Did The Mafia Kill JFK?

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Kennedy's not going to make it to the election.

He's going to be hit.

Santo Traficante, the top Florida mobster, to an FBI informant in August 1962.

You know what they say in Sicily, if you want to kill a dog, you don't cut off the tail, you cut off the head.

Carlos Marcello, mafia boss in New Orleans, to an acquaintance that same month, explaining why President John Kennedy, not Attorney General Robert Kennedy, would be killed.

There is a price on the president's head.

Somebody will kill Kennedy when he comes down south.

Bernard Tregle, a New Orleans restaurant owner, allegedly associated with Marcello, within hearing of one of his employees in April 1963.

Well welcome to the Rest is Classified club members.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski.

And that was me doing my best Italian mob accents.

I don't think they were all Italian mobsters, but we'll come to how good they were.

We'll get them rated by an expert in a minute because we are in the second part of our special bonus series on the assassination of President Kennedy.

A reminder that on the main pod, we've done a six-parter leading up to his death, which you might want to hear first before listening to these three bonus episodes.

In the first one, we looked at some of the key facts around the killing and the question of whether the CIA may have done it.

Now, I slightly relinquished my position under pressure that it was the CIA and the shadowy spy master Alan Dulles that did it.

You very willingly relinquished your position, I would say, Gordon.

But this time, we're not looking at the CIA.

We're looking at the mob.

And we have a very special guest, don't we, David?

We do.

We very pleased to have with us today Anthony Scaramucci, co-host of The Rest is Politics U.S., former White House Communications Director, who is here with us because he is, Anthony, I would say, a vigorous proponent of this theory that the mob killed JFK.

And we're very excited to have you with us today.

Thank you for being here.

Well, you know, all Italians from New York are in the mob, David.

You didn't know that?

I mean, Gordon Gordon knows that, right?

That's why he was reading all the quotes.

So how was my accent, by the way?

He did a good job.

Let me tell you something.

Your accent is worth 15 to 20 IQ points in the United States, Gordon.

So continue to go with that accent.

Unfortunately, McCloskey and my accent scores no points in the UK, but what can I say?

But obviously, the mob killed Kennedy, and I believe that.

Now, you didn't bring Dominic Sambrook on because he doesn't believe that.

McCloskey is a CIA guy, so he's going to bullshit everybody and tell everybody he was a lone gumman.

But I don't, and by the way, I don't think think it was the CIA, but I, you know, the mob had a hit on Kennedy, which was a mistake that they all admitted to regretting after they blew the top of his head off.

But, but you guys tell the story, and then I'll tell you what I know, and I'll tell you why I believe they killed him, and I can tell you who shot him.

If there's ever been a kind of tease to stay with the show, that's it.

We're going to reveal the truth.

We should say that Anthony does claim to have some information that he will not share with us, that he is protecting sources and methods from his time in the White House.

All I'm going to talk about is what's available in the public domain, and then people can listen and they can read what's available in the public domain, and they could read the Warren Commission, and then they can read the other stuff.

And a lot of the stuff, the conspiracy books and all that stuff, is a bunch of nonsense.

And frankly, none of those theories happened.

You know, Carlos Marcello got super pissed off after they sent him 800 miles down the Yucatan Peninsula and they dropped him off in the middle of the jungle.

They said, This is a message from Bobby Kennedy.

He had to find his way back to his Louisiana New Orleans office.

And he got pissed.

And, you know, once he called Sam Giancana and the five families got together, they said, okay, enough of these guys.

And by the way, an obscure fact in this: if Joseph P.

Kennedy didn't stroke in December of 1961, and just for all the history buffs out there, Joseph P.

Kennedy was a bootlegger.

He was very tight with the mob.

The mob helped Jack Kennedy in West Virginia.

The mob delivered dead people votes in Chicago with Mayor Daly.

And so the mob was super pissed at Bobby Kennedy.

And there's a phone call, recorded phone call between Joseph Kennedy and Jack.

where Joe Kennedy was telling him, you got to get Bobby to lay off the mob.

And Jack Kennedy says to Joe Kennedy, you know, the problem with Bobby is he thinks like a cop, dad.

That's the problem with Bobby.

But, you know, Jack was out there, obviously, having his liaisons, and he was a little unfocused at the time.

