Mafia secrets, p.8
Mafia Secrets, page 8
I had La Disc on the causeway for years. Show-biz royalty performed there: Frank, Dean, and Sammy, Rickles, funnyman Shecky Greene, and Liza Minnelli. I hired fearsome bruisers to work as bouncers so troublemakers were outside on their ear before they knew what hit them.
Many years later, the joint made the papers when Richard Nixon and his running mate Spiro Agnew, fresh from being nominated for president and vice president at the 1968 Republican National Convention at the Miami Convention Hall, had their victory party at La Disc.
Nixon was in the Mob’s pocket and not squeamish about having a party at a connected club. If they didn’t already know, people figured out that Nixon was mobbed up when he commuted Jimmy Hoffa’s prison sentence. Considering what happened, Hoffa would’ve been better off behind bars.
My partners at La Disc, Carmine Black and Charlie Alaimo, were made guys with the Genovese family. They broke the rules and sold blow out of the club. When the pair was summoned to New York, they thought they were getting a pat on the back for being great earners. Turned out, the bosses knew about their cocaine side hustle and they were erased. Black fell from the roof of a Brooklyn tenement and Alaimo disappeared.
That left me on my own in Miami, sole owner.
I had to answer a few questions, too. Mr. Costello wanted to know if I knew about the drug deals going on in the club. I didn’t and he believed me. But life didn’t go on as before. The Bureau of Narcotics was watching La Disc twenty-four/seven. I got sick of it and walked away from the club.
CHAPTER 5
The Murder of Marilyn Monroe
By 1962, my jobs for Mr. Costello were international—Central and South America, the Caribbean where I was having adventures that seemed out of a James Bond novel. I still dropped off and picked up, but now there were times when I thought I might be transporting something other than cash. I didn’t ask. Some sort of valuable commodity. I met Manuel Noriega down there, a connection that would come in very handy years later.
John Kennedy had been in the White House for a year and a half, a very long year and a half of the Mob tapping its collective toe impatiently. And Castro was still entrenched in Cuba.
Bobby was busting mobsters left and right.
Something had to give.
Joe Kennedy had promised he’d get the casinos back first thing, but it didn’t happen. Joe was in a wheelchair. Did Jack even know what his dad had promised? Questions ate at Mr. Costello. Was old crooked-as-the-day-is-long Joe Kennedy no longer in charge of his brood? Had Jack and Bobby gone rogue? Or was it just Bobby, the mama’s boy, who didn’t care what his invalid dad had promised?
And Bobby wasn’t just at war with the Mob, he was prosecuting a nasty, mean-spirited campaign versus organized crime, one that he saw as his destiny, one that he hoped they’d make a Hollywood movie about someday, attacking the very entity that helped get his brother elected. It was like he had a death wish.
Mr. Costello’s suspicions about those “Irish cocksuckers” became all too true not long after the inauguration. You couldn’t trust them. He said the Kennedys had “no measure of loyalty.” Until the Kennedys used the Mob to gain power and then went to war against it, I’d never seen Mr. Costello mad. Good thing, too. When he angered, he was terrifying.
And it got worse.
It started with the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, which featured U.S.-trained Cuban exiles hitting Cuban beaches. It was a massive failure because the promised air cover was canceled by President Kennedy, and there was a slaughter on the beach. Jack had made the Costello shit list for certain.
Castro sided up with Moscow just as Meyer Lansky had predicted. Khrushchev put nuclear missiles in there, and the world teetered on the brink of war.
As all of that was going on, Mr. Costello still had me traveling from boss to boss. After five days of picking up and dropping off, I was spending weekends at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas—so I could take out the skim on Monday morning.
During the early summer of 1962, Frank Costello couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“I don’t care if the motherfucker’s got a drool cup, I’m giving him a piece of my mind,” Mr. Costello said.
He called his old booze partner Joe Kennedy, who remained incapacitated by a stroke. Frank yelled at Kennedy about the promises he and his kids had not kept. Whether Joe could understand or do anything about it, we don’t know, but he received a warning from the Ambassador: “It’s been a year and a half. Joe, the clock is ticking. You and I both know what happened at the Bay of Pigs. You don’t get Castro out of Havana, we start taking out your sons.”
