Long Before James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, There Was Joe Kennedy
by Howie Carr 14 Sep 2015 BOSTON
BOSTON – It’s the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters – an
ambitious Irish family parlays fabulous wealth generated in the rackets into a
spectacular political rise. But in the end, like Icarus, they crash and burn as
their sordid, never-severed underworld ties finally drag the arrogant sons down
in disgrace and scandal. The Bulgers? Yes, of course.
But long before the ascent of the Bulgers of South Boston
came the much greater success of the Kennedys of East Boston. In the earlier
rags-to-riches-to-rags story, Joe Kennedy starred in the
psychopath-as-patriarch role that Johnny Depp fills as James “Whitey” Bulger in
the new Warner
Brothers movie “Black Mass,” which
opens in U.S. theaters Friday.
Like Whitey, Joe Kennedy was a gangster, make no mistake
about it. Mobsters Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky confirmed it late in their
lives. That inconvenient fact is the Kennedys’ original sin, and they are still
trying to expunge it from the historical record, along with his rabid
anti-Semitism, which may have stemmed from his bootlegging wars with Jewish
gangsters during Prohibition.
In 1922, it was Joe Kennedy who supplied the booze for the
tenth reunion of his Harvard class. One of his classmates wrote, “It came
ashore at Plymouth Rock, like the Pilgrims.”
As Prohibition wound down, he journeyed to the UK with Jimmy Roosevelt,
crooked son of the new President, and wrapped up most of the lucrative Scotch
and gin importing franchises. Joe made millions until 1946 – when he sold
Somerset Importers to a consortium headed by New Jersey’s “Public Enemy No.
One,” Abner “Longie” Zwillman of Newark.
The fact that Longie was Jewish didn’t seem to bother Joe
Kennedy, maybe because Zwillman and his partners were willing to pay $8 million
for Somerset.
Joe Kennedy had “hundreds” of women, as even the author of
his latest hagiography concedes. Like Longie Zwillman, Joe had an eye for
Hollywood sex symbols. Joe’s leading lady was Gloria Swanson, Longie’s was
Jean Harlow.
Like Whitey, Joe Kennedy also liked to grab women on the
rebound, especially after they’d lost their mates in gangland hits. He had a
brief affair with the widow of the late Broadway racketeer Larry Fay. Whitey
took up with his last girlfriend, Catherine Greig, after murdering her two
brothers-in-law, Donald and Paul McGonagle. She explained to her hairdresser,
“I like the bad boys.”
Other than his Nazi cheerleading during his term as U.S.
ambassador to the Court of St. James, few of Joe’s scandals were
ever reported in the newspapers of the day. The Boston Globe whitewashed Joe Kennedy’s monstrous life just as
assiduously as it would later cover up Whitey Bulger’s crimes – “he kept the
drugs out of Southie,” the Globe’s top columnist proclaimed, as Bulger flooded
the streets of his hometown with cocaine.
Actually, the Bulgers weren’t just following in the
footsteps of the Kennedys. The connection between organized crime and politics
has long haunted Boston, as it has so many American cities. In the 1930s the
leading Southie gangster was an ex-cop named Dan Carroll; his brother Ed was
the state senator in the same district Billy Bulger would later represent for
26 years.
The Congressman from South Boston was John McCormack, who
rose to become U.S. House speaker. As the state senator before Ed Carroll,
McCormack also worked as a lawyer for the Gustin Gang, another early Southie
mob. And in 1968, as U.S. House Speaker, he would write his friend FBI
director J.
Edgar Hoover asking him to hire
one of his constituents, John “Zip” Connolly.
Once he became an FBI agent, Connolly began accepting
hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from Whitey and his gang. Connolly
was so close to Whitey’s politician brother, Senate President Billy Bulger,that
Billy tried to install the crooked cop as Boston police commissioner.
Connolly was flamboyantly, openly corrupt, even dressing
like a New York Mafioso. He was so flush with cocaine cash that he let his
paychecks pile up uncashed in his desk for months at a time. The honest agents
in the Boston FBI office took to calling him “Agent Cannoli.”
