February 5, 2006
President Richard Nixon with Bebe Rebozo (left) and J. Edgar Hoover (center)
at the "Florida White House". Credit: National Archives.
The Mob's President:
Richard Nixon's Secret Ties to the Mafia
by
Don Fulsom
During the height of the Watergate scandal, Atty. Gen. John Mitchell's wife,
Martha, sounded one of the first alarms, telling a reporter, ''Nixon is involved
with the Mafia. The Mafia was involved in his election.''
White House officials privately urged other reporters to treat any anti-Nixon
comments by Martha as the ravings of a drunken crackpot.
Time, however, has proved Mrs. Mitchell right.
Richard Nixon's earliest campaign manager and political advisor was Murray
Chotiner, a chubby lawyer who specialized in defending members of the Mafia and
who enjoyed dressing like them too, in a wardrobe highlighted by monogrammed
white-on-white dress shirts and silk ties with jeweled stickpins. The monograms
said MMC, because perhaps to seem more impressive he billed himself as
Murray M. Chotiner, though, in reality, he lacked a middle name.
In this cigar chomping, wheeler-dealer, Nixon had found what future Nixon
aide Len Garment called ''his Machiavelli a hardheaded exponent of the campaign
philosophy that politics is war.''
When Nixon went on to the White House, both as vice president, and later as
president, he took Chotiner with him as a key behind-the-scenes advisor and
for good reason. By the time he became president in 1969, thanks in large part
to Murray Chotiner's contacts with such shady figures as Mafia-connected labor
leader Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Los Angeles
gangster Mickey Cohen, Richard Nixon had been on the giving and receiving end of
major underworld favors for more than two decades.
In his first political foray a successful 1946 race for Congress as a
strong anti-Communist from southern California Nixon received a $5,000
contribution from Cohen plus free office space for a ''Nixon for Congress''
headquarters in one of Mickey Cohen's buildings.
And there was more to come.
In 1950, at Chotiner's request, Cohen set up a fund-raising dinner for Nixon
at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles. The affair took in $75,000 to help
Nixon go on and defeat Sen. Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he had portrayed as a
Communist sympathizer ''pink right down to her underwear.''
''Everyone from around here that was on the pad naturally had to go,'' Cohen
himself later recalled, looking back on the Knickerbocker dinner, ''
It was all
gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money. There wasn't a legitimate person in the
room.'' The mobster said Nixon addressed the dinner after Cohen told the crowd
the exits would be closed until the whole $75,000 quota was met. They were. And
it was.
Cohen has said his support of Nixon was ordered by ''the proper persons from
back East,'' meaning the founders of the national Syndicate, Frank Costello and
Meyer Lansky. Why would Meyer Lansky become a big fan of Richard Nixon? Senate
crime investigator Walter Sheridan offered this opinion: ''If you were Meyer, who
would you invest your money in? Some politician named Clams Linguini? Or a nice
Protestant boy from Whittier, California?''
Lansky was considered the Mafia's financial genius. Known as ''The Little Man''
because he was barely five feet tall, Lansky developed Cuba for the Mob during
the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, when Havana was ''The Latin Las Vegas.''
Under its tall, swaying palms, gambling, prostitution and drug trafficking
netted the U.S. Syndicate more than $100-million-a-year even after handsome
payoffs to Batista.
In the mid-50s, Batista designated Lansky the unofficial czar of gambling in
Havana. This was so Batista could stop some Mob-run casinos from using doctored
games of chance to cheat tourists. A shrewd, master manipulator whose specialty
was gambling, Lansky was also known among mobsters as honest. It wasn't
necessary to rig the gambling tables to make boatloads of bucks. Lansky directed
all casino operators to ''clean up, or get out.''
Lansky, in turn, was very generous with the Cuban dictator. As former Lansky
associate Joseph Varon has said: ''I know every time Myer went to Cuba he would
bring a briefcase with at least $100,000 (for Batista). So Batista welcomed him
with open arms, and the two men really developed such an affection for each
other. Batista really loved him. I guess I'd love him too if he gave me $100,000
every time I saw him.''
