Located at the northern shore of Lake Tahoe on Crystal Bay, the Cal-Neva Resort and Casino casts a long shadow across the death of Marilyn Monroe. At Cal-Neva Lodge, which straddles the border between California and Nevada, Marilyn allegedly engaged in several sexual liaisons with several lovers, including John Kennedy; and it has been reported for decades that she also engaged in sexual activities with several mobsters there, frequently when she was a willing participant and, on one occasion, when she was unwilling. Marilyn allegedly cavorted there with mobsters Sam Giancana, Bugsy Segal, Skinny D’Amato and Handsome Johnny Roselli, just to mention a rumored few.

The original building at Lake Tahoe was constructed in 1926 by a wealthy San Franciscan real estate tycoon and property developer: he used the lodge primarily as a weekend retreat for his wealthy clients and friends. In 1930, after Nevada legalized gambling, Cal-Neva became the first legal casino in the United States. Not long thereafter, an incident involving the actress Clara Bow, and some gambling debts that she refused to pay, provided Cal-Neva with a considerable amount of national publicity. As an added curiosity and attraction, gambling was only legal on the lodge floor within the border of Nevada.

Cal-Neva passed through the portfolios of several owners before Frank Sinatra purchased the property in 1960. Sinatra than added The Celebrity Room, a helicopter pad and allegedly expanded the prohibition era tunnels that are one of Lake Tahoe’s many tourist attractions, including a guided tour of them. The tunnels remain a part of Marilyn’s murder orthodoxies and her mythological, legendary affair with the assassinated  King of Camelot. According to the website, A Presidential History of Lake Tahoe, several members of the Kennedy family, including Joe Senior and baby brother Teddy, visited Tahoe regularly; but all of John Kennedys’ visits occurred before he was elected president.

Allegedly, since both needed a sexual romp and a roll on a heart-shaped bed, Marilyn met then candidate John Kennedy at Tahoe on February the 1st in 1960, a blue Monday. The rompers were able to move, as the legend goes, from cabin to cabin and remain unseen by traversing the subterranean walkways. As I noted in a previous section dedicated to Marilyn and John Kennedy, their 1960 meeting at Tahoe is a myth regarding an assignation which never occurred. Marilyn would not meet John Kennedy until December in 1961.

Just one week before her tragic death, Marilyn visited Lake Tahoe and Cal-Neva Lodge. While there, she allegedly endured a horrific weekend. It is unclear which conspiracist author began the rumors which eventually expanded into the legend and mythology of that now controversial weekend in the Sierra Nevada Mountains; but allegedly Peter Lawford and his wife, Patricia, Marilyn’s friend and John Kennedy’s sister, recommended Marilyn’s sojourn to Lake Tahoe and Cal-Neva Lodge in late July of 1962. Marilyn was completely down on herself, constantly referred to herself as ugly, worthless, used and abused, certainly a severe and negative self-assessment provided second hand via the fantasist author C. David Heymann by way of an alleged interview with Peter Lawford.

What Lawford allegedly said that Marilyn allegedly said appeared in Heymann’s dubious and frequently criticized 1989 publication, A Woman Named Jackie: An Intimate Biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. In that often questioned and maligned book, Heymann described Marilyn’s two trips to Lake Tahoe during July without providing any calendar dates; but one of the trips obviously referred to the weekend visit of July the 28th. The Tahoe sojourns, of course, occurred after Marilyn’s alleged affair with and sudden rejection by Robert Kennedy, a time in Marilyn’s life, according to Heymann by way of Lawford, which allegedly featured excessive alcohol abuse and excessive drug abuse, even more abuse than her normal amount.

During that Tahoe weekend, allegedly Joe DiMaggio arrived unannounced and uninvited, under the mistaken impression that Marilyn was a kidnap victim. DiMaggio did not like the persons at Cal-Neva that weekend or the circumstances those persons created, according to Heymann’s recitation of Peter Lawford’s testimony. Joe and Marilyn argued after she refused to leave with him and return to Los Angeles, after which Joe departed and Marilyn drank too much, of course; and she ingested so many pills that she was taken to Reno and then returned to Los Angeles by Frank Sinatra’s ever present airplane, of course. Lawford supposedly admitted to Heymann that the lodge featured its share of call girls along with wild, perverted sex parties and excessive drug use; but, Lawford asserted according to Heymann, Marilyn was not a kidnapping victim.

