn't Fidel kill the gangsters that were running the casinos at the time when he committed his revolution? Well, one of the gangsters in my story, Santo Traffa County, was actually jailed for a while and exactly how he got out of jail. it leads to some really interesting suspicions

about whether or not he was a double agent or not. But basically Fidel had enough on his hands. He had a lot of people that wanted to leave. They fled by plane and by boat and such. And so it wasn't bloody there, although there were plenty of political enemies that they just basically lined up against the wall and fired away. And, you know, actually there's some footage in Mafia Spies,

the TV show on Paramount, but also in my book, there's a photo of one of these ad hoc type of firing squads where, you know, we get rid of the enemies, one, two, three. Now, how does this plan start to actually hatch? Who are the people around it? Is it the CIA? Is it the president at the time? Like, where does it actually start? Well, bear in mind, the same.

CIA, it's the Eisenhower administration, the last days of Dwight Eisenhower's administration, that he signs off on this plan to get rid of Castro. And it's the CIA's job to do that. Now, bear in mind two things. One is with the CIA, we were relatively slow to get into the whole spying game, the United States. You know, the Russians were involved with spying firsts for many, many years. Winston Churchill with the British, he very much believed, I've written a book about the Churchill's and the Kennedys. Winston very much believed in spying and urged the United States to create what ultimately became the CIA. But initially with the CIA, we were collecting information. What happened is with mafia spies is really the story of where we go from passive

spying to what they call covert operations. And so what this meant was actually trying to kill a foreign leader in his own country with Castro. And so this meant a big change for the CIA. And so when the job came down from the Eisenhower administration to get rid of Castro, the decision was made, well, you know, we all went to Princeton and Yale. and we're all Ivy League guys who are running the CIA here. We don't really want to get blood on our hands. So we need a buffer. We need an intermediary.

We need what the CIA calls a cutout. And so after much discussion, they realize there's a fellow named Robert Mayu who becomes a big player in Mafia Spies. And he becomes the cutout. He's a guy who had been a former FBI agent. and Robert Mayu knew Johnny Roselli. Mayu had worked his full-time job was for Howard Hughes, who was this very eccentric, richest man in America at that time.

He was also a government contractor, but May you worked for Howard Hughes. And one time, Hughes needed to get on very short notice a suite at the last minute in Las Vegas, and it was Johnny Roselli. Everybody said, oh, if you want that type of, you know, Hail Mary pass to be completed, call Johnny Roselli. So Robert Mayu, this cutout, became really good friends with Roselli.

And he approached Roselli. And Roselli said, yeah, I'll do it. Let me talk to my bosses. And he talked to Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Chicago mob, which was the biggest mafia. family in America. You know, we see the Godfather and Goodfellas, but we're talking in New York City of five rivalrous families, mafia families in New York. In Chicago, it's one big family. Essentially, it was created by Al Capone. And this is what Sam Giancana by 1959, 1960s. He was in charge of this.

So Roselli goes to Sam Giancana, and lo and behold, after much, discussion here and there. They have a big meeting down at the Fountain Blue Hotel. I don't know if you've ever seen the beginning of Goldfinger, the James Bond movie, where they have that big pan to the pool and the fountain blue, this big white hotel in Miami Beach. And so they have this meeting, the CIA, the intermediary Robert Mayu, and the two gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam G. and Kana. They have it in no less a place than the boom boom room in. in the Fountain Blue Hotel. And that's where they decide how exactly they're going to try to kill Fidel Castro.

Wow. Now, who were the CIA agents at the time that were conducting that meeting? Well, you know, he goes down different steps. It was the head of the CIA was Alan Dulles. There was another man, like a number two, Richard Bissell, and he went to Yale. But then they had one or two other steps. So it became a guy named Jim O'Connell, it was about three or four or five, steps down the pecking order in the CIA who actually met with Roselli, Gene Kana, Robert Mayu,

the intermediary, and also Johnny and Sam brought along another gangster, a guy named Santo Traficanti, who we talked about before. And he was the mob leader in Tampa, but he was also a Spanish speaker. So he was really critical down in Havana when they were running the casinos. And so he came along for this one meeting at the Fountain Blue Hotel. And that's where they decided, you know, exactly how they're going to kill Castro. And what was the nature of their meeting? I'm sure, you know, in my experience speaking with and also reading about different Italian mob guys, you know, what's in it for me? What are we going to get from this?

Like, were they looking for some type of, you know, immunity from crime? who were trying to operate with the, you know, impunity in their own districts. Like, what was the, what was the nature of the negotiation? Well, the FBI had just begun to really wake up to the mafia's power and presence in the United States. The FBI then run by Jayekul Hoover had been really running after communists after World War II. So they were embarrassed. The FBI was embarrassed about just how much there was a big meeting of the, of the mafia, an upstate New York, and it made the front pages.

And everybody in America essentially woke up to the mafia. The mafia was really getting pressed by the government. And so Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean-Connor were really looking for in Monopoly. They call it a get out of jail free card. And they felt, okay, if we become killers, we assassinate Fidel Castro. we'll, in essence, get the government off our backs. We'll get out of jail free card. Now, at the same time, the FBI is more and more going after the mafia,

including Johnny and Sam. But they thought that they would have this magic card, that they, if they did this dirty deed for the CIA, that they went ahead and tried to kill Castro in a very top secret operation, that they would be immune to any type of person. prosecution. They were doing what they were doing a solid for Uncle Sam. I see interesting. Do you think there's a patriotic element? Because if you've ever met an Italian American, these guys love America. They really do. Well, particularly Johnny Roselli. Johnny Roselli, Sam Jean kind of was born in

Chicago, but Johnny Roselli came over, uh, from Italy with his mother as a very young lad. And he was indeed very patriotic. And when the CIA offered a, uh, from Italy, uh, from Italy, uh, from Italy, uh, from $150,000. This is in early 1960. It's a lot of money back then. So $150,000, Johnny said, no, we don't need the money. We'll do this for free. You know, I believe in America.

I am, I love my new country, and I'm a patriot. We'll kill him for free. He wanted the favor. He didn't want the money. They had enough money. Yeah, exactly. They need some more favors. Now, if I'm Alan Dulles, right, if I created the CIA and I'm sitting there trying

to figure out how to get rid of Castro, the first place I would go would not be to try to negotiate with potentially volatile gangsters, right? And these are going to be guys that are looking for favors down the line. And it just seems like high risk. And I'm also, you know, leading the CIA. I have a lot of access to, you know, American military. apparatus. And I feel like, in my mind, I would just try to send in troops or I would try to, you know, send in a trained assassin or something to that effect. I feel like going through these, these mob guys

seems like option D. So I'm curious, did they try those things? And if not why, you know, down in Miami, one of the extraordinary things is that we were running, you know, when Castro throws everybody out, the Americans, but also a lot of the people who had been supporting the previous dictator, Batista, or just everyday people from Cuba who found themselves now as exiles in particularly in the Miami areas. A number of those folks, also for patriotic reasons, wanted to go back and reclaim their homeland from Castro. So the CIA was training a lot of Cuban exiles and Florida and elsewhere to essentially attack. And there was a big attack in April of 1961 called the Bay of Pigs. And that became a big fiasco. By that point, President Kennedy had adopted,

had taken on these plans to get rid of Castro. He was also very much in favor of getting rid of Castro. But that plan was thwarted, partly it seems, particularly now that with some of the documents that I've gotten in the last five years that have become available, you become aware that Castro had a spy network, not only in Cuba, but he had also been able to set up a network of informants, double-agent spies in South Florida, where the CIA was doing all these different things. So a number of the attempts to kill Castro were stopped, where Castro knew they were coming in advance, even the Bay of Pigs.

