Julian Dorey Podcast - #236 - Operation Mongoose: Inside CIA's Failed Mafia Conspiracy to Kill Castro | Tom Maier

Starting point is 00:00:00 What was the closest they came to getting Castro in this mission? They recruited a woman named Marita Lorenz, who was a young woman whose family, they had a boat that landed in Havana, a big boat in Cuba. Castro was invited and he met Marita Lorenz and courted her a little bit there and they eventually became lovers. Lorenz went back to New York, recruited by the CIA. Lorenz winds up in a hotel room with her former lover, Fidel Castro. She was given two poison pills that were put into cold cream, a jar of cold cream that she brought with her. So when she's in this hotel room with Castro and she goes to the bathroom, she excuses herself. And she goes in. She opens up the jar of cold cream. These capsules filled with poison. They actually dissolved in the moisture. She realizes she can't do anything about it. And when she comes out of the bathroom, Fidel is lying on the bed. He's got a gun lying on the table. And he said, you came here to kill me.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Tom, you have just written a book that is now a docuseries on premium television that is right up my alley. We are talking mafia. We are talking CIA. We are talking world leaders that the CIA doesn't like. And we're talking murder and mystery and canaries that are dead and can't talk in the middle of it. So I'm very, very excited to have you here today. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it. Of course. And shout out to my friend, Mark Gagnon, who I know recorded with you, said it was awesome. So he helped put this together on his show, Camp Gagnon. I guess

Starting point is 00:01:39 you guys have an episode coming out there. Absolutely. Yes. He's a great guy. He had a lot of fun. Awesome dude. But what got you like you you've written a lot of great books that are really deep biographies you've you've written a couple on the kennedys you wrote you wrote one that was also the kennedys and the churchills which is a pretty interesting combo right there you wrote masters of sex which later became a premium series on showtime right Right. Absolutely. Yeah. What got you into, was it just like the continuation of the Kennedys that got you into this particular new book, Mafia Spies? Yeah, it did. It did.

Starting point is 00:02:14 About 20 years ago, I wrote a book about the Kennedys, how their Irish Catholic immigrant experience informed their public and private lives. Big fat book about that. Then I wrote Masters of Sex, as you mentioned, about Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson, and they made that into a TV show. And when they were doing that TV show, I was talking to somebody and I mentioned the relationship of the Kennedys to the Churchills and that they had been friends before they had a very big falling out over World War II and then subsequently. And I realized there had not been a book about that.

Starting point is 00:02:50 So I, somewhat to my surprise, did that book. And that was a big fat book as well. But in my research about the Kennedys, I was very aware of a guy named Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Chicago mob. Sammy G. Sammy G. Momo. And I started as a reporter. Essentially, my whole career has been as an investigative reporter. I worked for Newsday for many, many years.

Starting point is 00:03:19 But before that, I worked for the Chicago Sun-Times. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I covered the murder of a guy named Alan Dorfman, who was a pretty well-known gangster in Chicago. He was kind of like the money man for the mob out there. And I was very young and I was sent out to the scene of the crime. But I've always been aware of Sam Giancana. So I thought about doing a book about G and Connor. I actually wrote a

Starting point is 00:03:45 proposal and it just didn't have enough meat on the bone. And I wound up doing something else. And I decided that when I came across another gangster named Johnny Roselli and the relationship between Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean Conner, it kind of struck me as that movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In other words, an adventure story of these two gangsters, terrible gangsters, both murderers on one level, but particularly in the case of Johnny Roselli. He was a Chicago gangster that had been sent out to Hollywood to oversee the interests of the mafia in Hollywood. And Johnny was known as Handsome Johnny, but he was a fellow that kind of like a Leonardo DiCaprio type. He was a guy, a bad boy who was very attractive to a lot of attractive women and so he went out with people he knew marilyn monroe but he also uh went out

Starting point is 00:04:54 with donna reed i couldn't believe that you know it's a wonderful life donna reed uh lana turner uh and uh he got married to it yeah he got married to another actress. That didn't last very long because Johnny really was a Casanova. And he really loved women and they loved him. One of the women that he met was a woman by the name of Judy Campbell. And she had been married to an actress. She had gotten divorced, but they lived in this housing complex called the Garden of Allah. I love the name, Garden of Allah. It was out in Hollywood where a lot of young actors would live. And Johnny lived there, Johnny Roselli, kind of like the resident gangster there.

Starting point is 00:05:39 And he made the acquaintance, and more than the acquaintance, of Judy Campbell. He kind of went out briefly. But she was a young woman who, through Johnny, met Frank Sinatra. Roselli migrated, basically. He expanded, actually, Chicago's influence from Hollywood to Las Vegas. This would have been in the 1950s now, where the mob is moving into Las Vegas. The mob is still in Havana, Cuba, and that's where most of the money that they have from casinos is being made in Cuba. But Las Vegas, after World War II, really started to grow. And that's where Johnny was

Starting point is 00:06:28 increasingly there. And so by the late 50s, Johnny introduces Judy Campbell to Frank Sinatra, who's out there with the Rat Pack. And Sinatra is, you know, part of that rat pack is uh included an actor by the name of uh peter lawford it was sammy davis jr it was dean martin famously those three sinatra dean martin sammy davis jr but there were a couple of others joey bishop who was a comedian but also uh lawford peter lawford Peter Lawford, and he was the brother-in-law of Senator Jack John F. Kennedy. And in March of 1960, John F. Kennedy is campaigning. He spends the weekend in Las Vegas hanging out with the Rat Pack. In fact, there's kind of fuzzy black and white tape that's in our show, Mafia Spies on Paramount and Showtime. Was this at Calneva neva no this was in

Starting point is 00:07:27 las vegas and it was around march of 1960 jack kennedy's campaign he was there for the weekend relaxing and in fact at one point sinatra says uh you know in the audience is senator kennedy and it's kind of fuzzy the the the actual clip but he jack but Jack Kennedy stands up and he waves to the crowd and then sits down. On that weekend, he's introduced by Sinatra to Judy Campbell. And so, you know, looking at all of these characters, it was just a really interesting way for me to use that as a window. In other words, the relationship, the friendship, the buddy, the outlaw buddies of Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana as a window. And as a person who's written biographies for most of my career, I've always found that if you can use a biography, an individual person or two people or two families, as in the case with Churchilllli and Sam Giancana,

Starting point is 00:08:46 you tell the story of the cold war, what the growth of Las Vegas, the influence of the mafia, the, the whole Kennedy error. Hey guys, if you're not subscribed, please hit that subscribe button as well as that like button on the video. They are both a huge, huge help. If you're not following me on Instagram or on X, my links are in the description below so please go follow me over there thank you uh and so once i i knew about johnny roselli on the relationship that's when mafia spies really takes off well there's something i've said on a bunch of podcasts before so for people who've heard this sorry i gotta repeat this but when i take the drive coming from jersey into new york up route 78 so if you're looking at our wall right here just behind the skyscraper in jersey city over there as you're coming up that the full

Starting point is 00:09:37 beautiful outline of the new york skyline comes into view and like i've done this drive in the middle of the night i've done in the middle of the day and it never gets old for me. I look at it every time and I'm like, God damn. And inevitably the thought goes into my head that not one of those fucking buildings went up without the permission of the United States, Italian American mafia. And it's a strange thing to think about because like, you know, it's a criminal organization or whatever, but they had such influence through their rackets. And I think what gets forgotten by a lot of people is that, you know, obviously they were effective at what they did from a crime perspective that also included, you know, making certain people disappear.

Starting point is 00:10:19 They were good at that too. And they're kind of like this underworld organization that had a handshake agreement in some cases with another underworld organization that in this case is sanctioned by the government called the CIA and the intelligence community. And when you look at our history in the 20th century, there's a lot of interesting potential crossroads. And I'm sure many, we don't even know about where those two paths meet. Well, that's why I was really interested in this book, in this subject, because this was not some made-up conspiracy. This was a conspiracy that actually the CIA acknowledged. It took them a while. 2007 was formally when the CIA actually acknowledged that they had done this. There was Family jewels? Exactly.

Starting point is 00:11:05 And that was the name of a memo that contained a lot of the undercover things that the CIA had been doing. But for me, Mafia spies was a way, I said about a window, it was a window in really the high watermark of the mafia in this country you know bear in mind when you drive into new york a lot of the spoils of of the mafia here in new york and i've covered that for for at least 40 years um is divided among five families historically in the in chicago it's really one family it's the family essentially that al Capone developed and was inherited or the reins were given over to Sam Giancana. There were a couple of other folks.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Tony Accardo, who preceded him, was still kind of like the consigliere. He was quote-unquote retired, but he's kind of retired the way I'm retired. He's still working and um and so he kind of oversaw things that gene kind of but gene kind of was the day-to-day guy he was the boss in chicago's known as the outfit and um they really controlled virtually everything west of the mississippi uh so they were very involved with Johnny Roselli in Hollywood. They increasingly were involved in Las Vegas. And so I thought this was a really good opportunity to talk about the mafia at its high watermark here. And then the marriage of the

Starting point is 00:12:41 two, the CIA and the mafia involved in this effort to kill Fidel Castro, to me, it was fascinating the fact that they acknowledge it, that it had so many implications to other things, including the investigation of JFK's assassination. There's consequences that result, that influence that as well. But also, you know, today, we just recently, in the last few months, we've had a Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, which basically means that the president, according to the Supreme Court right now, any official acts that the president can do, that the president would be immune from prosecution. Now, in the oral arguments for that case, Clarence Thomas, who's one of the justices on the Supreme Court,

Starting point is 00:13:37 actually mentions, he poses a question about Operation Mongoose, which is the name of the operation that we're talking about with Mafia Spies. In other words, the attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Back in 1960, they were all concerned. They kept it top secret because, among other things, they didn't want to go to jail. They thought if you were trying to have a murder plot to kill somebody, you could be liable for some type of prosecution. So I think right now with the whole decision about presidential immunity and what is that going to mean, and does it mean that the president of the United States can have a plot to murder somebody, some political enemy? That seems to be, at least in the eyes of myself and a number of other critics of the Supreme Court decision, it makes the whole story of mafia spies almost like a lesson, a warning about what can

Starting point is 00:14:32 happen if things are not overseen properly, if our intelligence agencies are not overseen properly. I'm trying to think of the best place to start with this. And I think you're actually on the right strand here, not surprisingly. But, you know, at the core of this is also we're talking about the earliest years of the CIA. So when people look at the history of it, most people out there listening know that there was something called the OSS in World War II, which was essentially spun up to be what would later become the CIA. But at the end of the war, America still had these weird feelings about – traditionally about like, oh, do we need espionage or something? So it's almost like they were going to get away from it.

Starting point is 00:15:17 But then the people who had run the OSS, like the Allen Dulles's of the world were like, fuck that. We're making a CIA. They make a CIA in 1947, I believe. Very good. But there's this weird gap during the Truman and Eisenhower years where it's almost as if, at least the way we know it from the history we've been given access to, they were strictly more an espionage agency. Right. And then when Castro takes over in 59, Eisenhower loses his shit and says, we got to whack this guy. That's exactly right. With mafia spies, what I'm telling my readers and certainly we're making the point in the TV show is that this is a major change for the CIA. It had been historically, as you mentioned, gathering intelligence, economic, political intelligence, but we didn't get directly involved in countries to the extent that we would try to assassinate them. That's what

Starting point is 00:16:19 mafia spies represents, is the change from gathering intelligence to instead getting involved in covert actions. And the attempt to kill Castro is the most overt. It's the most wild example of covert operation. that, in other words, the idea of essentially what we did in Mafia Spies, the CIA hired two gangsters to kill Fidel Castro in an operation that was based in Florida. And most Americans had no idea that was going on. It was an undeclared war that we were running out of southern Florida. Right state to do it. Well, a lot of tans.

Starting point is 00:17:09 And only 90 miles away in Cuba, there were all these operations, the training of a number of Cuban exiles who wanted to return to their homeland. And the fact that Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean kind of get involved in this, it's just an extraordinary set of circumstances. Yeah. And a guy who's obviously at the middle of it is the director of the CIA at the time, Alan Dulles, who you and I were talking right before camera, you're familiar with Talbot's work, Devil's Chessboard. So when I read that book, that was an eye-opener for me. Annie Jacobson's Operation Paperclip talks a bit about that as well. It was definitely an eye-opener for me.

Starting point is 00:17:51 That guy seems to be at the middle of pretty much everything. Am I exaggerating when I say that? No, absolutely not. In fact, let's talk about Alan Dulles for a moment. Alan Dulles was a great spy in World War II. They, as you mentioned, the OSS, he had worked with the OSS. And then they sent him to Switzerland, which was a neutral country during World War II. And he set up a lot of different spy operations. Very effective. Truman disassembled the OSS when he became president after World War II. Said it's not necessary and disassembled it for about two years.

Starting point is 00:18:30 And then they realized, whoa, we do need a spy agency. And eventually, Alan Dulles is put as the head of the CIA. His brother had, at that time, was the Secretary of State or would be soon the Secretary of State. He served under Eisenhower. And so particularly by the 1950s, it was a really interesting brother combination of a guy running the spy agency and the other one running the State Department. And it leads to another interesting brother duo, the Kennedy brothers. And so what happens is in the late 50s, in the last stages of the Eisenhower administration, when Castro takes power, there's a revolution in Cuba. And we initially think, well, maybe he'll be a reformer, that he's maybe a good guy. He replaced this big, bad dictator, Batista.

Starting point is 00:19:29 A number of newspapers, like the New York Times here in New York, Castro came to visit New York, and he was embraced in many ways. That's wild. But as it turns out, Castro allied himself. We kind of mishandled things with Castro, too. And I think we kind of, I don't know, I wouldn't say bully is the right word. But he was a firebrand, a guy who led a revolution. So he wasn't going to be listened to some big entity, some other big country telling him what to do.

Starting point is 00:20:01 And I think that was part of it. But I think historians, as we look at Castro, really became, he was a socialist and he wound up becoming, Cuba wound up becoming a puppet of the Soviet Union, the Russians, the communists at that time. And Castro clearly established himself as a communist. So for the Eisenhower and for Alan Dulles, that was something that was just unacceptable. It was an unacceptable threat. At the same time in the late 50s, the Russians were the first ones up in space with the Sputnik satellite. So the idea that maybe the Russians could put a nuclear weapon on the top of that rocket. And we were yet to get into space. After World War II, the United States, we were preeminent in the world. We were the first to develop the atomic

Starting point is 00:20:53 bomb. So it was really shocking to official Washington, almost 15 years after World War II that the Russians are up in space. And now 90 miles away from Florida is another satellite, Cuba, a Russian satellite that's capable eventually, within a year or two, Castro was allowing the Russians to bring in nuclear missiles. And when that began, that really set off the alarm bells uh and it was up to the cia it was it was a this operation mongoose was the name of it but it was an attempt to overthrow and get rid of castro the phrase was sawed off he eisenhower said he wanted him sawed off uh but essentially in translation what it meant was that to assassinate yeah and get rid of castro uh and because i think particularly in the minds of somebody like

Starting point is 00:21:52 alan dulles and certainly in eisenhower coming out of world war ii you know there was a lot of talk about well if we had assassinated hitler there were talks about assassinating hitler early on in the late 30s, early 40s, and there were a couple of unsuccessful attempts. But the feeling was if we had gotten rid of Hitler earlier, so many millions of lives would have been saved, so much destruction to the world. So the idea, you know, is Hitler a fair comparison with Castro? Well, not really on one level, but on another level, the fact that he was willing to let the Russians bring in nuclear missiles and then lead to a possible nuclear confrontation with rockets only 90 miles away from the United States shore, in the minds of those folks at that time,

Starting point is 00:22:47 policymakers, the decision was made that he was an unacceptable risk. Not unlike what we would think about with somebody like Osama bin Laden for a later generation. Yeah. A couple of things there. Number one, obviously there are bad people in the world and there are bad today. There are some horrible leaders who do horrible things to people and it's a very shitty reality that exists. I think unfortunately it's dangerous that we've made Hitler over the past seven, eight decades a two-cent word. Everyone who's bad immediately is Hitler when in fact know, in fact, Hitler and Stalin were kind of on their own level, right? And I'm not saying like, well, this is less bad, so that's okay.

