The Last Boss

He was a getaway driver for Al Capone before he was old enough to vote. Three decades later, he was sitting across a table from CIA officers, helping plan the assassination of a foreign head of state. Four years after that, he was shot seven times in his own basement kitchen - days before he was scheduled to tell a United States Senate committee everything he knew.

Sam Giancana ran the Chicago Outfit through the years it mattered most: Las Vegas, national wire services, a Havana empire lost overnight to revolution, and a partnership with the American intelligence community that no organized crime figure before or since has matched. He shared a mistress with a sitting president. He shared a stage, and a Nevada gaming license scandal, with Frank Sinatra. And when Robert Kennedy's Justice Department turned the full weight of the federal government against him, he beat it the only way he knew how - through silence, exile, and a refusal to talk that would eventually cost him his life.

This book follows Giancana from a hard Chicago slum called the Patch to the inner circle of Cold War espionage, separating what the Church Committee actually confirmed from what five decades of Kennedy-assassination mythology has simply assumed. It is the story of the one man in the history of American organized crime who died not because of what a court could prove he'd done, but because of what he might have said.