The Devil May Dance

about my father’s relationship with Giancana. I didn’t even know he had one.” He wondered if the attorney general knew that the Teamsters had also been visiting Charlie in New York, had been leaning on him for almost a year.
“Did you ever hear of a man called Mooney?” Kennedy asked. “Or Momo?”
“No,” said Charlie, thinking about it. “No Mooney. No Momo.” Why did mobsters always have such moronic nicknames? “I’m guessing you’ve seized my dad’s files and haven’t found anything.”
“Nothing yet,” said Kennedy.
“Who’s Momo?” Charlie asked. “Who’s Mooney?”
“Aliases,” Kennedy said. “Giancana.”
“Hail the son of righteousness!” the choir sang. “Light and life to all He brings.” The lyrics were about Jesus; Charlie couldn’t help but wonder if the Kennedy brothers thought of themselves as the sons of righteousness. There was certainly nothing virtuous about their father, the would-be appeaser of Hitler. From the pew behind them, Addington White gave Kennedy a manila envelope. The attorney general opened it and handed some papers to Charlie.
“A transcript from a wiretap this week,” Kennedy explained. “Giancana and Johnny Rosselli, the Mob’s man in Hollywood.”
In the dim light of the nave, Charlie read:
ROSSELLI: You ask Winston?
GIANCANA: I leave messages with his secretary.
ROSSELLI: Christ, he doesn’t call you back? What the sainted [expletive deleted]—
“I don’t know what any of this is about,” Charlie said.
“Keep reading,” said Kennedy.
GIANCANA: What happened with Frank?
ROSSELLI: We talked. I said, “Frankie, can I ask one question?” He says, “Johnny, I took Sam’s name and wrote it down and told Bobby Kennedy, ‘This is my buddy. This is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob.’”
GIANCANA: Well, I don’t know who the [expletive deleted] he’s talking to. Maybe one of these days he will actually do what he promised.
ROSSELLI: He says he wrote your name down.
GIANCANA: Well, one minute he tells me this and the next minute he tells me that. The last time I talked to him was at the hotel in Florida and he said, “Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man, I’m going to talk to the man.” One minute he says he talked to Robert and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. It’s a lot of [expletive deleted]. Why lie to me?
ROSSELLI: If he can’t deliver, I want him to tell me, “John, the load’s too heavy.”
GIANCANA: When he says he’s gonna do a guy a little favor, I don’t give a [expletive deleted] how long it takes, he’s got to give you a little favor.
The transcript ended there. Charlie handed the papers back to Kennedy.
“I don’t know what they’re talking about either,” Kennedy said. “I don’t know what favor Giancana wants regarding me or my father or my brother. No one ever brought any of this up to me.”
“Who’s Frank?” Charlie said.
“Sinatra,” Kennedy said. He reached into his briefcase and withdrew another transcript.
FORMOSA: Let’s show ’em. Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys, Lawford and that Martin, and I could take the coon and put his other eye out.
GIANCANA: No, I’ve got other plans for them.
“Who’s Formosa?” Charlie asked.
“Just another one of these thugs,” Kennedy said. “You know the kind, they got ’em in New York too.”
Charlie looked at him again, trying to read his face. Did he know about the union toughs? He saw no indication one way or the other in Kennedy’s eyes.
The carol drew to a close, and the church was briefly, dramatically silent save for the hushed stirrings of worshippers lighting candles and finding seats. Charlie looked around; no one seemed to recognize him or his famous pew mate.
“Sinatra thinks the president is going to stay with him when we go out to California in March,” Kennedy said quietly. “He’s been on the president’s case about it ever since the inauguration. Apparently, he’s had all this work done at his Rancho Mirage estate prepping for a visit. Whole place wired for sound. A press filing room. He’s even building a helipad.”
Charlie had to smile at the excess. “You don’t want the president to stay there?” Throughout the 1960 election, Sinatra and the Rat Pack had gone all in for Kennedy, and the campaign had been only too happy to capitalize on the fame, the glamour, the money. Sinatra had even rerecorded his Oscar-winning song “High Hopes,” written by Sinatra songmeister Jimmy Van Heusen, with new lyrics:
Everyone is voting for Jack
’Cause he’s got what all the rest lack
Everyone wants to back—Jack
Jack is on the right track!
As if reading Charlie’s mind, Kennedy shrugged. “When I started at Justice, an agent asked me how he could be expected to go after Mob bosses when my brother’s most famous supporter is paisans with a bunch of them. I took his point. Unfortunately, the FBI doesn’t have any evidence supporting the rumors that Frank is mobbed up, but now he shows up in this wiretap.”
Charlie, encouraged by Kennedy’s willingness to confide in him, ventured a question. “What does Hoover say?” he asked. “Why don’t you ask the FBI to investigate Sinatra?”
Kennedy considered his answer. Finally, he said, “The FBI has been looking into it, but in all honesty, it’s not a priority for them. It’s not as if Sinatra and the Rat Pack are actually robbing five casinos in one night, right?”
“I would imagine not,” said Charlie.
Kennedy sighed; he clearly wasn’t telling Charlie everything he had on the subject of Hoover, who’d been running a rogue fiefdom for years. “I really would prefer to have my own intelligence sources, the way Eisenhower once did,” he said. “You ever hear anything about that, Congressman?”
Charlie froze. He had never spoken of his secret work for Eisenhower, which started back in ’54. “Ike’s Platoon,” as its members referred to themselves. Or as they once had; with Ike’s retirement, the group largely disbanded.
“Don’t think so,” Charlie lied.
Suddenly, breaking the choir’s silence, a lone treble voice rose