Starting point is 00:23:30 But it leads you to then say, out of fear, for example, oh, so that means we got to kill Castro, right? Which then could have all kinds of reverberating effects. But what I really don't understand when I study some of the history of CIA and particularly Dulles, because he's at the spear of it, is that they had such a hatred for communism, understandable. But they didn't seem to have the same hatred for fascism. I mean you're talking about a guy who, as you said it yourself, he was stationed in Bern, Switzerland during World War II. That was not by accident. This is one of the godfathers of Operation Paperclip who he's someone who outside of the scientists protected other Nazis as well and then formulated our CIA as a result of it and I'm looking at it and I'm going you know I personally make no distinction between

Starting point is 00:24:20 communism and fascism they're both on one end of the circle of politics doing the same end result. What do you think contributes to the willful blindness on just looking at one end of the problem as opposed to maybe both of them? Well, I think with the Kennedys, they came from a unique standpoint in the sense that, as I mentioned, I wrote a book about the Kennedys and how their Irish Catholic immigrant experience informed their public and private lives. Bobby Kennedy in the 50s, for instance, wrote about in the New York Times, as a matter of fact, in a magazine article. He talked about how the communists took apart and dismantled the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe. So I think for a lot of people, there was a distinction that the fascists would allow the church at least to operate, whereas the communists just completely disassembled.

Starting point is 00:25:13 They did not allow religion at all. They did not allow, and they disassembled all the churches in Eastern Europe, certainly the Catholic church. And that was the view from the Vatican, and that was something that the Kennedys were keenly aware. Joe Kennedy, one of his closest confidants, was the right-hand man of the Pope, Count Enrico Galeazzi, who was the right-hand man for Pope Pius XII. I wrote about that extensively in that book that I did 20 years ago. It's called The Kennedys, America's Emerald Kings. And those are documents from the JFK library. These are all Joe Kennedy's documents. And subsequently, they became available during that time period around 2000, 2001. And so I think it's

Starting point is 00:26:00 really important when you're a historian to look at the culture that people come from, that leaders come from. And the Catholic experience was something that John F. Kennedy, who was the first minority president of the United States, his religion was the number one issue of that 1960 campaign. So this was all stuff that was in the back of the minds, I think, in the decision making of the Kennedys and the idea that Cuba would turn communist and perhaps it would become the nexus of spreading almost like a cancer of communism throughout Latin America. That was something that was really unacceptable to them. Yeah. And I think there's also, you know, looking at that moment in history, you had mentioned the, essentially the Cuban missile crisis where the Soviets put their own nuclear missiles within Cuba. You know, there was such a fear back then that there was like going to be this nuclear

Starting point is 00:27:02 Holocaust. And so to see it to see it from the perspective of the cia and the american government i think this is perfectly fair you know you got an island 90 miles away with these weapons who's as you said a puppet of the place that you're in this cold war with what started that that's a different conversation. But like, you know, one snap goes off, suddenly you have that whole, well, maybe we'll lose 60, but they'll lose 240. And it just gets like, does the world end? It's insane. People have no idea. Actually, I did do a big documentary about 15 years ago about the Bravo bomb out in the South Pacific and the folks in the Marshall Islands. To this day, they are still dealing with the health consequences of the bombing, the testing that was done.

Starting point is 00:27:55 Bravo was the biggest bomb. It was a hydrogen bomb. Can we pull this up a little? It was a thousand times stronger than the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so those folks still are dealing with the health consequences. So what I'm saying is people were totally ignorant of the real life consequences if we had a nuclear confrontation. And hopefully we never do have something like that yeah we have the video on on the screen right now so this is the test you're talking about right yeah that's

Starting point is 00:28:30 exactly it that was um actually went out with another group of a photographer from newsday we spent two weeks interviewing people we did a documentary uh called fallout for Newsday, actually, and that was about the Bravo bomb. But that gives you, now that's the hydrogen bomb, that's a thousand times more powerful than the bomb at Hiroshima. But nevertheless, we were, by 1962, when we're talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about a nuclear confrontation with both sides having hydrogen bombs. The consequences not only were immediate, in fact, a lot of people will say in an unfortunate way, they would say you're lucky to get killed immediately rather than get killed through radiation poisoning, which is what a lot of people suffered from.

Starting point is 00:29:30 So people from that time period in America, people my age or even a little bit older, when you were a school kid, they practiced going under their desk and things of that nature. The local school often would have signs on them that would have kind of a triangular, it was a yellow sign with a triangular figure within a circle. And basically what it said is that this is an atomic bomb shelter that schools could be used or other places could be used as bomb shelters. Actually, people would do that in their backyard instead of a garden or next to their garden.

Starting point is 00:30:08 They would actually make their own bomb shelter. So this was the frame of mind in America back in the early 1960s. And so I think that has to be kept in context to why Castro was perceived with such great alarm by the United States government. In the case of Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana and the mafia down in Cuba, it was a little bit more simple. They had been thrown out of – and they had closed down. They were making millions of dollars down in Havana. They had a – Johnny and Sam particularly had a casino called the San Sushi. It was on the outskirts of Havana.

Starting point is 00:30:51 And that was lots of money. And there was nobody keeping an eye on them. You could do whatever you want. There wasn't really much, if any, taxes that were being paid. The guy who was in charge of tourism for the Cuban government was Meyer Lansky. He had been put in by the top mobster in Florida.

Starting point is 00:31:10 He was running the whole Bureau of Tourism for this Batista-led government in Cuba. So it led to a great deal of resentment. It led to the revolution that Fidel Castro led. But when he threw out all of the U.S. interests, including the mafia-owned casinos, they were really upset in Chicago. They were losing millions of dollars because of this. And so they wanted to get rid of Castro. So when you had these two meetings of the minds, if you will, You had the U.S. government that wanted to get rid of Castro for their reasons. And then you had the mafia who wanted to get rid of him for their own reasons. Yeah, there's also a 500-pound elephant in the middle of this room, though, with this, which is Kennedy's actual election.

Starting point is 00:32:00 And I don't know how much – I would imagine you came across a lot of this in your research. But I'd love to get your thoughts on this because there is a lot of discussion in the middle of the whole mob doesn't like Castro, government doesn't like Castro. This young Irish Catholic kid is now running for office whose dad happened to be an enormous bootlegger who was friends with all these guys in the mafia you know but in the middle of that he wins in a in a historically tight election against vice president at the time richard nixon right barely wins two states texas and illinois which somehow flipped to him because allegedly a lot of dead people voted because allegedly sam giancana had been approached by joe kennedy to get his boy across the finish line and into the white house did you find evidence to to prove or disprove that theory well a couple of things i would take exception to but fundamentally right and i think that uh the the mafia uh particularly sam giancana's outfit um unlike other mobsters who were favoring nixon down like for instance uh well i think lansky for instance favored nixon but it was frank sinatra

Starting point is 00:33:15 actually who's a major player in mafia spies who brings in sam g and connor you know just to back up a little bit so So in Las Vegas, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana are hanging out in Las Vegas quite a bit. And I talk about the reason why Sam is hanging out. It partly has to do with the personal reason his wife died. But in any event, in Las Vegas, they get involved more and more with Frank Sinatra, so much so that Giancana and Sinatra are exchanging friendship rings and things of that nature. Oh, friendship rings. Yeah, yeah. Is this a Taylor Swift concert?

Starting point is 00:33:56 Well, it's interesting. Actually, Rosselli had exchanged friendship rings with a guy named Harry Cohn who was the head of columbia studios that's so apparently it was a thing that people did a men did among themselves at that stage uh uh and um what was uh through sinatra jean canna is becomes more becomes a supporter of Kennedy. And the perception was, and it was very erroneous, was that if we support, if we get out the vote, if we push, really get out the vote in places like Chicago and even places there was this talk about there was mob union money

Starting point is 00:34:44 that was involved in the West Virginia primaries and such. But particularly when we talk about the Chicago area, the feeling was that if we support the candidates that he gets in, they'll go easy on us. And in fact, that same logic by Sam and Johnny Roselli applied to the request to kill Castro for the CIA. In other words, at this point, the FBI was waking up to the threat of organized crime after many years of being more concerned about communists in the U.S. government than the growth of organized crime after many years of being more concerned about communists in the u.s government than the growth of organized crime but by the late by 1960 there was more and more pressure on the mafia uh and so they felt well we support the upcoming the new president uh he'll get he'll go easy on us and particularly with the c CIA, we kill Castro for the government.

Starting point is 00:35:45 We'll look like patriots. We'll get out of jail free card. And so that was their logic. And with Sinatra, Sinatra just identified a great deal with Kennedy. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that Kennedy was being persecuted for his religion by, it was a pretty active force in 1960 that did not want to see a Catholic and immigrants and all of that type of baggage, if you will, in the minds of the folks that were essentially wasps in the United States who felt that the election of a Catholic in the White House, that suddenly we'd have the Pope telling us what to do. So there was a real visceral connection between Sinatra and the Kennedy campaign. And so it was Sinatra who convinced Gene Khanna to help support the

Starting point is 00:36:40 Kennedy effort. And that's what happened. There were wiretaps that later came out that you could see that they were angry that what happens when Jack Kennedy gets elected, instead of going easy on them, Bobby Kennedy becomes the attorney general and he goes really tough on the mafia. He really declares a war on the mafia. by that point this is 7 61 62 they were really upset about it they felt they'd been totally betrayed not only that that giancana looked like a fool in the eyes of some of these other mobsters around the country who said look you know nixon would have been we favored nixon we felt he would have been easier to deal with than now Bobby Kennedy running down our backs, running after us and trying to either deport us or prosecute us and send us to jail. Yeah. It seems like on both fronts, on the organized crime front, which literally got

Starting point is 00:37:38 him into office, and then on the intelligence front, John F. Kennedy was operating from behind from the moment he got into office. So he wins the election in 1960, assumes office in 1961. And as you said, this Operation Mongoose was already well underway. This is something that Eisenhower- Yeah, he inherits it. Right. Now, the question is, in your research, is there reason to believe that he was read in on that right away? Or is this something that the intelligence community kept to themselves and didn't necessarily tell him about? Well, you know, that's still in historical debate because some of the recent documents that have been released that are part of the JFK assassination investigation, but they were kept confidential for more than 50 years. There is testimony by some CIA agents that say, particularly Bill Harvey and another person that

Starting point is 00:38:32 worked with Bill Harvey, these were CIA agents, that from the moment Kennedy came in, he wanted a mechanism to be able to get rid of foreign leaders. In their testimonies, they said it was more of a general type of thing. But there was already in place a plan to get rid of Castro that was launched in the last stages of Eisenhower's administration that, similar to the Bay of Pigs invasion, that was another plan that Kennedy inherited. And Bay of Pigs was where a group of Cuban exiles who had been trained invaded Cuba to overthrow Castro's government. variety of reasons, not the least of which was Kennedy said he supported the invasion, but he was not willing to allow U.S. jets involved in that because he felt that would definitely start World War III.

Starting point is 00:39:34 So the CIA kind of called this bluff on it. And the invasion happened. And while it was going on, they were hoping that Kennedy would be forced to come in with jets. And he said, no, I told you, I'm not sending jets. This would set off World War III. And so it was a big failure at the Bay of Pigs. And Castro was waiting for me. He had been tipped off. So he was already set. How was he tipped off? Well, as one of the things I really make a big point of in Mafia Spies is the documents that show how Castro, kind of being a student of spying and espionage, learning from the Russians who were aces at this, Castro, in almost record time, developed not only a network of informants may have been double agents or informants. Almost like whack-a-mole where we had this giant mallet and we're trying to kill Castro and all these different attempts sponsored by the CIA.

Starting point is 00:41:11 And yet Castro, how does he survive? And over time, the CIA realized that he had – there were these informants and double agents that were warning Castro. And he had set up a really good intelligence network of his own. And that's how he was able to avoid assassination. How did he convince so many people to do that? And the reason I ask that is because, for example, some of his double agents, if you will, in Floridaida they're living among all the people who escaped him because it was the rule was so brutal and he became a full-blown you know he went from revolutionary to the guy that anyone who questions anything he kills you like how was he able to

Starting point is 00:41:57 convince so many people they're like yeah we're the good guys. Usually money. That's it. And money. And probably there were a number of different examples. Sometimes it's family reasons. Sometimes there's extortion. You may have family members back in Cuba. Or maybe over time they ease up on their criticism of Castro and say, well, you know, he did do this. And maybe he's not as bad a guy or whatever. But money usually was the major thing.

Starting point is 00:42:30 And the most clear cut, in my mind at least, example of that was another gangster who lived in Florida. His name was Santo Traficante. Oh, yeah. 10%. Exactly. And Santo Traficante is a key figure in Mafia Spies. Oh, yeah. 10%. He was, before they were thrown, the mafia was thrown out of Cuba. Santo Traficante was friends with Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, and he helped run their casino, the San Sushi, outside of Havana. So the feeling was that Traficante really wanted to get rid of Castro. But if you're a gangster based in Tampa, the biggest money for the mafia, particularly for somebody like Traficante, was not gambling and things of that nature, but was drugs.

Starting point is 00:43:34 And getting drugs into the United States was not an easy thing. But usually there were drugs coming through the Caribbean. And you needed Castro. You needed his cooperation for that drug trade. And so later on in my book, you see as things develop, the CIA, and there used to be a thing called the Bureau of Narcotics. It was kind of like an arm of the FBI. It was its own bureau, but investigators there.

Starting point is 00:44:05 They all came to the conclusion that Traficante was a double agent, that he had some involvement with Castro or Alliance or some working relationship. With Castro. Yeah. And so that money, money, money, money was the big factor in all of this. And that's fascinating too because when you look at Roselli's motivations in this whole thing, here you have this hardened gangster who's lived his whole life running the rackets for the mob, but he had some sort of – he genuinely felt it seemed some sort of like patriotic duty. Like, yeah, we can whack this guy for America. I love this place. And then you have his compadre in the mafia who's like, there's none of that.

