Word: roselli
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...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...
Three months after Roselli's first appearance before the Senate committee, he was called back. This time he told another startling story: how he and Giancana had shared the affections of an attractive brunette named Judith Campbell Exner at a time when she also had, in her words, a "close, personal" relationship with President John F. Kennedy. The committee, trying to determine if Kennedy had known about the CIA's plans to eliminate Castro, wondered if Exner might have told the Pre ident about the activities of Roselli and Giancana. The investigation turned up no evidence that...
...Roselli was one of a breed that is dying off - usually by murder. Born Filippo Sacco in Italy, he entered the U.S. illegally as a child and remained in trouble for most of his life. In the '20s, he was a recruit in Al Capone's Chicago gang, reportedly as an arsonist, then moved on to bookmaking and numbers...
...late '30s, Roselli became the Chicago Mob's man in Hollywood and was subsequently jailed for three years for plotting, with seven others, to extort $1 million from movie companies. The muscle: threatening to use a Mafia-controlled union of stagehands to close down production unless the studios paid up. Even so, the dapper, debonair Roselli remained a luminary of sorts in Hollywood. He married a starlet, got a piece of two nightclubs, and helped produce two crime films in the late 1940s, Canyon City and He Walked by Night. Says a producer who knew...
...early '50s, Roselli even be came a member of the Friars Club, Hollywood's frat house. He was backed by none other than Comedian Georgie Jessel, the club's founder. "There were other members who had served sentences," Jessel recalled last week. "I said anyone who had paid his debt to society was O.K., so I made him a Friar...