Johnny "Handsome Johnny" Roselli

Roselli was the Outfit's man everywhere the Outfit was not: Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, Las Vegas in the 1950s and 1960s, and, in between, a Central Intelligence Agency operation against Fidel Castro.

He was born in Italy, came to the United States as a child, took an American name, and spent his career as the presentable end of an organisation that mostly was not. The 1948 mugshot on this page is one of very few occasions on which the record caught up with him.

The studios

The Outfit's Hollywood racket was the projectionists' union. Control the union and you control whether a studio's films can be shown, which is a position from which money can be requested politely.

The scheme collapsed when the men running it were prosecuted in 1943. Roselli was convicted and served time. What is notable is what happened next: the paroles granted in that case, unusually early, produced a political scandal of their own and no lasting damage to the men involved.

Las Vegas

He moved to the desert as the casinos went up and did there what he had done in Los Angeles — arranged things, introduced people, and kept the organisation's name off the paperwork.

The drum

Roselli disappeared in July 1976, after further contact with congressional investigators. His body was found in August, in a steel drum floating in a bay near Miami.

No one has been charged. He is the second man in this archive to die shortly before or after answering questions from Congress about the same subject, which is a pattern people have built a great deal on, and which the record does not explain.