They knew in advance that they were going to be attacked there because Castro, with the help of the Russians, set up a very extensive spy network in relatively short order and in short period of time. And that's one of the major ways in which he was able to avoid getting assassinated. ultimately dying as an old man only a few years ago. Right. Yeah, he seems unkillable, right?

Like, they tried to honeypot him, which that, you know, sort of failed and fell through. Can you explain, like, the honeypot and how that didn't work? Yeah. Well, one of the ways they tried to kill him was to enlist a woman named Marita Lorenz. And in our show, Mafia Spies on Paramount and Showtime, we recreate this whole scene in which she was recruited by the CIA to go back. She had had an affair early on with Castro, and then she fled to New York, and that's where she was recruited by the CIA, and she was convinced to go back. And ultimately, she winds up in a bedroom with Fidel Castro, and she asks if she can excuse herself

to go to the bathroom for a moment. And when she does, she opens up a jar of cold cream. And in that cold cream jar is our capsules with poison in them that have been prepared by the CIA. Unfortunately, the moisture from the cold cream itself actually made those capsules melt. And so, at least according to Marita, they were unusable. So she comes out of the bathroom. And there's Fidel on the bed. And there's a gun that he has just like this one here. on the nightstand.

He's going to kill her. And he says, no, he says, you were going to kill me, weren't you? And she kind of stalls. And he takes his own gun, says, here, you want to kill me, go ahead, kill me. And according to Marita, instead, she burst out in tears and made love to him on the spot.

So instead of assassination, she resumed her affair with Castro, at least for that evening. She went back to the United States. She later told that story to a number of different people. It's one of the many different attempts to kill Castro. Many of them were pretty straightforward, either poisoning. I know the CIA initially wanted some type of rub out.

You know, if you're going to hire gangsters, you might as well have like a St. Valentine's Day massacre where you rub it, rub them out with machine guns or whatever. Gene Kana said no, he preferred the poison. He felt that they could plant people in Havana because they knew people from their days when they were running casinos there. And they felt that they would be able to get close enough to Fidel Castro to be able to kill him. Other things like explosives and such, you know, bear in mind people like Alan Dulles and anybody,

even JFK, who served in World War II. But particularly Alan Dulles, it was a terrific spy during World War II, and by then was running the CIA, a lot of people after World War II asked the question, well, if we had assassinated Adolf Hitler, would we have been able to save millions of innocent lives? Would the world have been spared this awful destruction? And so there was a lot of talk about that.

There were attempts to kill Hitler. But early on, I know the Brits talked about it, but ultimately decided not to assassinate. And we were still way too early to the game to even get involved in those discussions. But by 1960, Fidel Castro, by allowing the Russians to put nuclear missiles, being willing to have that,

and having the idea of having atomic missiles, 90 miles from the shores of the United States, that was the same type of threat. An atomic attack that could literally kill millions of Americans within a few minutes. That was perceived as just an unacceptable risk, an existential risk. And so he had to be taken out. And so I think that was the mindset of a lot of people, both in the White House, and in the CIA. I see.

The stakes are so dire. He has to go. America's, you know, being threatened by Cuba, you know, as a proxy for Russia. Fidel is behind it. And, you know, ultimately, he is orchestrating this entire thing. And we've tried to take him out multiple times. We're kind of, we're 0 and five probably at this point, right? Like, you know, we tried to honeypot him.

Didn't work. You know, failed invasion with the Bay of Pigs didn't work. Now we're on to, you know, the bad news bears. You know, when you go to amusement park, like an arcade and you go to whack a mole. Sure. That game, you know, we have the big mallet and you try to hit the mole. And that was kind of like what it was like for about four or five years there.

And all these different attempts to kill Castro. And somehow he anticipated when things were happening. In fact, there's a scene in my book, but also in the TV show on Paramount, that Johnny Roselli, he really gets into this whole thing. and he's involved with the training and how to, with the Cuban exiles. And one particular circumstance, he jumps in a group of boats with other Cuban exiles. And in the middle of the night, they go across that 90 miles from the Florida Keys to a landings point in Cuba. And they're loaded with guns and explosives and they're going to be meeting people.

turns out Castro's security forces again knew that they were coming. And so they start chasing Roselli and the Cuban exiles in their boats. In fact, Johnny's boat, the security forces start firing weapons. Johnny's boat starts taking on water and he has to jump into another boat and off they go. So, you know, there was all these crazy attempts to kill Castro. And eventually they began to say, okay, why is it, how is this guy able to avoid getting assassinated? So the CIA brought in kind of their ace. They kind of signaled to the bullpen.

And in came a guy named William Harvey, who was known, he looked like Jackie Gleason, but he was known as the James Bond of the CIA. He had been a terrific spy in Europe, in Berlin and Germany. And they brought him to Florida. And he kind of was looking at everything and assessing, you know, what's going wrong and what do we have to do to make this right? And he had the Kennedys, particularly Bobby Kennedy, who was then the Attorney General, really pushing them to say, why aren't we getting rid of Castro?

We need this done, you know, as soon as possible. And so Harvey, he came to the conclusion that Johnny Roselli was sincere, that he was a patriot, that he did want to kill Castro. Sam, Gene Kana, he wasn't so sure about that. And he had a lot of questions about Santo Traficanti, the other guy who had been involved, who was a drug trafficker. You know, he ran his own gambling operations, but purely when you're running a drug trafficking network in the Caribbean, you do need the cooperation. of the Cubans and such. So the question was always, was Santo Traficanti,

at some point did he become a double agent? Was he kind of saying that he wanted to get rid of Castro, but was he also looking out for his own interests and those interests that were helped by Castro? And so what evidence do we have to suggest that he was double agent? Well, a lot of the documents that became available in the last five years, not only showed the extent of the CIA operation in Southern Florida,

which would involve hundreds, at times thousands of people, but what it also showed is that people like Bill Harvey, the CIA agent that they bring in towards the middle point of this thing. And he oversees a lot of this Operation Mongoose, as it was called. He, these documents that became available five years ago that were released. These were the JFK files that had been kept secret for like 50, 60 years. And they were released finally around 2017 and 18. And when I went through all those documents, they kind of provide a lot of pieces of evidence where people like Harvey was saying in these memos saying, this guy Traficanti, I don't think he can be trusted. And And so the FBI, particularly the CIA, had doubts about that.

