FBI memorandum, J. H. Gale to Mr. DeLoach: Santo Trafficante, Jr., called 'boss' of La Cosa Nostra in Florida (21 March 1968)
A headquarters memorandum on a source's information about political arrangements said to have been offered for permission to operate gambling in Florida counties describes Santo Trafficante, Jr. as 'boss' of La Cosa Nostra in Florida and records that a Departmental Attorney was seeking a federal grand jury.
- Date
- 1968-03-21
- Kind
- case-file
- Source
- FBI Records: The Vault
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105.
Viewer pages 333-334 are a headquarters memorandum from J. H. Gale to Mr. DeLoach dated 21 March 1968 (file 92-2781); viewer page 336 is a letter to the Special Agent in Charge at Tampa of 22 March 1968. The memorandum relays a source’s information on political arrangements said to have been offered for permission to operate gambling in Florida counties, in which the source inferred that a representative acted for Santo Trafficante, Jr., described in the memo as “boss” of La Cosa Nostra in Florida.
It records that a Departmental Attorney was seeking a federal grand jury to consider possible indictments of Trafficante and his associates, and that the FBI’s Florida offices were instructed to conduct no further investigation of what appeared to be a purely local political matter unless the Department requested it. The pages are heavily redacted; the source and the person who relayed the offers are not identified. Page 339 includes a source’s remark that someone had “reportedly gone to Mexico from Tampa during the former Kefauver Crime hearings in Florida during about 1950.”
“Boss” is the memorandum’s label, quoted as such. No indictment is shown by these pages. This record rests on the Vault viewer’s OCR text layer; the page image of viewer page 333 is now stored here. OCR names and file-number lines are partly garbled or redacted.
