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  And, from 1961 on, Johnny Rosselli was an ever-closer friend of Bill Harvey.

  GENTLEMAN JOHNNY ROSSELLI

  Rosselli was born Filippo Sacco on July 4, 1905, in a village midway between Rome and Naples, which was Camorra territory, not the Sicilian Mafia’s turf. He and the rest of his family came to join Sacco Senior in Boston in September 1911. Johnny’s first arrest, for delivering drugs, came in September 1922. Soon thereafter he was nailed for robbery; he may even have caused the death of a government informant and was shot in the leg. He skipped to New York, collected points in the bootleg trade, and then migrated to Chicago, where he became a sworn, or “made,” member of Al Capone’s syndicate during Prohibition and where he also became John Rosselli, a name he took from a Renaissance artist he found in an encyclopedia. (In another version of the story, he took the surname of a murdered Boston mobster; in still another, he copied the name from a tombstone.) Throughout his voluminous FBI records, his name is spelled “Roselli,” whereas his business cards and other references prefer the double “ss” version.

  Johnny’s lungs couldn’t take gusty Chicago, so Capone personally dispatched him to the sprawling village of Los Angeles. He quickly became LA-suave, endearing himself to various gangsters. He even once piloted a speedboat with a load of booze in a getaway that may have resonated with him years later when he was aiming for the shores of Castro’s Cuba on behalf of Uncle Sam.

  Rosselli did some foreshortened World War II military service at Camp Cook near Santa Barbara, and for years thereafter, he was a frequent patron of the Sansum Clinic there. He was excused from the military; was tried and convicted on charges of racketeering in Hollywood unions; was sent to Atlanta, one of the Feds’ most ancient prisons; but was soon transferred to the more modern and comfortable pokey at Terre Haute, the town where Sara Harvey was then still prodding Indiana State students.

  After he was released from prison, Rosselli renewed prewar connections. Soon he was accepted as the true Hollywood article. Johnny was a dandy, the epitome of a salon mobster, the kind of guy who sent shivers up and down the spines of more-or-less wellborn ladies and who compiled a notable bedding record. He became a recognized rim figure to the Frank Sinatra Hollywood/Palm Desert entourage. Indeed, persistent rumor has it that Rosselli was instrumental in securing Sinatra the lead role in From Here to Eternity.

  Rosselli’s admirers considered him “gallant” and “loyal.” In his later career, his sponsor—the guy who could provide the muscle if Rosselli needed it—was Sam Giancana, who ran the Chicago Mob from the 1950s until his unseemly death two decades later.

  When Las Vegas’s time came, Rosselli was there. His official position in Vegas was unassuming. He had the concession for the ice-making machines on every floor of every hotel. If Johnny was short of folding green, said one observer, he simply walked up to a cashier’s window, signed a marker, and walked away with a bundle.

  Rosselli was also a passionate patriot of the country he had adopted, which had done him well, even though he had not bothered to become a legal citizen in good standing. The FBI bitterly disagreed with all the glowing characterizations of Gentleman Johnny.

  TICKLISH CONTACT

  The CIA’s Office of Security, with a view toward the assassination of Fidel Castro, made contact with Rosselli in 1960. According to the Church Committee report, once Harvey was appointed head of Division D, he got in touch with the CIA’s director of security, Col. Sheffield Edwards, and asked “to be put in touch with Rosselli. Edwards says he verified Helms’s approval and then made the arrangements…. Harvey states that thereafter he regularly briefed Helms on the status of the Castro operation.”2 Rosselli and Harvey met at a turnover meeting at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York on Sunday, April 8, 1962, in the company of several others.

  From then on, the official record—what there is of it—is straightforward. Less than two weeks later, on April 21, 1962, Harvey and Rosselli met in the cocktail lounge at Miami Airport. The bulbous Harvey gulped his double martini while the sleek Rosselli, wearing a custom-tailored suit, alligator shoes, and a $2,000 watch, sipped Smirnoff on the rocks. Harvey is alleged to have suddenly slapped his revolver down on the table between them. From now on, he commanded, Rosselli would work only for him. Rosselli was to maintain a particular Cuban contact but have no further dealings on the existing Castro assassination operation with Robert Maheu, Sam Giancana, or Santo Trafficante.