Lansky saw to it that his friends were generous to Batista too. In February
1955, Vice President Richard Nixon traveled to Havana to embrace Batista at the
despot's lavish private palace, praise ''the competence and stability'' of his
regime, award him a medal of honor, and compare him with Abraham Lincoln. Nixon
hailed Batista's Cuba as a land that ''shares with us the same democratic ideals
of peace, freedom and the dignity of man.''
When he returned to Washington, the vice president reported to the cabinet
that Batista was ''a very remarkable man
older and wiser
desirous of doing a
good job for Cuba rather than Batista
concerned about social progress
'' And
Nixon reported that Batista had vowed to ''deal with the Commies.''
What Nixon omitted from his report was the Batista-Lansky connection, the
rampant government corruption under Batista and the extreme poverty of most
Cubans. The American vice president also ignored Batista's suspension of
constitutional guarantees, his dissolution of the country's political parties,
and his use of the police and army to murder political opponents. Twenty
thousand Cubans reportedly died at the hands of Batista's thugs.
Under Batista, Cuba was the decadent playground of the American elite. Havana
was its sin city paradise where you could gamble at luxurious casinos, bet the
horses, play the lottery, and party with the some of best prostitutes, rum,
cocaine, heroin and marijuana in the Western Hemisphere. Should you have been in
the mood, you could also have watched ''an exhibition of sexual bestiality that
would have shocked Caligula,'' according to Richard Reinhart in an article he
wrote for American Heritage in 1995 entitled ''Cuba Libre.''
Cuba was only a one-hour flight away from the United States. And there were
80 tourist flights-a-week from Miami to Havana, at a cost of $40, round trip.
Three Syndicate gamblers from Cleveland including Morris ''Moe'' Dalitz, a
friend of Nixon's best buddy Bebe Rebozo were part owners of Lansky's
glittering Hotel Nacional in Havana. In fact, during the Batista regime, as
recalled by Mafia hit man Angelo ''Gyp'' DeCarlo, ''The Mob had a piece of every
joint down there. There wasn't one joint they didn't have a piece of.''
In a noteworthy reversal of that situation, the Cuban dictator owned part of
at least one Mob-run gambling operation in the United States. Batista was
partners with New Orleans godfather and future Nixon benefactor Carlos Marcello
of a casino in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana called ''The Beverly Club.''
Another Rebozo associate, Tampa godfather Santos Trafficante, was the
undisputed gambling king of Havana. Trafficante owned substantial interests in
the San Souci a nightclub and casino where fellow gangster Johnny Roselli had
a management role.
The relationship between Nixon and Rebozo tightened in Cuba in the early
50s, according to historian Anthony Summers, when Nixon was gambling very
heavily, and Bebe covered Nixon's losses possibly as much as $50,000. Most of
Nixon's gambling took place at Lansky's Hotel Nacional. Lansky rolled out the
royal treatment for Nixon, who stayed in the Presidential Suite on the owner's
tab.
As far back as 1951, Bebe Rebozo the man who bailed out Nixon at the
Nacional had been involved with Lansky in illegal gambling rackets in parts of
Miami, Hallandale, and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Former crime investigator Jack
Clarke recently disclosed those operations, adding that Rebozo was pointed out
to him, back then, as ''one of Lansky's people
When I checked the name with the
Miami police, they said he was an entrepreneur and a gambler and that he was
very close to Meyer.''
A bachelor, Rebozo was short, swarthy, well dressed and ingratiatingly glib.
The American-born Cuban had risen from airline steward to wealthy Florida banker
and land speculator.
Many Nixon biographers say Richard Danner, a former FBI agent gone bad,
introduced Nixon to Rebozo in 1951. Danner was the city manager of Miami Beach
when it was controlled by the Mob. Danner eventually became a top aide to
Nixon's financial angel, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. And, years later,
during the final act of the Watergate scandal, Danner delivered a $100,000
under-thetable donation from Hughes to President Nixon.
Nixon and Rebozo hit it off almost immediately. Their mutual friend, Sen.
