Word: giancana
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Roselli described how he and his longtime mentor, onetime Chicago Mafia Chief Momo Salvatore ("Sam") Giancana, had been recruited by the CIA in the early '60s to assassinate Fidel Castro. It made a kind of amoral sense for the agency to turn to the Mob: when the Cuban leader took power, he closed down the Mafia's big moneymaking operations in Havana; Roselli had been running the swank Sans Souci gambling casino there. Roselli told the Senators that he also saw the killing of Castro as a "patriotic" endeavor, something he could do for his country. Both poisoned...
Five days before Roselli's testimony, Giancana had been murdered in his Oak Park, III., home by seven .22 bullets fired at close range into his face and neck. As it happened, Giancana was due to be called before the same Senate committee. The FBI now believes that Giancana was killed not because of his CIA-Castro connection but as a result of a bitter feud over dividing the Mob's spoils in Chicago...
...Third Man. During his testimony, Roselli not only talked freely about Giancana but also claimed that a third person took part in the anti-Castro plot: Santo Trafficante, now in his mid-60s, who has been identified as the Mafia chief in Florida. A man who abhors publicity even more than most of his colleagues, Trafficante took refuge for 18 months in Costa Rica to escape his notoriety. He returned to the U.S. shortly after Roselli talked to the Senate committee...
When her sometime friendship with President John Kennedy and Chicago Mobster Sam Giancana became public knowledge last month, turned up by the Senate investigation of the CIA, Judith Campbell Exner seemed sure of one thing. Appearing at a San Diego press conference, Exner, 42, assured reporters that she had no interest in profiting by telling tales out of the White House. She has apparently changed her mind. Last week New York Literary Agent Scott Meredith announced that Exner had agreed to write an autobiography and provide details of her relationship with J.F.K. Her asking price for the still unwritten book...
...friendship with Kennedy apparently came when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose sleuths learned of the affair during their investigation of Giancana and Roselli, had lunch with Kennedy at the White House on March 22, 1962. No one knows what the two discussed during the time that they were alone. But Hoover had made a point of being briefed beforehand about Judith Campbell's disconcerting friendships with both gangsters and a President. And according to White House logs, the last known telephone call between J.F.K. and Judy came only a few hours after the luncheon...