And if Joe didn't stroke, because just remember this, guys, Joe Kennedy stroke December 1961 immobilized him, paralyzed him, and he could no longer really speak.

And a result of which he wasn't there to broker the deal with the mob.

So now by 1963, Bobby's running hard on the mob, even though the mob helped the Kennedy family.

And that's what's known as retribution.

But okay, you guys go.

You tell the story, and then I'll tell you what I think happened.

And I'm delighted to be on the show because I love your show.

And I hope you guys know I cite your show often on the rest is Politics U.S.

We appreciate that.

David, why don't you go and you give us some of the facts as we know them and the story, and then we'll hear what Anthony thinks about them.

Okay, so maybe it's worth starting starting with some of the points on motive for the mob, because I think, Anthony, you laid a few of these out.

And

these build a bit, Gordon, off of the story we told and kind of the main pod, but they're, I think, distinct enough that it's worth laying out.

So the first one is that in the run-up to and during the 1960 election, the mob, as you mentioned, Anthony, was instrumental in helping Kennedy win in Illinois, and I think lesser well-known in West Virginia, but that there was some work via trade unions and kind of getting out the vote and frankly, even fabricating the vote in some cases, that the Bob may have been instrumental in helping Kennedy get elected, right?

So that's one point.

The second point related to that is that when

John F.

Kennedy brings Bobby into the administration as the AG, he sort of absorbs into the administration as official policy Bobby's war on organized crime, which Bobby had been at the Justice Department and working in sort of various roles on congressional committees in the late 1950s, really working hard to target organized crime and the mafia in general.

This sort of

impulse gets brought into the administration.

And I do think there's actual intercepts of guys like Sam Giancana, one of the heads of the outfit in Chicago, who are royally pissed when Bobby is brought into the administration.

They see that as a double cross.

Now, I think there's another point here, which is related to maybe a different set of mobsters and ties directly to Cuba, which is after Bay of Pigs, there's a subset of kind of the Florida mob who are furious with Kennedy that he didn't actually get rid of Castro.

And all these guys, of course, want that turf in Havana.

They want access to those casinos and resorts again, all that lucrative cash flow they'd had in the 50s.

And they are furious with Kennedy for kind of looking weak on Castro and feel in the aftermath of Bay of Pigs like they're never going to get that money back.

So there's kind of some different motives, I guess, depending on the mobster you're talking about.

But that would be the high-level picture of why mobsters would want JFK dead.

And to me, the one of those which feels most plausible is the Bobby Kennedy one.

If he's going after them, if he's trying to take them on, that one feels like, you know, the kind of double cross argument.

I'm curious as to why he was so determined to go after them.

Do we kind of understand or know that?

Anthony, I'd be curious for your thoughts on this, because it does seem confusing when you look at the extent to which the Bob was useful in helping the Kennedy campaign, why Bobby is so vociferously anti-mob.

So I brought some props with me, and I know you guys have audio listeners, so if you're listening on audio, what I'm holding up is Stefano Vaccaro's book.

Now, if you go to try to buy this book, you're going to have to pay about $150 to $200 for it because most of these books are out of circulation now.

And the title of the book is Carlos Marcello, the man behind the JFK assassination.

And if you look at the picture, guys, it's Bobby and Jack during the racketeering charges and the indictments back in the Senate when they were faced off against Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Cohn.

And so Bobby had this thought in his head, this very Puritan thought, he was a righteous guy, that he was going to root out corruption and make things right in the society.

But wait a minute, your dad was corrupt and your dad was a bootlegger and he was tied into the mob and the mob helped your brother get elected.

I don't care.

I'm in a role.

I'm taking the Constitution seriously and I'm going to prosecute the mob.

Now, his father did not want that.

And that's why I always said, you know, you got to cut it out.

And Jack said, he's thinking too much like a cop.

They both wanted him to lay off.

But once the father stroked and Jack Kennedy got sidetracked by his own personal dramas and the liaisons he was having and trying to run the office of the presidency, he let his brother more or less do what he wanted.

And of course, you guys bring it up in this script.

So I'll just mention it.

There's a famous situation where they take the mob boss from Louisiana and they ship him into El Salvador.

They take him 800 miles down the Yucatan Peninsula.

They take his shoes off and they say, good luck down here, Carlos.

This is a message from Bobby Kennedy.

Kennedy.