Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...circumstances seemed to suggest a classic Mafia rubout: the cheery last supper followed by the kiss of death from a trusted friend who had been persuaded to betray Giancana at the Mob's bidding. Though Giancana had so far told the grand jury nothing of value, the Mafia might have been worried that eventually he would. And though he was still a member of the Mafia's nationwide high "Commission," the Chicago local had some months before excluded him from all its activities, believing that the investigations he had inspired had crimped Mob business in Chicago. The gang...
...serving time for income tax evasion. From Jones, Giancana learned that the city's black-run numbers racket was a $2 million-a-year bonanza, not the penny-ante game that the Mob had always thought. Soon after Giancana was released, he and other Young Turks in the Mafia won control of the numbers through a series of vicious kidnapings, beatings and murders of black racketeers...
Giancana became boss of the Chicago Mafia family in 1955, and ruled a three-state empire of some 1,500 Mafiosi who ran gambling, narcotics, prostitution, loan sharking and other underworld ventures. At the height of his power, Giancana lived relatively modestly in Oak Park with his three daughters-his wife died in 1954-but vacationed on a lavish scale: Miami Beach and Europe in the winter, Paradise Valley near Las Vegas in the summer. While visiting Las Vegas' Desert Inn in 1960, the don noticed Singer Phyllis McGuire standing at a blackjack table, seemingly bewildered by the game...
...when FBI agents planted a microphone somewhere amid the cans of tomato paste and olive oil in the back room of Giancana's Mob headquarters, the Armory Lounge in suburban Forest Park. For six years, agents listened to his most intimate business conversations, learning valuable information about the Mafia's organization and operations. In 1965 Giancana was jailed for refusing to answer the questions of a grand jury about Chicago's rackets. Released a year later, he fled to Mexico to escape further questioning and holed up in a walled estate near Cuernavaca...
...instructed Edwards to explore the feasibility of the project. For help, Edwards turned to a former FBI agent and later Howard Hughes associate, Robert A. Maheu. Maheu, then a private consultant and investigator, was believed to have a line to Mafia interests that had operated gambling casinos in Havana. Through the connection, Edwards sought to find out whether the Mafia could produce, if need be, a man in Havana in a position to liquidate Castro...