  From the beginning, Harvey was well aware of the ticklish nature of his contact with Rosselli, and he fully understood the blowback risk. ZRRIFLE “was truly a vest-pocket operation,” says Sam Halpern, who knew next to nothing about the Johnny connection. Bill wanted to be the only person who could answer questions, should they arise. He had no assistants on ZRRIFLE, and his closest, and apparently sole, confidant was, as it later turned out, Rosselli.

  After the Kill Castro phase ended, and before his transfer to Rome at the end of June 1963, Harvey continued a close relationship with Rosselli, which later made Bill the object of deep suspicion in the upper echelons of the CIA. Was it anchored in their shared antipathy for the Kennedys? And what tipped the balance between the two to give Rosselli control over Harvey? I have a strong suspicion that Johnny, less than a year before his death, may have involved Harvey in a murder contract. Whatever it was that locked the two together, their tight association in later years made life difficult for Harvey and kept both under official scrutiny.

  Bill’s attachment to the mafioso was reciprocated. Rosselli was the first non–family member to call CG Harvey only a few hours after Bill died. It must be assumed that Rosselli knew about Harvey’s passing so quickly because he had kept a phone watch on the Indianapolis hospital. Not content merely with expressing his deep and obvious condolences, Rosselli offered CG and the family “any help you need. Anything. You just tell me. You need money? You let me know, no matter how much.”3

  And then, only a couple of months after Bill died, Rosselli himself wound up dismembered in an oil barrel in a Florida swamp, a victim of his pals’ displeasure.

  GET CASTRO! CUBA AND THE MOB

  During the reign of the tough little Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, organized crime openly ran gambling and prostitution on its properties in Havana. In the mid-1950s Rosselli began to find his way around the Mafia-owned-and-operated casinos on the island. At about that time, he also became friendly with a CIA officer named Dave M., the notable figure mentioned by Sam Halpern as a member of the Task Force W staff in the Langley basement. Dave M. soon joined up with Johnny in the Florida Keys, where he was one of the mafioso’s frequent drinking buddies.4 Earlier assignments had earned Dave a reputation as a man capable of violence.

  When Castro came to power, he closed Havana’s casinos and jailed, albeit comfortably and without rancor, Santo Trafficante, the Mob’s proconsul. Trafficante was released and decamped to Miami, leaving the impression that he would eventually return to Cuba. In August 1960 Sam Giancana boasted, on an FBI intercept tape, that Meyer Lansky, the father of Mob gambling interests in Cuba, had put a million dollar price on Castro’s head. Such was the syndicate’s upset at its eviction.

  So, both the U.S. government and the Mafia shared an interest. President Eisenhower regarded Castro as enough of a bother to authorize an attempt at his overthrow and even his murder on March 17, 1960.

  OFFING CASTRO: THE EARLY STAGES

  If the CIA was to have an assassination capability specifically for Cuba, as distinct from roving commissions elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Africa, it needed better-qualified assassins. To fill this need, the Agency’s Office of Security got in touch with an FBI academy classmate of Harvey, and later front man for Howard Hughes, Robert Maheu, who had a portfolio of interesting contacts.

  In his testimony to the Church Committee, Harvey agreed that Richard Bissell, the deputy director of plans, and Col. Sheffield Edwards, the director of the Office of Security, were the ones who originally decided to reach out to the Mafia. The CIA�
��s Mafia contact was assigned to the chief of the Operational Support Division of the Office of Security, Big Jim O’Connell, who had become “close personal friends” with Maheu while dealing with him on other matters. O’Connell was told that the top brass were looking for someone to “eliminate” or “assassinate” Castro.