Other biographical accounts of Marilyn’s weekend at Cal-Neva Lodge vary considerably. For instance, Fred Lawrence Guiles asserted that Marilyn was never at Tahoe during that 1962 weekend in July. According to his literary effort, Marilyn was in the hospital aborting a Kennedy induced pregnancy, probably induced by Robert Kennedy, certainly an unfounded tale and most certainly false, as will be demonstrated later. From that Guiles vulgar and lurid tale, more than a few later conspiracists crafted some incredibly vulgar and lurid tales of their own, tales which descended into equally low registers. According to one writer and his vulgar literary effort, Marilyn was raped repeatedly by mobsters, prostitutes and marauding lesbians, not to mention that she was also photographed in various indelicate and compromising positions of sexual debasement, both clothed and naked, drunk and drugged. In yet another lurid account, the writer dismissed the prurient stories of rapes, orgies and lesbianism; but he replaced the tales of debauchery and excessive sex with tales of self-administered drug injections. According to him, Marilyn was ill and constantly ingested deadly pills and alcohol, constantly injected herself with phenobarbital, Nembutal and Seconal: she was simply a depressed and mess of a woman, who, like Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s famous movie, experienced a drug and alcohol induced lost weekend. She could barely walk, barely dress herself and seldom appeared in public during her malignant weekend from Hell; and according to another literary effort, Marilyn actually attempted suicide that weekend; but she was saved by a stomach pump. Her next attempt, however, the following weekend would prove successful, so the writer dutifully noted.

Donald Spoto and Gary Vitacco-Robles recounted a much less sinister, much less grim and lurid account of Marilyn’s sojourn to Tahoe during the weekend of July the 28th. Each biographer maintained that Marilyn visited Cal-Neva that weekend to watch Dean Martin perform and to be with Joe DiMaggio, who wanted them to remarry. Spoto and Vitacco-Robles asserted that DiMaggio proposed remarriage and Marilyn accepted. During that weekend, she thanked Dino for his support during her crisis with Fox over Something’s Got to Give, a crisis fundamentally caused by her appearance at John Kennedy’s birthday celebration and the Democrat Party fund raiser. She and Dino also discussed a new comedy that Arthur Jacobs wanted to produce for them: I Love Louisa.

Both Spoto and Vitacco-Robles offered testimony from various witnesses who also spent that weekend at Lake Tahoe; and they offered completely different stories and accounts, not only regarding what transpired there, but also regarding Marilyn’s general appearance and her demeanor. Buddy Greco testified to a completely different Marilyn Monroe than the one recalled by the conspiracist’s witnesses. Greco was seated on a nearby outdoor deck when Marilyn’s limousine arrived at Cal-Neva Lodge. At first, he did not recognize the beautiful woman wearing sun glasses and a scarf, and also dressed completely in green, who emerged from the long automobile; but he quickly realized who she was. Even though Marilyn had previously met Greco in 1948 at the Crescendo Club where he played jazz piano and where Marilyn auditioned for the job of Benny Goodman’s singer, Sinatra introduced her to the musician again. Greco was positive that Marilyn would not remember him; but when she did, became emotional and then hugged the pianist, he, too, became emotional. Greco recalled for biographer Vitacco-Robles that Marilyn exuded an unparalleled warmth, testimony that completely contradicted the conspiracist’s testifiers. They asserted that Marilyn arrived at Cal-Neva drunk and already drug addled; and she was removed there from in even worse condition.

Another witness, Betsy Duncan Hammes, also offered contradictory testimony, stating that she was in Lake Tahoe that weekend and she saw Marilyn eating dinner. Betsy said that Sam Giancana and his usual retinue were not there; and she would have known if they were (Vitacco-Robles v2:549). Yet another witness offered by Spoto and Vitacco-Robles was the actor Alex D’Arcy, previously mentioned. Alex testified that Marilyn was in Lake Tahoe to be with Joe! (Vitacco-Robles v2:549).

Sarah Churchwell dismissed the eye-witness testimony offered by Donald Spoto, however: Sarah was distressed because the biographer failed to acknowledge the unreliable quality of MOB witnesses. I did not realize that Greco, Hammes and D’Arcy were MOB members and MOB witnesses; and if they were, why would they contradict the accepted orthodoxy? But then, on the other hand, why should the testaments of Greco, Hammes and D’Arcy be dismissed while the testaments of several nefarious mobsters offered by the conspiracists as proof of that weekend have been unilaterally accepted as fact and the truth? What Churchwell expressed, however, exposed a conundrum which leads to a couple of pertinent questions: who, then, is reliable; and which account should we accept as the truth?

According to several conspiracists, the entire Cal-Neva episode was arranged by Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford at the request of Sam Giancana. Mobster, singer and actor acted with one uniform purpose, to convince Marilyn not to hold her press conference and not to expose the adulterous behavior of the middle Kennedy brothers. If necessary, they would extort her into compliance by using her drug addiction along with sexual extortion, of course, that old reliable stratagem of personal destruction.

