J.F.K. and the Mobsters' Moll

As a West Coast party girl in the early 1960s, blue-eyed raven-haired Judith Immoor Campbell was known to swing in high places. Mobster John Roselli squired her to Miami, Palm Springs and other expensive watering holes. She was frequently with Roselli's friend and boss, Chicago Mafia Don Sam ("Momo") Giancana. By her own description, she had a "close personal" relationship with an even more powerful figure: John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the U.S. "To me he was Jack Kennedy," she said last week. "He wasn't the President."

Roselli, on the other hand, was very well aware that Kennedy was the President, and may even have been proud of his indirect connection with the White House. TIME has learned that a federal listening device once recorded him telling Mob associates openly about his moll and her trysts with the President.

CIA Contract. Kennedy broke off with her in 1962, and his close associates soon forgot about her; after all, she was only one of many pretty women who drifted into the President's orbit (see following story). Recently, however, details of the affair became known publicly, and last week Judith Campbell, now Mrs. Daniel Exner, 41, and something of a look-alike for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, ended her discreet silence. At a press conference in San Diego, she admitted that the President had once shared her affections with two mobsters. But she declined comment when bluntly asked whether she and Kennedy had ever had sexual relations.

What flushed Mrs. Exner into public view was the Senate Intelligence Committee. As part of its CIA probe, the committee investigated Roselli's and Giancana's other federal connection: their contract with the CIA to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. The

Senators wanted to know whether Kennedy could have learned about the plot from Judy.

Before Giancana could be questioned, he was murdered in his Oak Park, Ill., home on orders from the Mafia high command; for one thing, the bosses thought that he had been telling a grand jury about gangland activities (TIME, June 30). But committee members interrogated Roselli, who now spends most of his time fighting the Government's efforts to deport him, and committee lawyers questioned Mrs. Exner. They turned up no evidence to contradict her claim that she had never known about the plot to kill Castro. Nor were they able to challenge her statement that she had never told Kennedy about her mobster friends.

Persuaded that the affair was irrelevant to their investigation, the committee voted unanimously to describe her in their report only as a "close friend" of Kennedy's, not even disclosing her sex. Some committee staffers considered this a whitewash, however, and leaked the story to several newspapers. But it did not become a national scandal until last week, when New York Times Columnist William Safire accused the committee of a "cover-up." Committee Chairman Frank Church called the charge "preposterous." Said he: "We had no evidence to suggest that she was a conduit of any kind. We had no evidence that she was used to get a hold on the President. Had we such evidence, we certainly would have included it." John Tower of Texas, the committee's vice chairman and its senior Republican, backed Church fully.

Church argued that the committee was only trying to avoid needlessly blackening Kennedy's reputation. For similar reasons, ex-Kennedy staffers either claimed to have no recollection of

Judith Campbell or insisted that she had never been involved with the President. His former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, recalled Judy as a campaign volunteer who later "became quite a pest." Said Mrs. Lincoln: "She'd call and call and call, [but] as far as I know he never did talk to her when he was President."

Intimate Lunches. Provoked, Mrs. Exner called a press conference to set the record straight. Said she: "Statements to the effect that I was a 'campaign worker for Kennedy' are entirely contrived. My relationship with Jack Kennedy was of a close personal nature and did not involve conspiratorial shenanigans of any kind." She said she met Kennedy in Las Vegas in 1960 at a party given by "a friend." The friend was Singer Frank Sinatra; one former Kennedy aide understood that Sinatra and J.F.K.'s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, owned a piece of a nightclub where Judy once worked as a hostess. A month after she met the President, Sinatra brought her together with Giancana, who later introduced her to Roselli. Both gangsters knew of her affair with Kennedy, but she insisted that neither of them tried to encourage or make use of it.

By her account, she visited Kennedy at the White House more than 20 times, usually for intimate lunches. The Senate committee learned that on one occasion, while she was staying with Roselli and Giancana at Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel, she made a side trip to Palm Beach to spend time there with Kennedy. Judy claimed that she received countless telephone calls from him, and she seemed to dial his number quite often as well. White House logs show that during a 54-week period in 1961 and early 1962, she telephoned Kennedy 70 times from her home in Los Angeles, Oak Park and other spots.

Last Call. She declined to talk about her own background--how she was raised in Los Angeles as one of five children (two brothers, two sisters) of an architect; how she was married at 18 to a movie actor named William Campbell; or how, after her divorce about four years later, she managed to support a plush life-style that included a Los Angeles-area apartment and a Malibu beach house ("I was always financially able to take care of myself). Eight months ago, she married a San Diego golf pro and now lives in a mobile home.

The end of her friendship with Kennedy apparently came when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose sleuths learned of the affair during their investigation of Giancana and Roselli, had lunch with Kennedy at the White House on March 22, 1962. No one knows what the two discussed during the time that they were alone. But Hoover had made a point of being briefed beforehand about Judith Campbell's disconcerting friendships with both gangsters and a President. And according to White House logs, the last known telephone call between J.F.K. and Judy came only a few hours after the luncheon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.