Starting point is 00:44:53 It's just like you hear the stereotype of the mafia. It's money or nothing, right? So if I can make money, I don't give a fuck where this guy is. If he's in Cuba, sounds great. Yeah. Let's go to where it all starts in a way which is a hotel called the fountain blue in miami hotel beautiful hotel if you've ever seen i think it's gold finger uh in the james bond movie they have at the very beginning of this

Starting point is 00:45:17 the big sweeping view of this white uh uh big white colored alabaster uh uh hotel in miami beach with this huge pool in fact my wife joyce and i we had to make sure we checked it out i've never seen such a big smile on joyce's face as when she was there in january and it was so warm the pool it was so great but it was the fountain blue in 1960 where they all get together. And who do I mean by all? Well, it's the CIA. The CIA had recruited a guy named Robert Mayhew who worked for the richest man in the country at that time, Howard Hughes. Robert Mayhew had been an FBI agent, but he became, in this story, the middleman. He became what was known in a cutout, the jargon of the CIA. And he sets up a meeting at the Fountain Blue between Johnny Roselli, Sam Jean Conner, and Santo Traficante come here. And then there's a representative, a guy named O'Connell, who's representing, he's a CIA agent.

Starting point is 00:46:27 And it's there where they have a discussion about, they agree, we're going to kill Castro. Johnny Roselli says, they offer $150,000. And Johnny says, no, you don't have to pay us. We'll do it for free. We'll do it for free. Exactly. And I'm a patriot. In fact, Johnny roselli is born on the fourth of july oh my god that's too good yeah it really is amazing and so

Starting point is 00:46:53 they they'll do it for free and you know i'm sure that was helped when when the cia agent went back to washington to the bureaucrats you know we don't have to pay him 150 000 boss he'll do it for free where's the waiter from that dinner that's what i want to know where is that must have been a big tip right exactly you know that weekend is that whole time period at the fountain blue is amazing because sinatra is down there as well and he has a tv show that he's filming. It's a special. And the special is he invites Elvis Presley, who's just gotten out of the army. And there's a great clip of Sinatra and Elvis Presley singing together. Love Me Tender, Sinatra singing that song. And I forget the Sinatra song that Elvis

Starting point is 00:47:41 is singing. But it's just an amazing moment. And during that whole time period, the three gangsters are there and Sinatra and Gene Conner are going back and forth. In fact, it's interesting the portrayal of Sinatra. I'd like to talk about that in a second. The beginning of the story, which is at the Fountain Blue Hotel. And they decide that the CIA wants to have either some machine guns or some really violent ending to Castro. And they think that's what the mafia would be best. You know, Chicago mob, they're thinking St. Valentine's Day massacre. You know, that rat-tat-tat. So they cared about how it happened, too.

Starting point is 00:48:24 Exactly. And Gene Conner said,nor said no no no you want to poison him because this way there won't be any fingerprints and we we still have people who are friendly to us down in havana we think we can uh get one of them to poison uh castro and so that's really where the whole plot is launched. What month is this? This is around March of 19... You know, yeah, early 1960. So we're almost a full year before Kennedy's in there.

Starting point is 00:48:58 Right. This is very much still Eisenhower. Yeah, exactly. So Kennedy doesn't come until... Doesn't take office until early 61. He wins in 60, November of 60. So this is already brewing and such. And yet that poison attempt, the person that they think they can get, and there's a lot of back and forth that goes on, a lot of foot dragging and people up in Washington saying, why is this taking so long and whatever? And then the one person that they have that they think is going to be able to poison will have access to Castro down in Havana.

Starting point is 00:49:37 He gets cold feet, or at least that's the story that Traficante says. It's Traficante is the one who thinks he has that connection. And so it sounds really good when you're at the Fountain Blue Hotel, but as months go by, and it literally is months that go by, things don't happen. And so there's other plots that arise that are, and eventually Johnny Roselli winds up going down to Florida. Gene kind of was down there as well, but Roselli spent a lot of time in Florida and he was helping train the Cuban exiles. I mean, one of the most extraordinary stories, and they recreate this in the show Mafia Spies on Paramount and Showtime, is Johnny gets down in a boat.

Starting point is 00:50:25 This is in the Florida Keys, just south of Miami. And with a whole group of Cuban exiles who've been trained as soldiers, they come down. They have a couple of different boats that are loaded with armaments that they're going to go in the middle of the night to Cuba and meet at a certain place in Cuba. And when they get there, Castro's security forces are waiting for them. They start firing at them. In fact, the boat that Roselli is on takes on water and he has to jump into another boat and they wind up fleeing there. So there's an extraordinary number of attempts to kill Castro. The CIA acknowledged something like about a dozen or so, eight or 12, I think it is, somewhere in that

Starting point is 00:51:11 ballpark officially that they acknowledge. But other people who have studied this say that many, many more attempts to kill Castro. And so much so that Castro would make jokes about that they're trying to kill me, that this is, you know, people would say, well, what is your favorite hobby? And essentially he would say my favorite hobby is staying alive from the assassination attempts, just avoiding all these attempts to kill me. So it kind of built up Castro's reputation in the eyes of the Cubans as well. Can I go back? You're going on these amazing tangents and I don't want to cut them off because they're great. But I also want to like – I don't want to skip over some stuff that's pretty wild.

Starting point is 00:51:54 There was one thing you mentioned quickly back there that I think is kind of a core root of this story and shows how the business kind of gets done in the CIA. And that's the whole Mayhew connection because you called him a cutout which is a term they use but basically he's this insulation blanket if you will from the CIA to the mafia but he's this fascinating dude who as you said was in the FBI then he wasn't because he becomes the fixer for Howard Hughes, who's the subject of Scorsese's O2 movie. I think it was O2 or 2000, whatever it was, Aviator, right? Who is this polymath inventor, also like very kind of crazy dude. And he made Mayhew basically just work for him. But somewhere in there, Mayhew was able to convince him that hey

Starting point is 00:52:46 i'm doing some stuff for the cia too and that's right well bear in mind a lot of money that use was making he was in the aerospace was in the defense industry so he was a big customer for the for uncle sam at that time uh and uh Mayhew is a fascinating character in and of himself. He's a guy who went to Holy Cross, trained with the Jesuits when they came to him with the plot to kill Castro. He claims that he went home that night

Starting point is 00:53:17 and had a wrestle with his conscience. And he was one of those people that said, well, you know, he used the Hitler analogy. If we got Hitler earlier on, you know, we would have avoided so many deaths in World War II. And maybe this is the case here. And I'll do one, you know, I'll as you mentioned, he was involved in setting up dirty tricks with for instance a visiting leader of indonesia and he set him up with a a prostitute uh and they they somehow recorded that and that was that was used as compromising information so he did a lot of dirty tricks for the cia this this this request to help kill castro was at the top of the list though but he also got to know may you got to know johnny roselli because one time uh howard hughes wanted to visit las vegas on last minute and he wanted when when Hughes traveled, he wanted a big suite.

Starting point is 00:54:48 And he didn't, Mayhew, it was Mayhew's job to find the suite for Howard Hughes. And he called a friend, a lawyer friend of his. The lawyer said, what you should do is call Johnny Roselli. Johnny Roselli can make, can move mountains in Las Vegas. He's the guy to call. So that's where Mayu becomes friends with Johnny Roselli initially. And then the friendship between the two develops. There is a picnic that Mayu has that is back. it's a backyard picnic that he has a number of CIA people, people in intelligence. He had one particular senator who was there. But also, Johnny Roselli had come into Washington at that time period. And Roselli, excuse me, Roselli came into Washington.

Starting point is 00:55:40 Mayhew had a house in the suburbs of Washington at that time and where he had the backyard party and he invites Johnny Roselli to come there. And that's where some of the CIA agents that would work in this kind of were feeling out Johnny and get a measure of Johnny. And they came to the conclusion that Johnny, as mafioso go, was a solid citizen, at least for killing Castro. Later on in Mafia Spies with Mayu and Roselli, one of the things that is absolutely extraordinary to me, this is like the late 60s, this is later on in my book, but Roselli convinces Mayu, the two of them, to convince Howard Hughes to buy out the mafia in Las Vegas. So Howard Hughes in the late 60s bought out a number of mob-controlled hotels and casinos, including the Sands Hotel.

Starting point is 00:56:42 And what's really interesting there, and I recount this in my book, is that when Howard Hughes takes control of the Sands, what he does is he terminates the contract for Frank Sinatra at the Sands. Sinatra always considered the Sands to be his hotel. That's where he would entertain. But there was a problem for him there because Howard Hughes used to go out with an actress by the name of Ava Gardner. In fact, Robert Mayhew once had the assignment to spy on Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra together and report back to Hughes.

Starting point is 00:57:26 This is back in like the early 50s. So cut to 15 years later, like around 67, 68, Howard Hughes, the richest man, buys the Sands Hotel and he invests in a couple of other hotels. So Johnny Roselli brokers the deal with Mayhew. So Johnny actually gets a cut of the sale of the hotels in Las Vegas to Howard Hughes. And Howard Hughes, when he comes in, throws Sinatra out, says, you're out. And Sinatra has to go to Caesars and that he winds up entertaining at Caesars. But there's actually a fist fight that occurs during that whole time period when they tell Sinatra that his money is not good there. He can't, as the custom was, gamble at the Sands for free, that they would cover his bets and such. And Sinatra, who was drinking pretty heavily at that time period, was really upset and winds up in a fist fight. And one of Sinatra's teeth gets knocked out actually as part of this.

Starting point is 00:58:35 So, you know, it's kind of like a sidebar, if you will, in the whole story of Maf spies in this whole over uh but uh what happens in mafia spies is we we have the attempt to kill castro and then things go quiet for a while and it comes back later on but in that quiet period it's not so quiet uh and johnny this time period when johnny roselli with with robert mayu the cutout uh but who's also working for Howard Hughes. They brokered the deal so that Howard Hughes buys all these mafia-owned casinos in Las Vegas. And what happens there is that they still keep a lot of the mob-controlled people. So in the hotels in Las Vegas, they call it the skim, the money that if they collect $10, maybe about $3 or $4, they would not even report that money at all to the government. That was known as the skim.

Starting point is 00:59:36 And that money and a lot of the other things that were going on, in other words, the mob kept their people in these hotels. They sold their hotels to Howard Hughes, but they basically had their people running the hotels. Like the Tony Spolantros and stuff? Yeah. And there was a lot of money that Howard Hughes, that he thought he would be getting, he thought that, oh, wow, I'll get into the casino business. This is a source of great – look at the money that they generated. Yes, that's true. no business this this is a source of great look at the money that they generated these paid yes that's true but the thing is a lot of that money's going out the door and it's being it's going back to the same people that sold that hotel to you and the people that were the two characters that

Starting point is 01:00:16 that uh that brokered that sale was johnny roselli for the mob and Robert Mayhew working on Howard Hughes' behalf. And actually, that leads to the bad blood eventually between Robert Mayhew and Howard Hughes. And they wind up in the big lawsuits and back and forth. And he fires Mayhew. Mayhew had a really odd relationship with Howard Hughes, too, because Howard Hughes, by that point in his life, was really an eccentric, a really, a germaphobe who really didn't like to deal with people. And so he dealt with Mayhew over the telephone. Mayhew claimed that he never really met Howard Hughes, even though he had worked for him for like 15 years. He had moved out from Washington area out to the southwest. And he moved actually because it was in the California area.

Starting point is 01:01:12 But he did that all through a relationship that was over the phone. He never spoke to me. He never met you in person. This is a sidebar, but it's part of the story of mafia spies that to me it was amazing that the mafia sold out uh its interest uh in the late 60s and it was johnny roselli and mayu who brokered the deal and it's essentially may you is this super connector in a way that's what's so fascinating about him because he's one of those guys that he's lawless but thinks he's protected by the law at the same time you know that's so guys like that when i look at history i'm just like whoa

Starting point is 01:01:53 i there's a scene in my book where when uh john f kennedy is elected frank sinatra oversees the inaugural ball the big entertainment and he and Sinatra calls on all of his friends to entertain at this ball. But there was a plane that left Los Angeles to go to Washington, and the plane, everybody's seat was paid for by Bob Mayhew thanks to Howard Hughes. Yeah, there's a scene in Mafia Spies where, when I'm talking about Mayu, I recall that scene. They're all very happy. They're going to this big, happy celebration of the new president, thanks to Howard Hughes. God, there's so many characters in them and all this.

Starting point is 01:02:43 So many different people. And we know what we know through the things that have actually been released but i mean you gotta wonder about all the stuff that's never seen the light of day and never will well what could be in that yeah i really benefited from the fact that a lot of documents and court testimony and and hearings uh Senate hearings and congressional hearings. Those documents, particularly in the last five years, there were all these documents that were released that were part of the Kennedy assassination, but they were confidential. So they were top secret and they were not released

Starting point is 01:03:20 until around 2017. There were literally thousands of documents. And they helped me a lot in doing this book, Mafia Spies, for instance, like the CIA code number for Johnny Roselli, you know, like little things, but they're like little, another piece in the puzzle that really add a lot more detail about what was going on. And for me, the biggest, it's those documents that really showed the level of the CIA's operation down in Florida that, as I mentioned about,

Starting point is 01:03:56 that Castro had developed informants and that the CIA documents, and particularly the CIA documents, said, well, wait a minute, why are all these attempts failing to kill Castro? He's being tipped off. Who is it? How is he getting this information?

Starting point is 01:04:11 And you see that reflected in those documents. The other thing that I found really fascinating, particularly having done other Kennedy books, was about Robert Kennedy, who has always been a hero of mine, particularly Bobby Kennedy after the assassination of his brother. was about Robert Kennedy, who has always been a hero of mine, particularly Bobby Kennedy, after the assassination of his brother. He was really, a lot of the modern Democratic Party today has its roots in the campaign, the 1960 campaign of Robert Kennedy. But before the death of his brother, Bobby was really a different man in many ways. And he was much more hard driven. He was certainly anti-communist, but he was also somebody who felt that, particularly in this case, he oversees the attempts by the Cuban exiles and by the cia down in florida to overthrow castro's government and he's on their

Starting point is 01:05:06 back all the time and there's a lot of documents and a lot of testimony about bobby kennedy the attorney general the attorney general essentially being the de facto cia director running an undeclared war down in Florida and basically being on the backs of the CIA agents saying, come on, come on, why aren't we getting any results here? And so it's really interesting to me as somebody who admires Robert Kennedy, and I do admire Robert Kennedy in a lot of respects, but when you look at that time period, not unlike his experience with working for Senator Joseph McCarthy earlier to this point, where you have to scratch your head, there were really two Bobby Kennedys. It was Bobby Kennedy before his brothers killed, and then Bobby Kennedy after his brothers killed. Very different men.