When the wanted response didn’t come, Mr. Costello formulated a plan, one that had worked like a charm in keeping the FBI off the Mob’s case. Mr. Costello, via Dallas oil magnate Clint Murchison, indulged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s gambling addiction, saw to it that he always won, and if that wasn’t enough, he had a film made of Hoover at a drag party wearing a dress and calling himself Mary. That film was in the possession of Sidney Korshak.
Despite the fury that Mr. Costello felt toward the Kennedys, his first plan was nonviolent. He would set the Kennedys up in a sex scandal that would force them to keep their promises.
The plan was to be executed on the last weekend of July 1962. I know, because I was there.
Earlier in the month, Mr. Costello called me to a meeting at the Peacock Alley, a bar at the Waldorf.
“We’re setting up Jack and Bobby,” he said.
The brothers were to be invited to the Cal-Neva Lodge, a rustic resort on Crystal Bay, along the north shore of Lake Tahoe, directly on the Nevada-California border. There were tunnels that ran from the lake to the lodge, remnants of Prohibition when that was how they brought the booze in. The bungalows and the lodge’s inner walls were all covered with copper mesh, which was said to disrupt electronic surveillance devices.
At the Cal-Neva they would set up the Kennedys, using a sex lure and filming the extra-marital sex inside a bungalow—footage that would go straight to Sidney Korshak. The wired bungalow—film with sound—was Cabin #3. It was known as “the girls’ cabin.”
Trafficante and Lansky were going to have their Havana casinos back pronto. The Kennedys would have to get rid of Castro or fall to a sex scandal. He didn’t name the “sex lure,” and I didn’t bother to ask. Any woman would do. The Kennedys marketed themselves as good Catholic boys; a sex film would have ruined them.
One of the lodge’s main design elements was a dividing line painted on the outside and inside, right down the middle of the main building, so everyone knew what state they were in at all times.
The place was owned on paper by Frank Sinatra, but actually by Sam Giancana, who stayed on the California side, as Sinatra would have lost his gambling license had he been caught on the Nevada side.
Giancana, a convicted felon, had his name in the so-called Black Book. But all he had to do was stay on the California side of the line and the authorities couldn’t touch him.
(At some point Giancana must have wandered onto the Nevada side and got caught because Sinatra did lose his license in 1963, and Giancana being on the Nevada side of the premises was the reason.)
Enforcement of the Black Book was pretty civilized: If you were a convicted felon and were caught in a Vegas casino, they’d give you forty-eight hours to pack up and get out. After that, the casino’s license was in jeopardy. When a felon wanted to gamble at Cal-Neva, the joint would set up a private game for him in his California-side bungalow that no one needed to know about.
Mr. Costello continued giving me my instructions: “There’s going to be a meeting there. You are to be my eyes and ears,” he said. He was blunt. If the Kennedy boys didn’t show, they were dead. If Sinatra didn’t show, he was dead. Everyone better show up or they were dead.
One of the last things he said to me, almost as an afterthought, was, “Marilyn Monroe is going to be there—and I want you to stay away from her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She’s part of the plan.”
Uh-oh.
Mr. Costello was cashing in the chip he earned by paying Marilyn’s rent for a year at the Waldorf. He was so angry he wasn’t content to ruin the Kennedys, he wanted to film a pornographic masterpiece.
I hadn’t seen Marilyn much lately. She’d gone back to L.A. But she’d made the papers plenty, and I knew she wasn’t doing well. As July 1962 came to an end, her primary employer, Twentieth Century-Fox, wasn’t talking to her.
After years of being clear eyed, Marilyn’s gaze had developed a glaze in 1962, and the problems she’d had getting to the set on time during the shooting of Some Like It Hot only grew worse when it came time to make Something’s Got to Give with Dean Martin. Marilyn found it impossible to get up in the morning and was fired from the movie. Now Dean was suing for his whole salary, saying it sure as hell wasn’t his fault the picture was scrubbed.
Something with Marilyn was off. I sensed it too when she went to Madison Square Garden that May in a painted-on dress and sang, “Happy birthday, Mr. Pwesident,” in an affected babytalk. It was a little much even for her.