There were a number of other people that they had doubts about whether or not people had become informants or had their own financial reasons to somehow cooperate or provide information to the Castro government. And so those records were very, very helpful to me in writing Mafia spies. Right. Okay. This makes a lot more sense. now, now that we're kind of getting into this.

Two pieces of information that are kind of making this make a lot more sense for me is the urgency to get rid of Castro is predicated by the whole world reeling from the effects of World War II, needing to get rid of Hitler, not assassinating him when we had the chance. And obviously, this great atrocity happened, and let's stop after happening again. That explains the motivation really well. And then Fidel's ability to evade assassination countless times, once we understand that he is backed by Soviet intelligence, which at this time, you know, is the greatest in the world. The KGB is extremely prominent. They know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. And he has access

to all of those resources. It makes a lot of sense how he's able to evade capture an assassination for so long. So now we're back to the fountain blue. CIA and the mafia are discussing everything. They're going over the details. How does that initial meeting sort of conclude and what are the the steps from there. Well, essentially, it's decided they'll try to poison Castro because Sam Jean Conner, the head of the Chicago mob, says to the CIA guys there saying, look, if we go in there with guns are blazing, we're going to get killed. And as well, it's going to be a lot cleaner.

And there'll be no fingerprints if somebody poisons him. They won't even know exactly how he died. You know, with poisons like that, sometimes it's really not easily detected what the cause of the death was. So they pursued that. And like I said, they pursued also attempts to get guns and explosives into Cuba. And as I mentioned, the attack by Johnny Roselli with the Cuban exiles. he actually got in the boat with them. But there were a repeated number of attempts like that from roughly 1960 until about

1964 when LBJ takes power. So four years of back and forth trying to actually execute the mission. It was four years of an undeclared war run out of southern Florida in the Miami area. And it was really quite extensive. It's really remarkable that something like that fundamentally was kept a secret from the American people. And even when it became known, there were attempts to hush it up within the local press. And I talk about that in my book. Now, how does this operation with these specific gangsters sort of conclude?

Like, are they sort of cut off? Like, after they have so many failed attempts, does the government sort of, you know, throw their hands up and say, hey, thanks for trying? Like what exactly is the conclusion of their saga? Well, a couple of things happened. First, in 1961, there's the Bay of Pigs, and that's a big disaster where a number of the Cuban exiles trained by the CIA wind up being captured in Cuba. When they're attacking, they wind up getting captured by Castro. So there's a whole negotiation about how to get them out, and Kennedy eventually does do that.

And I detail that in the book. And then eventually when those hostages are released in exchange for other materials that Castro needs for his government, there's a big celebration at the Orange Bowl, which was the big stadium in Miami and Jackie Kennedy, who speaks Spanish, comes there. That's part of it. And another major thing in 1962 is the Cuban missile crisis. As I mentioned, Castro was willing to allow the Russians to put nuclear missiles into Cuban and used Cuba as a launching pad for a possible attack against the United States only 90 miles away. So that wound up in a huge confrontation between the United States and Russia. where we almost went. It was almost the start of World War III, and that was something that

anybody who lived during that time period in 1962, they remember that most vividly. That's when we almost had a big nuclear war in this country. Yeah, that's pretty significant. And we talk about nuclear war a lot now, you know, and I was born in the 90s, so I obviously missed this era. But that feeling of just impending doom is very stressful. And we have a lot. And we have a like little seeds of it now, but I don't think anything we experienced now was as close to the terror that people, especially in Florida, felt at that time. Right. Well, we're here in Brooklyn, I went to school in Queens. I was a kindergartner. And I do remember that time period where school kids were taught to put their heads under the desk, you know, in the event of an attack.

There were people that would put nuclear fallout, shelters in their backyards. They would build in the cellars of their homes or out in the backyard. Schools had these symbols on the side of them that said that this was a place for a nuclear attack where you could take shelter. So it was very much part of the time. Wow. Yeah. As if the deaths would help. I don't think that would do much.

No. Actually, when I've done a lot of stuff about nuclear warfare, actually I went out to the Marshall Islands in 2007. I did a big piece about a big documentary for Newsday about it. But I can tell you in a way, you're better off getting killed immediately than suffering from nuclear poison like that. Yeah. Atomic poison. Yeah. So standing on top of your desk is what you're saying.

That'd be better. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Right. But yes. Yeah. So, yeah, it's something that we were aware of. And also in the 1950s, we shot off a whole load of atomic bombs.

And then the hydrogen bomb was about a thousand times more powerful than the bomb at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So the hydrogen bomb was tested out in the Marshall Islands, and that's where I went. Wow. Yeah, that's remarkable. Now, this plan was hatched prior to Kennedy being elected. Yeah, the last days of ice and hazing. Howard's administration. So I'm curious, as he steps into the role as president and learns about this whole plan of hiring these mob guys to kill Castro, what did he think of it? Was he in

opposition to it? And did he have any detailed discourse with these guys? No, the Kennedys, as Catholics, I'm a Catholic, and I do know in having written books about the Kennedys previous to this, I know that the Catholic Church felt very strongly that the communists were literally disassembling churches all throughout the communist bloc. So the Kennedys were as strongly anti-communists as anybody, and they felt, in fact, JFK said it during the 1960 campaign, that Castro was a threat to this country and had to be dealt with. So from the moment that he came in, he said that he essentially was on board with getting rid of Castro.

Wow. Now, I've heard other plans to not necessarily kill Castro, but to humiliate him and embarrass him and lace his shoes with chemicals to make his beard fall out. Like, where did those plans come from and were any of those true? Do they attempt to do those? Yeah. Well, part of it was that there were parts to embarrass Castro where they thought initially that's what the CIA thought would work. JFK also felt that way. In the way in which he came to that conclusion,

just before he became president, he had a dinner party. Jackie was there as well with an author by the name of Ian Fleming who wrote all of the James Bond books. And he actually asked Ian Fleming, how would you deal with somebody like Castro? And Fleming said,

ridicule chiefly. And Ian Fleming had been a spy as well in World War II. And so JFK very much took that to heart, and so did the CIA. And in fact, the CIA in attempts to kill Castro kind of adopted a lot of the James Bond things that they saw. In fact, there were people in the Kennedy administration who would see James Bond movies and all these different killing gadgets that James Bond was using and say, geez, that looks awfully effective. Do you think we could make one of those type of things? And they actually had a lab at the CIA that was run by a guy named Sidney Gottlieb. And it specialized in putting together poisons or explosives.

And so as a matter of fact, Jackie Kennedy sent up a copy of a James Bond novel to Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, and said, you know, you should really read this. Wow. This is really something. So the Kennedy's very much. like that idea of the cool James Bond effectiveness of spying. Hey, what's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I need to tell you about a brand I'm so excited to be working with.

