Historian Lamar Waldron is out with his new book Watergate: The Hidden History which exposes Nixon's role as the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia in their failed plots to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, and it was files on this subject which the Watergate burglars were seeking as reported by Thom Hartmann for the Huffington Post:
As one of the Watergate burglars admitted, and Senate Watergate Committee investigators indicated in their secret questioning of Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, Nixon was worried about a Cuban Dossier of CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Those attempts began in earnest in September 1960, when Nixon was seeking an edge in his close presidential race against Senator John F. Kennedy. A Nixon associate involved in the attempts said that in 1960 "the CIA had been in touch with Nixon [and] it was Nixon who had him to a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro."
CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel continued until a December 1971 attempt in Chile, when Nixon was president and had ordered a huge covert war against Chile's socialist government. Remarkably, at those same key times -- September 1960 and December 1971 -- Nixon accepted $500,000 bribes from Mafia leaders, including some involved in his CIA-Mafia attempts to kill Fidel. Those Nixon-Mafia bribes were extensively documented by the FBI, Time magazine, and author Dan Moldea. Those Mafia bribes and Nixon's efforts to have the CIA work with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro were the secrets that Nixon could not afford to have come out during the 1972 campaign.
Waldron documents that in December 1971 Nixon took a bribe from mob bosses Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello to commute Jimmy Hoffa's prison sentence with the proviso, of course, that the labor leader would not get back his old Teamsters job.
Last year veteran Washington reporter Don Fulsom released his biography Nixon's Darkest Secrets in which he alleges the 37th President who served from 1969 to 1974 "may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon" as reported by Tom Leonard for the Daily Mail:
Bebe Rebozo was a short, swarthy, good-looking Cuban-American businessman with a history of failed relationships with women and close alliances with Miami's Mafia chiefs. * * * According to the FBI, he had close links with Mob bosses such as Santo Trafficante, the Tampa Godfather, and Alfred "Big Al" Polizzi, a stooge of Meyer Lansky, the Cosa Nostra's financial brains. * * * When Rebozo started his own bank in Florida in 1964, Nixon — then a lawyer — wielded a golden shovel at the ground-breaking ceremony and became its first depositor.
And apparently Bebe made deposits -- so to speak -- with Nixon: "when Nixon became President, Rebozo got his own office and bedroom at the White House, and a security clearance that allowed him to go in and out without being logged by the secret service." According to Fulsom's book Bebe was a well-known fixture in Miami's gay community.
