Author explores ties between mobsters and U.S. presidents

On a hot summer day in the early 1980s, Eric Dezenhall, then in his 20s and working in President Ronald Reagan’s White House communications office, mentioned to a person on the team that he was from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

“Isn’t that Mafia?” she asked, regarding the city’s reputation.

This led to a general conversation about the Mob, a discussion that stayed with the now 62-year-old author and crisis management executive as he pursued a “lifelong endeavor” examining organized crime’s connections to U.S. presidents.

Dezenhall’s interest in these connections has resulted in a well-researched book to be released January 14, Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents and the Deals They Made. The book is coming out only days before a new president is sworn in at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Mafia alliances

An author whose published works include fiction and nonfiction, Dezenhall, in his newest book, explores how White House occupants sometimes joined forces with underworld operatives. Some of these alliances were for personal political advancement. Others were for then-secret government objectives, including unsuccessful efforts during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro with the Mob’s help.

The Kennedy episode is just one example. Years earlier, during World War II, the White House struck a deal with New York mobsters Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano to protect the waterfront from wartime sabotage.

Other presidents, whether in office or not, had similar dealings with the Mafia or their associates. Harry Truman’s connection to Kansas City racketeers and political kingmaker Tom Pendergast is examined in detail in Wiseguys and the White House, as is the association that Dezenhall’s former employer, Reagan, an actor and Screen Actors Guild president, once had with syndicate-connected Hollywood insiders.

Ranking system        

In the book, Dezenhall offers his own numerical grading scale to evaluate how closely presidents worked with mobsters. The scale goes from No. 1 (“Tangential Mob links at best”) to No. 5 (“Wouldn’t have been president without Mob”).

For instance, Dezenhall gives Franklin D. Roosevelt a No. 2 ranking (“Mob links are not very impactful”) for his administration’s efforts during the first half of the 1940s to guard against Nazi incursions at U.S. ports.

“FDR authorized wartime measures under conditions of great peril,” Dezenhall writes. “He was likely aware of Mob involvement in one intelligence aspect of national defense in World War II, but it was a risk worth taking.”

Missouri’s Truman is viewed more unfavorably, given the worst rating, a No. 5.

“Few believe he greatly benefited in the material sense, but he saw dealing with racket-connected people as a necessary evil and advanced accordingly,” Dezenhall writes.

In an email, Dezenhall elaborated on Truman’s low score.

“Harry Truman would not have been president without the Mob,” Dezenhall said. “We know that Truman came out of the political machine in Kansas City, but many historians gloss over that this was an out-and-out Costa Nostra-controlled enterprise, and brazenly so. There is no evidence that Truman ever took a dime from the Mob, but he owed his career to them and helped them out along the way, both on his rise and as president.”

Truman was surprisingly candid about his involvement with the underworld, Dezenhall said. “So, the president who ended World War II with the atom bomb owed his career to the Mafia,” he said. “That’s a lot to get your head around.”

That long-ago conversation on the White House South Lawn, starting with a discussion about Dezenhall’s hometown, led to his extensive research over the years into mobsters and U.S. public officials at the highest level. In an email, Dezenhall reflected on this decades-long obsession.

“I’ve been cooking this one for 40 years, ever since I told one of my bosses in the White House where I grew up,” he said.

Recalling that conversation, Denzenhall noted that his hometown in New Jersey had been in the news a lot “because the Philly-South Jersey Mob war was raging and the Pizza Connection heroin racket was headquartered down the street.”

“You couldn’t grow up where I did and not have a relative, neighbor or family friend involved with gangsters,” he said. “We were standing 20 feet from the Oval Office and my colleagues were talking about how the Mob ran the country. I was in my early 20s, but I thought they were out of their minds and became obsessed by the gap that separates pop culture fantasy from day-to-day reality.”

‘Who’s being naïve?’

While researching the book, Dezenhall learned that high-ranking mobsters were concerned that national politicians would take advantage of them.

Over time, it has been reported that the mobsters who worked to get John F. Kennedy elected felt betrayed when the administration, led by his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, launched an anti-Mob crusade. Others from the underworld suspected their loyalty would result in betrayal.

“Meyer Lansky in particular expected to get knifed in the back, and even the Chicago Outfit guys who helped with labor in the 1960 election were wary about the project,” Dezenhall said. “The politicians usually got the better end of the deal, as Meyer predicted.”

Dezenhall, who had access to Lansky’s private records, diaries and correspondence, said, “The way Meyer spoke and wrote was not the rhetoric of a man who was pulling all the strings; rather, it was of a man besieged.”

The only mobsters who believed they controlled things “were the small-timers who needed to justify their way of life,” Dezenhall said.

“The top guys knew it was a dog’s life,” he said. “You can get away with more if you’re making the laws than if you’re breaking them. I think about how Kay told Michael Corleone in The Godfather that he was naïve to believe that presidents and senators have men killed. Michael responded, ‘Who’s being naïve, Kay?’ The Mob has long been a gear in the engine of presidential politics, sometimes by design, other times by opportunity.”

According to Dezenhall, there’s a lot to learn from these alliances. 

“The big lesson  — and a Machiavellian one — is that the players who knew the power of appearances and hypocrisy fared better than the ones who dismissed it,” Dezenhall said. “Nixon’s law-and-order crusade, not to mention very real prosecutions of organized crime, drowned out how he benefited from gangsters. Reagan’s career was sponsored by Lew Wasserman, who built MCA on the back of the Mob, but with his sunny disposition combined with select prosecutions, the Mob lurking beneath the surface of Reagan’s career didn’t register in the heartland despite relentless reporting by my friend (journalist and author) Dan Moldea.”

Dezenhall’s newest book also marks a career turning point. On January 1, he is retiring from his Washington, D.C.-based crisis management firm to write full time. The firm, Dezenhall Resources, will remain in operation but will be run by a “new generation,” he said. Dezenhall will be available at the firm as needed, but his main focus will be on book-writing.

“I’ve been noodling on a humorous book about what it was like to employ hundreds of human beings over the years,” he said. “It wasn’t funny at the time, but looking back over 40 years, I don’t know how I got anything done while dealing with the lunacy of personnel problems. Come to think of it, I could have used some help from the Mob to keep people in line, but I’m way too straight.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.