By- Suzie-Q @ 7:30 PM MST
Barry Goldwater: Friends In Low Places
American Mafia- By John William Tuohy
July 2002
When Hensley strolled out of the joint, Marley bought his silence with a lucrative Phoenix-based Budweiser beer distributorship.
Just when you think they’re out, they pull themselves back in again.
The mob has come close to setting up camp in the Oval Office more then once, through Truman, Kennedy and Nixon, but their ultimate dream never actually comes to fruition, for one reason or another.
But, I almost admire their tenacity. And I stress the word almost.
Take the recent example of Senator John McCann, [sic], Presidential candidate and Senator from Arizona.
Very few people outside the world of organized crime realize that the father of the Senator’s second wife is James W. Hensley.
And who was James W. Hensley, you ask.
He was an Arizona businessman who fell in with the wrong crowd a while back, and ended up taking the rap for a wheeler-dealer named Kemper Marley, Sr. over a liquor violation case back in 1948.
Although Hensley was represented by the best defense Arizona cash could buy, the services of future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Justice William Rehnquist, he got slammed away for a whole year.
But it all worked out. When Hensley strolled out of the joint, Marley bought his silence with a lucrative Phoenix-based Budweiser beer distributorship.
So, who is this Kemper Marley Sr?
To answer that you have to go back to a sweltering summer day in 1976 when Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republican Newspaper, stepped into his Datsun, put his foot on the peddle and was blown to bits. Parts of the reporter’s body were found ten feet from the burning car.
Bolles had been poking into Arizona’s local and state governments and discovered a land fraud ring, influence peddling, and shady deals that appeared to lead to the very top of Arizona’s power structure and to Senator Barry Goldwater’s doorstep.
If the purpose of murdering Bolles was to cover a series of crimes, it was a big mistake. An enraged news media descended on Arizona, determined to uncover the facts behind the Bolles killing.
The investigation led to a Phoenix liquor magnate and one time Bookie named Kemper Marley Sr., who had ties to Arizona’s resident Mafia Prince, Peter Licavoli.
Marley was a major financial and political power in the state and wanted to take back his seat on the Arizona Racing Commission. He had already been appointed to the post in 1976 by the Governor, only to resign several days later when his ties to organized crime surfaced.
The reporter who made the connections between the mob and Marley was Don Bolles.
Although never charged with the murder, most reporters on the scene believed that Kemper Marley ordered Bolles’ murder. Their suspicions were confirmed when John Adamson, an alleged burglar and arsonist, confessed to blowing up Bolles.
During the trial, a witness named Howard Woodall testified that Adamson told him Bolles was killed because he’d uncovered evidence of a loan swindle involving Marley, Barry and Robert Goldwater and Harry Rosenzweig.
The Bolles-Marley connection to the Goldwater brothers was only one of the many associations made over the years between the Senator and the underworld.
Robert Goldwater, the Senator’s brother, was a longtime friend of Moe Dalitz, the man who truly built Las Vegas.
Dalitz was present at the Atlantic City crime conference in 1929, and at the all important 1943 power summit at the Waldorf Astoria.
Dalitz was an early investor in Arizona real estate, with some of his first deals going back to 1933.
In 1943, it was Dalitz who introduced mob underboss Peter Licavoli, Sr. to the state.
Licavoli loved the place and purchased a massive Tucson ranch and he and Bobby Goldwater eventually went into the restaurant business, with Licavoli putting up the financing.
Another pal with a questionable background who was close to the Goldwater camp, was Willie Bioff, labor extortionist, paid goon, pimp and government informant.
In 1943, Bioff testified against the top leadership of the Chicago mob about their role in a massive Hollywood extortion scandal. That testimony resulted in convictions for mob boss Paul Ricca, Johnny Roselli and others.
In exchange for selling out his partners, Bioff walked away from prosecution a free man and got to keep the millions he had stolen as well.
Willie moved to Arizona, where he lived under the name Willie Nelson, Nelson being his wife’s maiden name.
Contrary to what’s usually written, Willie Bioff wasn’t hiding out in Arizona. In fact, he worked at the Riviera Casino in Vegas as the entertainment director for Gus Greenbaum, Chicago’s man in Nevada.
Outgoing, likable and very rich, Willie was a natural for politics, and was soon popular within the golden elite of Phoenix society, which is how he met Barry Goldwater, in November of 1952.
The two men became fast friends.
Goldwater, a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, flew Bioff and his wife all over the state to attend various parties, and Willie landed a steady flow of cash into Goldwater’s political campaign chest.
Willie even loaned Bobby Goldwater $10,000 for a farming investment in Southern California.
They were close.
A month before the Mafia killed him, Willie Bioff and his wife, Barry Goldwater and his family, vacationed together in Las Vegas.
