John Roselli

Roselli began his California criminal career working with Los Angeles mobster Jack Dragna.

Roselli became close friends with film producer Bryan Foy, who brought Roselli into the movie business as a producer with Foy's small production company, Eagle Lion Studios, where Roselli is credited on a number of early gangster movies as a producer. In the 1940s Roselli was involved in the Outfit's multi-million dollar extortion campaign against the motion picture industry. Read Less

However, in 1947 they were paroled after serving only about three-and-a-half years. It was widely assumed that the Outfit's political fixer, Murray "The Camel" Humphreys, used his influence with President Harry Truman's Attorney General, Tom C. Clark, to spring Roselli and the other Outfit bosses from prison. After his release, Roselli returned to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a movie producer with Bryan Foy. Read Less

Roselli had been strangled and shot, and his legs were sawn off. Some believed that boss Trafficante ordered Roselli's death. According to this theory, Trafficante believed that Roselli had revealed too much about the Kennedy assassination and Castro murder plots during his Senate testimony, violating the strict Mafia code of omertà (silence).

In 2010, Playboy magazine published an article by Hillel Levin in which Roselli was implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by William Robert Plumlee and James Files, an inmate within the Illinois Department of Corrections.

New York mob boss Bill Bonanno claimed in his autobiography that while he was imprisoned with Roselli, he spoke to him about the Kennedy assassination. Roselli allegedly told Bonanno that he had fired a shot from a storm drain located on Elm Street in Dallas. Read Less