There was something of Jay Gatsby about Joseph Patrick Kennedy, patriarch of the clan, father of Jack and Bobby, and grandfather of the new American health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Because, just as F Scott Fitzgerald’s literary phantasm had feet of clay, the money, glamor and influence of the Kennedys is rooted in something more secretive and sordid than most care to admit.
As readers of Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece eventually discover, Gatsby’s mesmerizing wealth comes not from the American virtues of hard work and optimism but from the sale of fraudulent bonds and Prohibition-era bootlegging.
And so it was with Joe Kennedy who, born in 1888, would have been a near contemporary of his fictional counterpart and who, like Gatsby, was in league with the mob – a relationship I explore in my new book, Borgata: Clash of Titans: A history of the American mafia.
As a young man, Joe made a fortune trading stocks and commodities, perfecting what we would refer to today as ‘pump and dump’ schemes in which stocks are artificially inflated then sold off at their height.
Kennedy notably managed to sell before the great crash of 1929 and exhibited, according to one biographer, ‘an almost uncanny knack for being in the right stock – short or long – at precisely the right time’. Many suspected insider-trading.
During Prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933, Joe acquired liquor from overseas distilleries and called on the mafia’s help to distribute it across the United States.
Frank Costello, boss of New York’s Luciano crime family (later known as the Genovese) confirmed that he had been a partner with Joe in the liquor business both before and after Prohibition.Â
The Kennedy family spend Thanksgiving at Hyannisport, Massachusetts, 1948. From left: John F. Kennedy, Jean Ann Smith, Rose Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy Sr., Patricia Lawford, Robert F. Kennedy, Eunice Mary Shriver, Edward Kennedy (squatting).Â
As a young man, Joe (pictured here with son, John F Kennedy) made a fortune trading stocks and commodities, perfecting what we would refer to today as ‘pump and dump’ schemes in which stocks are artificially inflated then sold off at their height.
During Prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933, Joe acquired liquor from overseas distilleries and called on the mafia’s help to distribute it across the United States. (Pictured John F Kennedy kissing his father Joe Kennedy’s head in 1963).Â
Author Gore Vidal, who was related to the Kennedys through marriage, wrote in his memoirs that, ‘[Joe] belonged in jail, along with his close friend Frank Costello. In fact, once a week… the boss of the mob and the president’s [JFK] father had dinner together in the Central Park South Kennedy apartment… Of course, Joe made no secret of his underworld connections, unavoidable for a man who had cornered the Scotch whiskey market.’
Crime boss Meyer Lansky and New York gangster Owney ‘The Killer’ Madden also claimed to have worked with Kennedy.
Joe Bonanno, the mobster sometimes known as Joe Bananas, once told his son that, ‘Kennedy was no different from the rest of us, except his whiskey went mainly to society people.’
The Bonannos, father and son, reserved a special contempt for Kennedy after hearing how one of his boats, heavy with a cargo of bootleg whiskey and illegal aliens, was spotted by the Coast Guard and, in an effort to pick up speed, dumped the aliens overboard. The alcohol was more valuable.
Author Seymour Hersh, who wrote a book about the darker side of the Kennedy family, concluded that, ‘in scores of interviews for this book over four years, former high-level government officials of the 1950s and 1960s, including Justice Department prosecutors, CIA operatives, and FBI agents, insisted that they knew that Joe Kennedy had been a prominent bootlegger during Prohibition.’
Hersh interviewed Abraham Marovitz, a Chicago attorney who represented top mobsters and would one day be appointed to the federal bench by President John F Kennedy (Joe Kennedy’s second son – his eldest, Joseph Jr, was killed in the war).
Marovitz said of the old man, ‘Kennedy was bootlegging… he had mob connections. Kennedy couldn’t have operated the way he did without mob approval. They’d have knocked him off too.’
Keen to profit from the end of Prohibition, Joe travelled to London and secured contracts making him the exclusive American distributor of Gordon’s gin and two premium Scotch whiskies through his new company, Somerset Importers Ltd.
Even today, Kennedy’s apologists deny his involvement with the mafia, but they struggle to explain why, in 1946, Joe sold this business to a Jewish mobster, Abner ‘Longie’ Zwillman, an associate of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.
Before Kennedy started pushing his children into politics, he had his own ambitions of becoming president and wisely aligned himself with the brilliant but sly Franklin Roosevelt.
Kennedy’s support for President Roosevelt was repaid in 1934 when he was offered the chair of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – the body which is supposed to protect investors from financial misconduct. Giving Kennedy the SEC job was like appointing Lucky Luciano head of the anti-mafia squad.
By March 1938, with his star in the ascendant, Kennedy was appointed ambassador to the Court of St James’s in London. The post was one of, if not the most, prestigious ambassadorships in the world and was widely recognized as a stepping-stone to the American presidency.
The Brits, who graciously welcomed Kennedy to London, were quickly appalled.
Keen to profit from the end of Prohibition, Joe travelled to London and secured contracts making him the exclusive American distributor of Gordon’s gin and two premium Scotch whiskies through his new company, Somerset Importers Ltd. (Pictured: JFK and Joe board an Air France plane at Croydon Airport).
Before Kennedy started pushing his children into politics, he had his own ambitions of becoming president and wisely aligned himself with the brilliant but sly Franklin Roosevelt (pictured).
Joseph Kennedy – nominated ambassador to London – is pictured taking the oath in the presence of Franklin Roosevelt In 1937.Â
By March 1938, with his star in the ascendant, Joe Kennedy was appointed ambassador to the Court of St James’s in London. (Pictured: Joe and daughter Rosemary in London).Â
Sir Robert Vansittart, undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, called Kennedy ‘a very foul specimen of double-crosser.’
It was an opinion shared by the Chicago mob’s brilliant consigliere, Murray ‘The Camel’ Humphreys, who had illegal business dealings with Kennedy and called him a ‘four-flusher and a double-crosser.’
Kennedy was also a war profiteer, using his clout as ambassador to secure precious cargo space on transatlantic voyages.
‘Using his name and the prestige of the embassy… I was able to get shipping space for up to, I think, around 200,000 cases of whiskey at a time when shipping space was very scarce,’ said an employee of Kennedy.
As ambassador, Kennedy also used insider information about world events to trade stocks on Wall Street.
However, any hopes Kennedy had of becoming president were dashed in November 1940.
At a time when Great Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, Kennedy was pushing for ‘an economic collaboration’ with Germany and the Axis powers and made it clear he did ‘not believe in the continuing of democracy’ in the United States – an odd viewpoint for a presidential hopeful in the world’s leading democracy.
Kennedy exposed his thoughts during a long, imprudent, interview at Boston’s Ritz Carlton hotel, in which he told reporters that ‘Democracy is all done,’ meaning he did not want America to enter the war under any circumstances.
Kennedy also insinuated that Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a drunk, that the King was a stutterer, and the Queen looked like a shlumpy housewife. However true these observations may have been, Kennedy was forced to resign.
But the determined one-time bootlegger, maritime smuggler and stock swindler was by no means done.
Kennedy simply transferred his ambitions to the younger generation – along, as it turned out, with his own troubled connections to organized crime.
For JFK, disappointing the mob would eventually prove politically disastrous and personally fatal.
As I have set out elsewhere in my book, his father’s ‘friends’ in the mafia were not merely connected – as has long been speculated – to the bloody events in Dallas of November 1963. They were prime movers.
Borgata, Clash of Titans, the second part of Louis Ferrante’s History of The American Mafia is published by Pegasus in the US, price $29.95 and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK, price £25.