Mammon's Bidding

When a hard-boiled private eye is tasked in 1976 by a well-known Mafia capo to find out who has hired an international assassin to kill the Kennedys, he must sort out the body count and uncover the truth—before death also knocks at his own door.

Sam “Momo” Giancana, head of the Chicago Syndicate, is found executed gangland style in his home, with no signs of a forced entry. His protective police detail had been mysteriously recalled for the night. Worried for his own life, his 2IC, “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, asks Dylan MacCabe, a laconic ex-Marine turned gumshoe, to track down his missing principal enforcer, Salvatore, who once served under MacCabe in Korea.

Through various sources—a bartender at a Chicago mob hangout, his research partner’s findings, an FBI lab technician, the French Security Services, and interviews with Caroline Kennedy and Marina Oswald—our detective learns of a rogue foreign operative who’s been hired to kill all of Joseph Kennedy’s children.

This elusive, psychotic assassin, codenamed “Mammon” after the Catholic devil of Greed, keeps showing up in MacCabe’s investigations—first, dressed as a seductive French woman hired by Sam Giancana’s gang as his birthday present, then where a car bomb in London meant for Caroline Kennedy blew up, killing a neighbor and his dog. A fatal plane crash that Ted Kennedy narrowly survived and crime scene photos taken at the JFK and RFK assassinations fuel his suspicion.

But the telltale signs of Mammon’s carnage aren’t limited to the Kennedy clan. MacCabe also discovers that Jack Ruby, who moonlighted as a gunrunner from Galveston to Havana for Castro, was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, along with Lee Harvey Oswald and a certain Laurent Baptise, Mammon’s alias. He finds evidence that suggests Mammon not only helped Oswald take a practice potshot at General Edwin Walker three months before Dealey Plaza, but that he also enlisted the services of Ruby to shoot Oswald later.

There are clues that the suspicious death of Dorothy Kilgallen was also Mammon’s handiwork. The famous columnist and game show panelist died of an “improbable overdose” as she was about to publish the results of her exclusive jail interview with Jack Ruby.

Just how does the mugging death of one of JFK’s paramours, Mary Pinchot Meyer, fit into the puzzle? And why did Marilyn Monroe spend her last night with Sam Giancana at Frank Sinatra’s Lake Tahoe lodge? MacCabe’s diligence also uncovers inconvenient truths that make him a target of his own client, until Roselli’s dismembered and decomposing corpse is discovered floating in a steel drum off the Miami coast.

When MacCabe finds his partner murdered, he realizes that he’s been drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, and that he’s the mouse!

Mammon is eventually captured and sent to an asylum in Paris, but when he escapes, MacCabe knows he must find him before he and his new wife can ever feel safe again.

Their rivalry culminates in hand-to-hand combat with a unique twist.

MacCabe locates Salvatore, his former comrade-in-arms, in a South African prison. During visitation, he learns from him who hired Mammon and why he hated Joseph Kennedy enough to want him alive to witness his children die.

This powerful denouement fits all the historical facts and unveils a virtually unexplored solution to one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing mysteries. This year marks the 50th anniversary of RFK’s assassination, and is likely to renew the public’s interest in a time in history when America’s psyche seemed to lose its innocence forever.