In 1955, Peter Licavoli, Moe Dalitz’s old pal, and Paul Ricca, boss of the Chicago mob, started to shake Bioff down for cash.
Willie paid off for a while, but then he started making noise about going to the feds through his new pal, Barry Goldwater.
The next morning, Bioff stepped into his Ford pick up, stepped on the gas, and was blown to kingdom come.
Barry Goldwater showed up for the funeral and denied, with a straight face, knowing who Willie Bioff really was.
Later, when the pressure continued, the Senator justified his relationship with the onetime pimp by saying it was an attempt “to gather information about labor racketeering for a government study.”
Yeah, Okay.
After that, came the Newman scandal.
Mike Newman, was a childhood friend of the Goldwaters and operated a huge gambling racket, completely unhindered by the law, in Phoenix.
Police suspected that Newman’s money man was Gus Greenbaum, but the connection was never made.
The building he operated out of was owned by Harry Rosenzweig, who was a close friend of both Gus Greenbaum and Willie Bioff. Rosenzweig was also the state Republican chairman, Phoenix Man of the Year, and Barry Goldwater’s financial and political mentor.
When Newman’s gambling operation was eventually closed down and charges were brought against him, Barry Goldwater used his considerable political power to get Newman a lenient sentence and outstanding prison conditions.
Goldwater’s troublesome brother, Bobby, was said to be Newman’s best customer.
Another friend of Barry’s was Gus Greenbaum, an old time Chicago hood who ran the Flamingo for the outfit.
Greenbaum hosted the Goldwaters at the Flamingo and Riviera casinos on a regular basis, and when Greenbaum and his wife were murdered, Harry Rosenzweig became the unpaid appraiser of Greenbaum’s estate which was being held in trust by the Valley National Bank where Bobby Goldwater was a director.
That would have been all right, but Greenbaum was a hood who went back to the old Capone mob. The Chicago outfit had sent Greenbaum to Arizona in 1928 to manage the Southwest division of its wire service, Trans-American.
In the early forties, he was moved to Vegas where he took over the Flamingo after the Bugsy Siegel murder, and put the place in the black within the first six months of his management.
By 1950, Greenbaum was widely recognized as the driving force behind the success of the $50 million Tropicana, as well as being known and respected in the underworld as a reliable source of information on Las Vegas real estate.
Like Willie Bioff, Greenbaum lived in Arizona, part time, and was close to Barry Goldwater, then a Phoenix Arizona Councilman. In fact, Goldwater’s family operated a branch of Goldwater’s Department store inside the Desert Inn, which was the excuse Goldwater used for visiting Vegas so often.
After his phenomenal success at the Flamingo and the Tropicana, Greenbaum was called in to put the Riviera Casino in the black after the place lost five million dollars for its original investors.
Greenbaum didn’t want the job, but, Tony Accardo and Jake Guzak, the Chicago mobs money manager, and technically, Greenbaum’s boss, personally flew out to Phoenix to try to persuade him to take the position at the Riviera.
Greenbaum heard them out, but turned the job down, because, he told them, the strain of correcting the outfit’s stupid mistakes was starting to take its effects on him. After seven years on the hot seat, he had enough. He was tired, he was rich and he wanted to retire away from Vegas to Phoenix.
Accardo and Guzak said they understood and returned to Chicago.
One week later, Greenbaum’s sister-in-law was found murdered in her bedroom, her throat split. The message was received. Greenbaum moved back to Vegas to run the Riviera for a 27% interest in the place.
This time he lasted only three years.
In 1958, Johnny Roselli, who was close to Greenbaum, and knew Barry Goldwater as well, was told by Accardo to order Greenbaum to step down. He was addicted to heroin, drunk when he wasn’t high, running around with women half his age who stole from him, and was deeply in debt from gambling at the tables, losing up to $20,000 a week. Worst of all, he was skimming from the joint “Beyond,” said Roselli, “what the guys back in Chicago considered reasonable.”
Roselli went out to Vegas and gave Greenbaum the order, he was to sell his share in the Riviera to one of the outfit’s front men and leave town. Do that, he could live. All past sins forgiven.
But Greenbaum refused. “This town is in my blood, Johnny,” he told Roselli, and went right back to stealing from the skim.
On December 3, 1958, the police found Greenbaum, dead, in bed, his throat was cut so completely that his head was almost falling off.
Down the hall, Greenbaum’s wife’s throat was cut as well. She had been knocked out with a heavy bottle which caved in the right side of her eye. Newspapers were piled around her to keep the blood from staining the carpet.
The Chicago outfit, which, by mob standards anyway, normally showed a loyalty to those who served it, would have let Greenbaum’s sins go. After all, he had made them a fortune, but Meyer Lansky had a piece of the Riviera and pushed for Greenbaum’s demise.