Starting point is 01:06:02 Yeah. You had started to get to the training down in Florida before we went back to Mayhew where you're talking about Roselli was the guy like on the ground there. Right. So I'm trying to put it together in my head because it's been a while. But like in the movie JFK, when Oliver Stone goes through all the – like some of the training in Florida lee harvey oswald was allegedly there and some of those other guys is that a part of the same thing or was that later well you know it's really hard to rely rely on jfk as anything than an entertainment it's a brilliant movie but it as a as an investigative document it really should not be relied on. Why do you say that? Well, just in general. I mean, he basically suggests that there's an overall conspiracy to kill JFK. And before you... You have to have the receipts for... When you're an investigative reporter,

Starting point is 01:06:58 like I have been for 40 years, when you do an investigation, you have to have receipts, you have to have documents, you have to have proof. And so that was a big problem with that. But overall, I do think that, you know, it's a brilliant movie. And I think there are a lot of filmmakers that look at the multiple cuts that he uses in JFK that really, from a cinematic standpoint, was really terrific and really aggressive and really set a trend for many, many films after that. But when I did Mafia Spies, I was very reliant. And I was very lucky, the fact that 50 years later, there were a lot of documents. And the truth, the things that can be proven is so wild in itself that the attraction for me and also for the filmmakers

Starting point is 01:07:54 of Mafia Spies, the true story itself is so wild that you don't have to entertain unsubstantiated conspiracies. One of the really unfortunate things is that there are a lot of politicians these days that trade on conspiracy theories. And they feed on people's fears and prejudices and things, their paranoia or whatever it is. And so we were very determined. I was determined with my book. I have many, many footnotes in the back of my book, but also in Mafia Spies, the show that we did, we tried to stay within things that we could actually prove. And those, you know, the story is so wild and so hard to follow in and of itself that staying with the facts, ma'am, just the facts, ma' just, you don't need to go into any conspiracies that are not true. This is the most extraordinary murder conspiracy that the federal government has ever

Starting point is 01:09:19 been involved in, certainly involving the mafia, and that is is proved and that's been acknowledged by the agency itself but well the one that they've acknowledged yeah the biggest one they've acknowledged because like they still hold the jfk files because somebody in the government killed that guy i mean there's just no there's no plausible way that the government wasn't involved alan dulles was running the cia from his Georgetown apartment because he'd been kicked out by this dude and then sat on the Warren Commission where they said, oh, this magic bullet went through three fucking people and made seven turns. And that's what happened. Oh, congratulations. Here's Arlen Specter. Well, I think you're right about

Starting point is 01:10:01 Alan Dulles not being forthcoming at all. And let's talk about that because I think that's a really important point in Mafia Spies. What I point out is Alan Dulles was fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles was building a big pardon me alan dallas was uh overseeing the construction of a new cia headquarters out in langley virginia and it was launched during his tenure and he really wanted to be there at its opening so they actually delayed alan dallas being removed as the head of the directory so that he could be there for the opening of that building. But Dulles was placed on the Warren Commission, the commission that examined the circumstances of JFK's death. It was set up by President Johnson, headed by the head of the Supreme Court Earl Warren it was a seven member commission one of the people that was

Starting point is 01:11:13 put on it was then Congressman Gerald Ford but at the request of Bobby Kennedy and I show this in my book Bobby Bobby Kennedy had one of his top Justice Department lawyers contact, went through Bill Moyers at Johnson's White House. And it was Bobby Kennedy who suggested that Johnson put Alan Dulles onto the Warren Commission. commission and in doing so alan dallas fundamentally protected uh the disclosure of this plot to kill castro now bear in mind when you're doing a murder investigation one of the things you want to do is you know one murder 101 murder investigation 101 you want to identify all the suspects. Just before JFK's assassination, Kennedy, I'm sorry, just before JFK's assassination, Fidel Castro said to a couple of reporters, and he said publicly, he says, I know you're trying to kill me. And essentially, he said that two could play this game. And it was basically a threat saying, if you continue to do this, I'm going to go after you. And yet, despite even the suspicions of somebody like Lyndon Johnson, who thought maybe that Castro might be involved, he puts Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission.

Starting point is 01:12:41 And Alan Dulles steers the commission away from that, knowing that it's a top secret plan. It's not something that we want to admit that we're trying to kill a foreign leader because that would have had huge consequences for us at that time period. So they deliberately avoid that. And that's something that doesn't come out

Starting point is 01:13:03 until many years later. It doesn't come out until about 15 years later in the mid-1970s after the Watergate scandal, which involved some misuse of the FBI and also the CIA and intelligence agencies. There's a committee that's set up by Frank Church that oversees, that reviews what's going on with the CIA. And that's when this 15-year-old plot to kill Castro really comes onto the front page of the New York Times. A number of reporters are following this. Cy Hirsch, as an example, most notably. And it becomes the subject of Senate hearings.

Starting point is 01:13:43 And that's when all this dirty laundry comes out about the attempts to kill Castro and including the involvement of Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. And they're subpoenaed to testify before the Senate. So there was – you had said like Roselli had a code name within CIA and everything. They were written out in the documents. Yeah, they loved his ass. They thought he was great. A guy named Bill Harvey, who was known as this James Bond of the CIA. in Berlin and they brought him from Europe over to Florida to oversee this operation, this illegal war that we're running. But the big operation down in Florida involving hundreds

Starting point is 01:14:33 of times thousands of people, there were buildings that were front buildings that were really run by the CIA, but they would have like signs out front that looked like there were regular businesses and such. And Harvey was sent down there to oversee things. And, you know, he looks at this whole, so he comes in with a fresh pair of eyes and he looks at this and says, you know, I got my suspicions about this guy, Santo Traficante. And you can see that in the documents that I reviewed. You can also see, and also the testimony later on that Harvey gave to the Senate committee. But also, he has doubts about Gene Conner. But Harvey is really impressed by Johnny Roselli in particular. And he feels that Johnny really is a patriot. And that Johnny is very dedicated on his own dime.

Starting point is 01:15:26 Johnny's paying his own way down there. He's meeting with all the folks down in Key West. And actually, some of the folks down in Key West, they know that Harvey's meeting with this guy, Roselli, but they don't know the whole story about Roselli. And Roselli, but is training, helping to train some of the Cuban exiles that are involved in going to overthrow and kill Castro. Wasn't one of, was one of those guys, what was his name? Tony, you know who I'm talking about? One of the Cuban.

Starting point is 01:16:03 Yeah. I'm blanking for a moment here. It was like a long name, but they shortened it. Yes. Why? Tony Buck. I still have Tony Ocardo in my name, but... Yeah, not Tony...

Starting point is 01:16:14 No, not on the mob side. Yeah, but he... You know what? If... I don't have my book here. Handily. Yes, but I know who you're talking about. He was one of the Cuban exile leaders.

Starting point is 01:16:28 And so he was definitely a game player. Somebody who they, like Harvey would look at this guy and say, okay, wait a minute. Where is he getting all this money from? And the fellow that you're talking about this cuban uh leader there's a picture of my book actually actually alessi can you pull up that email tom sent because it's it probably has yeah the first pdf there's a picture of this guy go down go down go down right there go up right no go down. That's Mayu. That guy right there.

Starting point is 01:17:07 Yeah, what's his name again? Anti-Castro fighter. Antonio. Tony Verona. Tony Verona. Jeez. I blanked completely. It's on the tip of my tongue or whatever.

Starting point is 01:17:15 Well, Tony Verona was one of those type of guys that was a Cuban exile leader. And there were a number of different Cuban exile groups that the CIA was dealing with. But he was an operator in many ways. He was a guy investing in properties in Miami. And the question was, well, where did he get all this money from? This is Harvey looking at this type of circumstance. And Verona actually wanted explosives and other type of armaments from the CIA and saying that we're going to use these to try to send over to Cuba to all part of the effort to get rid of Castro. So there were a lot of different characters basically in how to be snipers and how to kill. It was definitely a specialty of Johnny Roselli's. Anybody involved, the mafia.

Starting point is 01:18:15 But he was also pushing the whole idea that let's poison him. And there were a couple of attempts to poison Castro. You know, Alan Dulles was also influenced by the whole James Bond era. JFK and Jackie, even Jackie Kennedy, were enamored with the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming. And in fact, at one point, just before he becomes president, John Kennedy goes to a dinner party with Ian Fleming, and they talk about, Kennedy actually asks Fleming, how would you get rid of Castro? And Fleming says, through ridicule, chiefly, that in other words, if they could do things to undermine the authority of Castro. Plans, for instance, to have debilitaries that could take his hair out, that he would lose his beard or all these other different attempts to undermine Castro.

Starting point is 01:19:18 That's the suggestion by Fleming. I don't think Fleming, the creator of James Bond in 1959 when they're having this dinner, thought that things would go as far as you, well, you'll go out to Cuba and actually kill him. He was only saying embarrass him. And that would lead to the downfall of Castro. aspect of being influenced by James Bond novels and James Bond films that were becoming very popular, partly because JFK endorsed them and really liked Fleming's books. The CIA was encouraged to come up with these killing devices that would be similar to what they were watching up on the screen. And some of the policy people in the CIA would say, well, we saw in a James Bond movie that they had this type of gadget. Can't we do something like that?

Starting point is 01:20:14 And so there were labs at the CIA that were tasked with the job of trying to come up with all these different killing devices that they were inspired by James Bond films and such. Is this where Dr. Sorry, I'm going to check that in one sec. But is this where Dr. Sidney Gottlieb comes in? Yeah, exactly. Can we just pause for one sec?

Starting point is 01:20:37 I don't know what that noise is outside. Someone parked right outside of here. So let me just check what that is and we'll come right back. Okay. I've always tried to get my family involved in my little adventures here as well we're back on air button yeah by the way right okay go ahead sure yeah i've always as a writer i've always tried to get my family my wife joyce and my three sons involved in the various different escapades and investigating these uh and uh these books of mine and uh joyce I went down to Cuba as part of this.

Starting point is 01:21:07 My favorite moment in the whole effort was that the two showrunners were coming out to my house to interview me. And Joyce said she's a big fan of Homeland on Showtime. They have these investigative maps and such. She said, why don't you have a map to show all the different places where things happen in Mafia Spies? And I said, that's a great idea. Let's go down in the basement and whatever. And she said, no, no, no. Why don't you put it up here?

Starting point is 01:21:39 And she pointed to the wall in our dining room wall. We have this big painting from Paris. We took the painting off the wall and then suddenly we blew up a map of the United States and actually the map made the show itself on Showtime and Paramount. In fact, when Paramount came out with the movie trailer, the trailer for Mafia Spies,

Starting point is 01:22:04 it wasn't so much the fact that my face was in it, it was the fact that the map had made it. We was like, look, the map actually made it. How long did that map take to build? It's still up on our wall. It took a whole weekend. We took photos from the book, we cut out pictures of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli and Fidel Castro,

Starting point is 01:22:21 and then we pasted it up on this map in the United States. And it is funny because you can tell, you can tell a big part of this story by just moving around geographically. So here's Cuba, here's Havana. This is the picture of the San Sushi where the mob ran the hotel, the casinos down there. Here's the fountain blue hotel. Here's the Washington, the CIA. Here's the Fountain Blue Hotel. Here's Washington, the CIA. Here's Chicago, the base of Sam Giancana. Here's Las Vegas, where a lot of things happen with the Rat Pack and with

Starting point is 01:22:55 the two mobsters out there. And then here's Hollywood, where Johnny Roselli was working as well. So that's almost the whole extent of the United States. Yeah. And that's also when I do a podcast like this, keeping track of all of in my head to keep all the moving pieces of the puzzle together for not just people out there to follow, but for me to keep following it is crazy because we're talking like the focus of your book, Mafia Sp, is obviously on Roselli and Giancana working with the CIA to try to take out Castro. But this time period is like first Irish Catholic president comes in, Bay of Pigs happen, nuclear war on the horizon, trying to kill Castro, Kennedy gets gunned down vietnam starts like we're talking inside of a four and a half year period like the this crazy timeline of history and somehow in some ways allegedly and then also confirmed touching it you have the mafia and the mafia is touching hollywood you've been talking about sinatra

Starting point is 01:23:58 he's right behind you right there he's born four blocks from here right you know you have hollywood involved with that then you have you know it's like pop culture is downstream from politics in a way. And then it's like crimes with it too. It's so fascinating and also mind-blowing because, yes, the internet wasn't around obviously in the 60s and whatever. So news didn't spread around as much. But like mass media existed. People were investigating things. Absolutely. News didn't spread around as much, but mass media existed. People were investigating things.

Starting point is 01:24:25 Absolutely. You'd think the CIA could never blatantly work with the mafia and have Frank Sinatra be a go-between with the future president of the United States. But here we are. That's kind of what it was. Right. Even the press would say, well, the president of the United States would never have an affair with somebody. It was a different time, a different place in America. But that's what made this so interesting to me is that by telling the story of these two gangsters and using them as a window into all these different aspects of what

Starting point is 01:24:58 was going on at that time, that's what really, I think, makes Mafia Spies, both as a book and as a TV show, so appealing to me. Yeah, well, we had left off before the break on Sidney Gottlieb. I don't want to forget about that because I know a lot of people are quite fascinated. But we've talked about Sidney in the past on some different shows about he was the godfather of MKUltra and stuff like that. But as you pointed out, he was the – you can say what you want about the guy. He was obviously a very imaginative dude, and he was behind a lot of the actual surprise weapons building and stuff. So what did – were there things in the – were there things in the research you did that you learned a lot of new stuff about Gottlieb that you hadn't learned in the past in previous books you wrote? No. Gottlieb was more of a tangential character.

Starting point is 01:25:51 He was a person, the CIA labs were the ones who were developing the poisons that were used to try to kill Castro. So in that sense, he's part of it. And also, I should say, Stephen Kinzer, who has written a book about that, he's a prominent commentator in Mafia Spies on Paramount and Showtime. He's great. He's terrific, as are a number of other folks. Tim Weiner, who has written the definitive definitive book on the CIA and also he's written about the FBI he's a very prominent commentator we had Chris Matthews who was one of my one of my favorites as a journalist and as a political commentator probably the best interview and all of the Mafia spies all six hours of our docuseries,

Starting point is 01:26:46 is Antoinette Giancana. The daughter. The daughter of Sam Giancana. How old is she now? She's in her 80s, but she is hilarious in the show. Really a funny commentator. Not necessarily by design, but she has a lot of interesting comments to make, like, for instance, how

Starting point is 01:27:05 she had the hots for Johnny Roselli. And as a matter of fact, how she made a comment to her father about Fidel Castro, that she thought he was handsome. And Sam blew up and said, and actually- Not in this house, he's not. You know, a big part of Mafia Spies, what I try to do is not make cartoon characters out of these people, but make them as real people, the lives that they led. And one of the big appeals of Mafia Spies to me was in telling the story of these two friendships, these two friends, two buddies. It's a buddy movie in many ways, Mafia Spies.

Starting point is 01:27:43 And Johnny Roselli, as I said, was kind of this Casanova type. But Sam Giancana was another type of man, another archetype. He was a guy who was married. In fact, he was chosen to oversee the outfit, to be the head of the mafia in Chicago because they felt he was a married man. The person before him who was running the mob, Tony Ocardo, basically wanted to take all his chips and live in his beautiful mansion that he had out in the suburbs of Chicago and keep an eye on what was going on, but basically let Sam Giancana run things. And he thought Sam was a good bet that he was married. He had these three daughters.

