Santo Travacante, Jr. was a very shrewd operator and it was also very well-respected.

He was a mafia done who was smart enough to avoid the limelight.

Florida in the mid-1950s was the international gateway to the Caribbean and it was ruled by one man,

Santo Travacante, a mob boss who turned the neighboring island of Cuba into a gambling paradise.

He was very powerful, he had a lot of connections. He was the natural selection, the natural choice,

to be sort of the go-to guy when it came to Cuba.

Travacante was propelled into success by his influence among higher offices and relationships

with the likes of Videl Castro and JFK.

Travacante definitely was hedging his bets. He was paying off the Batista officials and the government.

By the same time he was giving money to the guerrillas into Castro and their causes.

The fact that he came up with money and helped JFK win went by the board.

Felt on the verge of becoming the wealthiest mob boss of them all, he thought he was betrayed by one head of state and then another.

And so he plotted their downfalls.

Nothing's more sensational than he says. He says the brother.

This is Mafia.

The world was shook on November 22nd, 1963, when on an official visit in Dallas, Texas, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in broad daylight.

The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed a few days later by a man named Jack Ruby.

Scott Dici is author of a biography of Travacante, the silent dawn.

Initially, Ruby said that he was doing it because it was his patriotic duty.

It wasn't until a few years later that his underworld ties really became known outside the Dallas area.

From the beginning, the two murders were suspicious and so the government set up several commissions investigating Kennedy's death.

The first, known as the Warren Commission, began days after the assassination.

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