Read Animal for Free Online

Patriarca balled his hands into tight fists as he stared across the committee room into the hard-bitten eyes of the bootlegger’s son. The air was thick with the acrid stench of cigarette and pipe smoke, and the blood pumping through the mob boss’s veins was fueled by a seething hatred for his inquisitor. It was a bitterly cold day in February 1959, and Patriarca had been summoned to Washington, D.C., to testify before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor Management—or the McClellan Hearings as they were called, after Senator John L. McClellan, the bespectacled Arkansas Democrat and World War I veteran who chaired the committee. McClellan’s attack dog was a young attorney from Massachusetts named Robert F. Kennedy. McClellan had hired the thirty-three-year-old brother of U.S. senator John F. Kennedy (also a committee member) as lead investigator and chief counsel for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It was Kennedy’s job to investigate and expose the mob’s violent infiltration of labor unions from coast to coast.
    This was a plum assignment for Kennedy, who hoped his racket-busting crusade would one day overshadow the high profile Kefauver Hearings, which had been broadcast nationwide in 1952. Under the alias Mr. Rogers, RFK traveled far and wide documenting horrific tales of moblabor abuse, including the story of a union organizer in San Diego who had received the ultimate indignity of having a cucumber shoved up his ass as a painful and humiliating warning to stay away. If the organizer did not heed the warning, mobsters had vowed to split his rectum with a watermelon on the next go-round.
    Accounts like this outraged Kennedy, who went after the mob with unfettered zeal. During the committee’s 270 days of testimony, RFK went toe to toe with Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, and had even accused Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana of “giggling like a little girl” whileKennedy tried to question him about mob activities. Giancana had invoked his Fifth Amendment right during the hearing, as did all the Mafia bosses—except Raymond Patriarca.
    When grilled about allegations of beatings and threats dished out by his employees at the National Cigarette Service vending machine company in Providence, Patriarca insisted that the stories were pure fantasy. The mob boss painted himself as an honest businessman unfairly targeted and harassed by police. “I’ve been a goat around Rhode Island for twenty years,” 9 Patriarca said, in a deep, booming voice. When grilled by Kennedy about the origin of the $80,000 to $90,000 used by Patriarca to start his vending machine business, the mob boss claimed that the cash had been a gift from his dying mother. According to Patriarca, the small fortune had been left for him in a box in the family basement. Kennedy took another hard look at the witness’s lengthy rap sheet and shook his head.
    “Why, if you had $80,000 or so sitting in the basement, did you become involved in burglaries?” Kennedy asked.
    “Why do a lot of young fellows do a lot of things when they haven’t a father?” Patriarca replied incredulously.
    The mob boss also pointed out the sheer hypocrisy of the proceedings, knowing how the father of his main inquisitor had amassed his fortune. “The only mob I know of are the Irish hoodlums,” Patriarca announced in a veiled reference to Joseph P. Kennedy, who had acquired much of his wealth as a bootlegger. No doubt this comment angered and embarrassed RFK . But Patriarca didn’t want only to embarrass young Kennedy; he wanted to hurt him deeply. At the close of testimony, a confident Patriarca strolled by the committee table where Kennedy was still seated. With his ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips, he leaned close to RFK and said sotto voce, “Your [retarded] sister has more brains than the two of you [ RFK and JFK ] together.”
    Raymond Patriarca was referring to Rosemary Kennedy, the third child of