If we forget for a moment the absolute suspension of logic required to include Giancana, or any mobster for that matter, in such an odd scheme, since the gangsters hated the Kennedys, why would Lawford involve himself in the extortion of Marilyn through sexual debasement if he and his wife were concerned about Marilyn’s mental condition, and particularly if Pat Lawford was present, as has often been asserted; and if Frank Sinatra was in love with Marilyn and wanted to help her, as reported by several of their common friends and Sinatra’s associates, why would he arrange such a disgusting and debilitating weekend for her? Finally, if Marilyn willfully engaged in orgies with men and women during that weekend, as alleged, why would it have been necessary to rape her? Or if Marilyn was so drunk and drugged that she could barely walk, how could she have willfully engaged in orgies? None of the tales asserted make any sense; they fly in the face of logic and reason; and they are certainly contradictory. And too, there is no indication whatsoever that Marilyn ever injected herself with drugs of any kind.

Additionally, as reported by Vitacco-Robles and April VeVea, Marilyn did not have a therapy session with Dr. Greenson immediately following the weekend of July the 28th. It is more than unlikely, then, both Vitacco-Robles and VeVea concluded, that anything traumatic transpired that weekend. As a result, the logical conclusion follows: like the legend of Marilyn’s alleged sexual romp with John Kennedy in February of 1960, the legend of Marilyn’s hellish lost weekend at Cal-Neva Lodge must be viewed with severe skepticism. Once again, including Sam Giancana in such an extortion scheme makes no sense at all and contradicts all the other orthodoxies in which the gangster wanted and hoped that Marilyn’s murder would entrap and destroy the middle Kennedy brothers.

Obviously, not all of the contradictory accounts offered as factual can be factual. The dubious second hand testimony of what the brother of a doorman allegedly told his brother or the secondhand testimony of the widow of Frank Sinatra’s deceased pilot or the recollections of a Lodge guest who recounted the story of a Lodge employee years after the fact or the vague recollections of a man who allegedly observed Marilyn that weekend, identified only as a concerned Cal-Neva man―in short, none of that testimony would be permitted in a court of law; none of that testimony would be accepted by a reasonable person as reliable; and none of that testimony has any evidentiary value whatsoever.

What is the truth about Marilyn’s alleged MOB associations? What are the facts? What exactly, if anything, can be proven? Assertions that Marilyn was involved with the MOB started with Bob Slatzer; and another Marilyn faux friend, Jeanne Carmen, expanded the fable through Anthony Summers’ pathography, Goddess; but Carmen often contradicted herself. According to Slatzer, as he reported in his 1992 publication, The Marilyn Files, Carmen testified that she coincidentally encountered Marilyn with Johnny Roselli at least twice while the actress and the mobster were eating lunch together. They were charming, she recalled; but that was all she knew, a suggestion that Carmen did not even know Roselli, certainly a goofy and confounding suggestion considering what Carmen asserted in her goofy memoir fourteen years later. She claimed that she and Johnny Roselli engaged in an affair while they traveled together from Florida to Las Vegas, grifting unsuspecting golfers. She also asserted that she actually introduced Marilyn to Handsome Johnny, an assertion contradicted by Chuck Giancana, who asserted in Double Cross that Roselli met Marilyn through Joe Schenck.

During the course of Marilyn’s life and her cinematic career, neither to her authentic friends nor to her acquaintances, did Marilyn ever invoke the name of one mobster, not Tony Accardo nor Sam Giancana nor Johnny Roselli, who was allegedly in love with the blonde movie star. She never uttered the name of one gangster. Not one. And certainly, if Marilyn had appeared in public with Handsome Johnny, the Hollywood paparazzi would have so reported and snapped a few photographs of the blonde movie star and the handsome gangster. Nothing. Not even one authentic photograph of Marilyn in the company of any mobster, not Sam Giancana nor Johnny Roselli nor Tony Accardo, has ever been discovered or produced. There are no media reports stating that Marilyn was in the company of or seen with any mobster or any nefarious member of organized crime, in the manner, for in-stance, that Lana Turner’s romantic association with Johnny Stompanato, a known nefarious mobster, was re-ported by the press.

Donald Spoto asserted that Marilyn was never a mistress of the MOB or connected to mobsters in any way. During an interview on MSNBC, aired March the 30th in 1993,1MSNBC News.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BACan6uXpWk>in response to a statement by the host, Bryant Gumbel, who asserted that Marilyn was in deep with the MOB, Spoto responded: Marilyn had absolutely no connection to the MOB at all. The renown Marilyn biographer mentioned the absence of evidence that could prove Marilyn’s MOB connection while asserting that he spoke to people who knew members of the MOB socially. She was never seen with them. She never had anything to do with them. But, eight years prior to the publication of Spoto’s biography, Anthony Summers presented conflicting testimony.

