The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro, Part 2
My interviews with Robert Maheu about what he knew and what he did not know
I recently watched the six-part series, Mafia Spies, on Paramount/Showtime that premiered on July 16. Although I have some disagreements with its content, I believe that it was an entertaining, noble, and sincere effort to present what is known about the events revolving around the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Notably, I investigated the CIA-Mafia plots and published the results in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, about the rise and fall of Jimmy Hoffa. Mike Ewing, a brilliant researcher and scholar, worked with me in 1977, bringing to my attention the connections between Hoffa and several of his gangster associates who were involved in Cuba before and after Castro took power.
Because this subject is back in vogue, I recount our research from 47 years ago that included my exclusive interviews about the CIA-Mafia plots with, among others, William Bufalino, Charles Crimaldi, Irving Davidson, Robert Maheu, Rolland McMaster, Edward Partin, Ralph Salerno, Walter Sheridan, Joe Shimon, Charles Siragusa, and Frank Ragano—all of whom are now gone.
Above is the inscription that Robert Maheu wrote for me in his memoir, Next to Hughes. Maheu and I first met in the dining room of the Georgetown Inn in Washington, D.C., while I was finishing The Hoffa Wars.
The following day, I recorded my first interview with Maheu.
Part 1: “The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro: The pre-Maheu, pre-Rosselli period,” August 25, 2024
Part 2: “The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro: My interviews with Robert Maheu about what he knew and what he did not know,” September 1, 2024
“I was willing to kill ten Castros. . . .”
Killing the Cuban leader was discussed at some length before the CIA’s failed approach to Charles Siragusa—the legendary former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN)—during the summer of 1960. But officially, it was not until that August—during a conversation between Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, and Colonel Sheffield Edwards, its director of the Office of Security—that the use of the Mafia was decided.
In late August or early September, James O’Connell, a CIA support chief under Edwards, contacted an old friend of his, Robert Maheu, Howard Hughes’s right-hand man and a former FBI special agent who worked in counterintelligence during World War II.
I first met Maheu during the editing process for my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars. Memorializing this meeting, I wrote in my memoir:
On Thursday, June 8, [1978] my new editor, Mary Heathcote, and I wrapped up the editing work on my book. We had saved the sections about the CIA‑Mafia plots and John Kennedy's murder for last. To celebrate, I invited her to the Georgetown Inn for dinner. While waiting in the dining room for Mary to join me, I saw a man I recognized seated alone on the other side of the room.
I quickly called the maître d', asking him if that man was Robert Maheu, the former top aide to billionaire Howard Hughes, who became the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia during the plots against Castro.
When the maître d' confirmed it, I offered him twenty bucks if he would bring Maheu to my table. The maître d' did as I asked, and, to my surprise, Maheu came over and sat down with me.
I introduced myself and told him, "I have just spent part of the day writing about you."
Explaining that I was interested in his role in the plots against Castro, Maheu proclaimed proudly, "I was willing to kill ten Castros to save a single American life."
When Mary arrived, she audibly gasped when I introduced her to Maheu.
As his dinner guest had arrived and he stood to join him, I asked Maheu if I could see him the following day. He told me to meet him there at the Georgetown Inn for breakfast.
During our interview on the morning of June 9, Maheu started at the beginning: “Jim O’Connell came over to my house and asked if I would be willing to help the CIA on a project related to the planning of an invasion of Cuba. I said, ‘Sure.’ Then he told me that he wanted me to contact someone who could arrange the assassination of Fidel Castro. . . .
“I couldn’t believe it, and I was hesitant at first. But when I finally said I’d do it, I kept wondering to myself, ‘What the hell am I getting involved in?”
O’Connell had been Maheu’s case officer during the Hughes aide’s previous work for the CIA. In the mid-1950s Maheu had broken into the room of an entrepreneur doing business with a Middle Eastern country and photographed some sensitive documents. Later, in a separate caper, Maheu arranged for the production of a porno film “purporting to depict a foreign leader with a woman in the Soviet Union.”