Agent Cannoli is now serving a 40-year state sentence in
Florida for a gangland hit in Miami. He is imprisoned in Chipley, 250 miles
north of where his paymaster, Whitey, is incarcerated at a federal penitentiary
in Sumterville.
In Black Mass, Connolly is portrayed by Joel Edgerton, an
Australian actor. The role of Billy Bulger is filled by Benedict Cumberbatch,
an English actor. Ironic, considering the Bulgers’ withering contempt for Brits
– at his St. Patrick’s Day roasts, Billy Bulger used to tell his Yankee
Republican guests, “Thanks for letting us use your country.”
In the 1960 presidential campaign, it was Joe Kennedy who
reached out to the underworld to help his son win the presidency. Although he
knew many of the hoodlums personally, he preferred to use Frank Sinatra as his emissary. Sinatra’s valet George Jacobs
later recalled Joe’s first visit to Sinatra in Palm Springs in 1958, describing
Kennedy as “another pillar of the underworld.”
“The man may have had a Harvard degree,” Jacobs wrote in Mr.
S, “but was a disgrace to it, cruder and meaner and, alas, proving crime does
pay, more successful than any of the street mobsters Mr. S had ever hosted.”
Whitey Bulger does not have a Harvard degree. But his FBI
agent, John Connolly, did get a graduate degree from Harvard in 1982 – while he was
simultaneously setting up the waterfront double hit that is one of climactic
scenes in the movie. A year later Billy would try to force a new mayor to
appoint the hit man as police commissioner.
From Harvard to City Hall to the meanest gangland dives – it
has been ever thus in Boston. As Edwin O’Connor wrote in “All in the Family, “Underneath
everything in our politics there seemed to be a depthless cushion of
street-corner cronyism, a special kind of tainted, small-time fellowship which
sent out a complex of vines and shoots so interconnected that even the sleaziest
poolroom bookie managed in some way, however obscure, to be in touch with the
mayor’s office or the governor’s chair.”
Or, as William Faulkner once said, the past is never dead.
It’s not even past. Especially in Boston.
In 1960, the older mobsters across the nation remembered
Kennedy’s Prohibition double crosses, hijacking his own truckloads of bootleg
liquor in order to sell them a second time. When the question of merging with
the JFK campaign was put to the elders of the Chicago Outfit, elderly mobster
Murray “the Camel” Humphreys denounced Kennedy as a “four flusher,” according
to Seymour Hersh in “The Dark
Side of Camelot.”
But Humphrey was outvoted by his Italian associates, and the
die was cast. LBJ
stole Texas, and Sam “Momo” Giancana pilfered Illinois’ electoral
votes with the help of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. But Humphrey’s
warnings proved prescient – despite Joe Kennedy’s promises to lay off, his sons
reneged, and went after the Mafia once they were installed as president and
attorney general, respectively.
Santo Trafficante Jr., the Mafia boss of Tampa, was
particularly irate. In 1957, he had entertained Sens. Jack Kennedy and George
Smathers at one of his pre-Revolution resorts in Havana, supplying three
hookers to JFK,
according to T.J. English in “Havana
Nocturne.”
Carlos Marcello, the Mafia chieftain of New Orleans, had
been personally recruited to the JFK campaign by both Joe and Bobby Kennedy,
but stuck with Richard
Nixon. In 1961, AG Bobby ordered Marcello summarily deported to
Guatemala. When he returned, Marcello began to plot with Trafficante to “remove
the stone from my shoe,” as an FBI wiretap recorded him saying in his Sicilian
dialect. Trafficante told a Cuban associate of JFK: “He is going to be hit.”
Like the Kennedys, Whitey Bulger likewise betrayed his
Italian cohorts. He became a rat for the FBI, in addition to bribing at least
six G-men in Boston.
But in both cases, some accommodations could have been worked out – if only the
street-wise patriarch had been around.
In December 1961, Joe Kennedy suffered a debilitating stroke
in Palm Beach. He was left unable to speak. He could no longer mediate between
his fellow gangsters and his spoiled rich-kid sons. Frank Sinatra, the old
man’s go-between, was distraught.
“Only the master strategist Old Joe,” Sinatra’s valet wrote,
“could tell Frank how to sort this out, and by now, Old Joe wasn’t talking.
