Ted Kennedy's accident involving the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in the Chappaquiddick incident, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. started refusing food and became uninterested in life. He died shortly afterwards on November 18, 1969.
Joseph P. Kennedy
Kennedy formed alliances with several other Irish-Catholic money men, including Charles E. Mitchell, Michael J. Meehan and Bernard Smith. He helped establish the Libby-Owens-Ford stock pool, an arrangement in which Kennedy and colleagues created an artificial scarcity of Libby-Owens-Ford stock to drive up the value of their own holdings in the stock. Using inside information, and the public's lack of knowledge, a pool operator would bribe journalists to present that information in the most advantageous manner. The stocks would then change in price up or down depending on the position favoured by the pool.
Kennedy got out of the market in 1928, long before the Crash, locking in multi-million dollar profits. Indeed when the 1929 crash did come, he made money due to his short positions.
During Prohibition, Kennedy's company Somerset Importers became the exclusive American agent for Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch which was only allowed to be imported during Prohibition for medicinal purposes. Anticipating the end of Prohibition (not difficult to do as it slowly passed through the required number of states) he assembled a very large inventory of stock that he sold for a profit of millions of dollars when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. He invested this money in residential and commercial real estate, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and Hialeah Race Track in Hialeah, Florida.
http://tinyurl.com/rng44
Good grief!