George Smathers of Florida, once said: ''I don't want to say that Bebe's level of
liking Nixon increased as Nixon's (political) position increased, but it had a
lot to do with it.''
The two men were almost inseparable from then on. Rebozo was there to lend
moral as well as financial support to his idol through Nixon's many political
ups and downs. He was there in Florida in 1952 when Nixon celebrated his
election to the vice presidency; Rebozo was in Los Angeles in 1960 when Nixon
got word that Sen. John Kennedy had edged him out for the presidency; he
comforted Nixon after his 1962 defeat for California governor; and Rebozo and
Nixon drank and sunbathed together in Key Biscayne after Nixon's political
dreams came true and he won the 1968 presidential election. During Nixon's White
House years, rough estimates show Rebozo was at Nixon's side one out of every 10
days.
Known as ''Uncle Bebe'' to Nixon's two children, Trisha and Julie, Rebozo
frequently bought the girls and Nixon's wife Pat expensive gifts. He
purchased a house in the suburbs for Julie after she married David Eisenhower.
The Saturday Evening Post, in a March 1987 article, put the price
at $137,000.
Rebozo came in and out of the White House as he pleased, without being logged
in by the Secret Service. Though he had no government job, Rebozo had his own
private office and phone number in the executive mansion. When he travelled on
Air Force One, which was frequently, Bebe donned a blue flight jacket bearing
the Presidential Seal and his name. (Nixon's own flight jacket was inscribed
''The President'' as though no one would recognize that fact by just looking at
him.)
Rebozo's organized crime connections were solid. For one, he had both legal
and financial ties with ''Big Al'' Polizzi, a Cleveland gangster and drug kingpin.
Rebozo built an elaborate shopping center in Miami, to be leased to members of
the rightwing Cuban exile community, and he let out the contracting bid to Big
Al, a convicted black marketer described by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as
''one of the most influential members of the underworld in the United States.''
Nixon and Rebozo bought Florida lots on upscale Key Biscayne, getting bargain
rates from Donald Berg, a Mafia-connected Rebozo business partner. The Secret
Service eventually advised Nixon to stop associating with Berg. The lender for
one of Nixon's properties was Arthur Desser, who consorted with both Teamsters
President Jimmy Hoffa and mobster Meyer Lansky.
Nixon and Rebozo were friends of James Crosby, the chairman of a firm
repeatedly linked to top mobsters, and Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank was a
suspected pipeline for Mob money skimmed from Crosby's casino in the Bahamas. By
the 1960s, FBI agents keeping track of the Mafia had identified Nixon's
Cuban-American pal as a ''non-member associate of organized crime figures.''
Former Mafia consigliere Bill Bonanno, the son of legendary New York
godfather Joe Bonanno, asserts that Nixon ''would never have gotten anywhere''
without his old Mob allegiances. And he reports that through Rebozo Nixon
''did business for years with people in (Florida Mafia boss Santos) Trafficante's
Family, profiting from real estate deals, arranging for casino licensing, covert
funding for anti-Castro activities, and so forth.''
If friendships enabled Nixon to craft links with the Mafia, so did hatred.
Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa hated John and Robert Kennedy as much as
Nixon did. Robert Kennedy had been trying to put Hoffa in jail since 1956, when
RFK was staff counsel for a Senate probe into the Mob's influence on the labor
movement. In a 1960 book, Robert Kennedy said, ''No group better fits the
prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his
lieutenants.''
Because he shared a common enemy with Nixon, Hoffa and his two million-member
union backed Vice President Nixon against Sen. John Kennedy in the 1960
election, and did so with more than just a get-out-the-vote campaign. Edward
Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and later government informant, revealed
that Hoffa met with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello to secretly fund the
Nixon campaign. Partin told Mob expert Dan Moldea: ''I was right there, listening
to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was
going to Nixon ... (Another $500,000 contribution) was coming from Mob boys in
New Jersey and Florida.'' Hoffa himself served as Nixon's bagman.
The Hoffa-Marcello meeting took place in New Orleans on Sept. 26, 1960, and
has been verified by William Sullivan, a former top FBI official.