What a can of worms!”
By 1968 both older Kennedy brothers had been assassinated,
leaving as the family’s only male survivor Edward Moore Kennedy, of whom John McCormack’s
nephew said in their famous 1962 Senate debate, “If your name were Edward
Moore, your candidacy would be a joke.”
As for Whitey, as long as he was at large, his brother never
lost an election. Maybe because Whitey threatened to murder any political
rival, businessman, girlfriend, reporter or anybody else who crossed any member
of the Bulger family – and sometimes did.
In late 1994, Whitey went on the lam ahead of a federal
indictment. Billy never risked another election. Instead he tried to pass his
Senate seat on to his son, Billy Bulger Jr. With Whitey no longer prowling the
streets of Southie, his nephew was crushed in the Democratic primary in 1996.
Joe Kennedy died in 1969 at age 81. Whitey turned 86 earlier
this month and will die in prison. The Kennedys are down to a single seat in
Congress, held by one Joseph P. Kennedy III
– a straight white male, not exactly a dream Democrat candidate these
days, in Massachusetts or anywhere else.
This is shaping up as a big weekend at the box office for
movies about corrupt Irish-American families built on blood money.
Still, as time passes, it seems hard to believe that such terrible corruption
could have ever occurred in America.
But then, as one of Whitey’s rat grave-diggers pointed out
at trial, “We weren’t in America, we were in Boston.”
Boston
John
Francis Fitzgerald was a mayor for Boston
(MA), Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s
father, and Edward M. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s grandfather.
Note: Rose
Fitzgerald Kennedy was John Francis
Fitzgerald’s daughter, Jean Kennedy
Smith’s mother, married to Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr., Edward M. Kennedy, &
Robert F. Kennedy’s mother.
Jean Kennedy
Smith is Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
& Joseph P. Kennedy Sr’s
daughter, Edward M. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Robert F.
Kennedy’s sister, an overseer at the International
Rescue Committee, and was the U.S. ambassador for Ireland.
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the International Rescue Committee, the Human Rights First, the Center for International Policy,
the People for the American Way, the Roosevelt Institute, the Center
for American Progress, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund,
the Robin Hood Foundation, ProPublica, and the Natural
Resources Defense Council.
George Soros
was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society, William D. Zabel was his divorce
lawyer, a supporter for the Center for American Progress, is a board
member for the International Crisis Group, Jeffrey Soros’s uncle,
Jonathan Soros’s father,
Samantha Power
was a director at the International Rescue Committee, a board member for
the International Crisis Group, Barack Obama’s aide, a correspondent
for the Boston Globe, and is the United Nations U.S. ambassador.
Mona K. Sutphen
is a director at the International Rescue Committee, a director at the Human Rights First,
and was the assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for the Barack
Obama administration.
William D. Zabel
is the chair for the Human Rights First, was a trustee at the Foundation
to Promote Open Society, and George Soros’s divorce lawyer.
Kerry
Kennedy is a director at the Human Rights First, and Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter.
John
F. Kennedy (JFK) was Kerry Kennedy’s father, John Francis Fitzgerald’s grandson, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy & Joseph P. Kennedy Sr’s son, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s father.
Kathleen
Kennedy Townsend is John F.
Kennedy’s daughter, and was a director at the Center for International Policy.
Barbra
Streisand Foundation was a funder for the Center for International Policy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Barbra Streisand
is the founder of the Barbra Streisand
Foundation, and a William Morris
Endeavor Entertainment client.
Margery Tabankin
is the treasurer for the Barbra
Streisand Foundation, and a director at the People for the American Way.
Norman
Lear is a director at the People for
the American Way, an executive producer & writer for All in the Family, and a board of
councilor’s member for the Annenberg
School for Communication.
Wallis Annenberg
is a board of councilor’s member for the Annenberg
School for Communication, a director at the Music Center (Los Angeles), and Walter H. Annenberg’s daughter.
Catharine Soros
is a director at the Music Center (Los
Angeles), and married to Jeffrey
Soros.
Jeffrey
Soros is married to Catharine Soros,
and George Soros’s nephew.
Jonathan
Soros is George Soros’s son, and
a senior fellow at the Roosevelt
Institute.