A few days after O’Connell and Maheu met, Maheu got in touch with Chicago gangster Johnny Rosselli, a member of the Chicago Outfit who also maintained close ties with the Las Vegas casino community. When they met at the Brown Derby restaurant in Beverly Hills in early September, Maheu asked Rosselli to participate in a plan to ‘‘dispose’’ of Castro.
Maheu had known Rosselli for a couple of years. In or about 1958, while Maheu was working as a consultant in Washington and living in Virginia, Hughes sent him to Los Angeles. There, Maheu saw a lawyer friend who offered him a free, all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas for the weekend.
In return, the attorney asked Maheu to serve a subpoena on the owner of El Rancho Vegas, a popular hotel-casino. After failing to get a reservation at the hotel, Maheu called another friend, Washington superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams, who was Maheu’s teammate on the college debating team at Holy Cross. Using his connections in Las Vegas, Williams, who also represented Jimmy Hoffa in a recent criminal case, contacted Rosselli, who then called Maheu.
Rosselli arranged the accommodations for Maheu and his wife at El Rancho Vegas through its owner, Beldon Katleman—who, by coincidence, was the same man whom Maheu had been sent to serve the subpoena.
“I had a quick decision to make,” Maheu told me. “Was I going to be a son of a bitch and serve the subpoena? Or was I going to go back home and explain what happened?
“To me, it wasn’t a big decision. There was no way in the world that I was going to compromise my friendship with Ed Williams and the man I had just met, Johnny Rosselli, under those circumstances.”
Maheu stayed mum about the subpoena and enjoyed the weekend in Las Vegas. And, when he returned to Los Angeles, he reimbursed his client for the expenses.
Maheu continued: “[The Los Angeles lawyer] laughed like hell, and subsequently, he told the story to Rosselli. Then Rosselli said he wanted to find out more about this guy, Maheu. After that we became friends. . . .
“When he and I began discussing the Castro plots, I was straight up with him. I wasn’t about to cross this guy or any of his friends.”
Maheu added that he explained to Rosselli that this proposed cooperation with the CIA in this matter “was a natural for them. There were legitimate business reasons for them to participate, considering what they’d lost in Cuba.”
Bufalino, Granello, and Plumeri
The idea of the CIA using mobsters wasn’t completely new. Several months before Maheu got involved in the Castro murder plot—while the CIA was planning the future Cuban invasion authorized by President Eisenhower in March 1960—the CIA had learned of losses taken by other underworld figures and tried to capitalize on them.
When the great researcher, Mike Ewing, and I first met in the fall of 1977, he gave me a stunning article, Mafia Spies in Cuba, with no byline, buried in the June 9, 1975, issue of Time magazine.[1]
According to the story, Russell Bufalino, the Mafia boss of northeastern Pennsylvania, once had an interest in a racetrack and a large gambling casino near Havana during the Batista regime. His partners were New York underworld figures Salvatore Granello and James Plumeri, two capos in the Thomas Lucchese crime family.
I quickly learned from my own files that Granello and Plumeri had helped Hoffa enforcer Rolland McMaster and Dave Yaras of the Chicago Outfit organize Local 320 in Miami. Plumeri and Granello were also in business with Hoffa at the time, splitting kickbacks on loans from the Central States Pension Fund to enterprises in Florida, New Jersey, and New York.
Regarding Russell Bufalino, one of Hoffa’s long-time union attorneys in Detroit was William Bufalino, Russell’s “cousin,” who once angrily barked at me during a recorded interview:
“If you want to charge me with something regarding Russell Bufalino, charge me with the fact that I selected him as my number-one friend! I would rather be accused of being his friend and my brother by choice, not by an accident of birth!”
When Castro overthrew Batista on January 1, 1959, and shut down the business interests of Bufalino and his associates a few months later, these mobsters left $450,000 with friends for safekeeping. Another $300,000—which was skimmed by Granello and Plumeri—"was buried in a field outside Havana,” according to Time.
