In 1962, just two days before he was to be deported from the
United States to a jail cell in England, John Factor was granted a Presidential
Pardon by John F. Kennedy.
• • •
Shortly after Roger Touhy was out of the way, the Chicago
mob saw fit to push Factor out of the Stardust casino and place the operation
into the steady hands of Moe Dalitz. But when the facts behind the transaction
hit the media—that John Factor had sold one of the largest and most prof-itable
casinos in the world for the paltry sum of $15 milllion—Attorney General Robert
Kennedy ordered an investigation into the sale. The United States Internal
Revenue Service along with the State of Nevada Gaming Commission started a
joint investigation into the Stardust sale.
The joint force intended to call Factor in for ques¬tioning.
However they were beaten to the punch when the Los Angeles Office of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suddenly ordered him in to to show
due cause why he shouldn’t be deport-ed to England where he was still a wanted
felon. The INS had now decided, based on Jake’s arrest and conviction in 1942
for fraud, that he was an undesirable alien. At seventy years of age, John
Factor, who had lived in America since at least 1919, was being ordered out of
the country.
The problem was that the INS had never closed its record on
Factor since he entered the country through Mexico after the British stock
swindle. It was a minor, white lie that kept the record open. Jake had told the
INS at the border that he had been born in England while their records said he
was born in Poland and the INS could prove it. Unable to show due cause why he
shouldn’t be deported, Factor was ordered to surrender to the INS on December
25, 1962, at which point he would be arrested and deported to Poland.
At the time, Poland was a backward, war-torn country,
crushed under the iron-fisted rule of the Russian Communist Party. The
conditions in Poland caused Factor to fight hard to prove to the govern-ment
that he was, in fact, a British citizen. The problem with sending Jake to
Britain was that his conviction for stock fraud remained in force. The second
he landed at Heathrow, he’d be jailed. Adding to Factor’s woes was the ongoing
IRS inves¬tigation into payment of his back taxes for the years 1935 through
1939. The government wanted Factor to explain where he received $479,093.27 in
income, and Factor couldn’t remember. If he was deported, the Government would
impound his holdings, which Factor estimated to be $13 million, until the
matter was settled, which meant that he would leave the country the way he came
in, penniless.16
16. If
his wife, Rella, went with him, he would have been more fortunate; the INS
estimated her wealth to be, in 1960, $40 million.
The only thing that could save Factor from deportation was
death or a miracle. The miracle came straight from the White House in the form
of a pardon.
Presidential pardons, the last imperial power of the Executive
Office, have long been the golden parachute for the mob’s monied elite looking
to avoid deportation, obtain a position in the casino business or a labor
union, or to help muscle their way into a legitimate enterprise.
Abusing the pardon privilege has had a torrid and often
astounding history, even on a state level. In the early 1920s, Illinois’
incredibly corrupt Governor, Len Small, sold an estimated 500 pardons before he
was indicted and chased from office. Small’s broker on the pardon deals was a
union extortionist named “Umbrella Mike” Boyle, a bigwig in the Electrical
Workers Union. Among Boyle’s clients was Spike O’Donnell, who started the great
Chicago beer wars of 1926 upon his release.
In the 1970s, when federal prosecutors tried to deport southwestern
Pennsylvania mob boss, John S. LaRocca, Governor John Fine pardoned the alleged
godfather of corruption along with his capo, Frank Rosa. Later, Governor George
Earle par¬doned Mafia bosses Joe Luciano, Luigi Quaranta and alleged Capporeime
Nicholas Piccolo. He also pardoned Frank “Binkie” Palermo, allegedly a made
member of the Mafia; Felix Bocchiccio, a fight fixer; Leo Kamminski and Louie
Barish, suspected mob members.
One of the most outrageous pardons on record belongs to
Harry Truman who pardoned “Ice Pick” Danny Motto, a labor thug in the Gambino
family. He had been convicted of wartime racketeering and as a result, Danny
the Ice Pick wasn’t allowed to hold an “elective” office in New York’s Bakers
Union local 350, a 900-member local which he terrorized from 1939 until his
death in the 1980s. Motto’s 1947 federal racketeering charge, plus a previous
one for murder, gave the Justice Department due cause to deport him. However, at the last moment, after
deportation had been ordered, Truman granted a pardon and the deportation was
canceled. The man who worked behind the scenes on Motto’s behalf was his
lawyer, Herb Itkin. Itkin was a shadowy figure with unspec-ified connections to
Naval Intelligence and later to the CIA.
It was Itkin who introduced New York’s
mayoral administration (under John Lindsay) to labor mobster and loan shark
Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corralo, who was also Danny Motto’s boss. That meeting
would eventually lead to the James Marcus scandal of 1966.
Truman also pardoned many felons from the Boss Pendergast
political machine. More than half of those pardoned were convicted of
interfering with a citizen’s right to vote, or, in other words, were members of
Owney Madden’s goon squads.
And now it was John F. Kennedy’s turn. During his brief
presidency, Kennedy issued 472 pardons, more than any chief executive before or
since. About half of these appear to be questionable, at best.
On November 26, 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy did
something unusual: he changed the laws that govern presidential pardons. It was
unusual because the fourteen sets of rules, all advi-sory in nature, that
govern presidential pardons, have seldom been tampered with, since they were
written in 1893.