Laura Delano
Roosevelt is a governor at the Roosevelt
Institute, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) granddaughter.
Anna Eleanor
Roosevelt is the chair for the Roosevelt
Institute, and is James (Jimmy) Roosevelt’s daughter.
James
Roosevelt was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
& James Roosevelt Jr’s father,
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s son.
James Roosevelt
Jr. is James (Jimmy) Roosevelt’s
son, and a governor at the Roosevelt
Institute.
Nancy
Roosevelt Ireland is a trustees chair for the Roosevelt Institute, and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Jr’s daughter.
John
C. Culver is a governor at the Roosevelt
Institute, a senior advisory committee member for the Harvard University Institute of Politics, and was a friend of Edward M. Kennedy.
Joseph
Patrick Kennedy III is a senior advisory committee member for the Harvard University Institute of Politics,
and Joseph P. Kennedy II’s son.
Joseph P.
Kennedy II is Joseph Patrick Kennedy
III’s father, and Edward M. Kennedy’s
nephew.
Edward
M. Kennedy was Joseph P. Kennedy
II’s uncle, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr’s son,
and Melody C. Barnes was his chief
counsel.
Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr. was Edward M. Kennedy,
Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, & Jean Kennedy Smith’s father, Gloria Swanson’s managed career, and a
U.S. ambassador for the Court of St.
James's.
Walter H.
Annenberg was a U.S. ambassador for the Court of St. James's, Wallis
Annenberg’s father, and the founder of the Annenberg School for Communication.
Wallis Annenberg
is a board of councilor’s member for the Annenberg
School for Communication, a director at the Music Center (Los Angeles), and Walter H. Annenberg’s daughter.
Catharine Soros
is a director at the Music Center (Los
Angeles), and married to Jeffrey
Soros.
Jeffrey
Soros is married to Catharine Soros,
and George Soros’s nephew.
George
Soros is Jeffrey Soros’s uncle,
was a supporter for the Center for
American Progress, and the chairman for the
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Center for American Progress, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Center for International Policy, ProPublica, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Melody
C. Barnes was the EVP for the Center
for American Progress, a chief counsel for Edward M. Kennedy, a domestic policy council, director for the Barack Obama administration, and is Barack Obama’s golf partner.
Ezekiel Emanuel
is a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress, Rahm I. Emanuel
& Ari Emanuel’s brother, and was
a health care policy adviser for the Barack
Obama administration.
Rahm
I. Emanuel is Ezekiel Emanuel
& Ari Emanuel’s brother, the Chicago (IL) mayor, a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and was the
White House chief of staff for the Barack
Obama administration.
Richard
M. Daley was the Chicago (IL) mayor,
is William M. Daley’s brother, a
member of the Commercial Club of Chicago.
William
M. Daley is Mayor Richard M. Daley’s
brother, a member of the Commercial Club
of Chicago, and the chief of staff for the Barack Obama administration.
R.
Eden Martin is the president of the Commercial
Club of Chicago, and counsel at Sidley
Austin LLP.
Newton
N. Minow is a member of the Commercial
Club of Chicago, and a senior counsel at Sidley Austin LLP.
Barack
Obama was an intern at Sidley Austin
LLP.
Michelle
Obama was a lawyer at Sidley Austin
LLP, and an advocate for the ONE
Campaign.
ONE
Campaign is a partner with the International
Rescue Committee.
Jean Kennedy
Smith is an overseer at the International
Rescue Committee, Rose Fitzgerald
Kennedy & Joseph P. Kennedy Sr’s
daughter, Edward M. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Robert F.
Kennedy’s sister, and was the U.S. ambassador for Ireland.
Ari
Emanuel is Ezekiel Emanuel &
Rahm I. Emanuel’s brother, and a co-CEO
& director at the William Morris
Endeavor Entertainment.
Barbra Streisand
is a William Morris Endeavor Entertainment client, and the
founder of the Barbra Streisand
Foundation.
