When I worked in the White House in the 1980s, my boss remarked that I came from a “Mafia town” after I told her I was raised in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. She said the Mob killed John F. Kennedy, as if this was a fact. For decades afterward, I’ve been researching and writing about organized crime, my latest book wrestling with the mythology—and reality—of the Mob and the presidency.
My biggest surprise was the omnipresence of the Mafia in presidential politics for much of the last century. Gangsters acted on an ad hoc basis down the food chain, but for the benefit of presidents when something needed to be done. Quietly—because appearances are everything in America.
Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that extraordinary steps be taken to protect Eastern ports after Nazi sabotage of a troop-transport ship was suspected on the Hudson River. The U.S. Navy’s partners in the watchdog operation were mobsters under the direction of imprisoned gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano and his partner Meyer Lansky. The navy later used gangland contacts to find assets in Sicily before the Allied invasion. For his help, Luciano’s prison sentence was commuted.
Harry Truman was hand-selected to serve as a U.S. senator by a Mafia-controlled political machine in Kansas City. Truman biographies tend to skip over the fact that the John Lazia Mafia family ran this operation. When citizens called the Kansas City police, a mobster often answered and directed the calls. Truman knew to whom he owed his career and admitted in his diary that he let hoodlums steal so he could advance his broader agenda.
I had long accepted the story that John F. Kennedy leveraged mobsters to win the 1960 election and try to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. I learned, however, that the Kennedys were not one unit: it was Papa Joe who did the election dirty work; J.F.K. and brother Robert were kept away from the details. On the Castro caper, R.F.K. was furious to learn that the C.I.A. had hired mobsters, but he applied withering pressure to assassinate him anyway, with his brother’s knowledge. (But, no, gangsters didn’t murder J.F.K.) In 1964, three civil-rights workers vanished in Mississippi. A frantic President Lyndon Johnson, seeking to prove his race credentials, demanded that the F.B.I. do whatever it took to solve the crime. F.B.I. chief J. Edgar Hoover obliged by enlisting a homicidal New York mobster to torture Ku Klux Klan members to give up the activists’ bodies.
Richard Nixon brought labor from the Democrats to the Republicans by cutting a deal with the Mafia-controlled Teamsters union. He would commute the prison sentence of its former boss, the boisterous Jimmy Hoffa, which entrenched his successor, whom the Mob preferred. And Nixon’s knowledge of the gangland plots to kill Castro while Nixon was vice president may have triggered Cuban operatives to break into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate offices.
Ronald Reagan owed his career to his agent and later M.C.A. boss, Lew Wasserman, who solved labor problems with the help of the Chicago Outfit. Wasserman arranged for Reagan’s gig with General Electric Theater, which became the springboard for his political career. When the Reagan administration went after the Mob, they overlooked the hoodlums that were most useful to Wasserman.
Which brings us to the present day. Donald Trump openly admits to having dealt with mobsters as a New York real-estate developer. To assure labor peace, he built Trump Tower out of concrete, not steel, the former of which is controlled by Mafia-connected firms. No one has proven this was illegal, perhaps because Trump had the guidance of the unscrupulous attorney Roy Cohn.
Delaware Teamsters also allegedly helped Joe Biden when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972. His opponent ran newspaper advertisements attacking Biden, but the Teamsters who supported Biden made sure they were never distributed.
While gangsters got plenty from presidents, the politicians who made the laws got away with more mischief than the hoods who flagrantly broke them. Lucky Luciano knew the lawmakers were the better ganefs, too, saying late in life, “These days you apply for a license to steal from the public. If I had my time again, I’d make sure I got that license first.”
Eric Dezenhall is a crisis-communications expert and author
