"Dont let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot."
-- Lerner & Loewe
Whether or not the Kennedys suspected Momo
was behind Miss Monroes death is not
known, but suddenly FBI agents dogged his footsteps, worse than ever. Bees on a sugar bar.
He never felt unwatched, not even in his Oak Park home. He had no private life. Bobby
Kennedys words haunted him: I want that dago Sam Giancana put away for
good.
Daughter Antoinette remembers the bad times. "The FBIs so-called lockstep
surveillance was a 24-hour watch over my fathers every move and, for that matter,
the moves of everyone in his family," says she in Mafia Princess. "Before
this, the FBI had already installed illegal bugs in motels and hotels and private homes
all over the country to listen in on (my fathers) love life in the remote hope of
hearing him make some slip about his criminal life."
Momo even attempted to sue the government for invasion of privacy, something almost
unheard of, and lost when the higher courts threw out the case.
Throughout the Outfit it became common knowledge: Momo had been pushed way beyond his
limit. He was going to strike big-time against the Kennedy family.
Of the many theories involving who killed President Kennedy and why, Chuck Giancana's Double
Cross adds a new theory --that it was indeed his brother Momo who perpetrated the
national crime. Claiming to have first-hand knowledge, he recalls the night that
Momo confessed his involvement to him in the privacy of the latter's Oak Park basement:
"He lifted his cigar to his lips and a cruel smile curled like an embrace
around it. There was a deadly silence in the room...For the next hour
(Momo) shared
the darkest and most horrifying of his secrets."
On November 22, 1963, in a scene reminiscent of the Anton Cermak killing 30 years
earlier, John F. Kennedy, riding in an open-car motorcade through the streets of Dallas,
had his head blown open by a sniper. Very few in Mobdom were surprised. And when the
hysteria died down, neither was Bobby Kennedy.
The nation, however, was, stunned. Not since Lincolns assassination had one,
single move crippled the emotions of America. The audacious move --to kill the President
of the United States -- left citizens reeling in their once-sturdy steps. No one felt
safe. But, that sensation came only after anyone was able to feel anything at all
under the numbness.
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Jack Ruby kills Lee Harvey Oswald
(AP) |
But, within Momos brain there was no time to yet consider his glory.
The sniper, CIA-controlled Lee Harvey Oswald, was not supposed to have been caught, Chuck
Giancana asserts. Another rifleman had been assigned to silence Oswald immediately
after the shooting, but had been unable to reach the fleet-of-foot gunman before the
police surrounded him. A new player was then needed, someone to take on the role of Mr.
Incensed American, the patriot overcome with grief for his President. That man was Jack
Ruby, the CIA associate who helped run guns to Cuba during the Bay of Pigs fiasco and now
was deep in debt to the syndicates. Before live television cameras, Ruby blazed away.
America watched as Oswald doubled over in pain before the smoking revolver. |
Communist
fanatic kills the President. American fanatic kills the commie. Case closed. Bobby knew it wasnt anywhere that simple. "He and Jacqueline Kennedy
were convinced that the President had been struck down not by communists, as J. Edgar
Hoover and many others believed, but by a domestic conspiracy," Seymour Hersh
explains in The Dark Side of Camelot. "One immediate suspect was Sam
Giancana,
who had been overheard by the FBI since early 1961 claiming again and again that he had
been double crossed by Jack Kennedy."
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Robert Kennedy mortally wounded
(AP) |
Four and a half years later, as Bobby Kennedy was successfully running on
the Democratic ticket for the upcoming Presidential elections, he was shot by a foreign
dissident in a mob-controlled hotel. Again, according to Giancana's theory, it was just
another grudge that Momo ached to settle to his personal satisfaction.If author
Giancana is correct, Momo's power was greater than even the FBI suspected. An
assassination of a United States President would have been his crowning achievement and
would have proven how frightfully far and how high a poverty- stricken boy turned gangster
could go with the right connections -- and without a conscience. Chuck Giancana goes on to
tell us in Double Cross that, in Momos describing the assassination plot to
him afterward, it had taken months to mastermind, dozens of men were involved, and, as he
quotes Momo, "Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson knew about the whole damn thing."
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