Giancana refused to testify and was jailed for contempt. He served twelve months and when he was released went to Mexico until the heat on him diminished or died entirely.
Richard Cain liked to brag a great deal and boasted that he had led raids, commando style, on Cuban power stations. Intelligence officials declared that they doubted a single guerilla from Chicago ever set foot on the island. Cain, at this time still a member of the Chicago police Department, was forced to quit the force after he was caught spying on Mayor Daley’s Commissioner of Investigations.
Incredibly, he was hired in 1962 by Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie in 1962 as a special deputy sheriff. Ogilvie later became governor of Illinois. Cain resumed his spying for the Mafia after he was discharged by Ogilvie. In 1968 he was imprisoned for his part in a Mafia swindle. He was becoming a problem to everyone, including the Mafia and police authorities.
On December 20, 1973, two men wearing ski masks and carrying a walkie-talkie walked into Rose’s Sandwich Shop, a sleazy lunch room that was plastered with color stills from The Godfather. One of the men held a 12-gauge shotgun under Cain’s chin, in full view of a dozen diners, and blew off his head.
Prior to that, in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was junior Senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy became involved with a cast of characters that would rival the imaginative creation of any writer for Playboy, Penthouse or any of the other magazines featuring clinical sex.
The group included, besides the future president, his brother Ted, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, then a Kennedy brother-in-law, and other members of the famous Sinatra Rat Pack. Also present were Sam Giancana, John Roselli and a few assorted party girls. The group was assembled in a plush suite in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
One of the party girls present was Judith Campbell, who later married a man named Exner and recently drew a great deal of space in newspapers with her story of an affair with Kennedy before and after he became President of the United States.
Judith Campbell was a typical Hollywood-type party girl found around cinema city or in the many hotels in Las Vegas. Kennedy was in the early stages of his campaign for the presidency. Judith’s story is that she was introduced to Senator Kennedy by Sinatra. That can be taken with a certain skepticism, because Ol’ Blue Eyes steers shy of any involvement with the gals on the make.
When her story appeared in the newspapers regarding her affair with Kennedy, and the statement that Sinatra had introduced her, Sinatra, through his press agent declared that “Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.”
Miss Campbell, or Mrs. Exner, at this time did have a literary agent who was trying to peddle her sensational allegations of a torrid romance with Kennedy. She told an interviewer that she had a four-day tryst with Kennedy at the Plaza Hotel in New York that was followed by passionate interludes with him in Palm Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles and in Kennedy’s Georgetown home when Jackie was out of town.
What is again bizarre about the Exner affair is that she also was meeting Giancana and John Roselli, with whom she carried on boudoir affairs. Her choice of lovers ran the gamut from gangsters and killers to a United States Senator, later a President of the United States, if she can be believed.
Her affair with Kennedy, according to informed sources, was suddenly and dramatically broken up when J. Edgar Hoover informed President Kennedy of Judith Exner’s ties with the Mafia.
If her affair with Kennedy had any romantic tie, it was never as strong as her affairs with Giancana and Roselli. Gangsters and killers intrigued her to the point where she underwent the same kind of excitement simply by being in their company as if she were experiencing a wild and abandoned bedroom climax.
There was a story making the rounds that President Kennedy broke with Sinatra on the advice of FBI Director Hoover because of his friendship with Giancana which cost him his license in a Reno casino. That was entirely untrue. The Los Angeles Times reported in a January 1976 edition that Kennedy continued his friendship with Sinatra long after he was warned about Sinatra’s alledged gangland connections. That, too, was unfair.
Every night club and café entertainer inevitably meets many men who are either directly or indirectly associated with underworld figures. In agreement with the story in the Times, documents in the John F. Kennedy library in Waltham, Massachusetts, and statements by long-time Kennedy aides, confirmed that the friendship continued. Kennedy aides Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers denied reports that Kennedy was more careful about seeing Sinatra because of warnings from his brother, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Kennedy was to have stayed with Sinatra during a March 1962, visit to California, but the accomodations were changed at the last minute because of security problems, not because of “political reasons,” O’Donnell said.
Powers was quoted as saying that Sinatra had been instrumental in the 1960 presidential victory in Nevada. How much Giancana or Roselli, or Accardo had to do with garnering votes for Kennedy in Chicago and outlying suberbs is not known.
When the story broke on Giancana’s involvement with the CIA in the plot to kill Castro, it was revealed that the CIA had considered killing Castro on several occasions. Informed Washington sources estimate there were from six to thirteen actual attempts.
There is no denying the truth of the CIA’s connection with Giancana. The FBI holds documents to the effect that the CIA, acting in a role akin to that of a Don, did let out a contract on Castro and did approach Giancana through Maheu to carry it out.
Early in 1975, former CIA Director Richard M. Helms declared flatly at a press conference, “I do not know of any foreign leader that was ever assassinated by the CIA.”
This statement was hurled at a Washington newsman who questioned him. Helms further blew his cool to yell at CBS’s Daniel Schorr, since discharged by that network for selling or handing over without pay (doubtful) information to the Voice, a newspaper printed in Greenwich Village, New York, calling Schorr a sonofabitch and a killer, and to apply one of the filthiest sexual epithets to Schorr.
Helms’ statement has to be considered as no more than an artful technical denial.
Although it is probably true that no American CIA official ever actually murdered a foreign leader there is plentiful material to suggest that foreign nationals employed by the CIA have attempted to assassinate, and sometimes succeeded in assassinating, key figures overseas, acting on orders from Washington. The name of the game seems to be Murder by Proxy.
Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller’s investigation of the Castro plot also revealed plots linking the CIA to assassination schemes against the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, killed May 30, 1961, and Vietnam’s Ngo Din Diem, shot to death November 2, 1968.
By and large, there is little doubt then that Giancana was involved in a plot to kill Castro and that the CIA was behind it. However, all evidence points to the fact that Giancana had neither desire, nor intention of involving himself in the plot. He took the money the CIA agreed to pay, lived in opulence splendor on the taxpayers’ funds and laughed up his sleeve.
If Detective Cain bragged about his imaginary exploits, and he did, Giancana took delight in saying he had slept many times with the same woman as did President Kennedy. He was careful to add that it wasn’t Jackie.