CRIME: Deep Six for Johnny

• Share

(2 of 3)

Three months after Roselli's first appearance before the Senate committee, he was called back. This time he told another startling story: how he and Giancana had shared the affections of an attractive brunette named Judith Campbell Exner at a time when she also had, in her words, a "close, personal" relationship with President John F. Kennedy. The committee, trying to determine if Kennedy had known about the CIA's plans to eliminate Castro, wondered if Exner might have told the Pre ident about the activities of Roselli and Giancana. The investigation turned up no evidence that she had.

Roselli was one of a breed that is dying off — usually by murder. Born Filippo Sacco in Italy, he entered the U.S. illegally as a child and remained in trouble for most of his life. In the '20s, he was a recruit in Al Capone's Chicago gang, reportedly as an arsonist, then moved on to bookmaking and numbers.

In the late '30s, Roselli became the Chicago Mob's man in Hollywood and was subsequently jailed for three years for plotting, with seven others, to extort $1 million from movie companies. The muscle: threatening to use a Mafia-controlled union of stagehands to close down production unless the studios paid up. Even so, the dapper, debonair Roselli remained a luminary of sorts in Hollywood. He married a starlet, got a piece of two nightclubs, and helped produce two crime films in the late 1940s, Canyon City and He Walked by Night. Says a producer who knew him at the time:

"He had direct knowledge about prisons and cops."

In the early '50s, Roselli even be came a member of the Friars Club, Hollywood's frat house. He was backed by none other than Comedian Georgie Jessel, the club's founder. "There were other members who had served sentences," Jessel recalled last week. "I said anyone who had paid his debt to society was O.K., so I made him a Friar."

Fleecing Friars. Roselli got along famously with the Jessel-Sinatra crowd, but again temptation got in his way. In 1968 he and four others were convicted of swindling members of the Friars — including Comedians Phil Silvers and Zeppo Marx and Singer Tony Martin —out of some $400,000 by cheating at cards. The elaborate fleecing system involved observers in the attic who peered through peepholes to read the cards of the players. They then flashed coded electronic signals to a member of the ring seated at the table, who picked up the messages on equipment he wore on a girdle beneath his clothes.

Before going to jail to serve eleven months for that caper, Roselli was bold enough to betray the Mafia in 1970. At the time, a federal grand jury was investigating charges that the Mob had illegally concealed its interest in the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. Roselli, by then the Chicago Mob's top man in Las Vegas, talked about the scheme after being given a pledge of immunity. One of the men he discussed was Chicago's Tony Accardo.