Starting point is 01:28:27 He also lived in Oak Park, which is a suburb of Chicago. Sam was known for cutting his own lawn and such. So he looked like a suburban gangster, kind of like, almost like a Tony Soprano type of thing. And yet something happened, and this involved Antoinette Giancana, the daughter, very specifically. Sam's wife took their daughters down to Florida for some type of vacation. And Antoinette Giancana, as a young woman in particular, was a real hell raiser. And Sam's wife dropped dead screaming at her kids, specifically Antoinette Giancana. And when that happened, Sam, who adored his wife, his wife Angeline was like an angel to him. He was somebody he always aspired to get married to. Her family had doubts about Sam because, of course, he was a gangster and such.

Starting point is 01:29:34 And so he won her over. They had these kids. And then she drops dead. And this woman that he had up on a pedestal was now gone. And here he was, a bachelor mobster father with three daughters. And the oldest daughter, Antoinette, is a real hell raiser. And he doesn't know how to handle it. And part of the answer for him is that he winds up going down to Las Vegas and he's hanging out in Las Vegas increasingly with his pal Johnny Roselli. And it's there in Las Vegas that Sam meets Phyllis McGuire, a singer, as part of an act called the McGuire Sisters, which was on television all the time. They were on things like Lawrence Welk and all these different big time, prime time shows, very well-known act. And Phyllis was probably the most prominent of these three sisters. And in a Las Vegas casino, Sam meets Phyllis. He courts her and now she becomes the beloved figure in Sam's life. And he's courting her at the same time that Johnny and Sam in Florida with the CIA is training all of the

Starting point is 01:30:57 Cuban exiles. They're getting ready for the big move. And word comes back to Sam that Phyllis McGuire in Las Vegas has met a guy, a comedian by the boyfriend of Phyllis McGuire. That is a very dangerous thing for somebody at that time period. Because Sam, even though he adored his wife before she died, while he was married, he also had all these other girlfriends on the side. The psychiatrists call it the Madonna horror syndrome of men, that you adore your wife, but you have girlfriends on the side. And there was one particular girlfriend who had another boyfriend, and the boyfriend, his name came to Sam's attention, and pretty soon the boyfriend was gone. Nobody could find the boyfriend again. So the idea that Phyllis McGuire had a new boyfriend in Las Vegas, and Sam's down in

Starting point is 01:32:11 Florida working with the CIA, and word gets back, and Sam's furious. He had a very short temper. So he wants to fly right immediately to Las Vegas to take care of this guy. And Johnny says, no, no, no, no, no. And Bob Mayhew's down there as well in the CIA. They say, no, no, no, no, no. And Bob Mayhew's down there as well in the CIA. They say, no, no, no, we need you here. Just stay here. What we'll do is we know a detective agency that in Las Vegas, and they'll check it out and they'll let us know, is it really true? And I, because of, you know, Sam, you don't want to have somebody like Phyllis

Starting point is 01:32:41 McGuire find out that you're checking on her and whatever. And I'm sure that was all part of the conversation. So in Las Vegas, the detective agencies are checking out Dan Rowan. Rowan goes to perform. And while the show is going on, they break into his hotel room in Las Vegas. And they start to put phone taps in his room to try to determine whether or not he really is cheating on, quote unquote, cheating with Phyllis McGuire. And the hotel security catches this and finds out these detectives, stops the detectives. They callives they call the cops the cops eventually uh uh alert the fbi about this these wiretaps and this whole story and what happens is that the detectives begin to cough it up and they they say that essentially that they were hired by this guy bob mayu who they knew

Starting point is 01:33:41 and the story comes back to mayu and then uh they go to Mayu and essentially he infers, he lets the FBI know that he is working for the CIA and that you can't get involved in pursuing this investigation in Las Vegas because I'm working with the CIA. We're trying to get rid of Castro. National security. And that's the get rid of Castro. National security. And that's the way the FBI finds out about it. The FBI is clueless about this stuff until this – really by accident that this failed break-in of Dan Rowan's hotel room by the detectives is discovered. And it sets off this whole chain reaction in many ways mafia spies is almost like a uh a comedy of various different errors it's just it's it you

Starting point is 01:34:35 know that whole phrase about is life a tragedy or is life a comedy with mafia spies it's both uh there are a lot of pretty funny moments and this is one of them and it leads to the fbi eventually finding out more and more about what's going on and they eventually find out about judy campbell and the relationship that she has with jfk and with jfk and that leads to a meeting i think it's 1962, between – first Bobby Kennedy finds out about it from the FBI through the Justice Department. But then there's a meeting. There's a phone calls between Judy Campbell and the White House. That was later reported by a number of folks. established in even in the uh in the subsequent senate testimony that there was a relationship between the president and judy campbell at this time but this is how f uh the head of the fbi j

Starting point is 01:35:54 hoover when he finds this out he's a guy hoover was the type of guy he would keep a file on everybody and so this was dynamite uh if there was any concern bobby kennedy wanted to get rid of hoover which he kind of did um hoover this was this was his get out of jail card this was his insurance policy that in other words uh he had the goods on the president of the united states he found hoover found out that not only was JFK having an affair with Judy Campbell, but Judy Campbell was also being courted by Sam Giancana. And Giancana and Roselli clearly knew, particularly Giancana knew, I'm sure, by manipulating this young woman, that in essence, she was another insurance policy for them, that they

Starting point is 01:36:48 couldn't go after him because, in other words, the FBI couldn't go after Giancana because he had the goods on the president of the United States, or at least that was the thought. And certainly Hoover and his agents find this out more and more. There's increasingly more and more pressure put on the mafia, Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean kind of in particular, throughout the course of this story. And they find out a number of different secrets, and this is probably the biggest one. Wasn't there something where JFK was seeing Phyllis McGuire too? I don't know about that. I don't mention that in my book. I don't think so. But JFK,

Starting point is 01:37:37 the first book that I wrote about Kennedy, I really admire JFK in a lot of respects. I think he just broke through, really, as I mentioned, he was the first minority president of the United States elected as a Catholic, and really set the template for women who would run for office for president, for the first African-American black with Barack Obama. Romney, as a matter of fact, as a Mormon, referred to the example of JFK in 1960. And Kennedy was really a brilliant mind in the presidency in many respects. But his behavior behind the scenes and the complicity of the all-male press, who kind of got wind of some of his behavior, and that never was known by the public.

Starting point is 01:38:40 And what exactly do we make of all this type of stuff of president's sex lives and such, and how important is it? We've certainly discussed that a lot in america in recent years but it was not known at all uh and it's something that in the case of judy campbell being involved with both sam giancana and the president united states in other words the most powerful mafias figure in america she's involved with the most well-known entertainer in the country, arguably Frank Sinatra. And she's also involved with JFK, the president of the United States, all during that time period. It's extraordinary. And yet, I tried to make sure that Judy Campbell was not a cartoon figure. In fact, I think she's more like a Monica Lewinsky character. A woman who comes from a fairly affluent background

Starting point is 01:39:25 in Southern California. She meets Johnny Roselli, and she gets involved with a lot of powerful men, not unlike Lewinsky. And she gets into deeper waters and darker waters, I think, than she ever imagined. And she had her sense of loyalty. She actually kept quiet

Starting point is 01:39:46 about this for 15 years. It was the Senate investigators who made Judy Campbell into a household name. By that point, she was married. Her name was Judith Exner by that point. But for 15 years, she kept quiet. And Johnny Roselli comes back and in very interesting ways that I detail in Mafia Spies, when Jack Kennedy, who she really loved, is killed in Dallas, Judy Campbell basically puts herself in a hotel room. And the feeling is that she may be suicidal and it's actually johnny roselli who reaches out to her and you know is johnny roselli doing it out of the goodness of his heart or is he somehow trying to keep keep her quiet and do whatever it appears as though johnny roselli fundamentally uh did like judy campbell and and and so campbell is a much more complicated figure

Starting point is 01:40:48 in in mafia spies than just dismissing her as some sexual floozy or something like that roselli's background though too i don't know how much we got into this earlier i can't remember if we were talking before the podcast or on it no but he's he's also fascinating because he's not he basically has the autonomy to be this incredibly powerful mob guy but he's not a mob boss he's not in charge of a family he's not a capo he's not a captain of a crew or anything he's like this you know he's a strategist. He even has a card that says his business cards, Johnny Roselli, strategist. And so he kind of made, he was a facilitator, but that was his power. His power was that he was able, he also was acceptable to a lot of the

Starting point is 01:41:39 Hollywood types and business people. You know, somebody like Robert Mayhew, working with the richest man in the country. He deals with Johnny Roselli. Roselli, he might get rid of people. He might have been involved in numerous murders himself, but he was a younger man. And there was always that threat of violence with Johnny. But Johnny had that gleam in his eye. He had those sparkling teeth. He was dressed to

Starting point is 01:42:06 the hilt. He would go to his clothier in Beverly Hills. He was not a dees and does type of gangster. He was a really slick piece of work. And he was acceptable to a lot of the people from the CIA business people and even in politics that he dealt with. Yet he was very well liked in that world by the Giancones, by some of these other powerful figures. It's strange. It is. Well, you know, Johnny Roselli, though, was not his real name. Yeah. What was his real name again? Filippo Sacco. And that, you know, you have on your wall over here, Don Draper from Mad Men. Well, what's the big secret in Mad Men?

Starting point is 01:42:48 Don Draper. It's not his real name. Not his real name. And he's very- Spoiler alert. And he's, yeah, right. It's a little late, about 10 years after the finale of Mad Men. But that's really what's going on with Johnny.

Starting point is 01:43:02 Johnny's big secret is that's not his real name, that he immigrated with his mother as a young lad. Filippo Sacco arrived in Boston. And as he grew up, apparently he got involved with a couple of different crimes. There was even talk that he was somehow involved with a murder. But he winds up as a young man going out to Chicago, and he works for Al Capone as a driver. So does young Sam Giancana. This is like the early 1930s or so.

Starting point is 01:43:35 And Capone, because Johnny Roselli develops tuberculosis, they'd send, and he can't breathe with the coldness of the air in Chicago, they send him to Las Vegas, not a bad assignment, to Hollywood. And Johnny spends most of his career as Johnny Roselli working in Hollywood with studio heads, with the unions, some of the labor unions there. Again, as I mentioned, he's involved with a lot of actresses in his private life and such. He's living a really great life. Johnny Roselli, though, also what's interesting to me about it is, as I mentioned, I try to look at the culture of people that I write about. And he was also a Catholic, Roselli. And the name, so how does he go from Filippo Sacco to Gianni Roselli? Well, he actually took the name of a Vatican painter by

Starting point is 01:44:37 the name of Cosimo Roselli, and he adapted Gianni Roselli. How'd he land on that? Who knows? But that's how he did it. And he was, you know, so this was not, he didn't use John Doe or, you know, some other lame type of, it was a really sophisticated name. And he didn't anglicize it either. You know, there it was clear that you know it was roselli was an of italian district of extraction and such but uh you know so he that was always his pseudonym that was his that was his real name as he portrayed it he filled out documents he said it was in some

Starting point is 01:45:17 documents he said that he was born in chicago not he was born actually in italy yeah but he and he had immigrated with his mother illegally so later on in mafia spies as the the as the pressure of the fbi mounts and they keep on investigating him more and more they find out that johnny is sending money from las vegas to bought to boston to his mother still still alive, and to his family. And he would regularly send money to them. And the person that would send it was not Johnny directly. He had another guy that he worked with, kind of a mobster out in Las Vegas. And the mobster got into trouble.

Starting point is 01:45:59 And the FBI made a deal with him to follow him. And they followed him to the extent that he found out that johnny would have the satchel of money that he was sending to his mother and when he and they nailed it out and they checked out who the mother was they found out the name and they found out that johnny had a had an alias filipo sacco is his real name they went to the extent they even got a photo of johnny as filipo sacacco when he's like about seven years old. Somehow they got a photograph of him and they actually confronted Johnny Roselli late in the story. The FBI confronts him that he's a phony, that it's not Roselli, it's Filippo Sacco.

Starting point is 01:46:42 And Roselli says, go talk to to my lawyers he kind of blows it off and whatever but johnny realizes that he's going to be deported there were other gangsters uh who were deported that was one of the arms that uh the fbi and law enforcement in the united states they could use they yeah they would they would deport people if they realized they were here illegally. Instead of convicting them and going through all that trouble, just send them the hell out of the country. And so Johnny realized if he got deported, this was likely a death sentence for him.

Starting point is 01:47:16 So he was desperate. He was desperate not to be deported. And by that point, we're talking about the early 1970s. And that's when Johnny says, things are coming to a head here. So you have by the mid 70s, the church committee is now getting wind of what all these different operations by the CIA, the attempts to kill Castro. They're going to subpoena both Sam Giancana and Roselli to talk about that. And several things happen in a relatively short period of time. In 1975, when they subpoena Sam Giancana, the Senate sends two investigators to Chicago.

Starting point is 01:48:03 And that same day that those investigators arrive in Chicago, Sam has that dinner that night with one of his daughters and a couple of friends. They go home at night and Sam makes a little snack for himself. And while he's cooking up the snack, some assailant comes through the door. Some assailant. Some assailant, which might be who we don't know for sure who it is it's a speculation but it seems to be that was a that john that uh sam recognized who this assailant was the assailant had a uh a silencer on the gun of course and he pops sam six different times kills in fact most of the shots were around the mouth.

Starting point is 01:48:46 And it was a way of sending a message to anybody else who would talk that this will wind up, you'll wind up just like this. You'll wind up dead if you speak to the Senate. We're not going to have, the fear was that somehow Sam had something to say to the Senate and that he would say it. And so he dies in 1975. And after that death, Johnny is really incredibly nervous about what's going on. He moves down to Florida and he's subpoenaed to testify. The first time he testifies, Johnny barely says anything that the Senate investigators already didn't know. He barely says anything of real substance in his investigation.

Starting point is 01:49:32 But when, as things develop, and it looks like he's going to be deported now by 1976, Johnny has his lawyer float the idea that he knows something about the JFK assassination and that he's not only willing to talk more about what's going on with the CIA, but that he could shed some light and he dangles that through his lawyer. They dangle this to the Senate investigators and they subpoenaed Roselli the second time. But before he can testify, Johnny goes out to play golf, and he never comes back. This is down in Florida. In fact, a few weeks later, they find Johnny dead,

Starting point is 01:50:14 his body all chopped up, stuffed into a 55-gallon barrel, thrown into the bay out in Miami Beach, not too far from the Fountain Blue Hotel where all of this begins. And that is the death of Johnny Roselli. And it sends both the assassination of Sam Giancana in his home when he's been called to testify by the Senate. And then a second Senate witness, Johnny Roselli, is killed like this. It really upsets a lot of things there. And I think it also helped initiate the decision by the House committee to look at the JFK assassination itself. And what exactly the House decided there they that committee said that there

Starting point is 01:51:07 was some type of conspiracy but they really couldn't say what it was about i wonder why yeah i wonder why uh but um without going down that road what's what was interesting to me was the way that johnny used all that fear and paranoia about JFK's assassination. And could there have been a conspiracy? And even people like Lyndon Johnson privately said that he thought there was. And now that Johnny Roselli was working with the CIA, working even more so with the Cuban exiles who were furious with the Kennedys because of what had happened at the Bay of Pigs and the failure to support them at the Bay of Pigs. And also the mafia, to the extent that they were working with the mafia. And did the mob want to get rid of the Kennedys because they were putting pressure on the mafia during that time period?

