American tabloid

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Tiger Kab featured a big indoor dartboard. The drivers tacked up Fidel Castro pix and shredded them into confetti.

Pete had his own private targets.

Like Ward Littell. Carlos Marcello’s boy now-mobbed-up and untouchable.

Like Howard Hughes-his ex-bossman/benefactor.

Hughes fired him. Lenny Sands said the Mormons made him do it. The Hush-Hush fiasco helped.

Boyd was in the hospital then, plowed on morphine. He couldn’t call Lenny and say, “Pull the issue.” Lenny was incommunicado with some bun boy. He didn’t know the invasion crapped out.

Dracula loved his Mormons. Boss Mormon Duane Spurgeon glommed some dope contacts. Drac could now fly Narco Airlines without a Pete Bondurant ticket.

The good news: Spurgeon had cancer. The bad news: Hughes scuttled Hush-Hush.

The Bay of Pigs/OD piece caught some embarrassing flak. Hughes kept Lenny on the payroll to write a private skank sheet.

The sheet would feature skank too skanky for public skank consumption. The sheet would be read by two skank fiends only: Dracula and J. Edgar Hoover.

Drac was paying Lenny five hundred clams a week. Drac was calling Lenny every night. Lenny was fed up with Drac and his “I want Las Vegas!” wet dream.

Hughes and Littell were strictly dartboard pEelims. The main event was President John F. Kennedy.

Who:

Waffled, wiggled, weaseled, punked out and pulled out at Pigs.

Who:

Cringed, crawled, crapped his pants, cravenly crybabied and let Cuba stay Commie.

Who:

Shilly-shallied, sashayed, shook and shit his britches while eleven Blessington men got slaughtered.

He handed Jack the Hughes/Nixon loan dirt. He co-signed the cocksucker’s White House mortgage. The Boyd/Bondurant casino percentage deal-about as au courant as Slippery Dick Nixon.

The Agency kept cloning exile hard-ons. Speedboat crews kept popping the Cuban coast. It was all fart-in-a-hurricane kid stuff.

Jack called a second invasion “quite possible.” He wouldn’t give a go date or commit beyond nebulous rhetoric.

Jack’s chickenshit. Jack’s a pouty, panty-waisted, powder puff.

Blessington was still capacity-booked. The Cadre dope biz was still flourishing. Fulo bought off the Boyd shootout witnesses- forty people got fat paydays.

Nйstor saved Boyd’s life. Ndstor knew no feat Ndstor snuck into Havana once a week on the off chance that he might run into the Beard.

Wilfredo Delsol ran the cabstand. The kid was behaving solidly now. His pro-Castro dance was no more than a two-second tango.

Jimmy Hoffa bopped by Tiger Kab occasionally. Jimmy was Kennedy Hater Number One-for good fucking cause.

Bobby K. had Jimmy dancing to his beat: the old Nuisance Roust/Grand Jury Blues. Jimmy got a wild bug up his ass- manifested by nostalgia for the Darleen Shoftel shakedown.

Jimmy said, “We could do it again. I could neutralize Bobby by getting at Jack. You got to believe that Jack still likes cooze.”

Jimmy was persistent on the topic. Jimmy echoed the hate that the whole Outfit shared.

Sam G. said, “I rue the day I bought Jack Illinois.” Heshie Ryskind said, “Kemper Boyd liked Jack, so we figured he had to be kosher.”

Boyd was now some triple or quadruple agent. Boyd was a self-proclaimed insomniac. Boyd said rearranging lies kept him up nights.

Boyd was the Cuban Study Group liaison. Boyd was on Cadre sabbatical-a ploy designed to simplify his life.

Boyd fed Bobby pro-CIA distortions. Boyd fed the CIA Study Group secrets.

Boyd pressed Bobby and Jack. Boyd urged them to assassinate Castro and facilitate a second invasion.

The brothers nixed the notion. Boyd called Bobby more proCause than Jack-but only up to some ambiguous point.

Jack said, No second invasion. Jack refused to grant whack-the-Beard approval. The Study Group cooked up an alternative called Operation Mongoose.

It was nifty long-range nomenclature. Let’s recapture Cuba some time this century. Here’s 50 million dollars a year-fetch, CIA, fetch!

Mongoose spawned JM/Wave. JMIWave was the nifty code name for six buildings on the Miami U campus. JM/Wave featured snazzy graph rooms and the latest in covert study workshops.

JM/Wave was grad school for geeks.

Fetch, CIA, fetch. Monitor your exile groups, but don’t act boldly-it might fuck with Jack the Haircut’s poll standings.

Boyd still loved Jack. He was in too deep to see through him. Boyd said he loved his civil rights work-because there was no subterfuge involved.

Boyd had trouble sleeping. It’s a blessing, Kemper-you don’t want my claustrophobic nightmares.