Nixon lost the 1960 election, and Hoffa thanks to Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy
soon wound up in prison for jury tampering and looting the union's pension
funds of almost $2 million. But the Nixon-Hoffa connection was strong enough to
last at least until Dec. 23, 1971 when, as president, Nixon gave Hoffa an
executive grant of clemency and sprung him from prison. The action allowed Hoffa
to serve just five years of a 13-year sentence.
Hoffa evidently bought his way out. In 1996, Teamsters expert William Bastone
disclosed that James P. (''Junior'') Hoffa and racketeer Allen Dorfman ''delivered
$300,000 ''in a black valise'' to a Washington hotel to help secure the release of
Hoffa's father'' from the pen. The name of the bagman on the receiving end of the
transaction is redacted from legal documents filed in a court case. Bastone said
the claim is based on ''FBI reports reflecting contacts with (former Teamster
boss Jackie) Presser in 1971.''
In a recently released FBI memo confirming this, an informant details a
$300,000 Mob payoff to the Nixon White House ''to guarantee the release of Jimmy
Hoffa from the Federal penitentiary.''
Breaking from clemency custom, Nixon did not consult the judge who had
sentenced Hoffa. Nor did he pay any mind to the U.S. Parole Board, which had
unanimously voted three times in two years to reject Hoffa's appeals for
release. The board had been warned by the Justice Department that Hoffa was
Mob-connected. Long-time Nixon operative Chotiner eventually admitted
interceding to get Hoffa paroled. ''I did it,'' he told columnist Jack Anderson in
1973, ''I make no apologies for it. And frankly I'm proud of it.''
At the time, The New York Times called the clemency a ''pivotal element
in the strange love affair between the (Nixon) administration and the
two-million-member truck union, ousted from the rest of the labor movement in
1957 for racketeer domination.''
As one example of President Nixon's ''strange love affair'' with the Teamsters,
in a May 5, 1971 Oval Office conversation, Nixon and his chief of staff Bob
Haldeman pondered a little favor they knew the union would be happy to carry out
against anti-war demonstrators:
Haldeman: What (Nixon aide Charles) Colson's gonna do on it, and I
suggested he do, and I think they can get a, away with this . . . do it
with the Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up those, their eight thugs.
President: Yeah.
Haldeman: Just call, call, uh, what's his name.
President: Fitzsimmons.
Haldeman: Is trying to get, play our game anyway. Is just, just tell
Fitzsimmons...
President: They, they've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off.
Haldeman: Sure. Murderers!
Veteran Mafia bigwig Bill Bonanno describes Nixon's clemency for Hoffa as ''a
gesture, if ever there was one, of the national power (the Mob) once enjoyed.''
President Nixon did put one restriction on Hoffa's freedom: Hoffa could never
again, directly or indirectly, manage any union. This decision, too, was the
result of a financial incentive from another wing of the Mafia. The
restriction was reputedly bought by a $500,000 contribution to the Nixon
campaign by New Jersey Teamster leader Anthony Provenzano ''Tony Pro'' the head
of the notorious Provenzano family, which, a House panel found in 1999, had for
years dominated Teamsters New Jersey Local 560.
The Provenzanos, who were linked to the Genovese crime family, used Local 560
to carry out a full range of criminal activities, including murder, extortion,
loan sharking, kickbacks, hijacking, and gambling.
During the Nixon administration, pressure from Washington eased off on other
Mafia leaders, too, such as Chicago godfather Sam Giancana; long-standing
deportation proceedings against CIA-connected mobster Johnny Roselli were
dropped. Without going into specifics, lawyers from Nixon's Justice Department
explained in court that Roselli had performed ''valuable services to the national
security.''
A Giancana henchman, Roselli was an important contact man in the CIA-Mafia
assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. (Roselli and Dallas
gangster Jack Ruby the killer of JFK assassination suspect Lee Harvey Oswald
are reported to have met in hotels in Miami during the months before the JFK
assassination.)
Roselli was also apparently acquainted with longtime Nixon associate CIA
agent E. Howard Hunt. Nixon and Hunt were secretly top planners of the
assassination plots on Castro when Nixon was vice president. And later, Roselli
and Hunt are reported to have been co-conspirators in the 1961
assassination-by-ambush of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic.
