Free The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 by Laurence Leamer

His daughter Patty, in the bar in her home in Palm Beach, Florida, has a picture of her father and a smiling Jack Kennedy taken in Havana in the 1950s.
    Another witness is Benedict Fitzgerald, an attorney who not only knew the Kennedys intimately but also represented Owen Madden, a gangster who controlled leading nightclubs in New York City. Fitzgerald says that Joe was involved in bootlegging deals with Madden, a view confirmed by Q. Byrum Hurst, another of Madden’s attorneys.
    Madden, though English-born, was of Irish blood, a son of Erin brought up in Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan slum that bred little but disease, despair, and crime. Madden spent a term in Sing Sing, the upstate New York prison, for a killing he vowed he did not commit. Madden was a dapper dresser whose manner may have been appropriated by his friend George Raft in his screen portrayals of gangsters.
    Madden’s pathway was greased with ample payoffs to cops and Tammany Hall that allowed him to be one of the three biggest importers of bootleg booze along the East Coast. He moved from criminal deals to entertainment, backing his lover Mae West in her Broadway debut and running the celebrated Cotton Club, the Harlem boîte. He moved into the world of sports, managing the career of Primo Camera, the giant heavy-weightboxer. In Madden’s world there was a seamless journey from crime to politics to sports to entertainment, and Joe was now embarking on that journey. It was a world in which politicians acted like criminals, and criminals such as Madden acted like politicians or sports heroes. In this world a man like Joe Kennedy was just another player.
    Madden was forced out of New York and took up residence in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he reputedly controlled much of the gambling and vice. Even then, Fitzgerald says, Joe maintained a business relationship with Madden. “I know that Joe gave him some finances while he was down there,” Fitzgerald recalls.
    According to former Florida Senator George Smathers, “everybody knew” that Joe sold liquor. “But he wasn’t a bootlegger in the sense that he ran across state lines and carried illegal whiskey.”
    Yet another credible witness to Joe’s activities is Zel Davis, a former Florida state’s attorney, whose uncle was the leading bootlegger in Palm Beach County. “Joe was having scotch sent into the Bahamas from England,” Davis says. “He was doing business with Roland Simonette, who became the first premier of the Bahamas in the late sixties. When Simonette was young, he owned shipyards and had boats. He ran one boat from Nassau to New York and New England. Joe also had connections with Palm Beach County bootleggers. That boat came from West End in Nassau to Palm Beach. They built warehouses to hold it.”
    The most intriguing tale of all about Joe’s alleged illegal involvements was given in 1994 by ninety-three-year-old John Kohlert in a videotaped oral history interview conducted shortly before he died. As a young man in the twenties, Kohlert worked his way through college tuning pianos, including those in speakeasies and at the Cicero, Illinois, home of Al Capone. Kohlert, a Czech immigrant, knew little about Capone’s reputation as a vicious mobster and was delighted that Capone offered him work. “When I worked on his player piano, he said, ‘How would you like to stay for spaghetti?’ I tell you, I never had a spaghetti supper such as I had at Al Capone’s place. And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to have company.’ I said, ‘That’s fine.’ The company he had was Joe Kennedy. He introduced me to him. He said, ‘This is Joe Kennedy from Boston, and we have a little business deal to make at supper. I hope you don’t mind.’ I said, ‘Hell, no, I don’t mind.’ So while we had spaghetti, they made a deal.
    “Al Capone owned a distillery in Canada. I’m not sure, but anyway, it was quite a prominent distillery, that made whiskey. And so they made a big deal of Capone