"November 1963": Did the mob kill JFK?
The ghosts of the Chicago underworld still blow through Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse like a chill through a drafty window. Beneath this 131-year-old building are the remnants of Frank Nitti's hideout. He was Al Capone's right-hand man, helping him run booze during Prohibition.
Why Nicki Celozzi was down here is an interesting story; he was being given a tour of a secret passageway by the building's owner and amateur mob historian Grant DePorter. Celozzi knew the legend of Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti, but he also suspected a mobster in his own family was likely hanging out down here, too … and there he was: a photo of Sam Giancana, perhaps the most feared leader of the Chicago crime syndicate called the Outfit. He's also Celozzi's great-uncle.
"Look, when you grow up around it, it's not really a big deal," Celozzi said. "It's just something that always was."
As a boy, Celozzi says, the family business, as it were, was a puzzle he didn't put together until he was older. That's when he says Sam Giancana's brother, Pepe, pulled him aside and began singing like a songbird about a murder that changed the world.
Celozzi said, "He came to me one day, we were sitting there and he goes, 'The assassination of Kennedy, what do you think about it?' 'What do you mean?' 'Well, who do you really think did it?'"
The short answer? His great-uncle, Sam Giancana. The details of what he says was essentially a mob hit were revealed over the course of a few weeks on a quiet bench outside the Celozzi family car dealership.
"I was kind of scared about it," Celozzi said. "My mother told me to, you know, keep my mouth shut."
Why was he afraid? "Well, there's people still around," Celozzi said. "Put it this way: the people involved didn't generation out."
He said Pepe's revelations were like a confession of sorts: "I think he felt that if he didn't tell somebody, he goes to the grave with it."
Decades later, Celozzi, who went on to become a screenwriter in Hollywood, thought he had the bones of a pretty good screenplay. He called it "November 1963," and Hollywood ate it up. Big names like Mandy Patinkin and Dermot Mulroney were cast, along with John Travolta.
Travolta was nine years old when Kennedy was killed. He remembers the assassination very clearly: "For a week, I sat on my dad's lap watching news coverage of this," Travolta said, "and that whole thing evolved with Ruby and the killing of Oswald and the espionage and 'I'm a patsy' and all that stuff. And I started to go, 'What?'"
At the movie's core is the idea that Giancana and his mob associates helped swing Illinois to get JFK elected in 1960, and in return expected the White House to back off organized crime. But as attorney general, Bobby Kennedy cracked down even harder. In mob speak, he and his brother had dishonored a contract.
"They didn't really look at Kennedy as a president," said Celozzi. "They just looked at him as someone who screwed them over."
In the film, Travolta plays the guy tasked with the payback: Johnny Roselli, an unsavory guy who could mingle with celebrities and politicians, but who was also a sharpshooter. He was implicated in various CIA plots to get rid of Fidel Castro.
"I can't say he was fun to play, but I can say that I enjoyed pulling him off, does that make sense?" Travolta said. "You know, you have to go there. You have to just commit to these atrocities. But it doesn't mean that you feel good about it!"
The way the film tells it, on that day in Dallas, the fatal shot didn't come from Lee Harvey Oswald; it was Roselli from the infamous grassy knoll.
Travolta says "November 1963" isn't forcing ideas: "We're just telling a story," he said. Asked if he believes the film's premise, he replied, "Best presentation I've seen so far."
"The House Select Committee did conclude that there was likely a conspiracy, a fourth shot, fired by a second gunman from the grassy knoll," said Stephen Fagin, head curator at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, housed in the former Texas Book Depository on Dealey Plaza where Oswald took his shots.
Fagin says as recently as three years ago a Gallup survey showed that 65% of Americans still don't believe Oswald acted alone. "The idea that a disgruntled ex-Marine could aim a $20 dollar rifle out of a window and alter the course of 20th century American history is not only deeply unsatisfying, but it's frankly a little frightening," Fagin said.
That doesn't mean he thinks organized crime was necessarily involved. But he admits that two days later, when Jack Ruby (a nightclub owner with low-level ties to the mob) silenced Oswald for good, it sure looked like the mob was silencing anyone who knew anything.
And it continued: Sam Giancana was murdered in his Chicago home in 1975. A year later, Johnny Roselli's body was found stuffed in an oil drum.
One of the few remaining is Sam Giancana's daughter, Bonnie. "He was my dad," she said. "We were very close, and I just knew him as a wonderful, caregiving person."
But she, too, over the years pieced together aspects of that day in Dallas that she says can't be ignored. She says she has no doubts that her father was involved in JFK's assassination: "He had absolutely no regard for the Kennedys, or any of them."
Asked if she had anything to say to the Kennedy family, Bonnie replied, "I'm sorry that he was assassinated, that he died. There's nothing I have to say to them … Because there's nothing to say. What can I say to them that would make a difference in their lives, or my life?"
Like JFK's eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery, theories about who really stole the hopes of a generation still burn to this day. Which is why perhaps many of us are still open to any idea that might make sense of the senseless.
Nicki Celozzi said, "I just want people to think this is something that you could have been told before, and people chose not to."
To watch a trailer for the film "November 1963" click on the video player below:
Story produced by Michelle Kessel. Editor: Ed Givnish.
For more info:
- "November 1963" opens in theaters December 4
- The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas
- Nitti's Vault, at Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse, Chicago
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