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How the Kennedy Empire was Built
www.ytedk.com ^ | many

Posted on 05/06/2006 2:13:42 PM PDT by bkepley

- He formed alliances with crime bosses in major markets, among them Boston, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. These would come in handy years later when his son was running for national office. Among his mob associates was Frank Costello, former boss of the Luciano crime family, who bragged, "I helped Joe Kennedy get rich." Sam Giancana, who would later figure prominently in Jack's presidency, called Joe "one of the biggest crooks who ever lived."


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Government; Miscellaneous; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: corruption; frankcostello; kennedy; kennedyfamily; luciano; samgiancana
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Sins of the father. The Kennedy's had everything to be grateful about. Why are they all so corrupt? My opinion, Joe Kennedy. He was rich and a complete fool. So his ambition got two of his son's assassinated and various other offspring imprisoned, dead of drug overdose, or involved in scandals and "rehab". Compare other families..say the Buckleys. It's Joe's fault.
1 posted on 05/06/2006 2:13:45 PM PDT by bkepley
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To: bkepley

"Rosebud"


2 posted on 05/06/2006 2:16:10 PM PDT by battlegearboat
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To: bkepley

Teddy is only continuing the rum-running of his father.
Except he runs his rum in his liver and his belly.


3 posted on 05/06/2006 2:17:45 PM PDT by righttackle44 (The most dangerous weapon in the world is a Marine with his rifle and the American people behind him)
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To: bkepley

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy's father, the former Mayor of Boston, John Fitzgerald, did not like Joe Kennedy, thought him to be 'trash'....sent his daughter to Europe to get her away from him....but alas.....she married him anyways...


4 posted on 05/06/2006 2:19:34 PM PDT by HarleyLady27 (My ? to libs: "Do they ever shut up on your planet?" "Grow your own DOPE: Plant a LIB!")
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To: bkepley

Kennedys=White Trash.


5 posted on 05/06/2006 2:21:49 PM PDT by Crawdad (Hey, baby. Can I hijack your thread?)
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To: bkepley

I've read a lot of books about the Kennedys and the overriding theme in that family is that they are special and the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to them. A problem with man's law gets fixed with money or political pressure. A problem with God's law gets fixed with a donation and a special dispensation from the Church. They've never quite figured out how to get around the laws of physics, however, so Bobby's son Michael had to pay for playing touch football on the way down a ski slope.


6 posted on 05/06/2006 2:22:42 PM PDT by Huntress (Possession really is nine tenths of the law.)
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To: Crawdad

White trash with money.


7 posted on 05/06/2006 2:22:42 PM PDT by uncitizen
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To: uncitizen

That's even worse.


8 posted on 05/06/2006 2:23:26 PM PDT by Crawdad (Hey, baby. Can I hijack your thread?)
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To: HarleyLady27
Better known as a former Mayor of Boston, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Rose F. Kennedy's father, also apparently served as a U.S. Congressman:
1897: September 21 - The CONSTITUTION is moved to the Boston Navy Yard just prior to her 100th birthday. This is brought about in part due to the efforts of Massachusetts Congressman John F. Fitzgerald, grandfather of President John F. Kennedy.


9 posted on 05/06/2006 2:24:14 PM PDT by caryatid (Jolie Blonde, 'gardez donc, quoi t'as fait ...)
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To: bkepley
...various other offspring imprisoned, dead of drug overdose, or involved in scandals and "rehab".

You left off "lobotomized".

10 posted on 05/06/2006 2:26:14 PM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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To: bkepley

I heard they started as bootleggers?


11 posted on 05/06/2006 2:32:38 PM PDT by tobyhill (The War on Terrorism is not for the weak.)
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To: bkepley
A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, Thomas Reeves
12 posted on 05/06/2006 2:33:33 PM PDT by keithtoo ("Drilling in ANWaR is OK with us" - Alaskan Caribou Benevolent Association.)
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Comment #13 Removed by Moderator

To: tobyhill

Old Joe (father of Teddy) made his fortune running bootleg from Canada.


14 posted on 05/06/2006 2:35:19 PM PDT by Arizona Carolyn
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To: DuncanWaring

I've also heard rank speculation that there was something else going on between Joe and his daughter.