The change that Kennedy made in the rules,17
17.The
rules that govern federal pardons, are just that...rules...not laws. They can
be made, broken or ignored
by the President. All of these rules are simply procedural in nature.
Pardons are the last imperial power of the presidency, and
aside from the few pardons that have outraged Americans, such as Jimmy Hoffa’s
highly questionable pardon, the practice goes on, unregulated.
A few days after Kennedy changed the rules for pardons, an
alcoholic Chicago hood named Chuckie English, a former 42 Gang member and
bodyguard to Sam Giancana, strolled out of the Amory Lounge and leaned up
against the FBI observation car parked just across the street from the tavern.
The agents reported, “English is bemoaning the fact that the federal government
is closing in on the organi-zation and nothing can be done about it.
He made
several bad remarks about the Kennedy adminis-tration and pointed out that the
Attorney General raising money for the Cuba invaders makes Chicago’s syndicate
look like amateurs.”
Business executives and CEOs across the coun¬try were
whispering the same thing. Many of the executives were amazed to find
themselves talking on the phone with the Attorney General of the United States
and were even more amazed at what they heard. Kennedy operated shamelessly. He
told businesses he wanted money for the Bay of Pigs pro-gram, and reminded them
that they had either pending contracts before the government or crimi-nal cases
before the Justice Department. Before they could respond, Kennedy again
mentioned the fund to free the Cubans, and hung up. John Factor also knew about
the fund to free the Cubans. In fact he threw $25,000 into the project and
later explained to a curious press corp that James Roosevelt, the problem child
of the clan, had approached him about the donation.18
18. James
Roosevelt, then a member of Congress, strongly supported Factor’s bid for a
Presidential Pardon as well.
Factor had already given Kennedy $25,000 to help retire his
campaign debt and his wife gave several thousand more. Despite the endless
rumors to the contrary, Factor denied that he had given $1,000,000 to the
Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation19 as well.
Miraculously, on December 24, 1962, after Factor’s
contribution to the Bay of Pigs fund, President John F. Kennedy signed a
presidential pardon for Factor for the mail fraud conviction. As a result the
deportation proceeding against him was dismissed. For mob watchers and law
enforcement employees, who had put so much faith in Robert Kennedy’s war on
crime, Jake the Barber’s presi-dential pardon fell from the skies like a bolt
of lightning.
It was never made clear if Kennedy’s actions also killed the
investigation of Factor’s dealing in the Stardust but one way or the other,
that investigation was closed.
Factor always denied that the mob used pressure with the
White House to win him his pardon but in mid-1963, while Jake was trying to
gain control of the National Life Insurance Company of America and was buying
up the company’s shares at $125 each, he sold 400 shares to Murray Humpreys at
$20 each. Factor’s loss was $105 per share. Humpreys then sold the shares back
to Factor for $125 a share, making him $42,000 richer in one day.
19. The
Foundation refused this writer access to their records and refused to deny or
confirm that Factor donated money to its treasury. The reader should note that
the Foundation is a privately held trust; it does not have to account for its
spending or explain salaries given to its executives, many of whom are, and
have been members of the Kennedy family.
As far as the Hump’s unusual and creative stock transaction
with Jake (20) the Barber was concerned, the government decided that it was a
taxable exchange “for services rendered” and sent capital gains tax bills to
both of them.
20. In
1960 an FBI informant, believed to be Jimmy "The Turk" recorded
Humpreys and Joey Glimco discussing Roger Touhy’s murder, a month after it
happened. Humpreys said, "But this Factor, he’s a dirty
cocksucker...here’s a guy I've always gone along with. We go ahead, and we do
it, originally, and I wouldn’t...so he says, ok...200,000." Its not clear
from the transcripts if Humpreys was referring to a payment from Factor to him
of $200,000 to murder Touhy. Humpreys added, "I had to give the cocksucker
ten thousand dollars."
A presidential pardon was good but just to be sure, on July
16, 1963, in Los Angeles, John Factor, the poor kid from the ghettos of
Chicago, raised a slightly shaking hand and along with a dozen other more
recent arrivals took the oath of citizenship of the United States of America.
“I’m the luckiest man alive,”he said and he was probably right.
• • •
John Factor died after a long illness at the age of
ninety-one in 1984. More than 400 mourners, including California’s Governor Pat
Brown and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley attended his wake.
During the last half of his long life Factor contributed
millions to charitable causes and made serious efforts to change his life and
his reputation, but nothing ever changed.
Once, after giving an enormous donation to a charity in the
mid-sixties, the newspapers that cov-ered the event wrote about Factor’s shady
past. The report brought on a rare display of public anger when Factor called
the reporter on the story and demanded to know “What, my dear, must one
do...how much does a man have to do...to bury his past?”
It was proof that despite his incredibly agile mind, John
Factor either never really understood or refused to recognize the harm he had
inflicted on others during his long life.
His stock swindle in England had fleeced thou-sands of
people out of their life savings. His self-managed kidnapping had sent five
innocent men to jail for a total of 125 years. The skim from the Stardust he
helped to shelter produced an estimated $2,000,000 a year, net income, for each
of the Chicago bosses who held points in the resort casino.
A better question would have been, “How much should a man
pay before he is allowed to bury his past?”