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Everything you need to know, take control of your health today and sleep better and recover faster. Let's get back to the show. So how did the Cuban missile crisis ultimately resolve? Did things just cool off? Was there a specific event or a meeting that kind of, quelled things. Yeah, there was a big confrontation, but under the table there was a deal that was made. So the Russian leader, Khrushchev, was concerned about the fact that we already had nuclear missiles in Turkey, which was next door, essentially, to Russia. And so the Soviet Union,

And so the deal that was made was that the Russians would take their missiles out of Cuba if we took our missiles out of Turkey. And that was not made known for many years later. In fact, they didn't pull out. We did not pull our missiles out of Turkey for about eight or nine months after this confrontation. But this was something that many people thought, well, things have cooled off. But actually, the secret plan to try to kill Castro continued on with Johnny Roselli and Bill Harvey, and it carried on until JFK's assassination. Wow. And why did JFK's assassination ultimately change that plan so drastically? Was it because of the nature of the conflict just changing? Or was it because he was in charge of that operation at the time? what actually from his assassination would stop Brazelli from wanting to kill Castro?

Well, I think one of the things that mafia spies does is, and as I mentioned, these new documents five years ago that they called them the JFK assassination files. They didn't really say who killed JFK beyond Lee Harvey Oswald, the clear-cut assassin of Kennedy. But the Warren Commission that looked at Kennedy's assassination, one of the members happened to be Alan Dulles, the former head of the CIA, the man who had been the mastermind of the plot to kill Castro. And just before JFK was killed in 63,

Castro essentially gave a number of interviews where he said, I know you're trying to kill me. And two can play this game if you don't cut it out, basically. So Castro was essentially trying to call our bluff there. And when Kennedy is killed, Alan Dulles, by all accounts, steers the Warren Commission away from looking at this plot to kill Castro. They really don't look at the Cuban connection in any of this. And they come to the conclusion about Harvey, excuse me, that Lee Harvey Oswald is the assassination, is the assassin. But,

what I'm getting at is they didn't look at this whole Cuban connection and so when Johnson becomes president in 1964 he decides to steer away from Cuba and he turns his attention to a whole new battleground in the Cold War which was called Vietnam

Have you read the devil's chessboard? I have. Yeah, this is a fascinating book that kind of touches on this exact moment that you're talking. Yeah, I'm not sure I buy into everything there. Oh, yeah, no. I, you know, I have about 600 footnotes in the back of my book. I like, I'm an investigative reporter. I like to have receipts for everything that I say. So, you know, I, I don't talk about all the people's writing, sure, and whatever. But generally speaking, I, in mafia spies, the story is based upon

CIA documents that have been declassified, a sworn testimony in court, sworn FBI documents and investigative files, sworn testimony in the U.S. Senate, and also my own interviews, and or cases, you know, other books that I genuinely feel that are worth citing in my own work. I see. That makes sense. I guess I'm curious, though, just the, you know, the connection with Alan Dulles leading the Warren Commission and actually looking into the assassination of Kennedy. And Kennedy's, I guess, you know, the conflict with him, if I'm not mistaken, he removed him from the CIA prior to... He did.

After the Bay of Pigs, he gets rid of Alan Duff, Alan Dulles. And this is a huge stain on his career. His legacy is tarnished. He's extremely embarrassed. The guy that basically created the CIA is now kicked out by the president. And then that same guy is now in charge of... looking into who assassinated. It's part of the Warren Commission.

Which seems like a conflict of interest if you ask. Well, you're asked to investigate the assassination of the president of the United States. Also, your enemy. Murder 101, murder investigation 101, as any homicide detective will tell you, is you identify all the suspects. And you try to do that within 72 hours. And within 72 hours, the number one suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered. So that becomes a big problem, but it becomes even more of a problem if you don't

look at all the possible suspects there. And I know that, for instance, Gerald Ford, who was then a congressman on the Warren Commission and later becomes president. In fact, he's present when a lot of this stuff begins to come out into the open about what was going on in the attempts to kill Castro by the CIA. And he realizes that Alan Dulles, he was never told about this plan when he was on the Warren Commission. So there was a lot of feeling.

And I think that that is one of the more outrageous things in my book. I'm not the only one who says this. But it's something that really impeded our understanding. And also opened, unfortunately, opened the door to more and more conspiracy things. theories about, you know, who killed JFK, you know, whatever. And so it's unfortunate because it kind of opens up a Pandora box in this country of a lot of conspiracy theories. And with

mafia spies, there's a lot of things on the record 50 years, 60 years later that I'm able to show. And I think clearly the fact that the CIA said, they admitted in writing, they coughed up what they called the family jewels memo in 2007, where it actually says we hired these two gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam G. and Kana, to kill Castro. And they actually acknowledged it. So this is based upon all fact. Now, with Kennedy's assassination and your research into, you know, some of those files that have been declassified fairly recently, could you know, speculate on some of the theories that are out there, these outrageous conspiracy theories, which we know to be not true. Obviously, Lee Harvey Oswald killed him. Okay, that's what we both believe,

right? Yeah. So, but could you tell me some of the other theories of maybe other people that could have killed him or why other people would have a motivation and what your opinion on those are? Yeah. Well, well, the first one was the mafia. And certainly the mafia. In fact, Bobby Kennedy, when his brother was murdered, that was one of the first things that came to his mind. In fact, he had a labor investigator in Chicago who he trusted check out whether or not Gene Kana or any other person in the mob had been involved in his brothers in JFK's killing. And this investigator told the name was Jules Droznan, if I'm not mistaken, off the top of my head. But Bobby Newman trusted him. And Bobby had worked in the Senate Rackets

committee as well. So, and this guy in Chicago told him no, he didn't see any signs that the mafia was involved. What would be the motivation for the mafia to kill? Well, the mafia was very upset for a lot of reasons, but one of the major reasons is that Giancana and Johnny Roselli, particularly Sam Giancana, had vouched for JFK when he ran for president in 1960. This This really involves another major figure in mafia spies, which is Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra was pals with G and Kana, reaching back for a number of years, particularly during this time period. They were very close.