Starting point is 01:52:01 Cut off the head of the snake or the tail? Exactly. All this stuff comes to a head in the mid-1970s. And so it's really fascinating to me, that time period. But the way to make sense out of this, for me at least, looking at all these various different history books and books that are based upon unproven conspiracies, to me what was interesting,

Starting point is 01:52:27 and despite my initial reluctance, I thought that if I could tell the story of these two mobsters and get into all these various different streams, these dark waves of different things going on all at the same time. It was a way of making it understandable, both in the book and in the TV show. And that's exactly what we've tried to do. With the murders, though, because obviously, and you telling it, the antennas go up on you, they go up on anyone listening, they go up on mine. You know, Roselli feels like they sold it as a that feels like a pretty

Starting point is 01:53:08 classic mafia hit maybe someone else did that to make it look that way oh yeah but giancana's doesn't because there's no suspect someone comes in basically – he had security around him, I believe, at the time too, right? Yeah. Well, not really there. I mean people had left for the night. Left for the night. Gene Conner had two housekeepers in the house and they had Johnny Carson on that night and they were upstairs. And he's downstairs in his like little man cave and that's where he's assassinated.

Starting point is 01:53:42 He's cooking up peppers and sausages in a little fry pan there. And pop, pop, pop. In comes the – whoever it was, the gunman with a silencer. And what happens that night is also whoever it was that killed Giancana got in a car and apparently the cops were called pretty quickly. And so there were sirens going, and this is the theory of investigators. They found the gun with the silencer. It was about a mile or so away from Giancana's house. And when they traced the silencer, the gun itself go it wasn't traceable to chicago it was traceable to tampa

Starting point is 01:54:29 florida santo santo trafficante now i think i to the extent that i have an idea of who was involved with the death of gene connor sam and and Johnny Roselli. I think Traficante is clearly involved with both. For the reasons with the gun, with the traceable, back to Tampa. I mean, that's just pretty odd. Why does he want him dead? Well, I think it was a way the

Starting point is 01:54:59 whole movement to kill Castro was done on the sly by Sam and Johnny. And Traficante knew about it but they were supposed to tell the other commission members and they never told the commission members how do we know that uh they just didn't that also became part of the testimony uh that they just and that that has been reported in a number of different places. In the case of Traficante, he didn't want to upset the apple cart here. And it looked like Johnny was going to testify. He didn't want to be deported.

Starting point is 01:55:32 It was pretty clear that he was going to be deported. Johnny actually went to dinner with Traficante a few weeks before Johnny winds up dead. And he goes with actually Traficante's wife there. And Johnny goes with his sister and I think his nephew. They all go out to eat. And it's almost like that scene in The Godfather when I think it's what Tessio says, hey, Tom, can you get me off? Can you get me off the hook? Can you get me off the hook?

Starting point is 01:56:01 For old time's sake. And it's almost kind of like that because Traficante had been very friendly with Roselli for a number of years by that point. For almost 20 years, I guess, by that point. But no dice. Traficante, he was a really slick piece of work. He was a guy dressed in a bow tie. He wore pretty thick glasses uh he dressed like he was the accountant more than he was some slick mafia he wasn't like uh he was not a john gotty type

Starting point is 01:56:34 right al capone this was a guy who looked like he was doing the books uh but he was a second generation gangster so he knew the trick is live in a modest house, put your money places where people can't find it, make plenty of money, but run it like a very quiet businessman. And so Johnny was bad business. He threatened the whole – it just would have been even more trouble from them. And the fact that they had been involved with this. Also, Sam Giancana, as far as he was concerned, he fled to Mexico for a number of years. There was, the Chicago mob was really upset with what had happened. He invited all of this pressure.

Starting point is 01:57:23 You know, Sam Giancana, they thought he was going to be quiet. He was going to live there with his wife and three kids in the suburbs and just collect the money from gambling operations. Instead, he's going to Las Vegas. Now he's in the papers. Now he's hanging out with Frank Sinatra and Phyllis McGuire, and he's attracting all this attention, not unlike what John Gotti did in New York. And so they were upset about that. And rather than kill him, they let him go down to Mexico where he, Sam, for a number of years,

Starting point is 01:57:52 I'm talking about the late 60s, early 70s, is in Mexico running mob-controlled casinos in other countries. Like he works with the Shah of Iran, for instance. Of course he did, the CIA Shah of iran for instance in other places well exactly but he's making money he's making he's making money for the mafia now internationally and he's living the high life mexico eventually throws him out and he winds up back in chicago yeah and he winds up in his pajamas they literally pull him out of his

Starting point is 01:58:25 house put him on a plane and he arrives in his pajamas in chicago and so tony accardo who has now had to come back out of retirement to run things in chicago now has gene kanna back in town and so uh they weren't happy with sam what what is sam sam saying oh i'm gonna stay retired and blah blah blah blah but uh the fact that all this is now coming out the sign off was made by the commission obviously to to kill to kill both sam gene connor and johnny roselli and uh i think it's pretty clear that santo traficante was Traficante, he was the last man standing. He didn't die by a bullet or he wasn't chopped up in a barrel, left in a barrel. He wound up dying as an old man. And so did the other guy, the last man standing in this story, Fidel Castro.

Starting point is 01:59:21 Yeah. Now, where's Carlos Marcelo and all this that that's what i was trying to figure out because carlos and santa were always heavily tied together due to the fact that you know geographically speaking tampa new orleans pretty close families and all that where's he with this well you know kind of like sydney gottlieb i mentioned him in the book but that you know there's so many in my book i have a like a lineup, kind of a, what is it, the roster of characters and such. The cast of characters, I call it. Just like a movie. And there's so many characters that people's heads begin to swim.

Starting point is 01:59:58 And I think, to be perfectly frank, I think my book does a very good job, really, to the extent that it's successful. It's successful because I always stay with the two gangsters. And I talk about a load of different other things as we go along on these adventures of these two outlaw buddies, these two gangsters on the loose. You know, they're not cowboys on horses. These are gangsters who fly in jets to various different places. But I... So, Marcello, you know, I mentioned briefly, but I don't get involved with that

Starting point is 02:00:39 because it's just too many characters. Fair enough. But, you know, you talk about Roselli going to that dinner with Traficante two, three weeks before he dies trying to get off the hook or whatever. But then he dies playing golf. That's what's fascinating to me. So I don't know what the vibe was from that dinner. Well, he went to play golf. Who knows exactly? Right.

Starting point is 02:01:00 But point being, he didn't go on the run. He obviously didn't think someone was going to come whack him. He knew he had a target on him. In fact, there's a scene in the book where he actually goes to see a priest and he starts atoning for his sins. I know that Johnny, in Los Angeles as well, Johnny gave money to charities and such, Catholic charities and such. And so he knew that he had a target on his back. He actually said that to a number of different people. And in fact, actually what he said to his brother-in-law, he said, if I go missing, go look for my car in the airport.

Starting point is 02:01:40 Because that's where they usually stash a car like that. You know, like the big open parking. Yeah, the long-term parking. And so when Johnny goes missing, his sister and his brother-in-law, they alert the authorities. They alert the Senate. The Senate's very concerned. There's stories about Johnny missing. And then Johnny's found in a drum.

Starting point is 02:02:04 He's found in a 55 he's found in a 55 gallon drum but the way the brother-in-law goes and he goes to the two separate airports in that area the miami area and sure enough there's the car and that's when they knew johnny uh sleeps with the fishes as they say yeah they showed that they did that in the sopranos too yeah that was that was some art imitating life yeah where they still they stick Adrian I think it was Adrian well you know um Mafia spies also talking about uh Santo Traficante another favorite of mine that was kind of an eye-opener is that when we talk about Albert Anastasia, the head of Murder, Inc. here in New York.

Starting point is 02:02:47 You know, that killing of Anastasia, which was done in a barber shop. Yep. The Hotel Sheridan, I believe it was. But what happened was, in real life, what happened there. You know, a lot of people, in fact, there's a show on TV right now that's saying it was Joey Gallo who was involved with this. Not unlike what happened with Sam Giancana. With Giancana's death, a lot of the locals said, oh, it was this guy Butch Blasey, which, among other people, Antoinette Giancana says says no that that wasn't blase um but what i'm getting at is santo trafficante was involved with anastasia's death i think in a very interesting way what

Starting point is 02:03:33 happened is anastasia uh comes down they had a meeting uh in cuba uh about this is in the late 50s or so and uh there there was a meeting about where Anastasia wanted more of the cut of the mafia's money out of Havana. And the decision was made that, well, we'll send up Traficante to continue these negotiations with you. And so Traficante goes up. He stays at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan, right by Rockefeller Center. And he meets with Anastasia. And what exactly was the upshot of that meeting? It wasn't really clear. But what happens is about a day later, while Traficante is still in town, two people come into the barbershop and pop, pop, and pop pop pop and that's where they kill

Starting point is 02:04:28 anastasia now that's that's that that whole type of barber shop murder was uh repeated by mario puso and the godfather and it was a very famous murder but locally they said oh it's joey gallo and and i one of the things i noticed in doing Mafia Spies is that you'll have the local FBI with their sources. People are often, reporters included, are only as good as their sources of information. And so a lot of people in Chicago felt it was a local guy who had killed Gene Conner. And in New York, the same thing with Anastasia, that they felt that it was Joey Gallo. And you say, well, what's the proof?

Starting point is 02:05:08 How do you really know? And it's more speculation than proof. But when you look at the chronology of events the way an investigator would look at the chronology of events, things as they happen, it was Traficante coming up to New York. And clearly, they were not going to give any more money to Anastasia. There was a whole load of people. You know, Traficante was allied with Meyer Lansky. Lansky was not going to give that type, give up money. They were making tons of money.

Starting point is 02:05:38 This is before, this is when Las Vegas is just getting off the ground. And this is in the late 50s. So, you know, I think Traficante was involved in that murder as well. Traficante is, I think, one of the most intriguing. He's the mystery man in many ways in Mafia Spies, and he's the last man standing. He's one of the most fascinating guys in the history of the mafia to me because you bring up the idea that maybe he was a double agent with castro because there was money through his narcotics and whatever there but you're talking about a dude who operated out of tampa this wasn't new york it wasn't chicago he lasted for decades in this role he sold drugs

Starting point is 02:06:22 throughout i believe pretty much that whole time including through the areas where like that wasn't kosher allegedly he's potentially involved in the offing of albert anastasia which as you said is probably the most famous hit in mafia history he there's questions about his involvement obviously with any of the castro stuff and and also with any of the Castro stuff and also with the JFK assassination. And yet this guy's never touched. He's never killed. That's why he's very successful. Right.

Starting point is 02:06:53 Same with Meyer Lansky. You know, he was very much allied with Lansky, who was based in Miami. And some of Traficante's operations were also in Miami as well. But he was fundamentally comes out of Tampa, Florida. His father had been a gangster. So Santo was a second generation gangster. You know, he was very much aware of the do's and don'ts when you're a mob leader.

Starting point is 02:07:19 And one of the things you don't do is draw attention to yourself and so the uh you know he was definitely the most successful mobster in my story but it makes you wonder if he had some form of protection there this is a guy who is also potentially behind the offing of the two mobsters who are proven to have worked with the CIA while they were under subpoena to speak to the church commission right so you would think oh this is a key target for the government to go after well they called him in and he barely said anything and he kind of shucked and dived and and that was it you know and that was it you know very good lawyers and he just – and we have the Fifth Amendment to protect people's constitutional rights, and that's perfectly fair as far as it goes. But he evaded that, and, you know, he lived to be an old man. And, you know, he is really fascinating.

Starting point is 02:08:20 And actually, in doing Mafia Spies and investigating all of this more and more i saw trafficantes mentioned and in fact my suspicions were were really based upon people like bill harvey who was the cia agent who was brought in and he you know he was the one who smelt the rat with trafficante and i said wait a minute he's saying that he's trying to kill castro well why is it taking so long and some of these answers are just you know people that that are going to poison yet and yet and yet these secret people in in cuba somehow they get cold feet after months of waiting for this and uh you know of course harvey was getting a lot of pressure from bobby kenn Kennedy at that time.

Starting point is 02:09:05 But when I looked at the documents involving Harvey, and also Harvey testified before the Senate and he gave various different statements, when I reviewed that, it was pretty clear that he had a lot of suspicions about Santo Traficante. It's really he he he's one of the first if not the first to say wait a minute trafficati he's not with us he's a guy playing both ends against the middle yeah what was the closest they came to getting castro in this mission in operation mongoose specifically when it comes to the mobsters being involved like what was the closest mission of all of them well in a way arguably the closest that they came is that they recruited a woman named marita lorenz who was a young woman whose family

Starting point is 02:09:59 uh european i forget what country it was they were from, but they had a boat that landed in Havana, a big boat in Cuba. And Castro, it was such a large boat that Castro was invited and he met Marita Lorenz and kind of courted her a little bit there and they eventually became lovers. And Lorenz went back to New York. She went to New York and was living in New York, particularly when the number of Cubans had fled from Cuba and were living in New York.

Starting point is 02:10:39 And anyway, she was recruited by the CIA. And she objected to what Castro had done with the country. But they convinced her to go back. And Lorenz winds up in a hotel room with her former lover, Fidel Castro. was given two poison pills that were put into cold cream, a jar of cold cream that she brought with her down to Cuba. And so when she's in this hotel room with Castro and these two lovers are now getting back together and she goes to the bathroom, she excuses herself. And she goes in. She opens up the jar of cold cream. And these capsules filled with poison that were prepared by the CIA lab, they actually dissolved in the moisture of the cold cream itself.

Starting point is 02:11:38 And so she realizes she can't do anything about it. And when she comes out of the bathroom, Fidel, this is according to Lorenz's account, Fidel is lying on the bed. He's got a gun. He's got his pistol lying on the table. And he can just, Fidel realizes there's something funny here that's going on. And he said, you came here to kill me didn't you and and she kind of stalls initially and and then she admits that she did and he said well go ahead here's the gun if you want to kill me and instead according to

Starting point is 02:12:20 marita instead of taking the gun and killing him like the CIA wanted her to do, she jumps into bed with Fidel and they make love instead. So when you say, what was the closest? Can you imagine the halls at Langley or in Georgetown with Alan Dulles? Like, she did what? Right, exactly. So when you ask what was the closest to Castro getting killed, that was probably the closest. And instead, it wound up in a night of ecstasy.