15 posted on 05/06/2006 2:35:42 PM PDT by Mercat (It's still Easter and we are the Easter people.)
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To: bkepley

Bible says sins of the father are paid for up to the 4th generation.. Kennedys have a long way to go


16 posted on 05/06/2006 2:36:23 PM PDT by Cinnamon
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To: bkepley
Us massholes know all about how the kennedy crime empire was built. My question is how can it be demolished given our current political state...?

I am thinking we will have to suffer these kennedy pigs until we are all forced to learn farsi or die.

17 posted on 05/06/2006 2:38:18 PM PDT by mmercier (live and learn)
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To: Crawdad

White trash with money that thinks it knows better for us than do we.


18 posted on 05/06/2006 2:38:29 PM PDT by Uncle Vlad
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To: Mercat
That's been suggested too.

And it's not inconsistent with what's actually known.

19 posted on 05/06/2006 2:39:09 PM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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To: TeddyCon

I don't know if I would go along with that assertion and JFK, in comparison to what the dems have today would be much closer to the GOP than the rat party... he belived in lower taxes and I don't believe Clinton, Kerry or Gore would have the guts to stand up the the Soviets like he did... the thing he had in common with the dem party was an inability to make good personal judgements.


20 posted on 05/06/2006 2:39:10 PM PDT by Arizona Carolyn
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To: bkepley

Howard Hughes hated all these SOBs.


21 posted on 05/06/2006 2:39:55 PM PDT by Porterville (I gave at the State Franchise Board; leave me alone you blood sucking liberal.)
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To: bkepley
http://b-29s-over-korea.com/kennedy_story/kennedy_story01.html

The biggest cover up of a death in the Kennedy family is at above URL.
22 posted on 05/06/2006 2:39:58 PM PDT by HuntsvilleTxVeteran ("Remember the Alamo, Goliad and WACO, It is Time for a new San Jacinto")
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To: mmercier

Thing is they've spread out -- RI, Maryland and I heard speculation Robert was thinking of running for office from NY.... heaven help us if congress and/or senate was populated with even more Kennedy's... now, there should be a rule!


23 posted on 05/06/2006 2:40:50 PM PDT by Arizona Carolyn
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To: bkepley

Abe Lincoln once said you can fool some of the people all of the time, or All of the people some of the time, but you cant fool all of the people all of the time.

In Massachusetts the Kennedy's have fooled enough Massachusetts voters for long enough to have established a legacy of rapine,womanising,corruption,lies and criminal misconduct, second to no other family in the history of the United States. And still these people vote them back in office. God help the decent people of Massachusetts for they are outnumbered by the fools that empower assholes like the Kennedy's.


24 posted on 05/06/2006 2:41:00 PM PDT by sgtbono2002
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To: Mercat
rank speculation

Please, there is SO MUCH dirt on the Kennedys, verified and published, that there's not even a need for rank speculation. That family is like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" had never gone off the air! It's like....well, it's like having the guilty pleasure of reading "The National Enquirer" without having been seen buying it in the checkout lane!

25 posted on 05/06/2006 2:45:43 PM PDT by blu (People, for God's sake, think for yourselves)
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To: bkepley

26 posted on 05/06/2006 2:45:45 PM PDT by Revolting cat! ("In the end, nothing explains anything.")
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To: DuncanWaring

This one's particularly interesting: How old honeyfitz screwed with people's lives:

http://www.ytedk.com/framed.htm


27 posted on 05/06/2006 2:46:02 PM PDT by bannie (The government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.)
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To: Cinnamon

--Bible says sins of the father are paid for up to the 4th generation.. Kennedys have a long way to go

Things like this really help me to respect ancient wisdom.


28 posted on 05/06/2006 2:46:29 PM PDT by bkepley
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To: bkepley

"to the 4th generation"

And these fellows keep extending the lease.


29 posted on 05/06/2006 2:47:20 PM PDT by bannie (The government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.)
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To: Arizona Carolyn
Rats by their nature destroy an ecosystem and then move to another.

Four legged rats or two legged rats, all the same; the only difference being the four legged variety destroy ecosystems and the two legged variety destroy civilizations.

Coming to a district near you soon enough.

30 posted on 05/06/2006 2:48:39 PM PDT by mmercier (the storm swept country)
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To: Arizona Carolyn
Rats by their nature destroy an ecosystem and then move to another.

Four legged rats or two legged rats, all the same; the only difference being the four legged variety destroy ecosystems and the two legged variety destroy civilizations.

Coming to a district near you soon enough.

31 posted on 05/06/2006 2:48:39 PM PDT by mmercier (the storm swept country)
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To: bannie

And then there's Norma Jean..


