Shortly after 1:45 p.m. on November 22, 1963, Attorney General Robert "Bobby" F. Kennedy was in a lunch meeting with an aide and one of his Justice Department attorneys working on neutralizing certain organized crime members when he received a phone call from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.  Hoover delivered the bad news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas that his condition was grave.

While Bobby was overcome with grief over his brother’s assassination, he was almost immediately suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the events that took place in Dealey Plaza on that fatal day.  No one knew better than Bobby just how many enemies President Kennedy’s administration had made since taking office in January 1961: the mob, organized labor, anti-Castro groups, along with splinter groups from the CIA. Bobby understood just how all of these enemies were intertwined in one way or another due to Fidel Castro removing organized crimes from the Cuban casinos where they had making huge profits or to the failed overthrow of Castro in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

In the hours after the assassination, due to his tremendous distrust of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby had National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy change the locks on all his brother’s files.  In 1960, Bobby had lobbied hard to keep Johnson off the ticket as candidate to become Vice President. 

Bobby then received a phone call from the Director of the CIA, John McCone, and requested that McCone stop by his house.

 As Attorney General, the CIA had previously requested that Bobby stop its’ prosecution of Sam Giancana because he was assisting the CIA in trying to kill Castro.  And Giancana wasn’t the only member of organized crime who had ties to the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Castro – reportedly Trafficante and Marcello also were involved in similar plots.

According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby claimed that he asked McCone if the CIA had killed his brother. Bobby completely believed McCone’s response that the CIA was not involved.  Some question whether McCone would have known if the CIA had been involved, because after the Bay of Pigs Kennedy had Allen Dulles removed as CIA director due to Dulles involvement in the fiasco and appointed McCone in his place. While McCone was an ally of the Kennedys, there were still many individual remaining at the CIA who remained loyal to Dulles. Interestingly enough, Allen Dulles was one of the individuals who President Johnson appointed But above all else, Bobby really believed that he was the real target but knew that they couldn’t kill him with his brother in the Oval Office. In the years since JFK was assassinated, there have been quite a number of quotes attributed to mobsters such as Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante Jr., and Carlos Marcello that they were all involved in the “hit” to kill JFK.

In the case of Trafficante, he had lost millions from his casinos in Havana after the Batista was overthrown and had been imprisoned once Castro’s regime took over Cuba – and reportedly Jack Ruby visited him in his Cuban prison cell.

It is widely reported that upon learning the President had been assassinated, Teamster’s leader Jimmy Hoffa stood on a restaurant table and cheered. Bobby would have been an easy target to assassinate, he did not have the Secret Service protection like his brother, and he also allegedly did not routinely lock the doors to his house when he was home. However, if Bobby had been assassinated it is widely thought that his brother would have gone to all extremes to exact punishment on all responsible parties, which as President he could have done with impunity. And according to words attributed to Jimmy Hoffa, after the President was assassinated, Bobby was now just another lawyer.

One thing that history does prove is that after his brother was assassinated, Bobby no longer had the same burning drive to pursue member of organized crime as the United States Attorney General.