Word: giancana
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After dinner Kennedy turns to Campbell and asks her to help him set up a meeting with an acquaintance of hers, "Sam Flood," who is actually the Mafia boss Sam Giancana. "I'd be happy to," she tells him. "Why?" Kennedy's reply is wonderfully straightforward. "Well, I think he can help me with the campaign." Next he asks if she would mind conveying a little package to Giancana in Chicago. It turns out to be a satchel full of cash, maybe $250,000, in hundred-dollar bills. Would it be safe to transport so much money? asks the awestruck...
...years of venereal disease. Then there was his real role in the murder of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and in CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro--there's the Mob again--as well as his inflated victory over Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis. Mob leader Giancana was Bobby's first suspect in his brother's assassination, says Hersh. He knew the Mafia felt betrayed because Bobby's Justice Department had targeted them even after they had done favors for the government...
...Roman orgy, Hersh's chapter on his most reckless adulteries will be useful reading. And although historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a member of Kennedy's inner circle, insist that it is "an exercise in political fantasy," Hersh helps elaborate stories that Chicago Mob leader Giancana helped deliver Illinois to the Democrats in 1960. He says the support came largely by helping get out the vote among the rank-and-file in Mob-controlled unions and through "campaign contributions from the corrupt Teamsters Union pension fund." G. Robert Blakey, a Mafia expert and former federal prosecutor, confirmed...
...interview and walked out. Hersh supplies a corroborating witness, Martin E. Underwood, "a political operative for [the late Chicago mayor] Richard Daley," who says he was assigned to watch over Exner from a distance during her train trip to Chicago, and saw her hand the money over to Giancana...
...class structure of J.F.K.'s adulteries was different; philandering in an inclusive democracy, he wound up in the arms of women like Marilyn Monroe or Judith Exner, Sam Giancana's girlfriend. The American Dream. J.F.K.'s restless unfaithfulness was as American as Hollywood and gangsters...