  O’Connell testified (and Harvey agreed) that it was actually Maheu who suggested using Rosselli. Maheu recalls, “the CIA was my first steady client, giving me ‘cut-out’ assignments [those jobs in which the Agency could not officially be involved].” Now in his eighties, Maheu professes not to recall any involvement in CIA’s Cuban activities, unless provided with specific dates.5

  Maheu had known Rosselli since the late 1950s and was well aware that the mafioso could get things done in the fertile oasis of Las Vegas and in the Mob’s broader cosmos. The Church Committee report said, “The Support Chief [O’Connell] had previously met Rosselli at Maheu’s home.” Harvey’s marginal comment was that familiar OSOD (“Oh shit, oh dear!”), probably written with a deprecatory smile over the transparency of the admission.

  In late August or early September 1960, before Kennedy became president, O’Connell asked Maheu to ask Rosselli “if he would participate in a plan to ‘dispose’ of Castro.” Maheu overcame any moral qualms and introduced Big Jim to Rosselli. O’Connell told Johnny he represented unspecified corporate interests that might find the elimination of Fidel Castro advantageous.

  On the Senate committee stand, Maheu and O’Connell each righteously claimed that the other had suggested using an unseemly citizen like Rosselli to perform an unspeakable deed and then carefully noted that the contract was worth $150,000. Maheu brought big-time mobsters Momo Salvatore (Sam) Giancana, the Chicago boss, and Santo Trafficante, who had by now settled in Miami, into the operation.

  Of course Johnny didn’t buy O’Connell’s cover explanation, but he also didn’t make an issue of the sponsorship. He was eager and happy to engage in a plot to dispose of Castro. Rosselli, say his biographers Rappleye and Becker, was “a bedrock conservative, [he] considered it his patriotic duty … a matter of honor and dedication” to heed the government’s call to action.6

  The formal account of Rosselli’s accession to ZRRIFLE is in the 1967 report of the CIA inspector general (IG):

  6. The pitch [to join the assassination plot] was made to Rosselli on September 14, 1960, at the Hilton Plaza Hotel in New York City. Mr. James O’Connell, Office of Security, was present during this meeting and was identified to Rosselli as an employee of Maheu. O’Connell actively served as Rosselli’s contact until May 1962 at which time he phased out due to an overseas assignment. Rosselli’s initial reaction was to avoid getting involved, but through Maheu’s persuasion, he agreed to introduce him to a friend, Sam Gold [Giancana], who knew the Cuban crowd. Rosselli made it clear that he would not want any money for his part, and he believed that Gold would feel the same way. Neither of these individuals were ever paid out of Agency funds.

  7. During the week of September 25, 1960, Maheu was introduced to Gold at the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach. During this meeting Maheu also met an individual identified as “Joe” who was supposedly a courier operating between Havana and Miami. Several weeks later Maheu saw photographs of both of these individuals in the Sunday supplement Parade. They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santo Trafficante. Both were on the list of the Attorney General’s Ten Most Wanted Men. Giancana was described as the Chicago Chieftain of the Cosa Nostra and successor to Al Capone. Trafficante was identified as the Cosa Nostra boss of Cuban operations. Maheu called this office immediately upon ascertaining this information.7

  Giancana advised the small assembly at the Fontainebleau that guns might not be the preferred tools of execution; rather he suggested some kind of “potent pill which could be placed in Castro’s food or drink.” Giancana even had a possible agent, a corrupt Cuban official who had been on the Mafia payroll, “who still had access to Castro, and was still in a financial bind.”

  THE SECOND FONTAINEBLEAU MEETING

  O’Connell requisitioned six pills “of high lethal content” from the CIA’s Technical Services Division. The operation crawled along until details of the first attempt on Castro were firmed up at a second planning meeting on March 14, 1961, at the gangster-chic Fontainebleau, home of the Boom-Boom Room. The reason for the time and place was a world championship heavyweight boxing match pitting Floyd Patterson against Ingemar Johansson, a must-attend social event. Patterson won in the sixth; Johansson was noticeably past his prime.

  This all took place well before Harvey took over ZRRIFLE. If Bill had been in charge, such a large confabulation of Mob kingpins would not have come close to discussing a matter of top-level national concern. Too many people, especially people whose reliability was open to question and over whom the Agency had absolutely no control, were in the know.