The magazine article continued that when the CIA learned of this while it was planning the Cuban invasion, the mobsters were approached by a middleman—his identity is still unconfirmed—who suggested that, in return for their cooperation, they might be able to recover their money. The three men permitted some of the $450,000 to be dispensed among “their old contacts on the island to set up a small network of spies,” and the CIA then asked them “to pinpoint the roads that Castro might use to deploy troops and tanks in meeting the attacking forces.”
John LaRocca and Gabriel Mannarino
During the preliminary stages of the CIA’s invasion plans, other underworld figures also tried to cash in on the CIA arrangements. Among them were two western Pennsylvania mob leaders, John LaRocca, the boss of the Pittsburgh Mafia, and Gabriel Mannarino, LaRocca’s underboss, who had interests in Bufalino’s Havana casino and, thus, the $450,000.
Like the others, they were both well connected, especially to Jimmy Hoffa and the Detroit underworld. Mannarino had earlier sold his interest in Cuba’s Sans Souci casino to Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante. And in the 1950s, after being convicted of receiving stolen goods, LaRocca was pardoned by the governor of Pennsylvania during his deportation hearings.
In addition, according to my law-enforcement sources, the Zerilli and Tocco crime families in Hoffa’s Detroit had a close working relationship with LaRocca and Mannarino.
Federal witness Ed Partin told me that LaRocca and Mannarino were involved in the same Cuban gun-running operations in which Jimmy Hoffa had participated. And, during this same period of time, Hoffa began negotiations for a Central States Pension Fund loan with a Detroit development corporation financed in part by the local underworld. Subsequently, Granello, LaRocca, Mannarino, and Plumeri participated in the split of the ten percent kickback for the loan.
Meantime, according to the Time article, Bufalino and his four associates contributed nothing but worthless information to the CIA’s planning of the Cuban invasion.
And, although Maheu openly admitted to me that he was responsible for bringing Rosselli into the intelligence agency’s strategy to kill Castro, he denied any role in or any knowledge of the covert activities by the five New York-Pennsylvania mobsters.
To be clear, the CIA had approached two known men—Charles Siragusa and Robert Maheu—to recruit Mafia killers to handle the Castro assassination plot. They were contacted during the summer of 1960.
But, knowing what Siragusa and Maheu did and did not do begs the question: Who was the CIA’s intermediary to Bufalino, Granello, and Plumeri, as well as LaRocca and Mannarino?
Charles Crimaldi
During my research with Mike Ewing, he gave me a book about Charles Crimaldi, a Chicago syndicate contract killer-turned-federal witness. The author was John Kidner, a DEA agent who had worked on cases with Crimaldi.
Checking out this mobster, I called Charles Siragusa of the FBN, who, like Kidner, described Crimaldi as “absolutely reliable.”
I approached Kidner and asked him to arrange an interview for me with Crimaldi. When Kidner was sure that I could be trusted, he made the introduction. But, because Crimaldi was in protective custody, my interview with him was on the phone.
As he had declared in his book, Crimaldi told me that his high-ranking boss in the Chicago Outfit revealed to him that “Jimmy Hoffa was the ‘original liaison’ between the CIA and the mob.”[2]
Crimaldi worked for Sam DeStefano in Chicago, a ruthless murderer who actually killed his own brother in 1955—on orders from Sam Giancana, who was DeStefano’s superior in the local Mafia’s hierarchy.
Remarkably, Crimaldi’s claim provided a degree of corroboration that Hoffa played some role, officially or unofficially, in the decision by Bufalino, Granello, LaRocca, Mannarino, and Plumeri to cooperate with the CIA.
Jimmy Hoffa
The Kefauver Committee had targeted Jimmy Hoffa and a variety of underworld figures during its U.S. Senate investigation in 1950‑1951. However, the committee failed to discover a smoking gun that could lead to his prosecution and conviction.
The year after the hearings ended, Teamsters general president Dave Beck appointed Hoffa as an international vice president. Then, after feeding Beck to the newly created Senate Rackets Committee in 1957, Hoffa, who routinely supplied information about his enemies to the committee, succeeded him as the union's general president that same year.
Senator John McClellan (D-Arkansas) chaired the committee. Senator John Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) was a member, along with Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Senator Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina).
