Jimmy Hoffa disappeared 40 years ago today

[Octafish]

58. Nixon and The Mob

So much fuel melted under the reactors that I'd forgotten the clowns with the evil stares. LOL.

The Mob's President: Richard Nixon's Secret Ties to the Mafia

Don Fulsom
CrimeMagazine.com, February 5, 2006

EXCERPT...

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-the–table 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.

CONTINUED (now, for-pay, but a few more graphs can be read gratis)...

http://www.crimemagazine.com/mobs-president-richard-nixons-secret-ties-mafia

Nixon and the Mob go way back. Thanks to Bush political dynasty, their influence is felt to the present day. Most DUers would be happy to shed light on them. Why do you laugh, treestar? Do you find treason funny?