In the 70s, a Senate committee established that the CIA had supplied the
weapons used against Trujillo. In 1976, Cygne, a Paris publication,
quoted former Trujillo bodyguard L. Gonzales-Mata as saying that Roselli and
Hunt arrived in the Dominican Republic in March 1961 to assist in plots against
Trujillo.
Gonzalez-Mata described Hunt as ''a specialist'' with the CIA and Roselli as ''a
friend of Batista'' who was operating on orders from both the CIA and the Mafia.
Mafia Trials
The Nixon administration intervened on the side of Mafia figures in at least
20 trials, mostly for the ostensible purpose of protecting CIA ''sources and
methods.''
Nixon even went so far as to order the Justice Department to halt using the
words ''Mafia'' and ''Cosa Nostra'' to describe organized crime. The President was
roundly applauded when he boasted about his order at a private 1971 Oval Office
meeting with some 40 members of the Supreme Council of the Sons of Italy. The
group's Supreme Venerable, Americo Cortese, thanked Nixon for his moral
leadership, declaring, ''You are our terrestrial god.''
As president, Nixon also pardoned Angelo ''Gyp'' DeCarlo, described by the FBI
as a ''methodical gangland executioner.'' Supposedly terminally ill, DeCarlo was
freed after serving less than two years of a 12-year sentence for extortion.
Soon afterward, Newsweek reported the mobster was not too ill to be ''back
at his old rackets, boasting that his connections with (singer Frank) Sinatra
freed him.''
Sinatra had been ousted from JFK's social circle when the Kennedy Justice
Department reported to the President that the singer had wide-ranging dealings
and friendships with major mobsters. But the Nixon White House disregarded
similar reports, and Sinatra went on to become fast friends with both Nixon and
his corrupt vice president, Spiro Agnew.
In April 1973, at Nixon's request, Sinatra came out of retirement to sing at
a White House state dinner for Italian President Giulio Andreotti. On the night
of the dinner, the president compared Sinatra to the Washington Monument ''The
Top.''
In the summer of 1973, The New York Times reported that Nixon pardoned
DeCarlo as a result of Sinatra's intervention with Agnew. The newspaper said the
details were worked out by Agnew aide Peter Malatesta and Nixon counsel John
Dean. The release reportedly followed an ''unrecorded contribution'' of $100,000
in cash and another contribution of $50,000 forwarded by Sinatra by to an
unnamed Nixon campaign official.
FBI files released after Sinatra's 1998 death seem to confirm this and
provide fresh details. An internal bureau memo of May 24, 1973, describes
Sinatra as ''a close friend of Angelo DeCarlo of long standing.'' It says that in
April 1972, DeCarlo asked singer Frankie Valli of ''My Eyes Adored You'' and ''Big
Girls Don't Cry'' fame (when Valli was performing at the Atlanta Federal
Penitentiary) to contact Sinatra and have him intercede with Agnew for DeCarlo's
release.
Eventually, the memo continues, Sinatra ''allegedly turned over $100,000 cash
to (Nixon campaign finance chairman) Maurice Stans as an unrecorded
contribution.'' Vice presidential aide Peter Maletesta ''allegedly contacted
former Presidential Counsel John Dean and got him to make the necessary
arrangements to forward the request (for a presidential pardon) to the Justice
Department.'' Sinatra is said to have then made a $50,000 contribution to the
president's campaign fund. And, the memo reports, ''DeCarlo's release followed.''
Frank Sinatra's Mob ties go back at least as far as Nixon's. In 1947, the
singer was photographed with Lucky Luciano and other mobsters in Cuba. The photo
led syndicated columnist Robert Ruark to write three columns about Sinatra and
the Mafia. The first was titled ''Shame Sinatra.''
The Nixon administration's generosity toward top Mob and Teamsters officials
was truly remarkable: To cite just a few other examples:
- A few months after trouncing Sen. George McGovern in 1972, Nixon secretly
entertained Teamsters chief Frank Fitzsimmons in a private room at the White
House. Atty. Gen. Richard Kleindienst was summoned to the session ''and
ordered by Nixon to review all the Teamsters investigations at the Justice
Department and to make certain that Fitzsimmons and his cronies weren't hurt
by the probes.''