When I met her, she had had it with Hollywood and was going to see Strasberg’s Actors Studio. She was close friends with Susan Strasberg, Lee’s daughter. I heard that Marilyn went to live with the Strasbergs and during that time had a baby girl. As far as her acting career went, Marilyn was doing the right things. She was thirty-six and would need to transition into middle-aged parts, a transition that many a sex symbol failed to make. But, if she couldn’t get up in the morning, it would all go away and she’d be another unemployed middle-aged actress, a dime a dozen.
It was Friday night, July 27, when I got there and hung out at the pool. Singer Buddy Greco—his big hit was “Oh Look A-There Ain’t She Pretty” fifteen years earlier—was performing at Cal-Neva that weekend. He was also by the pool.
Frank Sinatra came out bare chested. He looked at me for a second or two, figuring out why I was there.
Then he said, “How ya doin’, Kid?”
Peter Lawford came strolling in, he didn’t sweat, and with him was a woman in all green, slacks, a blouse, and babushka. She also wore dark glasses, a disguise I recognized immediately. It was Marilyn.
For the Big Plan, everyone would be staying in bungalows. Like in an English sex comedy, there would be a lot of tippy-toeing from one to the other. The plan was for Marilyn to have three-way sex with both Kennedy brothers in her bungalow, a session that would be filmed by a hidden movie camera operated by Sam Giancana himself. What could go wrong?
As it turned out, the plan didn’t have a chance—for the simple reason that it was too ambitious, and far more complicated than it needed to be. Why did it have to be Marilyn? Wouldn’t any willing female have done the trick? And it didn’t have to be both brothers, blackmail evidence on one would have forced cooperation from both. It was a plan birthed from anger, and that was its fatal flaw.
It wasn’t hard to figure out the exact moment when Marilyn found out that she was part of a plan to ruin the Kennedys. Frank Sinatra gently took her away from everyone and whispered in her ear in private. She began to scream bloody murder.
Even though I’d been told to stay away from her, I wandered over by where Frank and Marilyn were to see and hear what was going on.
By the time I could hear her, she was saying, “These Kennedy brothers. I am done with them. They’re using me like a piece of meat! They want the world to think they are good Catholic boys. It’s a charade! Bobby got me pregnant six weeks ago and made me have an abortion!”
Marilyn wanted nothing to do with the blackmail plan, a possibility that Mr. Costello hadn’t considered. Like most men, he thought of her as a thing, tits and ass, a sex lure. He did her a favor, now he wanted one back.
President Kennedy, perhaps sensing a trick, sent his regrets. “Sorry, can’t come to the orgy, have to lead the Free World, carry on without me, chums,” or something like that. But Bobby showed up and when Marilyn saw him, she became freshly agitated.
Love was not in the air. Bobby was wary of Marilyn, who was intoxicated and furious. She said she was thinking of going to the press and letting everyone know what Jack and Bobby were really like. She yelled loud enough that even Buddy Greco heard some of it.
Once I realized that the plan wasn’t going to come off, I left Cal-Neva and reported back to Mr. Costello that it was scrubbed. Nobody’d cleared it with Marilyn ahead of time and she wasn’t into it.
Marilyn was just one of the problems. The president was a no-show. I told Mr. Costello I was troubled by Marilyn’s mental state that weekend. She was drunk and high.
My heart was breaking for her when I heard her say those things, things she couldn’t take back. I thought of all the long walks we’d taken through Central Park and across the bridge and she’d tell me that all she wanted was to have a baby. She didn’t even care whose it was.
I told Mr. Costello some of the things she’d said.
“She said ‘abortion’? She said that word out loud so people heard?”
“Yes.”
“They’re going to kill her,” Mr. Costello predicted.
I later heard that Marilyn wanted to get the hell out of Cal-Neva but no one there was willing to take her. She called Joe DiMaggio, her ex-husband and former New York Yankee baseball star, and asked him to come get her. DiMaggio called his friend Frank Sinatra and asked what the hell was going on. Frank said it was nothing, to stay away, and DiMaggio left Marilyn swinging in the breeze.
