CRIME: Deep Six for Johnny

• Share

(3 of 3)

After getting out of jail in 1971, Roselli again supervised the Chicago Mob's gambling interests in Las Vegas, while living quietly with his sister, Mrs. Joseph Daigle, in Plantation, Fla., just west of Fort Lauderdale. He was, his neighbors said, a nice, silver-haired gentleman who liked to walk his poodle and talk about such local worries as the caterpillars. Although he had arthritis of the spine, he played golf regularly. After another local underworld character was killed recently on the links, Roselli took the precaution of never playing the same course twice in a row. Still, he rejected his lawyer's advice to hire a bodyguard. Asked Johnny Roselli: "Why would they want to kill an old man like me?"

Aside from his proclivity for disclosing Mafia secrets, Roselli could have been killed, federal investigators suggest, because some members of his old Chicago Mob—including Tony Accardo —felt he had been keeping more than his share of the Las Vegas boodle. Following another theory, some Senators who had once laughed at his jokes during his sessions on the Hill called on the Department of Justice to find out why he was murdered. U.S. Attorney General Edward H. Levi ordered the FBI to determine whether Johnny Roselli's testimony about the CIA plot to get Castro might somehow have led to his end in an oil drum bobbing on the surface of Dumfoundling Bay.