Barbra
Streisand Foundation was a funder for the Center for International Policy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Kathleen
Kennedy Townsend was a director at the Center
for International Policy, and is John
F. Kennedy’s daughter.
John
F. Kennedy was Kathleen Kennedy
Townsend & Caroline B. Kennedy
& John F. Kennedy Jr’s father, Edward
M. Kennedy & Robert F. Kennedy’s
brother, married to Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis, and a member of the Burning
Tree Club.
Lyndon B. Johnson
was a member of the Burning Tree Club,
and Robert A. Caro was his
biographer.
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was a member of the Burning
Tree Club.
Richard
M. Nixon was a member of the Burning
Tree Club, and Diane Sawyer
assisted on his memoirs.
Caroline B.
Kennedy is John F. Kennedy &
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s
daughter, John F.
Kennedy Jr’s, an honorary chair at the Harvard
University Institute of Politics, and was a director at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund.
John F. Kennedy
Jr. was John F. Kennedy & Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s son, and a
director at the Robin Hood Foundation.
Diane
Sawyer was a director at the Robin
Hood Foundation, and assisted on Richard
M. Nixon’s memoirs.
Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis was Caroline B.
Kennedy & John F. Kennedy Jr’s
mother, married to John F. Kennedy (JFK),
and Frank Sinatra was sometimes her
escort after JFK's death.
Frank
Sinatra would sometimes escort Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis after JFK’s
death, and was a William Morris Endeavor
Entertainment client.
Ari
Emanuel is a co-CEO & director at the William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, and Ezekiel Emanuel & Rahm
I. Emanuel’s brother.
Barbra Streisand
is a William Morris Endeavor Entertainment client, and the
founder of the Barbra Streisand
Foundation.
Barbra
Streisand Foundation was a funder for the Center for International Policy.
Kathleen
Kennedy Townsend was a director at the Center
for International Policy, and is John
F. Kennedy’s daughter.
Robert
A. Caro was Lyndon B. Johnson’s
biographer, and is an advisory board member for ProPublica.
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was Laura Delano
Roosevelt’s grandfather, James (Jimmy)
Roosevelt’s father, a member of the Burning
Tree Club, and wrote 1933 inaugural address at the Mayflower Hotel (Washington).
J.
Edgar Hoover had lunched at the Mayflower
Hotel (Washington) daily, and a director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Judith
Campbell Exner was a resident at the Mayflower
Hotel (Washington), and John F.
Kennedy’s lover.
Harry
S. Truman was a resident at the Mayflower
Hotel (Washington), the vice president for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, and is Barack Obama’s seventh cousin 3 times
removed.
Monica S.
Lewinsky was interviewed at the Mayflower
Hotel (Washington) by the House investigators, and had an affair with William J. Clinton.
William J. Clinton
had an affair with Monica S. Lewinsky,
and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was a member of the Phi
Beta Kappa Society, Laura Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather, James (Jimmy) Roosevelt’s father, a
member of the Burning Tree Club, and
wrote 1933 inaugural address at the Mayflower
Hotel (Washington).
George
H.W. Bush is a member of the Phi
Beta Kappa Society, and a member
of the Burning Tree Club.
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was a member of the Burning
Tree Club.
Richard
M. Nixon was a member of the Burning
Tree Club.
John
F. Kennedy was a member of the Burning
Tree Club.
Lyndon B. Johnson
was a member of the Burning Tree Club.
John
A. Boehner is a member of the Burning
Tree Club, and the speaker for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
Joseph
Patrick Kennedy III is a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives, Joseph P.
Kennedy II’s son, a senior advisory
committee member of the Harvard
University Institute of Politics,
and Gregory Mecher is his chief of
staff.
Gregory Mecher
is Joseph Patrick Kennedy III’s chief
of staff, and married to Jen Psaki.
Jen
Psaki is married to Gregory Mecher,
and the communications director for the Barack
Obama administration.
Barbra
Streisand Foundation was a funder for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Center for International Policy.
Alan
F. Horn is a trustee at the Natural
Resources Defense Council, and was the president & COO for Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Joe Kennedy starred in the psychopath-as-patriarch role that
Johnny Depp fills as James “Whitey” Bulger in the new Warner Brothers movie “Black Mass,”
which opens in U.S. theaters Friday.
Kathleen
Kennedy Townsend is was a director at the Center for International Policy, and John F. Kennedy’s daughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment