★ 09/03/2018
Server (Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care”) traces the astounding life of gentleman gangster Johnny Rosselli in this exhilarating, exhaustively researched account, revealing how the dapper Al Capone protégé befriended mobsters and glamorous movie stars, and seduced beautiful showgirls while smoothly corrupting Hollywood unions and local politicians for more than 50 years. Rosselli rose from the poverty of a Boston ghetto to the top echelons of the underworld, directing extortion of golden age Hollywood unions and studio chiefs, supervising the criminal heyday of Las Vegas, and participating in a Fidel Castro assassination plot, as well as producing two critically acclaimed film noirs. Server employs evocative phrasing (“Politics, showbiz, sex, crime: come together that season like dirty water clogging a drain, and Johnny wielding the plunger”) to luridly examine the shady underbelly of movies, moguls, and politics from the 1930s through the ’60s, all through the prism of the charming Rosselli. Filled with crackerjack writing and Damon Runyonesque characters, this entertaining page-turner is a rich look at one of organized crime’s most intriguing characters. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Nov.)
Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin
Narrated by B. J. Harrison
Lee ServerUnabridged — 18 hours, 55 minutes
Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli: Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin
Narrated by B. J. Harrison
Lee ServerUnabridged — 18 hours, 55 minutes
Overview
“No one knew more about the mob, Hollywood and Las Vegas than Johnny Rosselli, and Lee Server got it all in Handsome Johnny.” - Nicholas Pileggi, bestselling author of Goodfellas
A rich biography of the legendary figure at the center of the century's darkest secrets: an untold story of golden age Hollywood, modern Las Vegas, JFK-era scandal and international intrigue from Lee Server, the New York Times bestselling author of Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing...
A singular figure in the annals of the American underworld, Johnny Rosselli's career flourished for an extraordinary fifty years, from the bloody years of bootlegging in the Roaring Twenties--the last protégé of Al Capone-to the modern era of organized crime as a dominant corporate power. The Mob's “Man in Hollywood,” Johnny Rosselli introduced big-time crime to the movie industry, corrupting unions and robbing moguls in the biggest extortion plot in history. A man of great allure and glamour, Rosselli befriended many of the biggest names in the movie capital-including studio boss Harry Cohn, helping him to fund Columbia Pictures--and seduced some of its greatest female stars, including Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe. In a remarkable turn of events, Johnny himself would become a Hollywood filmmaker-producing two of the best film noirs of the 1940s.
Following years in federal prison, Rosselli began a new venture, overseeing the birth and heyday of Las Vegas. Working for new Chicago boss Sam Giancana, he became the gambling mecca's behind-the-scenes boss, running the town from his suites and poolside tables at the Tropicana and Desert Inn, enjoying the Rat Pack nightlife with pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. In the 1960s, in the most unexpected chapter in an extraordinary life, Rosselli became the central figure in a bizarre plot involving the Kennedy White House, the CIA, and an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. Based upon years of research, written with compelling style and vivid detail, Handsome Johnny is the great telling of an amazing tale.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Handsome Johnny:
“No one knew more about the mob, Hollywood and Las Vegas than Johnny Rosselli, and Lee Server got it all in Handsome Johnny.” —Nicholas Pileggi, author/screenwriter of Goodfellas and Casino
"No one slices and dices true tales like Lee Server. In Handsome Johnny, he cracks the vault of time to reveal long-buried secrets. Maybe even this country’s biggest secret...Fast-paced, insightful, bold, witty, and masterfully told." —James Gladstone, Executive V.P. Lionsgate Entertainment and author of The Man Who Seduced Hollywood
"The incredible life of Handsome Johnny, a gangster worthy of the movies....Server's biography not only provides a window into Rosselli's life but also contextualizes a time when Hollywood, politics and organized crime were inextricably linked." —The Washington Post
"Written in the snappy style of a hardboiled detective novel...an in-depth history of the growth, development and eventual decline of organized crime in America." —The Economist
"Based upon years of research, written with compelling style and vivid detail, HANDSOME JOHNNY is a rich rollercoaster of a biography." —TCM.com Movie News
"Server employs evocative phrasing to luridly examine the shady underbelly of movies, moguls, and politics from the 1930s through the ’60s, all through the prism of the charming Rosselli. Filled with crackerjack writing and Damon Runyonesque characters, this entertaining page-turner is a rich look at one of organized crime’s most intriguing characters." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A definitive rags-to-riches biography... Paced like a fine piece of fiction, this is a handsomely written chronicle of an interesting mob character." —Kirkus Reviews
"Author Lee Server has done his homework on Handsome Johnny and no stone is left un-turned. It’s a fascinating look the mob, it’s influence, it’s muscle and some of the biggest names of the day that were involved with the Mafia whether they wanted to be or not. One thing for sure is Johnny Rosselli didn’t lead a boring life." —Red Carpet Crash
"Lee Server does a bang-up job with this guy, not allowing endless detail to overwhelm the reader. I enjoyed the thrill ride from front cover to ending." —Stuff I Like blog
"If the Mob history is your genre, then add this to the shelves of your library." —Melisende's Library blog
2018-09-02
A definitive rags-to-riches biography of Al Capone's "Man in Hollywood," Johnny Rosselli (1905-1976).
In his latest biography, Server (Ava Gardner: "Love Is Nothing", 2006, etc.) sorts through a massive amount of information—grand jury testimony, police records, news reports, hearsay—to create a cohesive, engaging narrative of the life of a gangster and the "Los Angeles underworld" in which he lived and worked. After enduring a childhood of poverty in Boston, Rosselli plunged into the criminal world in 1920s Los Angeles, at age 19, where he excelled as a bootleg driver. By 22, he was already running his own independent race book under his newly won moniker, Handsome Johnny. "His appearance evidenced good fortune and expensive tastes," writes the author. "Gone were the old work clothes and boots, the stubbly face and dirty fingers, replaced with a fine wardrobe [and] immaculate grooming (movie-star haircut, treated skin, manicured nails with the luster of Red Sea pearls)." At only 23, together with Jack Dragna, Rosselli became Capone's ambassador to the wide open frontier of Los Angeles. "It had happened quickly and efficiently," writes Server. "And it was just the beginning." From his tenure as a producer of major film noirs and hand in launching the career of Marilyn Monroe to his pioneering involvement in entrenching the Mafia in the new frontier of Las Vegas and 1960s entanglement with Sam Giancana in a CIA-backed plan to poison Cuban president Fidel Castro, Rosselli lived an unquestionably fascinating life, and the author ably captures it from one compelling exploit to the next. Server also examines Rosselli's friendships with Frank Sinatra and other celebrities, his part in negotiating eccentric aviator Howard Hughes' entry into the Las Vegas crime-scape, his alleged role in JFK's assassination, and his grim end (his decomposing body was found in a fuel drum near Miami).
Paced like a fine piece of fiction, this is a handsomely written chronicle of an interesting mob character.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169198416 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Macmillan Audio |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
OUT OF THE PAST
Beverly Hills, California, May 6, 1966
Johnny Rosselli walked down Brighton Way. He was in no hurry, enjoying the warm spring weather and the streets full of pretty girls on their lunch break. Silver-haired and suntanned, groomed to perfection — he was fresh from his weekly visit to Drucker's Barber Shop — in big dark glasses, custom-made suit, alligator shoes. A hard-looking, confident-looking man in late middle age, he appeared very much a part of that opulent neighborhood. Passersby might have taken him for a motion picture producer or a powerful agent, even an old movie star, one of those tough-guy actors from the days of black-and-white.
Nearing the corner of Brighton and Rodeo Drive he paused before crossing, and as he stood there he felt a sensation at his back, a sudden change in the atmosphere, like the chill from a dark cloud crossing the sun.
With a glance over his shoulder he saw two men in black suits coming up the sidewalk, coming up, flanking him at the corner.
One of the men said, "John. We need to talk to you."
He gave no reaction and started across the street. They followed, and on the other side they moved ahead of him and blocked his way.
Staring through big dark lenses, Johnny Rosselli said, "You know how it goes, fellas. If you've got a problem, go talk to my attorney."
The second man said, "You don't want your attorney to know about this."
The first said, "This is different, John. Something new. You need to take a look...."
The second man held out a buff-colored envelope.
Johnny looked at the package but kept his hands at his sides.
"Listen. For your own good. The Bureau knows who you are."
Johnny looked past him, as if no one were there and nothing had been said.
"Do you understand? We know everything."
The first man held out a business card. It read "DuPar's Restaurant," with an address in Thousand Oaks.
"This is a place where we can meet. After you've had a look in the package."
Johnny glanced at the card but did not take it, and he did not take the package, saying, "If you've got a subpoena give it to my attorney. I don't know what you're talking about."
He started walking again.
"Have a nice day, John," said the second man. "We'll be seeing you."
* * *
Halfway to the next corner he stopped and looked back. The two FBI agents were gone.
You have a nice day, too.
Vaffanculo.
In the ass.
* * *
He entered his place on the eighth floor of the Glen Towers Apartments, a large, modern, sleekly furnished apartment with a sweeping balcony view of western Beverly Hills. Slipped under the door was the envelope one of the men on the street had tried to give him.
He picked it up and dropped it on the glass-topped coffee table in his living room.
He went to the telephone and dialed his attorney's office. He stopped. He put the phone down. He went to the bar and fixed himself a drink, took it to the couch by the coffee table.
He smoked most of a cigarette and then reached for the envelope and unsealed it. He withdrew the contents. There were two pieces of cardboard packing and between the cardboard two black-and-white photographs. He placed them faceup next to each other on the tabletop.
Both were newly made prints but the images themselves were vintage — two figures in the clothing and hairstyles of many years ago. They were formal portraits taken against plain backgrounds in a studio setting. One was of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her thirties, the other a grim-faced schoolboy about ten years of age.
He leaned close to the photographs. He looked at one, and then the other. He had not seen these pictures in a very long time.
My mother.
And me.
He looked into the face of the boy staring out of the picture from long ago. Nearly fifty years had passed since he and that boy had gone their separate ways. Now they shared only a trace of physical resemblance, but once upon a time ...
He sat in his living room and considered the meaning behind the arrival of these old photos, the two images that connected him to his former self. What purpose did they serve? "We know everything," the agent on the street had said. He turned the claim over in his mind. To a man who held as many secrets as Johnny Rosselli, it was a statement of some concern.
He studied the old photographs on the table, the woeful look on his mother's face, and the boy's grim expression. For a few moments he found himself adrift in sad recollection.
He finished the vodka and lit another cigarette.
Only a handful of people in the world could have connected his present identity to this kid from the distant past and might have been willing to give that information to the law. One of them was going to wish he was dead.
2
It was "Rosselli" with a double s and sometimes "Roselli" with just the one.
Somebody at the FBI thought that was a pretty funny thing. When a guy starts to write his name different ways in different years you wonder what is his problem. That was how things got started — you found a loose thread and you pulled on it until something opened up. Here was a little mistake that might lead to a bigger mistake and when you found the big mistake there was a good chance you were going to get your man. Agents started to sniff around. This was in the 1950s, after the Kefauver hearings on organized crime in America. What they learned at the hearings was big shocking stuff. Nobody before then had understood how much of the country was populated by gangsters all working together for the common bad. Johnny Rosselli had been among the many forced to testify. He told the senators his story, about being born in Chicago, losing his parents, and being raised by a kindly old uncle. It was a sad story, with little bits and pieces of the truth thrown in.
Someone at the FBI went to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Chicago. They looked for the papers on Johnny Rosselli, and they found out something interesting: The document recording Johnny Rosselli's birth had been filed thirty years after the fact; the document itself was a forgery, and there was no other evidence to be found that the person described therein had ever been born — in Chicago or anywhere else.
An investigation into the "facts" of Rosselli's life was begun. In all parts of the country agents gathered evidence, examined files, followed leads, interrogated people from all known periods of the man's life. It went on for years. They found little that wasn't already known, or wasn't what Johnny Rosselli allowed them to find.
He had covered his tracks well — his origins, his early years. The FBI was sure he was not who he said he was. But who was he? What was he hiding? For a guy whom everybody in law enforcement knew about for decades — one of Al Capone's boy wonders, the Mob's man in Hollywood, big wheel in Las Vegas, the hundreds of pages of police reports in which he figured, numerous arrests and trials, headlined convictions — he was a mystery.
Agents looked at the file and cursed. It nagged at them. There had to be some good reason he had gone to the trouble of falsifying his birth, covering up his past, when his known record was already so bad. Had he run away from a crime for which he could still be prosecuted? If they could solve the mystery, find out who he was, what he was hiding, they were sure they could nail him good, close the book on another major hoodlum.
One day they lucked out. An old soldier in the LA crime family — and a longtime associate of Johnny's — had become an informant. His handlers in the Bureau kept the informant on a long leash so as not to expose him to his fellow gangsters, but they kept him under observation too. One day they followed him to the airport, saw him greet a stranger from across the country. The agents pulled him in. What was going on at the airport? He wouldn't talk, which made them more interested. They told him the deal again: If he ever held anything back it was over and they would throw him in prison. The mobster tried to figure a way out, but he couldn't. Fuck it, he decided. I'm a rat, I'm dead already. He told the agents he'd been doing a favor for his friend Johnny Rosselli. Rosselli? Keep talking, said the Feds. It was nothing, he said, a little errand. A little cash for the guy's mama. He'd done it before, many times through the years. For Johnny's mother back in Boston. The fella at the airport was Johnny's kid brother.
His mother? the FBI agents said.
Johnny Rosselli had a mother? In Boston? A brother? The agents grinned like cats over a spilled bowl of goldfish.
* * *
Armed with the slight but crucial biographical information supplied by their informant, the Bureau refocused its long-running investigation of Rosselli — what it described as an "intensive discreet endeavor to develop the facts," to "uncover some crime committed which would have caused him to change his identity." As long as it was still under the statutes, an old crime was as good as a new one to the Feds. But the goal was not just to convict and punish the man for his individual crimes. The Feds were working to undermine and degrade the whole criminal system — La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the Syndicate, the Organization, whatever you called it. To blow it up from the inside. The goal was to get him, and then to "turn" him, to make him talk and to keep him talking.
As the FBI's investigation advanced, moving deep inside Johnny Rosselli's shadow world, on a quest to uncover his hidden past, a strange course of events was set in motion, one that would reach far beyond the investigators' original intent, a Pandora's box opened to unforeseeable consequences, to chaos and scandal, the exposure of dirty secrets and black lies in the corridors of American power, and, in the end, to sudden and ghastly death.
3
His certificate of birth — the real one — is held in the house of records in the Italian provincial capital of Frosinone. The document indicates a male child, last name Sacco, given name Filippo (after his father's father), born on July 4, 1905, to Vincenzo and Maria Antonia Sacco (née DiPasquale), the Comune di Esperia, Provinzia di Frosinone. There is no mention of Chicago.
* * *
Esperia rises along the slopes of Monte Cecubo in wooded land in the region known as the Campagna, 110 kilometers southeast of Rome. It is of ancient origin, with scattered remnants of a lost eminence — a medieval castle on the hilltop, a Baroque church, a crumbled monastery — though most of its long history is without distinction. In the early years of the twentieth century it was an isolated and backward settlement. There was no running water, no electricity, no resident doctor; carts and wagons were the only transportation, and workhorses and donkeys plodded the streets, leaving the cobblestones decorated with shit.
In the year of Filippo Sacco's birth much of southern Italy was in the grip of a devastating depression, the result of decades-long cycles of human-made and natural disasters that had left half a nation in misery. It was an era of widespread emigration as millions of southern Italians left their homes, left their country, in search of a better life. The largest number of these traveled to the United States, l'America, to the expectant migrants a mythic land of opportunity. And for now America welcomed them, almost without restriction, eager to admit the needed workforce of a booming economy.
In Esperia, in good times, Vincenzo Sacco had made his living as a cobbler, a skilled and respected member of the community. Now the times were not good, and people had no money to buy new shoes or even to repair their old ones. Vincenzo's father and his brother had both heard the siren call from overseas and gone to find their fortunes in the United States. From their assembly-line jobs in Massachusetts they urged Vincenzo to do the same. It was a troubling thing to leave a wife and a child on the way, but it seemed the best hope for the future, and by the time of Filippo's birth his father was gone, another hopeful pilgrim. He joined his relatives in Boston's large Italian population, found a job assembling shoes at a factory, a paycheck every Friday. He spent little on himself, put a little more away, and sent the rest to his wife and the son he had never seen.
Many of the heads of households who went abroad would send for their family or would return to Italy after two or three years of working and saving. But some did neither, and some were never heard from again, preferring to start their lives over without the responsibilities they had left behind. Years passed, and Vincenzo remained in Boston. Maria and the child lived on the small stipend from America. The boy grew up in cloistered Esperia, on the dirt paths and the cobblestone streets, in the shadow of the ancient knights' castle on the hill.
* * *
It would be six years before he sent for them. What frustration and disappointment those years had meant to the mother and child were put away. The future was everything.
They departed Esperia late in the summer, traveling by wagon over the mountain paths to the city of Naples. They joined the crush of passengers at dockside, an apprehensive parade, assessed by a gauntlet of wary soldiers, customs agents, health inspectors, white-uniformed pursers. They boarded the great ocean liner (North German Lloyd's 500foot Koenig Albert, en route from Genoa), hurried through the noise and chaos, the crowded corridors, down to the teeming, dark, foul-smelling quarters they would share with the two thousand passengers in steerage. In the night the ship roared to life, and they moved out across the bay, headed west for America.
On September 10, 1911, the ship entered New York waters, moving north to the federal immigration station at Ellis Island. It was recorded that the number of settlers arriving from Europe that week was so large and the facilities on the island so overwhelmed — immigrants were subject to long waits, invasive health inspections, delousings — that it took three days before the last of the passengers was processed.
Setting off into the roaring center of the modern world, the mother and her boy found their way through glutted Manhattan streets to the station and the train that would take them to Boston. By evening after three weeks of travel from Italy, they reached their destination. Maria saw her husband for the first time in six years, and Filippo saw his father for the first time in his life.
* * *
In the 1900s, Boston was a densely populated center of commerce, manufacturing, and education. It was home to every layer of society, regal Brahmins and new-money tycoons at the top, slum-dwelling poor at the bottom. For more than a century it had drawn waves of immigrants from Europe, a new ethnic influx appearing with each generation. The Irish had come in the early 1800s, then the Germans, Poles, Russian Jews. The latest to arrive were the Italians. The southerners who had been coming in great numbers each year since the end of the last century were almost entirely from the peasant class, the contadini, uneducated laborers intended for unskilled and low-paid work. They now provided the majority of Boston's pool of manual labor. They repaired roads and bridges, dug tunnels, built buildings, and filled the hundreds of factories and mills in the city and the surrounding towns.
Vincenzo Sacco had been living on North Street in the old red-light district; for his family he found more suitable quarters in East Boston. They traveled on the newly opened subway that ran beneath the harbor, connecting the North End and Boston proper to the annexed East. East Boston was the starting point for successive groups of newcomers to the country, and it claimed one of the two biggest Italian neighborhoods in the city. It was a poor and overpopulated neighborhood; men and families and extended families crowded into broken-down wooden boardinghouses and brick tenements.
On Maverick Street, Vincenzo had rented a small three-room cold-water flat. The windows looked out the back at a spiderweb of clotheslines, an unkempt yard, an outhouse. There was no time for acculturation. The Saccos' new life began with the next sunrise — Vincenzo setting off at dawn for the shoe factory, Maria turning the shabby apartment into a home. On Sundays they went to mass at the small, crowded Roman Catholic church by the square. The six years of waiting were forgiven and forgotten, like a bright morning after a cold, stormy night, the natural order of things quickly restored. Maria Sacco became pregnant; they would have their first American child.
Late in September, Filippo entered the first grade at the Samuel Adams School in East Boston. No consideration was made for immigrant kids who did not speak English. They had to learn as they went, sink or swim. American-born boys taunted them. There were slurs and bullying for the foreigners. "Because of the beatings I received in the first three grades, having a name like Filippo," Johnny remembered, "I used the name of Philip or Phil. I stopped talking Italian because of the beatings." And he learned to fight back. By the time he reached the fourth grade, he would recall, "the tables were turned."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Handsome Johnny"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lee Server.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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