How do I know that? You look at both their FBI files. It's replete with references to conversations and, you know, of things that the two men did. But that was a big factor in. believing that the mafia may have been involved. And the other major area was, of course, the Russians and or the Cubans, and was Castro involved? And as I said, because the Warren Commission was essentially steered away from looking at the Castro connections. And we're only seeing this in some of these documents that have become available over subsequent years,

Patili in the last five years where you can see a lot of, just a huge amount of effort that we made in Florida to try to get rid of Castro. So he would see a natural suspect for the Kennedy assassination. Castro went to his death as an old man many years later saying, no, I did, I had no part in it. The Russians claim that they had no part in it. And so we're kind of left with a lot of open questions even to this day. Could you just button up the theory for the mafia that Sinatra was paling around with JFK and he was writing songs for him and sort of, you know, was helping him with his campaign. And in a very close race, you could, you know, potentially say that Sinatra swayed the election

in some capacity. And why would Gene Kana feel frustrated with Kennedy after that? or what was the actual fallout that they would have had? Well, there's a, it's a long story that's played at it in both of my book and in the TV series. But essentially, Gene Kana thought for like the same reasons what they were involved with the CIA. If we do one for the CIA, they'll stay off, they'll get off our backs, they'll prosecute us and such. So by, particularly with Sinatra's involvement with the Kennedy campaign and the closeness there, assumed that if Kennedy wins that the Justice Department would not go after the mafia to the

extent that they were at that point. Actually, if anything happens, it's just the opposite. Bobby Kennedy becomes the attorney generally. He turns up the heat on the mafia. But this is something that the mob initially thought, well, if with Sinatra and if we, particularly Gene Kahnip, we support Kennedy, or at least, you know, behind the scenes support, that somehow will get a favor and will be looked on favorably by the incoming Kennedy administration. I see. And people so. Right. Yeah. Now, as we've seen since. And obviously, there's a weird sort of connection with Lee Harvey Oswald having sort of CIA ties and, you know, directly after the assassination, he outwardly claims, I'm a pass.

Hatsy and then he's assassinated, you know, hours after JFK is killed. It's incredible. Yeah. It leads to a lot of speculation and confusion. So it was one screwed up murder investigation. Yeah. So then from that moment, Giancana and I'm sorry, what was the other gentleman's name? Johnny Roselli.

Rosselli. So these two guys now were no longer in some sort of direct conflict trying to take out Castro. I guess the administration changed, plans changed, and they kind of fell to the wayside. Is that fair? Yeah, well, it becomes a real point of contention because at a certain point, and this is really like a whole other river that runs through my story here, Johnny Roselli was essentially the mobster who the Chicago mob sent out to Hollywood initially, and Johnny was known is handsome Johnny.

And he dated a lot of actresses, Lana Turner, Donna Reed from It's a Wonderful Life. He knew Marilyn Monroe, but he also knew a woman named Judy Campbell. And she becomes a major figure in this story. Because what happens is that she first goes out with Johnny, then Johnny introduces her to Frank Sinatra, who goes out with Judy Campbell.

She's described as like a young Elizabeth Taylor type. And she's not a flusy. In fact, she's kind of a, I portray her in my book as a young woman, almost like a Monica Lewinsky in a sense that she kind of willingly gets involved with a very powerful man, man in the Lewinsky case. But in this case, Judy Campbell gets involved with first Johnny Roselli. Then she has an affair with Frank Sinatra, arguably the best-known entertainer in America, the rat pack in Las Vegas. All that's going on there.

Johnny Roselli, by that point, is the mob's guy also in Las Vegas. He's very much involved there on behalf of the Chicago mob. He's overseeing things both in Hollywood, but he's also in Las Vegas. Sinatra introduces her, Judy Campbell, in I believe it's March of 1960 during the presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy decides to have a little relaxation in Las Vegas. His brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, JFK's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, is part of the Rat Pack. He's part of the Sinatra's crowd.

And somehow Sinatra is already no longer going out with Judy, but Judy's hanging out with them. Sinatra introduces Judy Campbell to JFK. And JFK and Judy Campbell begin an affair that carries on for the next two years, even right into the White House. And so that becomes something that the FBI becomes aware of in this story. And there's a whole story about how the FBI learns about it. But the head of the FBI, Jay Edgar Hoover, when he finds out about this, he realizes that he's got some compromising material on the president of the United States. And so if the mob thinks that it's going to somehow get the FBI off their back, they think that one of the ways to do so is to have Judy get involved.

with JFK, but also get involved with Sam G. and Kana eventually. So at one point in this story, the president of the United States is having an affair with a young woman, Judy Campbell, who at the same time is being courted by Sam G. and Kana, the top mobster in the country. Wow. Now, that's compromise. Yeah, that is a major, a major source spot. If that comes to light, especially in that time, yeah. That's a major. major issue. So how does that resolve? What happens with Judy Campbell and does the FBI come in to sort of clear up the blackmail? In the short answer, yes. When Hoover finds out about this, he uses it like a card that he keeps very close to his vest and then eventually he lets Bobby Kennedy, his boss, the

Attorney General Robert Kennedy, know about it. But there's a meeting that's set up, a private meeting between Hoover and JFK. And as a result of that, the affair between Judy Campbell ends at that point. And we're talking, I guess, 61, 62, I guess it is. And but Judy Campbell comes back in this story. When this becomes more well-known, after Watergate in the early 1970s, the Senate looks at how Nixon during Watergate had had improperly used the FBI and to some extent the intelligence services. And ultimately, the Senate Intelligence Committee finds out about this super secret plot to kill Castro dating from the early 60s that was now by that point almost 15 years old. and they decide to have hearings about it. And so they subpoena our two gangsters in this story,

Johnny Roselli and Sam G. and Connor. And that becomes a very fateful decision for both men. And why do they subpoena them? Why are they looking into a hearing 15 years after the fact? Right. Well, they're finding out how is it that the CIA would be hiring the mafia to kill a front? foreign leader. Back in the mid-1970s, that was something that was outrageous. It was particularly

outrageous to President Ford, who had been on the Warren Commission and was unaware about this secret plot to kill Castro. It was super secret for many, many years. And so the feeling was that we should not be in a position of trying to kill other countries' leaders, that that was inappropriate. And so there was hearings about it. And the Senate decided to subpoena both Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. This makes more sense. I think it can't be overstated the generational context that all this is happening in. Like even, for example, the Judy Campbell story, if Giancana is aware of the affair that JFK is having with Campbell, he is able to lean on JFK and say, hey, you have to do X, Y, Z for us.

And if you say, no, we will leak this information to the press. We will, you know, make this a big public story. Absolutely. And in that time, you know, now we're a little desensitized in American politics. You know, we have presidents that are, you know, sleeping with, you know, strippers and porn stars or whatever else. You know, it's not. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Allegedly. Or, you know, having affairs with their, you know, interns, things like that. Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. You know, we're a little desensitized. But in this time, if this story leaks. JFK's career is over. It's possible he's, you know, kicked out of office. He no longer has a career. I mean, you see what they did with Bill Clinton, you know, only 20 years ago and how much, how huge of a debacle this was for him. So if this came to light, it could be the end of his entire career. And that is a lot of leverage to have over the president of the free world.

It sure was. It definitely was. You know, and so what happens is for, particularly for the two gangsters, Johnny and Sam, Jing Conner. On one hand, they have the FBI now running after them more and more and more. But they thought, well, wait a minute, we are trying to kill Castro for you guys, Uncle Sam. So on one hand, they're doing a favor for the CIA and think they're going to get some special treatment. And if anything, the other hand, the FBI is running after them full speed. And that also leads to Johnny Roselli's big secret being revealed. Wow. Yeah.