Starting point is 02:12:59 I love that he didn't kill her either. He was just like, oh, it's cool. He came here to kill me, but you're hot. And she later came back to kill me but you're hot yeah and she later you know she later came back to the united states she told the story and and her story is on tape and videotape that we have uh in mafia spies she's actually in the show itself wait can we pull that up on youtube uh yeah well she's she's she's definitely she was interviewed by a number of people, but the clip that we used was Geraldo Rivera. She was on a TV show of Geraldo Rivera's, and she tells the story. And in Mafia Spies, we also have actors who act out certain scenes.

Starting point is 02:13:37 And so we have a woman who plays Marita Lorenz, and this whole scene that I've described is acted out in mafia spies on paramount and showtime and uh and uh but but at the same time we're also using clips so it's marita telling the story of what happened uh while they're showing it while we're showing that's so cool do we have anything marita lorenz geraldo i think that might be it it's pointing to like a female but yeah that that is the real maria yeah it's a documentary on it yeah wait can we type in marita lorenz marita lorenz yeah i think it's episode heraldo i think we think marita marita maria m-a-r-i-I-T-A. Lorenz Geraldo interview. Type in Geraldo. You know, what you can do is if you go to episode two,

Starting point is 02:14:32 I just sent you the email with the link, and just go into episode two of Mafia Spies. It's in there, and you can actually see what I'm talking about. Yeah, so if you want to pull it up, Alessio, we'll keep talking, but there's an email. He's saying there's an email that has the link to the episode. Did I send it to you? I sent it to you.

Starting point is 02:14:50 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alessio has. Go back. Go back. It's a new email, right? So go to the top. I sent it earlier today. Yeah, let's not have my email on the screen in the post edit.

Starting point is 02:15:02 Okay, there we go. Yeah, let's definitely get this off the screen in the post edit. okay there we go yeah let's definitely get this off the screen and it's number two yeah it's um episode two the betrayers okay and you have to grab the password though yeah yeah so let's see this all has to be edited afterwards yeah but but yeah all right you pull that up and we'll keep talking here so marita lorenz is the closest that they came but they – like they tried stuff. Gottlieb built like exploding cigars and stuff. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:15:37 There's a – very early on, the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar when Castro came to New York City. And they – as part of this whole thing, getting this exploding cigar to Castro, they explained it to a New York City police commander. And the commander said, what are you crazy? We're not killing a foreign leader here in the United States with a, you know, get rid of this with this exploding cigar. So, you know, at least the New York City police said, we've got enough problems here. We don't need Castro blown up with an exploding cigar. That was certainly one. But later on, they had various different sniper attempts, things with bazookas. There was something that was mentioned in our show where people were attempting to kill Castro, some of the Cuban exiles.

Starting point is 02:16:23 They came over in a boat that yeah here we are By the way, if we have a problem with copyright and we just skipped ahead people you will have to check it out I think we should be okay if we're just reacting to the video and that's still in the episode But if not, I'm gonna skip that we just watched the actual scene of what you guys filmed in the documentary That's that's crazy too that like she went and talked about that publicly well you know it's part of the records i think that as things developed and and such in fact it's been talk about trying to make a movie uh about her life and such you know there's a lot of talk like that but uh when you say what is the closest that uh castro came to getting killed that

Starting point is 02:17:07 arguably is it but it was part of a whole uh an assortment of killing devices and methods of trying to kill him from poisons to bazookas to sniper fire uh sniper fire from many yards away to a variety of other different attempts to get rid of Castro. And they all seemed to fail. They all did fail, obviously. He died as an old man in his bed. So the idea that we had this game of whack-a-mole

Starting point is 02:17:43 trying to kill Castro, why didn't it happen? How is it that the world's most preeminent spy agency, if it wanted to kill somebody, was not able to do so? Castro had developed a spy network of informants that really helped. That and that plain old luck kept him from being killed. Yeah, it's so it's that's a part of history that considering everything the government was able to pull off in the same time period and after that the fact that he lasted another six decades almost five six whatever it was five six decades and they never got to him and he's 90 miles off our shores pretty nuts like it makes me think that that spy organization that you talked about that he set up just had to be fantastic and obviously he had brass balls. I got to give him that. Oh, yeah. In fact, the CIA kept this whole plot to kill Castro involving the mafia. They kept it from the president of the United States.

Starting point is 02:18:56 Lyndon Johnson himself did not learn about this plot until like 1967 uh there was some mention in the newspaper about this that was actually floated uh by a columnist by the name of jack anderson and it sent off a lot of alarm bells and um and johnson inquired about it and turns out they told him yeah that for years they said well if he's not going to ask us about it we're not going to tell him that we had this plot to kill castro and so uh people like richard helms and other people in the cia this was such a such a uh top secret plan that they even didn't tell the united i'm sorry this this was such a I'm sorry, this was such a top secret plan. They didn't tell the president of the United States. What does that tell you though? Because obviously this one's a long time ago, but

Starting point is 02:19:56 the thing that every president has in common with each other is that when they get there, these people, the ones who work in these agencies, they were there before the president got there and they're going to be there after they leave. So it's almost like, well, who really does run this place? Well, I think that's what we learned in the mid-70s is that with the church committee, we looked at the operations. The big concern was that the CIA had become a rogue elephant, that there was not a proper uh oversight over this and as a matter of fact when that happened in the mid-1970s by then gerald ford who had been a congressman who had been a member of the warren commission he was outraged uh to find out that about this castro plot he didn't know about he acknowledged it later on to people.

Starting point is 02:20:46 He said that he was not aware when he was on the Warren Commission about this because Alan Dulles never told them about it. So Ford issued an executive order that basically forbade any type of future assassination attempts by the CIA that we got out of. This story is about our getting into the assassination business. And then by 15 years later in 1975, President Ford says, we're getting out of the assassination. We're not going to, and forbade any type of attempts to kill foreign leaders. And yet, today, particularly because of the war in terror,

Starting point is 02:21:29 we certainly, and the development of drones, where without getting our fingerprints on anything, we can literally fly over and kill foreign leaders or other radicals that in our eyes that that are threatening our defense uh and so i think increasingly there's a concern about assassination and certainly we have seen with uh vladimir putin who has invented in many ways is an old style soviet communist russian leader leader and has no problems with assassinating people and has done so several times and sees that as an instrument of his power and of his foreign policy. This is a new world, once again, where we're getting involved with assassinations. And so it's really important that we oversee our intelligence agencies and our law enforcement agencies, having good people in those agencies of good character and that they're properly overseen. That's one of the major morals, the lessons of mafia spies. Well, that's also a huge issue too,

Starting point is 02:22:46 because unfortunately it doesn't take many people to ruin it for everyone else. We live in a society now where everything's zero or a hundred, people either love something or they hate something. You can never have nuance. And I live in the nuance, right? I live in the good and bad and I'll judge them each on their own accord. And when you look at different, let's say like intelligence agencies within our country where due to access to information and the current age, we can uncover some things where they've clearly done some really fucked up stuff. That doesn't mean in my opinion that everything else they do is bad. The matter is – i've always used this example unfortunately if you fill a room with 99 bad people and one good person not good like it's a bad outcome on the contrary but not on the contrary at all if you fill a room

Starting point is 02:23:41 with 99 good people and one bad person, bad shit can happen. And that's what scares me about this stuff because it doesn't take much. And then everyone else gets upset in those agencies because they get blamed and they got nothing to do with maybe some, I don't know, anti-constitutional or completely wrong and illegal things that are beyond the scope of what we should be doing when they happen? Well, I think having moral courage and having people of good character and having proper oversight with our intelligence systems and also with our law enforcement, those are really, really important. They can change our society. They would threaten our democracy if they're not properly overseen by people of good character. And having the moral courage, you know, physical courage, that is a great thing.

Starting point is 02:24:33 And we certainly give out awards and medals for people for physical courage. But sometimes in life, the most difficult thing is moral courage and to make sure that when things are going awry, when people are being led astray, when things are being abused, that people are willing and have the moral courage to speak up and say the right thing and do the right thing. And I think that's also something that is a lesson out of Mafia spies. Yeah. And, you know, I keep forgetting to ask you, by the way, with this time period when Roselli and Giancana were recruited to do this, how did it wind down? Did we find that out? Like, was there a day where Mayhew or someone went to them and said, guess what, it's off?

Starting point is 02:25:22 Well, it really wound down with the death of JFK. After JFK is killed, essentially the activity of Bobby Kennedy ends as the attorney general. People who work with him say essentially he didn't speak about the mafia again. And JFK is killed in November 63. A year later, Bobby has left as attorney general and run for the Senate. He becomes a senator from the state of New York, a U.S. senator from the state of New York. And Johnson decided, you know what, just let it go with Castro. In essence, Castro won by just evading assassination by all these different maneuvers and by, to some extent, to a large extent, by our own fault, by our own mistakes. And so when Kennedy is killed, Johnson in turn, he turns his attention

Starting point is 02:26:27 to another communist foe, the Vietnamese, and we enter the Vietnam War. And so Cuba goes in the, you know, really in the backseat of foreign policy. That's so bizarre. It's 90 miles off the coast

Starting point is 02:26:44 and they just, they've been trying to kill this guy with the most insane methods over, I guess, the last three years or something like that at that point. And now they're just like, eh. Mafia spies, we had a premier in Miami. And I know we got some criticism for what I think is a fairly even-handed historical presentation of castro was castro a good guy or a bad guy and i think he's a bad guy don't get me wrong about that i think he was a man who was a murderer who had his own firing squads who there was a very quick uh justice he uh justice, against his political enemies. If you go to Cuba, as we did for this book, I went to Cuba with my wife, Joyce. And when you go to Havana,

Starting point is 02:27:39 it looks like it's stuck in time. It's a society caught in the 1950s, you know, 60 years later. It seems like it's a society in the amber, if you will. So whatever good Castro may have meant for some people in Cuba, overall, he was a very dark figure in our history. And, you know, certainly in Miami, that feeling of anti-Castro runs very high among the Cuban exiles. And it has influenced our policy. You know, I do think that if we had more exchanges with Cuba, I think our influence would permeate throughout Cuban society. Maybe I'm idealistic or naive even to that point, but I do think we would have an impact

Starting point is 02:28:36 on Cuba. And I think by just totally isolating them, it's not necessarily the most effective way to have a regime change there it drives them more back into their own corner yeah i think freedom is something that's contagious and i think democracy and freedom is is something that people will emulate if they see the fruits of that in and uh so hopefully someday we see a democracy in in cuba that'd be pretty cool i would think so what was it like i mean obviously you talk about it being like it's stuck in time. But like did you get to talk with people while you were down there? Were you also as a journalist and someone who writes on topics like this, is there any nervousness going there because they might be watching you?

Starting point is 02:29:21 No. I have to say when we went, I basically had finished up the book and I just wanted to eyeball some of the places that I was writing about. So fundamentally that was that. I did rely on some documents that had been, and books that had been written by people that were essentially, either actually Cuban historians or were pro Castro or some certainly more uh uh open to Castro's ways than than than frankly I was um you know I I looked at his human rights abuses which are the

Starting point is 02:29:57 human rights organizations have documented so I I think that's pretty firm there. But I know for the show itself, Mafia Spies, the showrunners, Tom Donahue and Alon Arboleda, they went to Cuba as well. And they did interview people. You'll see that in Mafia Spies. There are a number of different Cuban historians. And so the first chapter we felt that was really important for getting some some of the cuban history and and how did castro come to power and the reasons why and also to understand why why the cia was acting in the united states government acted the way it did i think for a lot of younger people that that that's really a necessary uh history lesson so yes it's a story about two gangsters hired by the caa to kill

Starting point is 02:30:47 castro and that's the fundamental focus but in doing so we tell a lot of the history of this time period nothing like a couple gangsters to get people excited about some good history it's a good way to i think it's a good tipping point absolutely i think it's the great murder conspiracy, spy conspiracy story of our time. The fact also, I had an editor who used to say that, oh, this is like a Reese's peanut butter cup. And I said, what do you mean by that? He said, two great flavors, chocolate and peanut butter together. Well, Mafia Spies is like that. It's two great, extraordinary stories.

Starting point is 02:31:24 It's spying and it's the Mafia togetheries is like that. It's two great, extraordinary stories. It's spying and it's the mafia together in one great adventure. So that's what really made Mafia Spies to me very appealing as a storyteller. middle of how quickly something like this happened, how quickly it spun up, like we talked about earlier with suddenly like, oh, espionage, nope, killing now. And you bring in criminal organizations. It's like, it makes sense once you look at it, but you still can't believe that they just met at a hotel and had dinner, broke bread and said, yeah, you're right great let's go well when i talk about moral courage you know i on one level i'm kind of dismissing uh the cia and and eisenhower and other the kennedys uh who uh said well you know castro he looks like another hitler or we could be develop into another hitler and and uh he's he's willing to allow nuclear missiles and have it pointed at our head 90 miles away.

Starting point is 02:32:31 We have to do something about that. But not enough people spoke up, and later on, when all of this came out, there was a guy named Richard Bissell. He was the number two character, and he's a pretty prominent character in Mafia Spies, my book. But he's in the show as well. And there's a clip that we show of Bissell saying later on, well, it wasn't a bad idea to kill Castro.

Starting point is 02:32:56 But it was a bad idea to get involved with the mafia because you can't control the mafia. They control you. And so I think that's when I talk about moral courage and having people of good character, I think that's why it's really important. And people with experience as well, for people to be involved in setting our foreign policy and the affairs of state,

Starting point is 02:33:21 because the world looks to the United States for leadership. And so we have to have people of good character and people with experience and people with the moral courage to do the right thing. That's a good way to put it. Really good way to put it. You had brought up way earlier in the conversation, then we got off at the whole family jewels thing in 2007 where some of this information was elaborated upon. But there were a lot of other findings in there too. And I can't really remember like some of the things they said. What were some of the prominent ideas from that? You know, off the top of my head, I know that there were attempts to kill other foreign leaders that were mentioned in that Family Jewels memo. And for me, when that memo came out in 2007,

Starting point is 02:34:07 a friend of mine who used to work at Newsday Works at the Washington Post now, Glenn Kessler, he wrote an article about it and about the Family Jewels. And when I was reading his articles and other articles about it, I had finished my book about the Kennedys, my first book about the Kennedys and how their Irish Catholic immigrant experience impacted their public and private lives. That came out in 2003. So in 2007, when this Family Jewels memo came out, kind of added a little bit more interest in my part

Starting point is 02:34:41 to doing something with Giancana in this time period. And then eventually when I did more and more research and I learned about the role of Johnny Roselli, I realized that Johnny Roselli was arguably a much more interesting character and much more active character than even Sam Gene Kana. And yet the two of them together was fascinating to me. If I may, I just wanted to mention, you know, we were talking about Sinatra. And one of the things... Oh, yeah, we got off that. I had a lot of fun with examining the influence of Sam Jean-Kana, particularly on Frank Sinatra.