- In April 1973, The New York Times disclosed that
FBI wiretaps had uncovered a massive scheme to establish a national health
plan for the Teamsters with pension fund members and top mobsters playing
crucial roles
and getting lucrative kickbacks. Yet Kleindienst rejected
the FBI's plan to continue taps related to the scheme. The chief schemers
behind the proposed rip-off had included Fitzsimmons and Teamsters pension
fund consultant Allen Dorfman.
- From 1969 through 1973, more than one-half of the Justice Department's
1,600 indictments in organized crime cases were tossed out because of
''improper procedures'' followed by Atty. Gen. John Mitchell in obtaining
court-approved authorization for wiretaps.
- During Nixon's administration, the Treasury Department declared a
moratorium on $1.3-million in back taxes owed by former Teamsters president
Dave Beck.
- In May 1973, the Oakland Tribune reported that Nixon aide Murray
Chotiner had interceded in a federal probe of Teamsters involvement in a
major Beverly Hills real estate scandal. As a result, the investigation
ended with the indictment of only three men. One of the three Leonard
Bursten a former director of the shady Miami National Bank, and a close
friend of Jimmy Hoffa, had his 15-year prison sentence reduced to probation.
- In June 1973, ex-Nixon aide John Dean revealed to the Senate Watergate
Committee that Cal Kovens, a leading Florida Teamsters official, had won an
early release from federal prison in 1972 through the efforts of Nixon aide
Charles Colson, Bebe Rebozo, and former Florida Sen. George Smathers.
Shortly after his release, Kovens contributed $50,000 to Nixon's re-election
effort.
By contrast, the Kennedy administration's war on organized crime was highly
effective: indictments against mobsters rose from zero to 683; and the number of
defendants convicted went from zero to 619.
There's evidence Nixon later made an effort to cash in on the ''good deeds'' he
had performed for his Mafia friends. Records reveal that FBI agents suspected
the Nixon White House of soliciting $1 million from the Teamsters to pay hush
money to the Watergate burglars.
In fact, in early 1973 when the Watergate cover-up was coming apart at the
seams aide John Dean told the president that $1 million might be needed to
keep the burglary team silent. Nixon responded, ''We could get that
you could
get a million dollars. You could get it in cash, I know where it could be
gotten.''
When Dean observed that money laundering ''is the type of thing Mafia people
can do,'' Nixon calmly answered: ''Maybe it takes a gang to do that.''
It is suspected that most of the Watergate ''hush money'' distributed to E.
Howard Hunt who, during Watergate, was Nixon's secret chief spy and other
members of the burglary team came from Rebozo and other shadowy Nixon pals like
Tony Provenzano, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, Carlos Marcello, Santos
Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lansky buddy John Alessio.
An ex-con, Alessio, the gambling king of San Diego, was one of the few guests
at Nixon's New York hotel suite on election night, 1968. Alessio was rubbing
elbows with Nixon and his family at a very special occasion despite a mid-60s
conviction for skimming millions of dollars from San Diego's racetrack revenues.
On June 20, 1972 an anxious Richard Nixon picked up the Oval Office phone and
called Anthony Provenzano's top henchman, Joseph Trerotola, a key Teamsters
union power broker in his own right. Perhaps the President had some laundered
cash in mind to help keep the Watergate burglars quiet about their White House
ties. We will never know for sure why Tony Pro's right-hand man was one of the
first people Nixon called after the burglary. Scholars who try to listen to that
recently released one-minute-long conversation at the National Archives will
find that the tape has been totally erased. The Archives believes the tape was
probably erased by mistake by Secret Service overseers of Nixon's taping system.
But an Archives spokesman acknowledges that Nixon or someone else might
possibly have tampered with the Nixon-Trerotola tape.
