MOB RULE
A Brief History of Mafia
Involvement in U.S.
Presidential Politics

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:
 
In 1960, all three major candidates were mobbed up. JFK's father, the ex-bootlegger Joe Kennedy, dealt directly with his former associates in the Outfit, tapping them for untraceable vote-buying cash and their unrivaled vote-rigging muscle. Nixon, then vice president, had long worked his mob contacts ­ chiefly the Los Angeles gang of Mickey Cohen and New York's Meyer Lansky ­ for secret campaign funds. Meanwhile, the Chicago Outfit ­ playing both sides as always ­ sought Nixon's favor by agreeing to a CIA request for help in assassinating Fidel Castro.

Johnson was backed by the Carlos Marcello gang out of New Orleans, who paid the all-powerful Texas senator $100,000 a year to keep the legislative heat off their gambling and racing interests. Of course, this mob dime was small beer to Lyndon, whose career had been bankrolled by massive cash infusions (some of them legal) from the construction and military servicing firm Brown & Root ­ now more famous as the chief cash cow in the Halliburton empire. (Like the Outfit, Halliburton always plays both sides.)

The rest, as they say, is history. Kennedy's Outfit connections trumped Johnson's Marcello play for the nomination, then Joe's vote-riggers outmuscled Nixon's vote-riggers in the election ­ the closest in American history. Nixon felt, rightly, that he'd been robbed of a presidency he'd bought fair and square. Thus he went on to even greater illegality ­ including outright treason in his secret negotiations with Vietnamese officials to scuttle peace talks before the 1968 election ­ to ensure his perch atop the greasy pole. Millions of people would die from his expansion of a war that U.S. officials had already privately conceded was a disastrous mistake. As Russo points out, gangland's rap sheet looks like a hymnbook next to the genocidal record of the upperworld.
 
I guess that means that the Bush brothers' election theft of 2000 is as American as apple pie and George Washington...or pizza and Don Corleone, for that matter.
 
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