'Mafia Spies' review: Series details how CIA hired Chicago Outfit to kill Castro, based on Thomas Maier book
In the early 1960s, the CIA enlisted the services of Chicago Outfit gangsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli to orchestrate the murder of Cuba’s Communist leader Fidel Castro.
Let’s take a moment to inhale the sheer insanity of that statement.
By the mid-1970s, Castro was still in power, with another 30 years to go, having survived myriad assassination attempts in the 1960s.
As for Giancana and Roselli, both were called to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the CIA’s plans to kill Castro. On June 19, 1975, Giancana was killed execution-style in his Oak Park home days before he was to testify. Roselli did testify before the Senate committee in 1976. But, before he could be recalled by the Senate, his dismembered body was found in a steel drum floating in a bay near Miami.
It’s one of the most bizarre chapters in American espionage history, and it makes for one of the more entertaining documentary series of the year in “Mafia Spies,” a wild, six-part ride premiering Tuesday on Paramount+.
Directed by Tom Donahue and based on the book by the excellent journalist and Chicago Sun-Times alum Thomas Maier (who also wrote the book on which the series “Masters of Sex” was based), this is a jazzy and fast-paced series featuring the usual package of (sometimes cheesy) re-creations and archival news footage.
Experts interviewed include Maier and other top journalists and historians as well as former Cuban revolutionaries and American law enforcement personnel, even Antoinette Giancana, the sassy daughter of Sam Giancana, who was dubbed “The Mafia Princess” and posed nude for Playboy when she was 51.
One can see the likes of Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”) making comedic/dramatic hay out of this material, which proves the cliché of truth being stranger than fiction.
“Mafia Spies” begins with an informative primer on the reign of Cuba’s military dictator Batista in the 1950s, a time during which wealthy Americans would fly to Havana to partake in gambling and other forms of debauchery in casinos and nightclubs, with the mob controlling the tourism market. (We see a clip from “The Godfather Part II,” in which Lee Strasberg’s Hyman Roth, a thinly disguised take on Meyer Lansky, has a cake bearing the map of Cuba sliced up so his associates can all have a piece.)
After the revolutionary movement led by Castro rolled into Havana on New Year’s Eve 1958 and New Year’s Day 1959, the mob was summarily pushed out of Cuba, and U.S.-Cuba relations soured as Castro aligned with the Soviets.
The series does an admirable job of introducing a wide variety of real-life, colorful, often shady and duplicitous characters. And we’re not just talking about the gangsters. CIA director of intelligence Allen Dulles, former FBI agent-turned-Howard Hughes associate Bob Mayhew, Cuban exile Frank Sturgis (who later achieved notoriety as one of the five Watergate burglars) and spook Sidney Gottlieb, aka the “poisoner in chief” for the CIA, are among the many figures involved in various plots to take down Castro.
Marita Lorenz, who reportedly had an affair with Castro, was given two poison pills she was to place in Castro’s food, but the pills dissolved into the cold cream in which they were smuggled. Other bungled attempts involve methods ranging from an exploding cigar to a drug-soaked microphone to the use of bazookas to poisoning Castro’s scuba wetsuit. It would all be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high.
“Mafia Spies” also devotes attention to a number of major historical events, including the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of JFK. Tabloid fodder also gets play, like Frank Sinatra’s mob ties, including his friendship with Giancana; the affair between singer Phyllis McGuire and Giancana; and the story of Judy Campbell Exner, who claimed to be the mistress of Kennedy and Giancana.
Mobster Roselli, while indisputably a lifelong criminal, makes for fascinating fodder. He was movie-star handsome and even became a Hollywood producer and considered it his patriotic duty to take out Castro. (I mean, among other dark adventures, the guy was involved in rigging high-stakes gin rummy games at the Friars Club of Beverly Hills in which the likes of Zeppo Marx, Phil Silvers and Harry Karl — shoe magnate and husband of Debbie Reynolds — were taken for hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
So much crazy material. It almost defies belief, were not it for the evidence contained in the treasure trove of material contained within the National Archives’ 2017-2018 release of the JFK files and the solid and comprehensive journalistic work by Maier that serves as the foundation for the entire series.