Senator Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy, served as the committee’s chief counsel.
The committee members relentlessly pursued evidence against corrupt businessmen, union leaders, and organized-crime figures from 1957 to 1960 in what became known as “The Great Investigation.”
Because of Hoffa's election, the AFL‑CIO expelled the Teamsters, and the federal government placed the union under the supervision of a court‑ordered Board of Monitors. Later, Hoffa sabotaged the board and won the union's independence in 1961. He immediately rewrote the union's constitution, centralizing power in his own hands and allowing him to throw dissident locals into trusteeship.
Meantime, Hoffa had been indicted and acquitted in separate bribery and wiretapping cases. Also, federal prosecutors indicted him in a third case for his role in a land fraud scheme in Florida.
Maheu told me that he first met Hoffa after he became the president of the Teamsters in 1957. Public relations man Edward Cheyfitz, who did work for Hoffa and the union, introduced them.
Maheu explained: “I was hired by Hoffa to ‘sweep’ his new office, looking for ‘bugs.’ After that, he asked me if I’d come to work for the Teamsters in a public-relations capacity. I told him I couldn’t do it.”
Although Maheu said that he had no knowledge of Hoffa’s participation in the CIA’s plots against Castro, he did concede, “Things were happening before I became involved, and therefore I might not know about them.”
“From the outset,” Ralph Salerno—the supervisor of detectives for the New York Police Department and one of the top organized-crime experts in the country—told me: “The CIA knew that guys like Rosselli didn’t have the muscle or the pull to influence the Cuban exiles, who were expected to man the invasion force and pull off Castro’s assassination. If Hoffa was involved—and I don’t have any information that he was—then his role was the same as Maheu’s: To get to Santo Trafficante, the man who did have those contacts.”
To be sure, Hoffa did have Trafficante’s ear, with or without organizers Rolland McMaster and Dave Yaras of Local 320 where Traficante had an office. But it is quite possible that the CIA feared that further involving perpetual DOJ-target Hoffa, who was under growing government surveillance, could endanger the entire project.
Significantly, during the summer of 1960, the Board of Monitors filed criminal charges against Hoffa for borrowing $395,000 from a Florida bank, using $400,000 from Hoffa’s home, Local 299, as collateral. It was a dead-bang case.
However, for unexplained reasons, Hoffa’s anticipated indictment was suddenly withdrawn by the U.S. Department of Justice during the summer of 1960 while the CIA was approaching men like Siragusa and Maheu to be their link to the Mafia.
Why was Hoffa the beneficiary of this unexpected gift?
Johnny Rosselli
After Maheu was selected by the CIA as the one and only official liaison to the Mafia, he proposed the idea of killing Castro to Rosselli during a meeting in Beverly Hills. At first, Rosselli refused to commit. But shortly thereafter, during a meeting with CIA Support Chief James O’Connell in New York—while Castro was appearing before the United Nations in late September 1960—Rosselli consented to cooperate with the agency.
A few days after the second meeting, Richard Bissell and Sheffield Edwards informed CIA Director Allen Dulles that “contact had been made with the Mafia.” But in early October, Rosselli complained to O’Connell that the job was too big for him to handle alone.
Consequently, O’Connell suggested that he approach Santo Trafficante, whom Castro had released from jail after a reported four-month stay.
A short time later, Rosselli—who understood that he would need a Mafia boss to speak to Mafia boss Trafficante—introduced O’Connell to two men whom he called “Sam Gold” and “Joe.”
“Joe” was said to have the Cuban contacts and was able to make the necessary arrangements while “Sam Gold” would serve as “Joe’s” back-up man.
Of course, “Sam Gold’’ was Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who brought in “Joe,’ aka Santo Trafficante.
Sam Giancana
Simultaneously in Washington, rumors were beginning to spread. On October 18, 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to Richard Bissell:
[D]uring recent conversations with several friends, Giancana stated that Fidel Castro was to be done away with very shortly. When doubt was expressed regarding this statement, Giancana reportedly assured those present that Castro’s assassination would occur in November. Moreover, he allegedly indicated that he had already met with the assassin-to-be on three occasions. . . . Giancana claimed that everything has been perfected for the killing of Castro, and that the ‘’assassin” had arranged. . . . to drop a “pill” in some drink or food of Castro’s.