And yeah, I just again, I think the generational component is so important here. Like I don't even know if this would be an apt comparison to the modern day. But if it fit America, especially in this time, was seen as global good guys that would never try to assassinate, you know, another country's leader. As we will see later on, you know, in America's story, the CIA has gone in and like, done coup d'etas to take out, you know, leaders in Central America and, you know, Iran and parts of the Middle East. And this is now known. But at the time, it would be shocking to find out that America would disrupt a nation by killing their leader. And especially using, you know, criminals in America to do that, I think would be... Well, what's really interesting now,

mafia spies is like a classic warning example of something that just has happened in this country. there was a decision by the Supreme Court about presidential immunity and basically said if it could be determined that it's an official act, including assassination, that the president wouldn't be held legally culpable. This was a decision that was just made by the Supreme Court in its last decision in this current term. and a lot of legal experts are still digesting this. But one of the dissenters, Justice Sotomayor, she made that exact point about assassination. And in fact, during the arguments about this presidential immunity decision that was made,

this had to do with the Trump prosecutions that are going on right now. But the Supreme Court, by granting this level of presidential immunity for official acts, it begs the question that something like this could be done without any consequences for the President of the United States. You know, it's really important to realize back when this became known in the 1970s, or even when they were doing it in the early 60s, the reason why it was all super top secret, because they were all concerned if this comes out, we're all getting

fired, we may wind up going to jail. There's going to be consequences for this. I think now mafia spies serves as a sterling example of why the Supreme Court decision is so wrongheaded in allowing such untethered immunity for the president to do official acts that could possibly include the political assassination of his enemies or of, you know, of foreign leaders and such. It opens a huge Pandora's box. So Mafia Spice is really very much part of today's discussion. That's really interesting because I don't know, maybe I'm cynical or maybe I'm jaded. I'm not sure why I feel this way.

But I'm surprised that there even was some type of like, you know, court action to give the president immunity. Because in my mind, I'm like, the president does whatever he wants. If he wants to kill, you know, Moseg and Iran, like, that'll happen. If he wants to get rid of Elmar Tiroos in Central America, he can do that. Like, if whoever they want to kill, they'll kill them. Even if they're in America, they take them out. Like, I just assume that that is a part of the role that you get to kill people. But I don't know that they had to make a law about it. You know, in the mid-70s, President Ford issued a ban on this type of assassination of foreign leaders. Now, with the war on terror, we've seen particularly the use of drones, where we have

taken out with drones, assassinated political leaders or, you know, terrorism leaders who were were- Mad Daddy was- Yeah, who were- Exactly, perceived as imminent threats to the United States or our security and such. And generally speaking, those decisions would be, would pass muster in the eyes of all Americans, I think, virtually all Americans, you know, particularly after 9-11, after we've suffered the type of attack that we did here in New York with 9-11. But what are the guardrails? What are the restrictions and such?

So we've opened up a big can of worms here with this Supreme Court decision. And if you say, okay, well, what can happen? What could go wrong? What possibly could go wrong with this? Tune in to Mafia Spies on Paramount and Showtime or read my book. It's all there in full glory about what can go wrong. Wow. So what happens with Gene Conn and Rosselli at this court hearing in the 70s?

What is the big secret that gets revealed? Well, let's talk with Johnny. You know, Johnny and Sam, one of the reasons why I wanted to do the book is I thought that, you know, you mentioned, there have been a lot of other books about the Kennedy assassination, even about the Cuba things, but it's mostly history books and such. I really wanted to do kind of a biographical book that is like a window of these two gangsters. And through that window, you go into a lot of different worlds that we've talked about already. But I also thought that the friendship, this outlaw friendship, these two gangster buddies,

They were two very different men. As I mentioned, Johnny Roselli was this handsome Johnny, the guy in Hollywood, dating all the actresses, who was married for maybe about five minutes, you know, but just marriage. But he loved women, and he certainly, in a way he understood women better than a guy like Sam. Sam Jean Conner was a guy who had been married to a woman who absolutely adored. He had three teenage daughters. And then his wife took the teenage daughters to Florida. And she was screaming at the oldest daughter, who was kind of a cut-up.

And his wife dropped dead while screaming at the kids. This daughter, her name is Antoinette. Actually, 88-year-old Antoinette Jean-Conna is in our show. It's probably the best interview. She's very funny. and she had the Hots for Johnny Roselli. She mentions that, mentions that.

But, you know, it's, it shatters Sam G. Kana. So here he is, when he becomes the head of the mob, they tell him, keep a low profile. They like that he mows his own lawn

out in the suburbs of Chicago. That's like one of these ostentatious, you know, like front men. Not like a John Gotti, you know, or like Al Capone. In Chicago,

the original guy, really was Al Capone, and he invited all of this attention, all these headlines, and they wound up, the feds wound up getting him, and they were all scorch, all the other gangsters were scorched in Chicago and said, look, to Gene Kana, whatever you do, keep a low profile. And what happens is, just the opposite. When his wife drops dead, Sam is kind of like lost, and now he's looking for the misright, the new, you know, the new perfect woman. He was, you know, that phrase the Madonna-Hore syndrome, I think, is what they call it in psychological terms.

Broiding idea. Yeah. And Sam was a guy who loved his wife. Maybe he had a few girlfriends on the side, but everything was stable for him until, boom, his wife is dead. And now he's kind of unmoored. And he winds up hanging out in Las Vegas more and more with Johnny Roselli. And then he's introduced to Frank Sinatra. And he's introduced to another woman named Phyllis McGuire, who's a singer, who, and suddenly Sam is on the front pages.

And he's in all these headlines in the press, the paparazzi is running after Sam Giancana. And Phyllis and Sinatra, not good. And so that leads to big problems for the both of them. So in the case of Johnny Roselli, when the Senate subpoenas him in 1976, well, let's stay with Sam first. In 1975, they subpoena both of them. And Johnny tells a little bit of what he knows about the Cuban Castro assassination attempts. It's very begrudging what he says. And when they subpoena Sam, they send two investigators out to...

Chicago to kind of prep Sam. And this is what's commonly done before people testify in the Senate. You'll send out two investigators. They do that. And that same night, Sam has a dinner with some friends, one of his daughters, not Antoinette, but one of the other daughters. And then they all go home. And at the end of the night, Sam goes into like his little man cave that he has in the basement of his home.

out in the suburbs, and he's cooking himself a little dinner of sausage and peppers. When somebody with a silencer comes into his room and fires six shots, five of them, fire six around his mouth, which is a classic sign in the mafia that saying that if you talk, if other people talk, you're going to wind up just like this guy dead. This is what happens to people who talk. And it shocked the Senate. It shocked. It was front page news.

Sam Jean-Cana, Senate witness, murder. And he's going to talk about the CIA Castro case. But also what happens with Johnny is something else. Johnny Roselli. Roselli is trying to avoid deportation from the FBI. because the FBI, after they keep on running after Johnny, Johnny gets involved with a lot of different things. He's involved with Howard Hughes with the sale of the casinos out in Las Vegas. He's involved at the Friars Club with this crooked rigged card game that was done at the Beverly Hills Friars Club.

