The CIA's plan to poison Castro ran through mobster Johnny Roselli
In September 1960 the CIA sent a former FBI agent to approach a Chicago mobster about killing Fidel Castro. Johnny Roselli, a smooth operator with friends in Hollywood, connected the agency with Mafia bosses who had lost their Havana casinos. The poison pills never reached their target; one batch ended up useless in a restaurant freezer.
He was born Filippo Sacco in Esperia, Italy, on 4 July 1905, and emigrated to Boston with his mother at six. After a narcotics arrest in 1922 he fled to New York, then Chicago, where he took the name John Roselli. By 1924 he was in Los Angeles driving liquor trucks for the bootlegger Tony Cornero and bribing officials in Orange County to open ports for smuggling.
Al Capone recruited him in 1928 to watch Chicago's interests in Los Angeles. Roselli became the go-between who carried payoffs from the underworld to the corrupt administration of mayor Frank Shaw, which began in 1933, and he moved easily among film people, befriending Columbia's Harry Cohn and getting producer credits on gangster pictures through Bryan Foy. That glamour had limits: in 1943 he was convicted in a scheme to extort money from Hollywood figures and stayed in prison until 1947. By 1956 he was the Chicago and Los Angeles mobs' chief man in Las Vegas, making sure casino profits were skimmed for the bosses.
Castro's closure of the mob's Cuban casinos after the 1959 revolution gave Roselli, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante a motive. The CIA used Robert Maheu, an aide to Howard Hughes, as the intermediary, posing as an agent of businesses that wanted Castro dead, and supplied six poison pills. The Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 halted the effort, and a revival in 1962 with Roselli's CIA friend Bill Harvey failed too. The scheme became public in detail when the agency's Family Jewels files were released in 2007.
In 1975 Roselli testified to the Senate committee led by Frank Church, shortly after Giancana was shot dead before his own scheduled testimony. Roselli returned in April 1976 to answer questions about a conspiracy against President Kennedy. That July his sister reported him missing in Florida, and he was found dead weeks later, on 7 August 1976.
Source: John Roselli