A short time before phoning the mobster, Nixon had an Oval Office
conversation about Watergate with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. This is the
famous tape that contains an 18 and one-half minute erasure. The president's
secretary, Rose Mary Woods, publicly took the fall for the ''gap'' in the
Nixon-Haldeman tape, saying she might have accidentally made the erasure. Many
historians suspect the president was the Eraser-in-Chief. Back then, the
strangest explanation of all came from Nixon aide Alexander Haig, who publicly
blamed a ''sinister force.'' Behind closed doors, however, Haig told Watergate
Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski that the tape in question had been ''screwed
with.'' At first, Nixon went along with ''the secretary did it'' story. But he
later blamed one of his Watergate lawyers, Fred Buzhardt after Buzhardt's
death.
After Nixon left office in August 1974 to avoid being impeached by Congress
for the illegal activities he supervised and concealed during the Watergate
scandal, he spent more than a year brooding in self-exile at his walled estate
in San Clemente, Calif. The very first post-resignation invitation the disgraced
ex-president accepted was from his Teamsters buddies. On Oct. 9, 1975, he played
golf at La Costa, a Mob-owned California resort with Teamsters chief Frank
Fitzsimmons and other top union officials. Among those who attended a post-golf
game party for Nixon were Provenzano, Dorfman, and the union's executive
secretary, Murray (''Dusty'') Miller.
Tony Pro would later die in prison, a convicted killer. A key Mob-Teamster
financial coordinator, Dorfman was later murdered gangland-style. Murray ''Dusty''
Miller was the man, records show, gangster Jack Ruby had telephoned several days
before Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in November 1963.
In July 1975, Jimmy Hoffa vanished in a Detroit suburb, and his body has
never been found. Some federal investigators believe he was shot to death after
being lured to a reconciliation meeting with Provenzano, who never showed up. On
at least two occasions, Tony Pro had threatened to kill Hoffa and kidnap his
children. Investigators theorize Hoffa's body was then taken away by truck,
stuffed into a fifty-gallon drum, then crushed and smelted.
Why does the Mafia sometimes dispose of the body of a hit victim? For one
thing, if there's no corpse, it's harder to find and convict the killer or
killers. For another, as Robert Kennedy Mob-fighter Ronald Goldfarb observes,
disposal occurs when the Mob ''wants to add shame and disgrace to a murder by
embarrassing the victim's family who are left with no body or funeral, no final
end.''
Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982.
Newly released FBI documents show that, in 1978, federal investigators sought
to force former President Nixon and Teamster boss Fitzsimmons to testify about
events surrounding Hoffa's disappearance. The investigators concluded that such
testimony offered the last, best chance of solving the Hoffa mystery. But they
accused top Justice Department officials of derailing their efforts to call the
two men before a Detroit grand jury.
The records also reveal that FBI agents suspected the Nixon White House of
soliciting $1 million from the Teamsters to keep the Watergate burglars silent.
The disclosures are detailed in more than 2,000 pages of previously secret
FBI documents obtained by the Detroit Free Press through a Freedom of
Information lawsuit. They show that Fitzsimmons had actually been a government
informant on an unspecified matter from 1972 to 1974. Could Fitzsimmons's
cooperation in that case have persuaded the Justice Department to turn thumbs
down on the grand jury idea?
The records don't say. But they do show that the Detroit FBI office sent a
number of memos to Washington stressing that Nixon and Fitzsimmons could hold
the answers to the Hoffa case.
Robert Stewart, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Buffalo, N.Y., who helped
lead the investigation into just how Hoffa vanished, said in another memo: ''The
one individual who could prove the matter beyond a doubt is Richard Nixon.''
Stewart wasn't sure whether Nixon would cooperate, given that he had been
pardoned by successor Gerald Ford for his involvement in the Watergate scandal.
But the investigator added that Nixon ''must certainly appreciate that while the
pardon may protect him as to whatever happened in the White House, a fresh
perjury committed in a current grand jury would place him in dire jeopardy.''