Although Hoover was not told how deeply involved Giancana was in the murder plot—or that, worst of all, he was working with the CIA—Hoover’s role later became vital to getting to the bottom of what was happening.
To complicate matters, Giancana was having an affair with Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Sisters singing act in Las Vegas. Suspecting her of having an affair with Dan Rowan, a popular comedian, Giancana asked Maheu to have the comedian’s room at the Desert Inn bugged.
Maheu hired a friend who specialized in electronic surveillance to do the job and waited for reports to deliver to Giancana.
As in a late-night movie, the melodrama was foiled by a hotel maid who discovered telephone recording equipment and called the authorities. The wiretapper was quickly identified, arrested, and booked. At police headquarters, he made his one call to Maheu.
“What the hell were you doing with a wiretap instead of a bug?” Maheu snapped at the surveillance expert. “1 don’t know of anyone who makes love while talking on the telephone.’’
On November 8, 1960, while the FBI moved forward with its investigation of Giancana, Senator John Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon. Soon after, the President-elect attended a meeting with top CIA officials, including Richard Bissell and Sheffield Edwards, during which he was briefed on the anticipated “Bay of Pigs’’ invasion of Cuba, which was scheduled for the spring.
There was no mention to the Kennedys of the CIA’s plan to kill Castro. And there was certainly no indication that the CIA was coordinating its work with the Mafia, including many of those who were the principal targets of the new U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
After all, if AG Kennedy had eaten mob guys for breakfast while he was the chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee, America had not seen anything yet. As U.S. Attorney General, Kennedy would start eating them for lunch and dinner, too.
On January 3, 1961, seventeen days before the inauguration of the new President—on orders from outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower—the United States Government broke off all diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro and the Cuban government.
ENDNOTES
1. In or about 1994, my friend and colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Denny Walsh of the Sacramento Bee, sent me a story he had published nineteen years earlier on June 1, 1975. I had never seen it before.
Although the unnamed author of the article in Time on June 9, 1975—which was likely released on June 2—did advance the facts of the case, the Time article contained essentially the same information as that published in Denny’s story on June 1 . . . with no mention of Denny’s work and no on-the-record comment from the CIA.
For his article, Denny contacted the CIA and was referred to retired CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston, who stated: “I do not recollect such a thing, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I won’t deny it, but I don’t remember anything like that. My memory is probably not as good as some. When you reflect on it, it is not an implausible situation, is it?”
See: Denny Walsh, Sacramento Bee, “Mafia Passed CIA Data for ‘Bay of Pigs,” June 1, 1975.
Sadly, Denny, 88, died on March 29, 2024.
2. Charles Crimaldi (as told to John Kidner), Crimaldi: Contract Killer (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books Ltd., 1976).
I am also in possession of a redacted copy of the FBI’s 302 report about Crimaldi, dated September 26, 1975—which was part of the Hoffex FOIA file. According to one section of the report: “[Name redacted] told DeStefano the CIA was talking to Hoffa about arranging a hit on Fidel Castro of Cuba. DeStefano told [name redacted] he was interested in doing it, but had to get clearance through Sam Giancana.”
Next in Part 3: How I uncovered the role of Antonio de Varona, aka Tony Varona
WOW! What a story! Historical, fascinating, and exposes the dark alliances between the CIA and the Mob, i.e. murder incorporated. Robert Maheu's involvement was a surprise to me. I had interviewed him about his relationship with Ted Gunderson and Robert Booth Nichols during my research in the early 1990's, so your narrative on his liaison status between the CIA and the Mob was quite an eye-opener. You are legendary, Dan, in this genre. It's such a privilege to subscribe to Mobology. Can hardly wait for the next issue!
Fantastic and wonderfully written. It is a must read for everyone that is looking for insight into the JFK assassination