Sam Giancana
Sam Giancana was the boss of the Chicago Outfit from the mid-1950s until 1966 who was recruited by the CIA alongside Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante Jr. to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro under Operation ZR/RIFLE, was found shot dead in his Chicago home basement in June 1975, the week before he was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee.
Salvatore "Sam" Giancana (June 15, 1908 - June 19, 1975) was the boss of the Chicago Outfit, the Chicago-based organized crime syndicate, from approximately 1957 until his exile to Mexico in 1966. Giancana was one of three Mafia figures recruited by the CIA in 1960 to plan and execute the assassination of Cuban President Fidel Castro under the program later designated ZR/RIFLE. He was murdered in the basement of his Oak Park, Illinois home on June 19, 1975, one week before he was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee about his role in the CIA-Mafia assassination plots.1
Chicago Outfit Leadership
Giancana rose through the Chicago Outfit under boss Tony Accardo, taking effective operational control of the organization in the mid-1950s and serving as official boss from approximately 1957. Under his leadership, the Outfit operated gambling, loan-sharking, and labor racketeering enterprises across metropolitan Chicago and maintained influence through political connections, including the ward organizations of the Democratic Party's Cook County machine.
His flamboyant lifestyle - a public relationship with singer Phyllis McGuire, frequent travel to Las Vegas and Caribbean resorts, and an ostentatious disregard for FBI surveillance - was unusual for an Outfit boss and created friction with the FBI's organized crime program. Giancana brought suit against the FBI in federal court over their intensive physical surveillance of his activities, winning a temporary court order restricting agents from following him onto golf courses - a legal victory that illustrated his unusual willingness to confront law enforcement directly rather than maintain the low profile other mob bosses preferred.1
CIA Recruitment and Castro Plots
The CIA's effort to recruit organized crime figures for the Castro assassination began in 1960 when the agency's Technical Services Division officer Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent working as a CIA contractor, approached Johnny Roselli in Las Vegas. Roselli's introduction brought in Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr., the Tampa-based Mafia boss with pre-revolutionary Cuban gambling interests.
The CIA's rationale for using organized crime was practical: the Mafia had existing personnel and connections in Cuba from their pre-Castro casino operations, and the deniability structure - using Maheu as intermediary between CIA officer William Harvey (who ran ZR/RIFLE) and the Mafia figures - created plausible distance from the agency. The plots were authorized at the highest levels: Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles was informed, and the program continued under Richard Helms as DCI.12
The assassination methods discussed included poisoning, with the CIA supplying pills containing botulinum toxin that were passed to Roselli for delivery to Cuban nationals in contact with Castro's inner circle. Multiple attempts were reportedly made with various methods; none succeeded. The plots continued intermittently from 1960 through approximately 1963, covering the presidencies of both Eisenhower and Kennedy.2
Relationship with the Kennedy Administration
Giancana's CIA connection created significant complications for the administration of President John F. Kennedy, whose father Joseph Kennedy had direct ties to the Chicago Outfit through his involvement in the liquor business and whose campaign had benefited from organized crime-connected voter mobilization in Illinois in 1960. Attorney General Robert Kennedy launched an aggressive campaign against organized crime that targeted the Outfit's leadership, with Giancana as a primary subject.
When the CIA-Mafia plots became known within the government, they created a collision between the FBI's counterintelligence concerns (Giancana's handler Maheu had also recruited Giancana's girlfriend Phyllis McGuire's ex-lover Dan Rowan for bugging - discovered by Las Vegas law enforcement, creating a scandal the CIA concealed from the FBI), RFK's prosecution of Giancana, and the Kennedy administration's simultaneous pursuit of Castro assassination through multiple channels.1
House Select Committee Finding
The House Select Committee on Assassinations, investigating the Kennedy assassination in 1976-1979, concluded that Giancana and Roselli "may have been involved" in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, based on their Mafia backgrounds, their CIA connections, and the circumstantial question of whether the CIA-Mafia plot infrastructure could have been redirected. The committee reached no definitive conclusion about such involvement and noted that both men were murdered before they could testify fully.2
Death
On June 19, 1975, Giancana was shot seven times in the basement kitchen of his home in Oak Park, Illinois. The first shot was fired upward through his chin while he was at the stove; additional shots were fired around his mouth, in a pattern that Mafia experts interpreted as a message about talking. He had returned from Mexico to the United States the previous year after his self-imposed exile and had met with intelligence contacts in the period before his death.
The murder occurred one week before Giancana was scheduled to testify to the Church Committee about the CIA-Mafia assassination plots. No one was ever charged. Johnny Roselli was murdered the following year, in July 1976, shortly after testifying to the HSCA. The timing of both deaths attracted significant attention in the Church Committee investigation and subsequent assassination research.12
Sources
- Church Committee (U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. Senate Report 94-465, November 20, 1975. (The primary official account of CIA-Mafia plots and Giancana's role.) ↩
- House Select Committee on Assassinations. Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations. Government Printing Office, 1979. Blakey, G. Robert, and Richard N. Billings. Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. Berkley, 1992. ↩
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