In a separate memo to headquarters, Detroit FBI agents concluded, ''It would
be a gross understatement to state that Fitzsimmons is the key to the solution
of this case, and yet he represents the major problem encountered with the
Department of Justice
Fitzsimmons should have appeared long ago before the
federal grand jury in Detroit to answer questions about his association with
Hoffa and any possible involvement he had in dealings leading up to Hoffa's
disappearance. To date, the Department of Justice has refused to allow
Fitzsimmons to testify.''
Fitzsimmons died three years later, never appearing before the grand jury. Of
course, Nixon, who died in 1994, never appeared either.
Nixon first met Fitzsimmons when Jimmy Hoffa was still in jail and
Fitzsimmons was in line to succeed him as Teamsters boss. The President and Fitz
quickly colluded on a plan for Hoffa's release, and they started an alliance
that was sealed with cold cash huge payments involving the Mob. How much in
addition to the previously mentioned $300,000 in the black valise that Hoffa's
son and Allen Dorfman allegedly delivered from Hoffa is not known, but there
are indications it was considerably more.
In 1997, a former Fitzsimmons crony named Harry Hall told historian Anthony
Summers: ''Fitzsimmons figured he'd found an ally in Nixon. The Teamsters would
help him financially, and Nixon ate that up
I was told they gave money to
Chotiner that was to go to Nixon. I think it was close to $500,000.''
Hall added that the half-million was intended for Nixon's personal use; and
that a similar amount was donated to the president's re-election campaign.
In return, a delighted Nixon privately praised the union's members to
Fitzsimmons as ''stand-up guys.'' And the President did a big personal favor for
the Teamsters chief he had the Justice Department stop a probe of Fitz's son,
Richard, who was accused of allowing his wife and children to use a union credit
card to buy $1,500 worth of gas for their cars. One federal investigator said
the case against Richard Fitzsimmons was dropped because of the ''love affair''
between Nixon and Fitz.
In a smaller favor, but one that meant a great deal to the golf-addicted
Fitzsimmons, Nixon ordered aide Charles Colson to try to get Fitz into a
prestigious Washington country club. Colson wrote a memo to his assistant,
George Bell: ''Fitz wants Columbia because that's where (AFL-CIO union president
George) Meany belongs. But if (Fitz) got into Burning Tree (where the President
golfed) he could be one up on Meany, which would appeal to him any way you
have to, but do it somehow, whatever needs to be done. I suspect the President
would write a letter (on Fitz's behalf) if needed.''
Colson wore horn-rimmed glasses and was a tall, heavyset, tough-talking
ex-Marine who was ruthless with Nixon's enemies (he had a motto above his bar:
''Once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow''). Yet
Colson showed an amiable, even pliable side, when doling out favors to the
President's mobbed-up labor allies.
A Jan. 19, 1972 Justice Department memo predicted that a Fitzsimmons
Teamsters associate a New York hoodlum named Daniel Gagliardi would be
indicted for extortion ''sometime next month.'' But Gagliardi knew whom to phone
for help in the Nixon White House: Chuck Colson. He actually spoke with Colson's
aide George Bell, who later told his boss in a memo: ''I talked to Gagliardi, who
maintained complete ignorance and innocence regarding the Teamsters. (He) asked
that he be gotten off the hook.''
Colson wrote back to Bell: ''Watch for this. Do all possible.''
Bell obviously carried out his assignment: Gagliardi was never indicted.
Nixon's and Colson's courting of Fitzsimmons paid off big-time at a July 17,
1972 meeting of Teamster leaders at the Mob-owned La Costa Country Club near San
Diego. The union's 17-member executive board enthusiastically endorsed Nixon for
re-election. Afterwards, the entire board traveled 35 miles up the California
coast to the Western White House in San Clemente. There they delivered the good
news to President Nixon and posed for individual pictures with him.
In October, Fitzsimmons issued a statement saying, ''The biggest weapon the
American worker has to protect himself and his country is the ballot. This year
we are going to use it to reject the extremism of (Democratic nominee Senator)
George McGovern, and to re-elect a great American President Richard Nixon.''
In November, Nixon scored a landslide victory over McGovern (who won only
Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) and prepared to give the nation
''four more years'' of his rather peculiar brand of ''law and order.''
You can email Don Fulsom at
donfulsom2002@yahoo.com.