And Johnny winds up going jail for a time period. But by that point, the FBI has checked out Johnny. and they learn that Johnny Roselli's real name is not Johnny Roselli. It is Felipe Socco, the name of the young boy who came from Italy with his mother and landed in Boston before he came to Chicago before Hollywood. And the FBI, when they find this out, they confront Johnny. And now Johnny realizes they want to deport him out of the United States. And Johnny realizes that he gets deported, he's going to wind him.

he's going to wind up dead. He's going to get killed over in Italy. So he's really frantic. And he has some really top-notch lawyers. And one of his lawyers essentially says that Roselli, who's already said somewhat what he knows about the Cuban Castro connection, but that Johnny also knows something about the Kennedy assassination and that he's willing to do this if you help Johnny avoid deportation that he's allowed to stay in this country. And before he testifies to that effect, Johnny winds up dead. He winds up murdered not too far away from the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami.

They chop up his body. They throw it into an 55 gallon oil drum, an empty drum. They toss it into the bay. and his body parts decay so much that the fumes actually forced the drum to the surface. Some fishermen find it, the cops come in, and now we have front page news across the country. Again, Johnny Roselli, another suspect here involved in the Castro assassination attempt, found murdered himself. And so to this day, both the Sam G.

and Kana's murder and Johnny Roselli's murder remains officially unsolved. I do, in mafia spies, kind of indicate who I think probably had a hand in both those murders. And that was Santo Traficanti. The guy that they thought was their friend, he was a gangster from Tampa, Spanish-speaking, a gangster who was with them in Cuba, who was also a drug trafficker. And apparently from these records that were released in the last five years or so, particularly when you look at them, you realize there was a lot of suspicion that Traficanti was playing both sides of the fence, both saying he wanted to kill Castro, but somehow informing or a double agent

for the Castro government. And in a case of Giancana, the silencer, the gun, that gun was thrown out of the fleeing car. Whoever killed Gene Kana, jumped into a car, apparently heard the cops coming or whatever, but a couple of miles away through the silence, the gun with the silencer, out the window, and the cops recovered it. And when they found, they traced the origins of the gun,

it went back not to Chicago, but to Tampa, Florida. So that seems to say, that's Santo Traficanti country. And in the case of Johnny Roselli, Traficanti is even more clear. Johnny had a pretty clear understanding that his days were numbered. In fact, that's why he fled down to Florida where his sister lived. And he actually went to dinner with Santo Traficanti, who he still thought was, I don't know if you remember that scene in the godfather when Abe Fagoda says, you know, hey, Tom, can you get me off the hook?

Well, it's kind of like that type of thing with Johnny, where it seems like he was essentially trying to, in so many ways, plead with Traficante to avoid getting, that Roselli would not get killed, that he was pleading for his own life. But two weeks later, he winds up dead. He winds up in that 55-gallon barrel, all chopped up right within,

You know, a few miles of where it all began at the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami Beach. Wow. Traficante. This is an interesting character, this guy. He really is. He was the one that was imprisoned in Cuba after Fidel's troops kind of came in and cleared everyone out. He was the one that was captured.

Yeah. And apparently Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, helped him get in. But it's never really clear exactly what was done. there and what were the terms and I know people like the CIA agent William Harvey who was called in to try to salvage things this whole operation this is this would have been around 61 62 Harvey definitely had his suspicions about Traficanti and there were other people who you know particularly these documents that I looked at some of the homicide reports the cop reports and the FBI documents kind of indicated that Traficanti may have had a hand in both these murders.

So let's speculate a little bit. Tell me, is it possible when he was imprisoned in Cuba, Castro, Raoul, and Fidel said, all right, we're going to kill you. And then they had an idea and they said, well, wait a second, this guy seems pretty valuable. He seems pretty well connected. He's got some money. If we kill him, it doesn't really do much for us, but maybe we could send him back into the U.S. and he could work for him. us. And we have our people in, you know, Florida. So if he gets out of line, we have that over him forever. We know where he lives and we know where his family is and we can take him out. So we're going to send him back and he's going to be able to work as, you know, a double agent like you had mentioned. And he's able to do two things. One, he's able to keep tabs on, uh, obviously these two main figures that we're talking about, uh, Gianconta and Roselli. And furthermore, he's also

able to tip off Fidel for everything that's going on, all these kinds of happenings, these poisoning plots, these honeypots, and he's able to give messages back to Cuba and say, hey, this is what's going on. So it's able to work on all fronts. Now, that's if I was, you know, the Soviets, if I was Fidel, that's what I would do. Is that, am I completely out of line here? No, I think you're very much correct in a general way. I mean, there were other people who were informants, double agents, but Traficanti was somebody that, like the CIA, for instance, wound up not trusting him because they weren't, they weren't sure that he wasn't providing all this and that's some special deal. I mean, how does he wind up when everybody else winds up being set up with firing squads or winds up in jail or lost forever? We don't know what happened to them.

How does this guy get out? And he had a top-notch mob lawyer named Frank Begano, I believe his name was, who also was involved with Meyer Lansky. And he was involved in some of that negotiations, as I recall. So, but when you look at Traficanti, he would have been the perfect double agent. He's not looking like James Bond in a, tuxedo. He actually wore a bow tie. He looked like the bookkeeper. Very quiet guy. Who's it? He was a deadly murderer. He was a guy who was involved in another apparent assassination up in the New York area. But he was a guy who didn't look the part. And so it took a long time for people to put things together. fact, there was an informant who flipped, a Cuban official who flipped in the 1980s and provided the names for a lot of Cuban informants that the CIA was not aware of. It was a real eye-opener. And as they checked it out individually, I forget if Traficanti specifically was involved with this list, but it was a real eye-opener for the CIA that even took.

20 years later, they didn't realize how sophisticated Castro was in putting together this network of informants, double-agent people who would be compromised for money or sex or any other reasons. Right. It's really a fascinating spy story just in and of itself. Right. I mean, there's the infamous story of Ida Mendez, Montez, I believe. She was a CIA operative that was working.

for the Cubans. I think it was a little bit later. I think it was the 80s, I believe. Right. Well, we see that even today. 60 minutes ran a piece not too long ago, how the Cubans had cultivated double agents and informants and such. So it's still very much as, you know, spying is probably the most cost-effective weapon of warfare. You know, it doesn't cost, what a atom bomb costs or grenades and such. And we are increasingly more sophisticated with our electronics with espionage. But as the Russians knew, as Winston Churchill knew, with developing his spy system in Great Britain, the human touch, the ability to develop informants and how to,

work that, you know, if you ever seen that TV show, the Americans, a lot of that, a lot of that show is about that. And certainly, mafia spies our TV show on Paramount and Showtime. We really talk about that a great deal as well. So now, what would beat Traficanti's motivation to take out these two guys? Was it at the behest of the Cubans because they didn't want them to testify? Or was it his own personal agenda because he was trying to protect himself from his involvement? What would you speculate it was? Well, when Sam and Johnny decided to make this deal with the CIA to get rid of Castro, they didn't go to the National Commission of Mafia chiefsons that they were supposed to kind of get the sign off on different things. Like, for instance, in Las Vegas, there were different, it was an open city, Las Vegas.

