Watergate Book: Richard Nixon Took Mafia Bribes In Plots To Assassinate Fidel Castro

Historian Lamar Waldron is out with his new book Watergate: The Hidden History which exposes Nixon's role as the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia in their failed plots to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, and it was files on this subject which the Watergate burglars were seeking as reported by Thom Hartmann for the Huffington Post:

As one of the Watergate burglars admitted, and Senate Watergate Committee investigators indicated in their secret questioning of Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, Nixon was worried about a Cuban Dossier of CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Those attempts began in earnest in September 1960, when Nixon was seeking an edge in his close presidential race against Senator John F. Kennedy. A Nixon associate involved in the attempts said that in 1960 "the CIA had been in touch with Nixon [and] it was Nixon who had him to a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro."

CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel continued until a December 1971 attempt in Chile, when Nixon was president and had ordered a huge covert war against Chile's socialist government. Remarkably, at those same key times -- September 1960 and December 1971 -- Nixon accepted $500,000 bribes from Mafia leaders, including some involved in his CIA-Mafia attempts to kill Fidel. Those Nixon-Mafia bribes were extensively documented by the FBI, Time magazine, and author Dan Moldea. Those Mafia bribes and Nixon's efforts to have the CIA work with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro were the secrets that Nixon could not afford to have come out during the 1972 campaign.

Waldron documents that in December 1971 Nixon took a bribe from mob bosses Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello to commute Jimmy Hoffa's prison sentence with the proviso, of course, that the labor leader would not get back his old Teamsters job.

Last year veteran Washington reporter Don Fulsom released his biography Nixon's Darkest Secrets in which he alleges the 37th President who served from 1969 to 1974 "may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon" as reported by Tom Leonard for the Daily Mail:

Bebe Rebozo was a short, swarthy, good-looking Cuban-American businessman with a history of failed relationships with women and close alliances with Miami's Mafia chiefs. * * * According to the FBI, he had close links with Mob bosses such as Santo Trafficante, the Tampa Godfather, and Alfred "Big Al" Polizzi, a stooge of Meyer Lansky, the Cosa Nostra's financial brains. * * * When Rebozo started his own bank in Florida in 1964, Nixon — then a lawyer — wielded a golden shovel at the ground-breaking ceremony and became its first depositor.

And apparently Bebe made deposits -- so to speak -- with Nixon: "when Nixon became President, Rebozo got his own office and bedroom at the White House, and a security clearance that allowed him to go in and out without being logged by the secret service." According to Fulsom's book Bebe was a well-known fixture in Miami's gay community.

(Motioning away from the current F&F scandal)

“Move along, citizen, nothing to see here. Move along, please.”

(Pointing to a 40 year old scandal that has absolutely no bearing on anything in the present)

“Good Lord, the audacity of that man! He should be in jail!”

Two things: 1) This isn’t really news. It’s well known that there were many CIA plots to kill Castro, and that the CIA worked with the FBI’s mafia liasion on these plans. They included Johnny Roselli. In addition, Frank Sturges, one of the Watergate burglars, was Castro’s bagman with the Mafia in Havana in the late 50’s.

2) So Richard Nixon was involved in a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, and this is a problem? You have a President right now who is assassinating people on foreign soil on a daily basis and nobody says boo!

Just my 2 cents worth:

I always believed the Watergate break-in was to secure evidence linking Humphrey to Howard Hughes. Hughes was so rich he could afford to throw money at both sides, and no matter who won, he had them in his pocket.

Nixon had been shamed by taking Hughes money when he was governor, so he had a hard-on about Humphrey getting money from Howard Hughes and getting away with it.

Remember the Howard Hughes warehouse break-in? Remember how we never heard much more about it, and it was never solved?

I think the purpose of the warehouse break-in was to recover Watergate related evidence, but the stuff stolen there that was so damning to both parties that no one wanted it made public.

...exposes Nixon's role as the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia in their failed plots to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro...

The CIA had been paying the mob as one of the avenues for snuffing Castro. The mob came to the conclusion, early on, that it was a futile effort. The Kennedy brothers (not Ted, he was already displaying his utter uselessness somewhere) ordered that part of the program terminated, reasoning that, even if successful, the US gov't would be exposed as having paid tax dollars to the mob. They already owed JFK's election to mob chicanery, and were in the process of turning on them.

Turns out that the CIA didn't terminate the program, and the mob kept taking the money. When the mob later murdered both Kennedy brothers, they used the threat of exposing the CIA payments to ensure the silence of the CIA, and it worked perfectly. Helms denied to Congress knowing the trigger man when shown photos of him. Nixon enjoyed payoffs from the mob, because he knew the whole story, and the mob knew he knew it, and paid him off for silence.

Nixon wound up associated with Frank Sturgis -- and a simple web search should turn up the photo of Sturgis, in Cuba, holding a rifle, with which he'd recently gunned down a group of Batistiano captives, and the scene of the photo is Frank standing on their fresh mass grave. Castro had taunted and threatened Sturgis, claiming he couldn't be trusted, being an American, so Sturgis did as Castro ordered (mass-murder Batistianos) to prove he was trustworthy. Sturgis could have pulled the trigger on Castro any time, but decided he didn't stand to actually get the contract money, since he wouldn't have survived the escapade (even if he had been successful).

Funny how Nixon's political career came to a sudden end though, huh? Kennedy bangs thousands of women during his marriage, in competition with his brother Bobby who did the same, and alleged journalists saw this going on in the White House, and said nothing. Diem assassinated, hey, it's somebody else's doing! JFK takes the world to the brink of nuclear war not once but twice, no problem, not even in retrospect.

And by the way, WTF is HuffPo "reporting" doing creeping onto and stinking up FR?

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