It haunts me to think about that conversation. What if Joe DiMaggio had come to save her, took her away and protected her? She might’ve had a chance to live a full life.
How she got back to L.A. is a mystery to me. When I left the party, Marilyn was asleep in her bungalow and the only two men around that I knew of were Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana.
That’s what makes Don Rickles’s story so interesting. When Don Rickles was old and sick, he told a story about Frank Sinatra that he’d never told before. Frank was bipolar. When he was drinking he could be strutting around like God’s Gift, and the next second he could be weeping over something or other; one second he’s six-four, the next he’s a little kid. Top of the world, Ma. Head in the oven. So, I believed Rickles when he said that he was with Frank one night when Frank was drinking heavily, and Frank went into a crying jag and confessed to being part of Marilyn Monroe’s murder.
The blackmail scheme didn’t work, and it ended up costing Marilyn her life. One week later she was dead, injected (I was told) in her pubic area with air by a doctor under Bobby’s orders. Considering the drugs in her, this was overkill, and an indication that the killers wanted to make damn sure she stayed dead.
According to my friend Mark Shaw, who’s writing a book about Marilyn’s murder, Joe had a sister who was very fond of Marilyn and kept in touch with her after she and Joe separated. She spoke to Marilyn during her last days and quoted Marilyn as saying, “They’re going to kill me.”
“Who?”
“Bobby.” No last name necessary.
A lot of sources still list Marilyn’s death date as August 5, 1962, but it was actually the fourth. In Hollywood there was a longstanding tradition of studio people and fixers getting to unseemly crime scenes before the LAPD or county sheriff had a chance to respond. It was tradition that the “first responder” was usually about the eightieth responder, and that was the case here.
As for my observations of activities at Cal-Neva, no one else who was there wanted to talk about it. Sinatra didn’t mention it until he was very old and sick. The guy who best corroborated the events was Buddy Greco, who noticed that Cal-Neva was more star-studded than usual the weekend before Marilyn’s murder—but Greco didn’t know what was going on, just the roster of players, and the fact that Marilyn was pissed off at the Kennedys.
As for the murder of Marilyn, one of my best sources was Joe DeCarlo, a manager and club owner of Sicilian blood who I knew very well. I knew Joe through backgammon. The club where all the celebrities went to play was called Pips—because the piece you move around the backgammon board is called a pip. I was known for a while as one of the better backgammon players in the world. I traveled everywhere. I played backgammon in Monte Carlo, Monaco. I played Omar Sharif for a million dollars. That was when I had my boat, the 146-foot Riva. I had it parked outside the Hotel de Paris. I was twenty-one years old.
So, I knew Joe DeCarlo through Pips, and he’d been around. He’d once been acquitted of murder with codefendant Mickey Cohen. He once had dinner at the White House (Jimmy Carter administration) with Cher on his arm. And he knew about Marilyn’s death.
Once, Joe DeCarlo was watching a TV show that said Bobby Kennedy had an alibi for Marilyn’s murder. That set him off. He knew. Bobby and Peter Lawford went to Marilyn’s house. Their intent was to talk her out of having her tell-all press conference. They begged her to shut up. Marilyn told them to get lost.
“So they sent people there,” DeCarlo said. “They had it handled, no needles, anal. A drug enema.”
I found out the same way everyone else did that Marilyn Monroe had died: on the news, in the papers, the official version. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, because I knew it wasn’t true, but this is what they said:
Officially, Marilyn died of a barbiturate overdose in her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood section of L.A. during the evening of August 4, 1962, Saturday night, and her body was discovered just before dawn on August 5. Her long-established problems, assumed to be a combination of mental illness and substance abuse, had prevented her from completing a picture for close to two years. Authorities, it was said, traced Marilyn’s last hours. She spent her final day at home and received four visitors, who came at different times. They were publicist Patricia Newcomb, housekeeper Eunice Murray, psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, and photojournalist Lawrence Schiller, who discussed with Marilyn the possibility of selling nude photos of her taken on the set of Something’s Got to Give, the film from which she’d been fired, to Playboy magazine. She also received a visit from her massage therapist, and had received a massage.