Starting point is 02:35:21 When you look at their FBI files, as I did for this book and for the show as well, but I was really interested how Frank Sinatra, who I think is one of the great artists, one of the great singers of the 20th century, was here in Hoboken, New Jersey. So of course I have to say that, but I genuinely do feel that way. You do, Tom. Right, exactly. Or else, right? But no, I genuinely feel he's a great artist and a great singer. And it's interesting when you look at the history of Sinatra. In World War II, in that time period, he's kind of a thin guy with a big bow tie, singing with kind of a high voice. And then he had throat problems.

Starting point is 02:36:03 And basically, everybody was dropping him. His record deals were being dropped. Hollywood was dropping him because of these problems that he had with his voice. And eventually they did go away. But during that lean period, it was the mob-controlled places that kept him still with dates that he could perform. And they kept his career alive. And so Sinatra had a certain loyalty to people that had stayed with him when everybody else was dropping him. And so when he recovered and he went on to make these great records that Sinatra made in the 1950s, particularly for Capitol Records, really the classics that we

Starting point is 02:36:53 know, when we talk about classic Sinatra, it was during the same time period. And it's interesting how Sinatra kind of adapted. He went from this kind of high-pitched, thin, kind of wispy type of character, very soft to kind of like this hard, rat pack, gangster. In many ways, today's gangster music, they look at Sinatra as kind of like the godfather of gangster music and gangster rap and such. And when you look at it, it's interesting how the influence of Sam Giancana on Sinatra. And they even started wearing the same hats. They dressed the same. And Giancana was almost like the idol of Sinatra. Sinatra was kind of like a fan boy

Starting point is 02:37:46 for gene you know most people think of sinatra as like the tough tough guy but actually he was the one who wanted to be like sam and interestingly enough johnny roselli was kind of like frank it was like dean martin it's it's almost like they were mirror images in art of real life of Frank and Dean looked an awful like Sam and Johnny. And they hung out quite a bit, much more so than most people realized until you go through their FBI files. Yeah. until you go through their FBI files. And then subsequently, as people talked and the various different books and magazine articles, investigations, Look Magazine, Life Magazine, did pieces on it.

Starting point is 02:38:33 But I was really interested in how Giancana seemed to have an influence on this kind of rat-packy gangster persona that Sinatra adopts both in his work as an actor and particularly in his music. And just to what extent did that have an influence? I play a lot with that in Mafia Spies. Yeah, with Sinatra, it's almost like he just wanted,

Starting point is 02:39:02 I don't know, I'm reading it from afar, studying his life. It's almost like he just wanted, I don't know, I'm reading it from afar, studying his life. It's almost like he wanted to have that persona without having to do the things to be in that persona. Right. You know what I mean? It was a little bit of an act. Let's play gangsters. Yes. You know, it's funny to also look at some of the Sinatra films, Manchurian Candidate.

Starting point is 02:39:21 Oh, yeah. You know, the whole business of assassination there. And then there's another movie that Sinatra makes, Robin and the Seven Hoods. And they make it in Chicago and they play gangsters, kind of like a Capone era, the same type of era that Sam Jean kind of begins in. So, it's fun to look at that and just what cultural influence he has. You know, the great songs of Sinatra are American standards that were written by, you know, Gershwin and a number of other people over the years. But it is interesting to see the mob's influence on Sinatra and how he was a fanboy for Sam Giancana.

Starting point is 02:40:08 And he didn't even want the Godfather made because of the Johnny Fontaine character. Well, in my book, one of the things I tell is how the mob was upset with the TV show, The Untouchables, which was kind of based on the Capone era. And they did not like the portrayal of italian americans in that tv show and the tv show was produced by desi arnaz uh the husband of lucille ball you know uh lusty lusty lucy yeah the uh desi arnaz who was actually a very good businessman he was a very good producer they had a whole studio desilu uh productions and that produced the untouchables and apparently the mafia wanted to kill uh desi arnez and they had to be talked out of it uh over a time period because they didn't like the portrayal of italian americans uh in this and you know i i i think um it as a person who went to St. Anthony's grade school, St. Anthony's

Starting point is 02:41:09 high school, who had many Italian American friends and even family members in my life, I can certainly understand why the mafia is something that is a sc scourge it is a it's a slur in many ways on the good name of the italian yeah people in the united states particularly here uh and uh you know fortunately by and large we've gotten rid of it it's still there uh organized crime is still there but mafia spies my book deals with that error in the 1960s in which the outfit in Chicago, the outfit that Sam G. and Connor ran, was the equivalent.

Starting point is 02:41:52 It was the revenues, the money that they brought in was the equivalent of General Motors, some of the Fortune 500 companies. They were doing billions. It was huge, the operations, both legally and illegally particularly illegally oh yeah it's it's crazy how much money even today like the mafia is not what it used to be but the the amount of money that still flows through those families is is

Starting point is 02:42:18 pretty nuts especially when you consider you're like how's this even happen with all the technology we have and tracking and shit but it still does yeah it's crazy but i i put a pin in something earlier i didn't want to get you off topic to ask you about it but your your book you wrote on the kennedys and churchill that you mentioned there was some kind of like relationship there and a falling out and and what did you mean by that i wrote a book called when lions roar uh the churchills and the kennedys and there are two things that kind of influenced me in in and preparing for mafia spies one is that um you know you mentioned about joe kennedy as a as a bootlegger well to some extent that's more conjecture than actual proven but he was definitely made a lot of money in

Starting point is 02:43:05 alcohol and in that book i actually tell you how he did it what he did was joe kennedy was the money man for fdr he was basically like the finance chairman for the 1932 campaign for FDR, which meant that he had a certain access to FDR and also FDR's son, Jimmy, his oldest son. Bear in mind, Roosevelt was a cripple. He was, I don't know if that's the exact term that we should be using these days, but he literally had suffered from polio as a relatively young man. And so he was confined to a wheelchair throughout the presidency. So Joe Kennedy, by being the money man for FDR, what happens is that one of the big issues in 32, the 32 campaign, was should prohibition, which had been in place for about 12 years in

Starting point is 02:44:06 other words where you couldn't sell alcohol that was a big boom for the mafia and stuff like that created them right exactly uh like people like al capone yeah but what happens in 32 is uh joe had some medicinal medicine permits and exactly how he abused that. So maybe if he was involved with bootlegging, he would have been maybe through that way. But where he makes his major money in alcohol is with the 32 election when FDR gets elected, Joe is all ready to go. What happens is he goes to London and he meets with a number of people, including Winston Churchill. And what he wants to do is get the British liquor rights. And so he forges a deal in which he gets the British liquor for Hagen Haag whiskey doers, Gordon's's gin i believe it was because you know bear in mind after 12 years of

Starting point is 02:45:07 prohibition you couldn't run any type of distilleries in the united states so who's the first one out of the gate uh for alcohol when it becomes when it becomes legal with the election of fdr in 1932 it's joe kennedy he goes to london gets this deal so the shipment of liquor from london to uh to a company that joe owns uh here called somerset importers uh that joe has um he uh arranges for that shipment the insurance payments on the shipping of that alcohol is done by an insurance company that's run by Jimmy Roosevelt, the oldest son of Roosevelt. And FDR, he doesn't know anything about this. And because Jimmy wants to be a big man.

Starting point is 02:45:59 And Jimmy, so Joe Kennedy puts his arm around the president's son and brings him into this deal. And he goes on the boat, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy's wife, Joe, Rose Kennedy, and they're on this big shipliner and they go to London and they meet with Churchill. Churchill gets stock in the company that Kennedy controls, the alcohol. Even though Winston Churchill, who was really a pretty bad businessman, and he was forced to close part of his Chartwell mansion and such, and he was kind of, he had lost a lot of money with the Wall Street collapse.

Starting point is 02:46:40 So this is in 32, 33. In 33, he gets all of the stock from Joe's company. So you have this deal where Joe is the first one to sell alcohol after Prohibition. The president's son gets the insurance contract. And for no money down, Winston gets stock in Joe's company. And that's exposed in my book, When Lions Roar. In fact, it also was excerpted in Time. Time magazine ran an excerpt of that. So that was, you know, that was, and Joe, his company, the liquor company

Starting point is 02:47:16 that was involved, they had a guy who was, looked like he was, he was shot in chicago and uh that was a pretty shady type of thing it was about 1945 when this guy was shot his name was thomas cassaro and actually some people reported that he died he didn't die actually went out to los uh out to uh to uh los angeles but um joe's involvement with the liquor industry that was something that kind of got me aware of you know the questions about the mafia and the cassero was there some something shady that happened out there the other thing though is that joe when he was the ambassador in in london had a spy in his embassy and he didn't know about it, a guy named Tyler Kent. And there's a whole big chapter about the Tyler Kent case. And Winston Churchill was a big believer in spying. And so when he came and became prime minister,

Starting point is 02:48:18 they became aware of Tyler Kent and really clamped down on it. Right away, they arrested Tyler Kent. Who was he working for? He was working for the Germans. He was selling secrets, information between Churchill and the Kennedys, diplomatic dispatches that were being filed in the embassy. And that was really almost like the mail room for the the correspondence between churchill and the kennedys between churchill and excuse me in the fdr and fdr

Starting point is 02:48:52 at that time was still saying oh i won't send your men your boys to war we won't get involved in that european war and of course winston wanted he wanted there he wanted the United States to get involved and help save Western civilization from Hitler. But the whole aspect of the secret agent, the spy, Tyler Kent, in Joe Kennedy's embassy is part of a chapter of that book. And the whole aspect of spying, the way that Churchill handled it, he handled it brilliantly. And he used it for his political advantage as well. He basically was able to get rid of Kennedy. Kennedy was the ambassador, the U.S. ambassador to London at that time. And he was very much an isolationist.

Starting point is 02:49:40 So he was saying, we should never get involved in this war. England is gone. We should try to deal with Hitler and do the best that we can and just tend to our own affairs back in the United States. Let's not get involved in this war. And so Winston used that spy thing to help get rid of Kennedy. Winston was an unbelievable politicker, if you will. Great life. He knew how to work the back rooms better than anyone.

Starting point is 02:50:12 And you know why? Because he did a lot of reading. He was a student of history. He was a great writer as well. He won a Nobel Laureate Prize for his writing, but he was also somebody whose life, particularly as a biographer, doing that book, that was so much fun. And I think anybody who writes about the life of Churchill is forever affected by it. It's just such a strong presence in so many aspects of people's lives. It was a lot of fun to do that book.

Starting point is 02:50:52 And so, but the whole aspect of spying, a little bit about Joe Kennedy and alcohol and what happened out in Chicago, you know, all these things led to the idea of, let's do this story about Sam, two gangsters hired by the CIA to kill Castro and use that as the window into this extraordinary time period. Somehow tied to World War II and Churchill. It's crazy how it all ties together. Yeah, it really is. And in many ways, Mafia Spies is the third in a trilogy of Kennedy books for me. Of the Kennedys. Yeah, I've been asked.

Starting point is 02:51:22 In fact, somebody about two years ago called me and said, are you interested in doing a book about RFK Jr.? And I said, thank you, but no thank you. And I think I'm done with the Kennedys. Never say never. But fundamentally, this is a trilogy. It's the book, my first book, about the Kennedys, America's Emerald Kings, about their Irish Catholic immigrant experience. And in many ways, that's a very positive book about the Kennedys because I do think when we talk about become not a white nation but a multifaceted country of people from all over the world.

Starting point is 02:52:18 We are a nation of immigrants. immigrants, just as John F. Kennedy wrote in this little pamphlet that barely anybody paid attention to. And in fact, all of his biographers barely mentioned that book, A Nation of Immigrants. He wrote it in 1957-58. But they passed the change in the immigration law in 1965 in his honor. It was on the front page of the New York Times, again, not too far from this place, on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Lyndon Johnson, President Johnson, with Bobby Kennedy and Ted Kennedy right behind him, signed the immigration law. And that law really opens up the door of America to people not only from Europe, but from Asia, from Latin America, from Africa, from all around the world. So that is, I think, the biggest legacy when I talk about the Kennedys and why I think JFK's example and the Kennedys' legacy still is with us as a family, but also as really the visionaries of the new America that we now live in. I wonder how much different the world would be if he hadn't been killed, though, because he didn't have much time.

Starting point is 02:53:37 He had two and a half years in there. Kennedy had a lot of interesting ideas. Today, he probably wouldn't have been defined by a political party. I don't know if he would exist today because he had Democratic and Republican beliefs based on what we have today. But he never got to see those through, and when he left, the world changed on a dime. We went to Vietnam. The rest is history, right? If some of his – I would call him a visionary as a president. If some of his visionary beliefs had been allowed to, I don't know, like see themselves grow, I think history would be much, much different. I agree with you.

Starting point is 02:54:16 I think one of the eternal questions of history, American history, is would we have gone into Vietnam to the extent that we did if Kennedy had lived? And that's a question that, you know, people say yes and no. It's hard to say. You know, bear in mind, I talked about Kennedy and how his Irish Catholic immigrant experience affected, influenced his worldview. And Churchill was a big influence on Kennedy's thinking. But as a Catholic, I think they were well aware that Diem, who was running Vietnam, there's only 10% of Vietnam was Catholic. But I think there was a more primal fight between communism and democracy and the ability to be Catholic in Vietnam. That in other words, I think his background made him much more of a strong supporter of the Vietnamese initially. So I think it is debatable

Starting point is 02:55:27 that's what i'm getting at is i think it is debatable whether or not he would have gotten out of uh uh got gotten out of the vietnam or would he have escalated to the degree that linden johnson did i doubt he would have done that yeah uh so you know, but it is interesting when you go back. I also think the thing that we talk about in Mafia Spies, the idea that Hoover had this very compromising personal information about his affair with Judy Campbell. And where would how would he use that? And if it came out in the 1964 election, would that have made any difference? Would there have been some type of – we just don't know what happens. With Clinton, he had a sexual affair that was exposed and his poll numbers actually went up among the public. People said, well, you know.

Starting point is 02:56:22 He's also the great Clinton and Kennedy was on a similar level, just the greatest politician I've ever seen. Yeah. He could lie to my face and I believe him. I got you, bro. I think Kennedy called us to our greater angels in terms of particularly when you look at the rhetoric, if you look at the speeches that he gave, this was – it was very much Churchillian. He was very influenced by the way that Churchill would speak and write. And so his speeches would deliberately had Churchillian phrases in them. And, but it also was to our greater angels about things.

Starting point is 02:57:10 And so I admire a lot of things about Kennedy. And it's difficult to see some of these other less than admirable aspects of it. But certainly in Mafia Spies, it's a huge part of the story. Well, I've had a chance to read some of the book it's really really good love it and the show we're going to be checking out now as well congratulations on all that thank you so much it's on paramount plus in showtime i know i want to make sure i say that we're going to put the links to your book and the show down in the description so everyone everyone can go get that right now but tom joyce thank you so much for coming out here today julian thank you so much all right everybody else

Starting point is 02:57:49 you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode before you leave please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video it's a huge help and also if you're over on instagram be sure to follow the show at julian dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

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Julian Dorey Podcast - #236 - Operation Mongoose: Inside CIA's Failed Mafia Conspiracy to Kill Castro | Tom Maier

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