32 posted on 05/06/2006 2:48:40 PM PDT by bkepley
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To: bkepley
There are so many biographies about the Kennedy family, and you could hold 24 hour TV marathons using all the made-for-TV Kennedy family movies.:)

But from everything I've read about them, I agree with you that old Joe Kennedy, the founding father, was terribly flawed and it passed on like a curse from him. Hubris barely begins to describe it. And Rose, who did leave him for a few weeks after Jack's birth, was sent back to him by her father and eventually worked out her own way of surviving.

33 posted on 05/06/2006 2:49:50 PM PDT by xJones
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To: bkepley

Just after John Kennedy was elected President, Harry Truman was speaking to some students at Harvard. One of them asked, "What are we going to do in January, when the Pope will be in the White House?" Truman replied, "It's not the Pope I'm afraid of, it's the Pop."


34 posted on 05/06/2006 2:49:56 PM PDT by popdonnelly
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To: mmercier

Sorry about the twofer...

Only the wife appreciates such.


35 posted on 05/06/2006 2:51:11 PM PDT by mmercier
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To: popdonnelly

"It's not the Pope I'm afraid of, it's the Pop."

LOL. There's a lot of aspects to that reply.


36 posted on 05/06/2006 2:51:54 PM PDT by bkepley
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To: bkepley

Yup. Mysteriously dead as a door nail.


37 posted on 05/06/2006 2:55:10 PM PDT by bannie (The government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.)
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To: bkepley

Let's not forget the daughter they had lobotomized. What a tragedy.


38 posted on 05/06/2006 2:55:47 PM PDT by surely_you_jest
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To: xJones
old Joe Kennedy, the founding father, was terribly flawed

There be the understatement of the century.

I am laughing so hard I have decided to take the wife out for a good drunk. I hope the local police will drive us home without the bother of an unnecessary breathalyser should I crash the truck.

39 posted on 05/06/2006 2:55:52 PM PDT by mmercier
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To: Arizona Carolyn
I was talking to a friend of mine whose grandfather (A Pollock) was a bootlegger in Lynn, Mass and a good sized bookie. He claims that his great uncles used to get drunk on the Anniversary in celebration of JFK biting the bullet.

It seems that old Joe eliminated the competition in a rather harsh manner. I know a couple of his cousins, they say the same thing, and the story has the possibility of being true.

40 posted on 05/06/2006 2:58:36 PM PDT by Little Bill (A 37%'r, a Red Spot on a Blue State, rats are evil.)
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To: Little Bill

I think most of the family fortune came not from bootlegging, but from manipulation on Wall Street, which would qualify as "insider trading" under today's regulations, if not those in force then.
Joe was as much a mobster as any Sicilian.


41 posted on 05/06/2006 3:01:44 PM PDT by hellbender
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To: hellbender

The Crash

The factual accuracy of this section is disputed. Please view the article's talk page.

Kennedy formed alliances with several other Irish-Catholic money men, including Charles E. Mitchell, Michael J. Meehan and Bernard Smith. He helped establish the Libby-Owens-Ford stock pool, an arrangement in which Kennedy and colleagues created an artificial scarcity of Libby-Owens-Ford stock to drive up the value of their own holdings in the stock. Using inside information, and the public's lack of knowledge, a pool operator would bribe journalists to present that information in the most advantageous manner. The stocks would then change in price up or down depending on the position favoured by the pool.

Kennedy got out of the market in 1928, long before the Crash, locking in multi-million dollar profits. Indeed when the 1929 crash did come, he made money due to his short positions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.


42 posted on 05/06/2006 3:05:57 PM PDT by Thinkin' Gal (As it was in the days of NO...)
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To: tobyhill
"I heard they started as bootleggers?"

The story back then was that ol' Joe stockpiled hooch during the Prohibition era and had the tacit approval of Franklin Delano Roosevelt because of the generous campaign contributions.

When Prohibition was lifted in the early thirtys, guess who had the inventory to flood the market?

43 posted on 05/06/2006 3:10:13 PM PDT by nightdriver
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To: Huntress
All of your analysis is "well said"....
A little more food for thought...

1. A problem with man's law gets fixed with money or political pressure.

True enough.... but eventually there are too many holes in the story to hold any more water -- or rum.