Or at least that’s the official mob explanation for Greenbaum’s murder.
The true story, is that when Paul Ricca found out that Greenbaum was stealing from the skim, a skim split between Chicago and the five New York Families, he sent word down to Greenbaum, that he expected a cut.
Like Willie Bioff, Greenbaum paid Ricca, about $300,000 in 1957, alone. Then he got stupid and stopped sending in his payment. That’s when Marshal Caifano, Chicago’s enforcer in Vegas, showed up.
Once again, Senator Barry Goldwater showed up for the funeral.
Special thanks to investigative writer Dan Moldea for his help in preparation of this story.
Mr. Tuohy can be reached by writing to MobStudy@aol.com
During Prohibition, Peter and Thomas (Yonnie) Licavoli, Joseph Bommarito and other St. Louis gangsters migrated to Detroit to act as gunmen for the Purple Gang, a group of notorious Jewish bootleggers. Later, Peter Licavoli moved to Tucson in 1944 at the request of mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Moe Dalitz. At the time of Bolles’ death, Peter Licavoli Sr. shared power in Arizona with Joe Bonanno, the exiled boss of one of New York’s ruling Mafia families.
This is the milieu Bolles inhabited by the mid-1970s.
Profits from illicit alcohol sales during Prohibition helped establish a new multi-ethnic criminal cartel in the U.S. After repeal in 1933, the same crime groups began financing the nascent casino industry in Las Vegas, and dominating other rackets throughout the Southwest, often with the paid cooperation of local politicians and law enforcement authorities.
Beginning in 1946, Licavoli, the Arizona mob boss, operated an illegal gambling wire service with Kemper Marley Sr., the wealthiest liquor distributor in the state. Later, Marley’s United Liquor Co. supplied Emprise dog tracks with 10 percent of their alcoholic beverages. During the 1974 Arizona gubernatorial race, Marley was the biggest contributor to Gov. Raul Castro’s campaign. After the election, the Castro administration appointed Marley to the state racing commission, but he was forced to resign because of adverse publicity from stories written by Bolles.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001120112000/home.stlnet.com/%7Ecdstelzer/bolles.html
As you can see, from what I have posted… mobsters can’t get out alive… once in the mob… always in the mob… and they do what they are told or they are found dead.
Nice life, huh?
So Cindy’s rich daddy had mob connections. Not surprised.
All the more reason to keep McCain out of the White House. People without the internet doesn’t know half the stuff McSame has done because the media coddles him.
Cats r Flyfishn:
Have you heard anything about this??
Press release: Philip J. Berg, Esq. Files Federal Lawsuit Requesting Obama Be Removed as a Candidate as he does not meet the Qualifications for President
Suit filed 08/21/08, No. 08-cv-4083
(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 08/21/08 ) – Philip J. Berg, Esquire, … filed a lawsuit in Federal Court today, Berg vs. Obama, Civil Action No. 08-cv-4083, seeking a Declaratory Judgment and an Injunction that Obama does not meet the qualifications to be President of the United States. Berg filed this suit for the best interests of the Democratic Party and the citizens of the United States.
Philip J. Berg, Esquire stated in his lawsuit that Senator Obama:
1. Is not a naturalized citizen; and/or
2. Lost his citizenship when he was adopted in Indonesia; and/or
3. Has dual loyalties because of his citizenship with Kenya and Indonesia.
Berg stated: “I filed this action at this time to avoid the obvious problems that will occur when the Republican Party raises these issues after Obama is nominated.
Suzie-Q, no I haven’t heard this but I see that you posted something. Wow this lawsuit is bullshit because Obama was born in the USA, he was never adopted and he cannot have dual citizenship with Kenya because Kenya’s law does not allow duel citizenship.
