Run-in with the Mob
DOUBLE CROSS By Sam and Chuck Giancana (Warner, $114) IT happens to all of us sometime or another if you do book reviews: you get lumbered with something that is either boring or disgusting. This one is gross and disgusting. But it has, apparently, made the US best-seller list.
It is the story - allegedly told by themselves - of the Giancana brothers. For many years they ran the Chicago Outfit, a collection of Italian-extraction gangsters with a murderous brutality which resulted in the deaths of innumerable little men right upto President John Kennedy and his brother, Bobby.
A peculiar aspect of this long-running saga over the decades was that, according to the book, the Outfit was working hand-in-glove with the the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), even including the assassination of President Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald was CIA; his killer Jack Ruby was a long-time member of the Outfit. There could be no chance of open disclosure of the Outfit-CIA connection.
The Giancana family, according to the book, used their muscle to get the Kennedy clan into the White House, by a slender margin. At first, it all seemed to work. But then it cooled off. The Outfit was no longer needed. So the Outfit decided that the Kennedy Clan was no longer needed: double cross.
This is a devious book, glorifying in violence. It is credited to Sam and Chuck Giancana. There is no mention of a ghost writer but I would be very surprised if there was not one.
Not recommended reading, unless you want to go to bed with nausea.