  At the second meeting “Maheu opened his briefcase and dumped a whole lot of money…. [He] came up with the capsules, and he explained how they were going to be used. As far as I can remember, they couldn’t be used in boiling soups and things like that, but they could be used in water or otherwise they couldn’t last forever. Maheu said, ‘this was Johnny’s contract.’”8 Giancana later was alleged by a Church Committee witness to have recalled, exquisitely, “I am not in it, and they are asking me for the names of some guys who used to work in the casinos.”9

  J. Edgar Hoover now weighed in, just to tell the Agency he knew what was going on. The Bureau’s tap on Giancana had caught him talking about the Castro contract with some pals. “It would occur in November. Moreover he allegedly indicated he had already met with the assassin-to-be on three occasions.” A month after the second Fontainebleau get-together, on or after April 20, 1961, Edwards told the FBI to lose interest in Maheu because Bureau persistence “might reveal information relating to the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion,” which had just blown up.10

  The Mob’s Havana contact allegedly made a few attempts to slip the pills into Castro’s food, but then he chickened out and instead nominated someone else “who made several attempts without success.” The new hit man never got the word to proceed, or he lost the job that had placed him near Castro. He eventually, and honorably, returned both the pills and payment.

  The timing of the pill operation is unclear. The CIA thought, officially, that it was in March–April 1961, before the Bay of Pigs, but after Eisenhower’s watch had ended. The witness quoted above placed it at the time of the heavyweight title fight, i.e., around March 14, 1961. Bissell said the effort was canceled after the Bay of Pigs in April. Harvey simply underlined that passage and noted “No” in the margin. Maheu said he was not involved in the Bay of Pigs. O’Connell was certain the pill operation took place in early 1962. So many operations against Castro’s life failed, were aborted, or were misconceived that even the Church Committee had trouble keeping track of them.

  Then, on April 21, 1962, a year after the Bay of Pigs, Harvey and Rosselli met at the Miami airport, and the Get Castro enterprise took on a new life. “The second phase [i.e., after Harvey took over] appears to lack the high-level gangster flavor that characterized the first phase. Rosselli remained as a prominent figure in the operation, but working directly with the Cuban exile community, directly on behalf of the CIA”11 and directly under Harvey. In fact, immediately after he took over the ZRRIFLE portfolio, Harvey cut Giancana and, most especially, Trafficante out of the operation. It would be rational to assume, however, that Rosselli kept them informed, as a matter of Mob tact and diplomacy.

  In an internal memorandum dated May 14, 1962, Sheffield Edwards noted a phone call from Harvey, who said “that he was dropping any plans for the use of [Rosselli] for the future.” The comment may have been an accurate indication of intent at the time, but it was not factually correct. Rather it was a conclusive, deliberately misleading signal, obscuring the fact that Bill was tucking the Rosselli/Get Castro operation into his vest-pocket.12
/>   Also in May 1962 Bobby Kennedy demanded to know what the hell the CIA was doing playing footsie with the Mob. Bobby was understandably irate because he had been prosecuting the Mafia for years, first as the lead counsel on Senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate Committee investigating organized crime and then as his brother’s attorney general. The Mob was, in its turn, even more irate because they felt that Jack Kennedy would not have been resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had it not been for considerable sums of untraceable money and for votes provided to Chicago’s Daley Machine by the Mafia. The Mob felt it was being persecuted, unreasonably and unfairly.

  Bobby’s demand flew in the face of the principle of plausible deniability, but the attorney general was not to be denied. The CIA responded with a straight tell-all memorandum, dated May 22, 1962, a week after Harvey took control of Rosselli. The sequence of events from Spring 1962 until Harvey’s dismissal (and even for a while thereafter) became the stuff of much investigation years later because it seemed as if it might have bearing on the assassination of President Kennedy.

  ROSSELLI’S NEW CASE OFFICER

  When Harvey learned that he was to take on the Castro assassination assignment in November 1961, he had to digest many new matters quickly.