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Shortly after Batiste’s fall and Castro’s ascension to the leadership of Cuba, Meyer Lansky proposes to the CIA that Castro be “taken out.” Norman Rothman, who has covered a number of VP Richard Nixon’s major gambling disasters as manager of the mob-owned Sans Souci casino, agrees.
According to House and Senate Intelligence Committee probes, the CIA and mob bosses begin planning the murder of Fidel Castro in the fall of this year. Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana meet with CIA Director Allen Dulles- who holds regular briefings with Vice-President Nixon.
CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and William Harvey (who organized the CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's Guatemalen government), meet numerous times with the gangsters. Plots are hatched, but Castro’s excellent security, as well as a good dose of charmed luck, leaves him untouched. Meyer Lansky reportedly offers a million-dollar reward for the killing of Cuban leader.
Hoover discovers from electronic surveillance that Sam Giancana, bloodthirsty Chicago mob boss and sometime-patron of Joe Kennedy Sr, and John Roselli are in league with the CIA to have Castro assassinated.
When Nixon’s friend and advisor Bebe Rebozo organizes the development of the Cuban shopping center in Miami, he picks ‘Big Al’ Polizzi’s construction company. Polizzi has held such high rank in the mob world that, according to the FBI, he is on the Mafia Grand Council. ‘Big Al’ has also worked for Meyer Lansky, and was jailed in 1943 for smuggling liquor between Cuba and the US. He owns the Sands, one of the Miami Beach hotels controlled by the mob, and is connected to US narcotics trafficking. In the ‘60s, Rebozo will try to get Polizzi a federal pardon, calling him, “a person of good moral character.”
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