"Somebody's got to go to prison...."
-- Harvey Keitel as the lead FBI agent in National Treasure

2. A problem with God's law gets fixed with a donation and a special dispensation from the Church.

Sadly true enough for a priesthood on the take...BUT...

God's spiritual law of sowing and reaping seems to have come home to roost more than once hereabouts....

Especially the reflection on your first additional comment: The sins of the father... will be visited down to the third and fourth generation.

As they reap the sad consequences here on earth from time-2-time... the eternal factors of God's law will eventually see justice done in all cases!

3. They've never quite figured out how to get around the laws of physics, however, so Bobby's son Michael had to pay for playing touch football on the way down a ski slope.

Some people who try to defy the law of gravity only end up proving that scientific thesis once again....

Not only Micheal... but JFK Jr.... as well!
You can't turn that winged-wonder sideways and upside down -- without mimicking the flight path and ultimate landing velocity of a free-falling refrigerator...

Sad but true -- thanks for the post

44 posted on 05/06/2006 3:15:13 PM PDT by Wings-n-Wind
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To: mmercier
I am laughing so hard I have decided to take the wife out for a good drunk.

Don't tell me you're going to trade her for the good drunk.:)

Old Joe went through hell, though in his last 8 miserable years. After his stroke, on December 19, 1961, he was almost totally paralysed and incoherent in his speech until his death.

It was so cruel, because he'd managed to get his second son elected president, and then he could no longer walk or talk. He sat there and was told of JFK's murder in 1963, and then RFK's murder in 1968. He, who had always been a control freak, couldn't do a thing about it.

It's been said by several that after he was told of Chappaquiddick in 1969, that he just gave up, stopped eating, and then, of course, he died in November, 1969.

A few years before his stroke, he'd seen an old acquintance that had suffered a bad stroke and was wheel-chair bound. He was horrified to see the change in that man, and repeatedly said he hoped that would NEVER happen to him. It did, and he had to sit and watch helplessly for the next 8 years. Mega-hubris, maybe...

45 posted on 05/06/2006 3:16:50 PM PDT by xJones
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To: mmercier

"My question is how can it be demolished given our current political state...?"

Go West, Young Man.


46 posted on 05/06/2006 3:19:28 PM PDT by truth_seeker
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To: surely_you_jest

Yes, poor Rosemary Kennedy, who it turned out had not been mentally ill at all, but merely rebellious, particularily against the ironfisted rule of Mother Rose. This was enough for the Mother of all Kennedys. In Emmett Tyrrell's grim phrase, Rose "had her lobotomized and parked her with the nuns."

Rosemary died in a Wisconsin convent not long ago. She's in Heaven, now.

Hope she doesn't feel too lonely up there.


47 posted on 05/06/2006 3:27:39 PM PDT by elcid1970
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To: bkepley

I thought it was seven generations. I know that I have genealogical connections to the King of France who sentenced the Knights Templers and he was cursed so my son refers to it as the pizza curse because he can never get the pizza he orders by phone. It got watered down after the first seven generations.


48 posted on 05/06/2006 3:31:50 PM PDT by Mercat (It's still Easter and we are the Easter people.)
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To: Arizona Carolyn
I fully agree with you on JFK's being politically closer to today's GOP than the moonbats .

My problems) with the Kennedy's was the mafia's being good enough for them to use to get to the oval office, but their then trying to absolve themselves of all that by playing the white hat and to the mafia's black hat once they got to the WH.

There was also the way those inbreeds tried to snob Onassis as some sort of eurotrash hoodlum that 'wasn't worthy' of Kennedy's friendship, etc.

Not to mention the way they made nice with the Third Reich.

I simply cannot stand that family. Much less respect them.

49 posted on 05/06/2006 3:33:49 PM PDT by TeddyCon
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To: xJones
I was surfing thru MSNBC earlier today, and some lefty news babe happened to be discussing the Patrick Kennedy story, and she made this comment in passing: "The first family of american politics, the Kennedys". I almost barfed! So, JFK was prez, and Teddy is senator...and miscellaneous Kennedy brats are in lesser offices...when you compare the Bushes, it seems to me that with two presidents, Florida Gov., and the offices held by GHW Bush and his father, that "First Family" description rightly belongs more to the Bushes. Not to mention the CLASSY first family.

The drive-by media makes me more disgusted daily.

50 posted on 05/06/2006 3:34:25 PM PDT by greyfoxx39 (I LIVE in a border state, fine the employers and the illegals will go home!)
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