So different mafia families could have a piece of loss. Las Vegas. No one owned it exclusively. And that was kind of the same deal down in Cuba before all the casino owners were thrown out. But the fact that Sam and Johnny did not ask for permission, and also just that it was blowing up in their faces, that this was now front page news. And it was exactly what they warned Sam Jean Conner not to do. They said, stay low. Don't draw. Don't draw attention to yourself. And when he's not out there in Las Vegas, dating Phyllis McGuire, the TV star and singer, or hanging out with Frank Sinatra in the Rat Pack, he's now being called to testify. And he had also, at one point, for a number of years, had to flee down in Mexico.

And then he came back to Chicago. He was thrown out of Mexico. And so, by about the mid, around 1973, I believe it was, Gene kind of comes back to Chicago. And so would he be trying, would he try to become the boss of Chicago? So there were a lot of reasons to get rid of them. But this, this, the fact that he was going to go public or even if he, even if he took the Fifth Amendment, he, the damage was done. He had already drawn way too much attention to himself and to the, the mafia. And that would have blown up Traficonte spot and he didn't want that to happen.

Right. And so what happened to Traficante? After these two guys go down, what does the rest of his life look like in Tampa? Well, Sam Giancana apparently told a relative of his. He said, you can always find out who is the person responsible for the murder plot because that person usually winds up being the last man standing. And that's exactly what happens with Traficanti. He becomes the last man standing. He dies in his bed. And the other person who dies in his bed,

the last man standing, of course, is Fidel Castro, despite all these attempts to assassinate him. He winds up dying only a few years ago, I believe at age 90, asleep in his bed. So Travaconte lives a pretty uneventful, uneventful life on the surface after this.

You didn't have to tell Traficanti to keep your mouth shut. He's the guy who looks like the bookkeeper with the little foet on, glasses like mine. He doesn't look the part of the big brash mob boss. He's only the guy probably learning more from Meyer Lansky, who is the same cut of the same claw. basically keep it low, just keep the money flow coming in. Yeah, this is like very much art of war, Sun Tzu style, you know, behavior, right? Like appear to be weak so that your enemy doesn't grow strong, those kinds of things. Interesting.

So he keeps a pretty low profile, and I'm sure kind of continues to do his business. You know, one of my favorites about the TV show, if I may talk about for a moment, is that we have three clips from the Godfather in Mafia spies. and one of the clips is that Hyman Roth episode where they have all the mobsters and they're down in Havana and they have a cake and the cake is made in the shape of Cuba and they actually cut up the cake

like they're all cutting up parts of Cuba and you know not only do we have three clips from the godfather and mafia spies on Paramount but we also have the guy who plays Johnny Roselli We have a number of well-done recreations that were, they were filmed on the Paramount lot out in Hollywood. And the fellow Nick Ananziata, the actor who plays Johnny Roselli, portrays Roselli in these recreations. He was in the Sopranos for about, I think, six episodes in the Sopranos.

So we kind of have a gangland lineage to mafia spies. And fundamentally, it is a spy story. But I definitely look at the mafia at its height in 1960. That was really the high watermark for the mafia in this country. And so for me it was almost like those two flavors together where you have like a Rhesus peanut butter cup, an editor of mine, stealing this from an old editor of mine. She said that this is like chocolate and peanut butter together.

Well, this is spies and the mafia together. And so that's why it's called Mafia Spies. Was there ever an effort to get in touch with Traficante's people or any of his confidants or any of the people he worked with? No, this is, you know, I do enjoy talking to people when I do books. And I've done other books. I did a book called Masters of Sex about Masters in Johnson. I talked to a lot of doctors and people who were involved in all of their sexual adventures. but this book was really

a document driven. And as I said, I, as an investigative reporter, I think it's really important when people watch Mafia spies, they say, holy shit, this shit is true. It's not made up. It's not, you know, my speculation of my, so my dream that came to me last night.

It's all document driven. And so I felt that the story itself, truth was crazy enough here, that, but I made sure that I had more than 600 footnotes at the back of the book. I wanted to make sure that people knew that this was one conspiracy case, at least, that was really true. Wow. Now, before we wrap up, are there any details or stories from, you know, these two men or these, you know, multiple men that are involved in this case that we didn't touch on that you think would be valuable for the audience to know that would kind of button up or create a more holistic view of the story? Well, you know, when you write a book, I didn't want it to be a dry history of this time. It's really biographical. And so I use these two gangsters. Basically, the story is two gangsters hired by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro and what happens, all the consequences. But I was really interested in also the relationship between these two men. And so, and the women in their lives.

And so I try to make sure that Mafia spies is a buddy movie, if you will. It was also the story of this outlaw friendship between these two very different men and how they reflected so much of our fascination with violence, how we look at women, how they look at themselves. I think the idea of Johnny Roselli at the end of his life, when he knows he's got a target on his back, and he kind of starts trying to make amends, and he seeks out priests that he knew or goes back to the church.

In fact, his name Johnny Roselli, it's an alias. It's a phony name that he's used his whole life. Where did he get Roselli from? It's from the name of a Vatican painter that he used. I mean, he didn't come up with John Doe or, you know, whatever. He came up with Johnny Roselli. It was actually, I believe the painter's name was Cosimo Roselli. So these were really fascinating people, especially Johnny Roselli.

They just were two remarkably interesting gangsters, arguably the two most interesting gangsters ever in the United States. Wow. Well, this series is phenomenal, very good. Streaming right now on Paramount as well as Showtime. The book, I have not read it yet, but I'm not. I'm sure if it is anything. It'll be a test tomorrow on Friday.

If it's anything like this conversation, I'm sure it's gripping. And, yeah, I'm really looking forward to reading your newest book that's going to be coming out soon as well. Yeah, Montelk to Manhattan, if I can throw that in. Absolutely, absolutely. That takes place in a very different time. But I imagine a lot of the themes, you know, kind of what it says about human nature and the things that we value once, you know, the sort of the artifice of society kind of is no longer applying the things that, that men and women do sort of just as human beings and try to usurp power from each other.

These are the themes that I find fascinating, which is why I'm drawn to crime, I think, why I'm so fascinated by this, right? I grew up in a suburb, I never saw any crime, but I find the way that people operate in sort of these underbelly worlds to be fundamental to what it means to be a human being. And I think we can learn a lot about ourselves by seeing how these people operate, given the stakes that they're dealing with. So I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing the, the story with me. And there's a lot more we didn't talk about that is obviously present in the series that everyone should go check out. So thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much,

Barr. Yeah, this is awesome. Let's do it again when the new book is out. We'll do.