A RARE SPECIAL!
ALL AMERICAN MAFIOSO:
The Johnny Rosselli Story
An excerpt from Ed becker and Charles Rappleye's fabulous book.
In my lifetime I have associated with presidents and kings, motion picture and television stars, religious leaders and mobsters, the rich and the poor, and the middle-class majority of which I am a part. And yet, of the hundreds of people I have met, vivid memories remain of a man who projected both good and evil and was murdered for one or the other.
I first met the man I knew as John Rosselli in the latter part of the 1950s in Las Vegas, where I handled both public relations and entertainment for the Riviera Hotel. During that period a group of businessmen were developing plans for a major new hotel, to be called the Tropicana, and met routinely for dinner in our Embers Room. On occasion these investors were joined by a handsome, well-dressed man who favored dark glasses, even at dinner. His style and his manner gave the immediate impression that this man had power, and knew how to use it. The other members of the group treated him with deference, and I soon learned that he had contacts with organized crime figures across the country.
John and I eventually came to know each other on a first-name basis. Nothing important, nothing deep, and no questions about his business were ever asked by me. He was very knowledgeable about entertainers and indicated he personally knew many top stars. For about a year I would join him for drinks when I ran into him; we developed a passing acquaintanceship.
My tenure at the hotel ended in December 1958, when my friend and boss, Gus Greenbaum, and his wife were brutally murdered in their Phoenix home. Along with the other executives of the hotel I submitted an immediate resignation. Ironically, the killing launched my career as an investigative researcher when I served as the source for the Reader’s Digest expose on Greenbaum and the mob in Las Vegas. It was almost six years later that I realized that Rosselli likely had a hand in the Greenbaum slaying, but when I foolishly put the question to him directly, he erupted angrily, denying his involvement and warning me, “I don’t want to hear anything more about it.
Our paths crossed several times over the years following Greenbaum’s death, while I pursued a number of ventures in business and entertainment, and developed a sideline as a private investigator. I bumped into Rosselli at the Friars Club in Los Angeles, where he used the sauna whenever he was in town. Then, in the early 1960s, I hooked up with Ed Reid, an award-winning reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle, who was working on a book about the mob in Las Vegas with Boston journalist Ovid Demaris. It was while working as a researcher and writer for Ed Reid on his book, The Green Felt Jungle, that I saw Rosselli’s testimony before the Kefauver hearings on organized crime. I was shocked to learn how much I had underrated his position and connections. Publication of The Green Felt Jungle left Rosselli incensed at Reid, but he remained cordial in his relations with me, and several years later he surprised me by requesting my assistance in a criminal case.
Rosselli had been charged by the federal government for failure to obtain citizenship after his immigration from Italy. He said he knew that I had good newspaper contacts in Washington and asked me to speak with his attorney, Jimmy Cantillon, who in turn persuaded me to find out what I could about the government's case. By the time the case came to trial I had been drafted onto the defense team. As the trial got under way, I asked John what he thought of his chances. His eyes narrowed and a flash of real anger crossed his face as he told me, “I shouldn’t even be here, much less be on trial. I did some very heavy work for this country, and they owe me.”
“When was that, Johnny?” I pressed. “Do you mean when you were in the Army?”
“No,” he replied. “It was when I worked for the CIA.” He then gave me the name of Bob Maheu, a mutual friend, and told me to check with him. A few weeks later I put the question to Maheu, and he quickly answered, in that booming voice of his, “I can’t discuss that because it concerns my country.” I knew instantly Rosselli had been telling me the truth.
The trial went badly for Rosselli, and I lost contact with him when he went off to prison. The next I heard he had turned up, murdered, in Miami. Truncated accounts of Rosselli’s exploits were published here and there, but the story of his life never came to light. It wasn’t until after Rosselli’s murder, when I had opened up a political consulting office in Washington, D.C., that I became aware through Joe Shimon, a mutual friend, that there was more to Rosselli’s association with the CIA and of his abiding patriotic fervor for his adopted country. I knew the awful things that Rosselli and his associates were capable of, but I also knew his charm, his grace and generosity, and that whatever else, the government that had recruited him had turned on him in the end. It came to haunt me, an amazing tale of crime and complicity, of punishment and betrayal.
It was in Los Angeles that an old friend, former FBI field investigator Julian Blodgett, introduced me to Charles Rappleye, a free-lance journalist who had just completed a Master’s Degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Southern California. We opened an office together and soon he was as fascinated with the Rosselli story as I have been for the past twenty years. We determined to do all the research we could, to let the story tell itself, and to let the chips lay where they fell. After three years of digging, after scores of interviews and a hundred dead ends, this is the result.
ED BECKER
Las Vegas
January 1991
John Rosselli worked most of his days to see that his occupation, his travels, his friendships, even his nationality, would remain obscure. Yet by the time of his death, the crimes and conspiracies he was party to, and for which he was investigated or prosecuted, had established him as a crucial figure in the annals of twentieth-century crime and politics. Rosselli’s scheme to extort millions of dollars from the Hollywood film studios was exposed in a sensational federal trial, his involvement in the plots against Fidel Castro was the subject of intensive inquiry by the Church Committee and later the House Assassinations Committee, and his connections to Judith Campbell Exner and the Kennedy clan fascinated a generation of investigative journalists. Before we commenced our work on this project, Rosselli’s name was recorded in the index of more than one hundred books, with titles ranging from Crime Movies to Citizen Hughes, and including most of the literature on the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination.
As a result, much of this story has been told before, in bits and pieces scattered across fifty years of publishing. Still, until now, Rosselli was usually mentioned as a footnote, a historical curio whose presence raised eyebrows but was quickly dismissed as anomalous to the course of events. What follows represents the first full examination of Rosselli’s life and career, tracing his evolution from rough-mannered immigrant to a crime chieftain whose activities touched on the course of history.
The focus of our interest was always Rosselli himself, a man of charm and contradiction, a professional criminal who lived by a strict moral code, whose path crisscrossed the continent and spanned the heyday of organized crime. We were determined to expand on the published record, and our research bore fruit in various and often unexpected ways. We learned for the first time the depth of his involvement in the film industry; the key role he played in the political life of prewar Los Angeles; his clandestine work for American interests in Central America and the Caribbean; his close, personal relationship with Judy Campbell. We found that Rosselli’s work as an intelligence operative in the campaign against Castro went far beyond the particulars laid out by the Church Committee, and that the Kennedys, Bobby in particular, took extraordinary steps to conceal their knowledge of those activities. Finally, we reached the conclusion that while Rosselli may not have had a hand in the shooting of John Kennedy, he carried out a concerted disinformation campaign designed to deflect the subsequent investigations into the assassination. All of this material is detailed in the pages that follow, and to that extent, this book is an expose.
But it was clear to us early on that this work would comprise more than a compendium of facts about a well-traveled gangster. Rosselli’s rise was inextricably intertwined with the creation of the American myth on the sound stages of Hollywood, and with the nation’s emergence as a modern world power. Viewed through the lens of his life, the epoch that some have dubbed “the American Century” takes on a new cast, more disturbing and yet more coherent than the transient appellations of New Frontier, Great Society, and Morning in America. From Ellis Island to the halls of Congress, from the neon lights of Las Vegas to the shadow intrigues of Miami, Rosselli was truly the All American Mafioso.