Hawaii Shaloha Education Nation Building: Hawaii’s former AIPAC supported RINO Governess, Linda Lingle, initially stated Obama’s birth certificate could not be confirmed from either Queen’s Hospital or Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu. She later confirms from the Hawaii Aloha Board of Health that Kapiolani Hospital is the origin of Obama’s found birth Certificate. Some interesting sidebar notes: Obama’s parents were both attending the new East-West Center at the University of Hawaii Campus. The Asian Pacific Economic Council [APEC] recently held their Global attended seminar meeting in 2011. In the early 1960s, the East-West Center was a major think tank for the cold war participants in Southeast Asia [Vietnam, Indonesia, Phillipines] including Africa. Obama’s mother and Kenyan father both took Russian language classes, at the height of the Russian-Sino Communist’s global influence, which included these areas as well as Central America [Nigaragua, El Salvador, Hondorus] and South America [Chili, Argentina, Peru, et al, visa Cuba. My aunt in Hawaii in the Hawaii Aloha real estate and mortgage business for many years, as well as working briefly for the Bishop Estate mortgage division land barons, she attended many Hawaii International Banking seminar forum meetings which included the most powerful advanced female in Hawaii’s Asian and local male dominated banking industry for Obama’s Grandmother, Madeline Dunham, working aloof and helping to establish the Bank of Hawaii’s Escrow Department. Afer her daughter [Obama’s Mother] is separated from Obama’s Kenyan father who departed for Harvard and married briefly a Jewish lady, his mother meets and marries a Indonesian national at the East-West Center, who is linked to the Indonesian Military with vested Oil interests. This is the same time frame for returning back to Indonesia with his new wife and Obama [Barry Sutero] for the Military coup from the Sukarno Military regime to the Indonesian Dictator Suharto….later reported worse than America’s oldest foreign Asian colony since the 1898 Spanish-American War, for Philippine President: Ferdinand Marcos. During the time Obama’s mother is in Indonesia, working for various U.S. Government agencies, Peter Geihtner, the father of Obama’s Sect of Treasury Tim Geihtner, is operating in Indonesia. Soon after Martial law is declared in 1972, from next door Phillipines, Sect of Treasury, George Schultz alters the Gold Standard table. Soon after the collapse for U.S foreign polivcy in Southeast Asia in 1975 [Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and later Burma [Myamar], “The Family Jewels” Report involves classifed CIA assasination claims in Vietnam [Diem Brothers, Chili: Allende] including tampering with internal governments such as allied Australia [Goth Witham Labor Government]. In 1976, East Timor is invaded by Suharto’s strong arm Military government while the Ford Administrations changes numerous U.S. Cabinet Officials known as “The Halloween Massacre”, replacing CIA Director, William Colby [“The Man Nobody Knew” – Nugan Bank Intl morphed into Hawaii Aloha Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham, & Wong CIA Corporate Front] with George H.W. Bush. This inludes NSA Henry Kissinger [AIPAC links], Brent Scrowcroft [Mormon Connections], and the newly created U.S. Congressional Intelligence Chairman: Hawaii U.S. Senator, the self-designated King of [DOD] Pork from the U.S. Military Quid Pro Quo cross-roads in the U.S. Sovereign Off-Shore South Pacific: Daneil Inouye [Watergate Chairman – Feature 1987 Iran-Contra Gate Keeper Chairman]. This includes the use from the 1976 CIA – NSA created: “Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act” [FSIA] under the Ford Administration. Small World, eh?
Hawaii Shaloha Education Nation Building: Hawaii’s former AIPAC supported Governess, Linda Lingle, initially stated Obama’s birth certificate could not be confirmed from either Queen’s Hospital or Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu. She later confirms from the Hawaii Aloha Board of Health that Kapiolani Hospital is the origin of Obama’s found birth Certificate. Some interesting sidebar notes: Obama’s parents were both attending the new East-West Center at the University of Hawaii Campus. The Asian Pacific Economic Council [APEC] recently held their Global attended seminar meeting in 2011. In the early 1960s, the East-West Center was a major think tank for the cold war participants in Southeast Asia [Vietnam, Indonesia, Phillipines] including Africa. Obama’s mother and Kenyan father both took Russian language classes, at the height of the Russian-Sino Communist’s global influence, which included these areas as well as Central America [Nigaragua, El Salvador, Hondorus] and South America [Chili, Argentina, Peru, et al, visa Cuba. My aunt in Hawaii in the Hawaii Aloha real estate and mortgage business for many years, attended many Banking seminars which included
Mobsters you say! The present govt is mostly a product of the Chicago political machine…call that what you want.not red white and blue,for sure….My personal experience and that of my dear father, rip, who had business transactions with Peter L were all on the up and up…Peter’s son Teddy and I were best buddies in grade school and I visited their home many many times…I saw nothing unusual, Peter was a very busy businessman always doing his books–that was all I saw…Media and facts, what a joke!…Media vs facts and truth. that’s the reality…Peter L moved to Tuscon in 44.??.HOWEVER, .I saw him several times at the family house on Balfour in Grosse Pt. in 1949-51. He visited his son as did my father at the Hall of the Diving Child boarding school on several occasions during that time span…He was a very loving father to my best buddy Teddy…He was a very astute business owner…not some mob boss as the bullshit media claim…. I know what I saw with my own eyes…I was in their house on many many occasions…Even youngsters know the score…and as a street wise kid, I could smell a rat..there was none there….Let the LiCavoli family accusers bring facts to the table, not just some hearsay, other blurbs from competing newspapers, hype, sensationalism or WRF yellow journalism…Like the famous Jack Webb, aka Sgt Friday, used to say: show me the facts, mam, only the facts…