While performing research for his Marilyn pathography, Goddess, Summers uncovered Gary Wean, a former shamus for the district attorney’s investigative division in Los Angeles County. Wean had a salacious anecdote to relate. During the latter months of 1959, Wean and his then partner, Frank Hronek, participated in a stake-out on Sunset Boulevard; but the former investigator did not provide Summers with an exact date when the stake-out occurred. Wean only asserted that he and Hronek observed Marilyn and another female enter a restaurant on that famous boulevard; they were accompanied by two men. One of the men was George Piscitelle, a Mikey Cohen associate. Apparently Wean could not identify the other man or woman; or at least Summers did not reveal their identities. Around 2:00 AM, Marilyn and Piscitelle exited the restaurant and departed by car. The investigators followed the couple to a Coldwater Canyon motel where they parked and then disappeared into a room. Wean and Hronek watched briefly but soon departed. While the investigators observed the motel, Marilyn and Piscitelle did not emerge from their room. Wean related the preceding anecdote to Anthony Summers; and the author recounted the story in Goddess.

Unfortunately, or predictably, Wean’s testimony could not be corroborated by testimony from Hronek because Hronek was already dead by the time Summers interviewed Wean. Thus, Wean was Summers’ only source for the anecdote. Still, and in usual Summers’ fashion, he produced and dropped another name, Jack Tobin, a former ace crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Tobin recalled, according to Summers, that Hronek mentioned the Marilyn and Piscitelle episode. Tobin, then, testified to what Hronek, then dead, had said, hearsay testimony and no corroboration of Wean’s anecdote at all.

Summers then mentioned an unnamed senior law-enforcement official who testified that Mikey Cohen and his gaggle of gangsters often attempted to entrap movie stars in a sexual situation in hopes of extorting money. Putatively, the hot romance between Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato was an extortion scheme gone south that ended with Stompanato’s murder, either by Lana or her daughter, Cheryl. Also allegedly, Marilyn was a target of a Cohen extortion scheme. Cohen used Piscitelle, who was also known as Georgie Perry, allegedly a good-looking, twenty-eight-year-old fellow in 1959, to seduce Marilyn, then thirty-three years old, a seduction Cohen used to blackmail her. While I do not want to get too far afield analyzing Wean’s anecdote, I believe it is important to present a clearer picture than the one presented by Summers.

For most of 1959, Marilyn and Arthur Miller resided in two locations: Connecticut, on their farm in Roxbury, or New York City, in their Manhattan apartment. They visited the cities of Chicago and Philadelphia, each city once. Marilyn did not travel to Los Angeles until September the 18th. Frank Taylor, Ralph Roberts and others accompanied her. On the day following, she appeared at Fox’s Khrushchev luncheon. On the 20th, she attended meetings with various Fox executives regarding her next movie, Let’s Make Love; and thereafter, she returned to New York City. She did not return to Los Angeles until the 2nd of November, accompanied by Arthur Miller. During the remainder of November, filming Let’s Make Love with Yves Montand occupied a majority of Marilyn’s time while she and Miller also spent a considerable amount of time during the evenings with Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret. A considerable number of photographs of the two couples visiting with each other and dining together verify that fact. Beginning on December the 18th, Marilyn struggled with various illnesses, which caused her to miss several days on the set; and during the Christmas holidays, her step-children visited. I’m not exactly sure when Marilyn could have skulked away unnoticed for an evening out alone, late in 1959, for a motel tryst with Georgie Perry, one that resulted in the alleged black mail. And, too, could Marilyn have entered a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard unnoticed, without the press being alerted?

During the time frame that the alleged tryst and extortion transpired, Mikey Cohen’s cavalcade of criminals included two women, Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins, otherwise known as Liz Renay, and Juanita Dale Slusher, otherwise known as Candy Barr, who, in 1959, tutored Joan Collins on the art of strip teasing in preparation for the movie, Seven Thieves. According to Tere Tereba and her Mickey Cohen biography, both women were Marilyn Monroe look-alikes, voluptuously bodied with bleached platinum hair. According to Tereba, Renay even won a Marilyn look-alike contest. Both women became involved in Cohen’s badger games, one of which involved Candy Barr and Alfred Bloomingdale, founder of the department store chain and the Diner’s Club.

In its purest form, the badger game involves a complicit man and woman whose mark is an unsuspecting married man, enticed into a sexual encounter. The woman’s male partner, posing as either her husband or her brother, discover the lovers in the throes of sex and demands money. If posing as the complicit woman’s husband, the money guarantees non-violence; and if posing as her brother, the money guarantees his silence. I suppose such a scheme could work in reverse; but I have doubts. At any rate, is it not possible that the woman observed that night was either Renay or Barr, mistaken for Marilyn Monroe, and she was involved in a badger game with Georgie Perry, who would at some point that night, pose as a cuckold or an angry brother? Seems more than plausible to me.

According to Summers according to Wean, other observers trailed Marilyn on other occasions, with less titillating results than the alleged restaurant and Coldwater Canyon motel episode. Intelligence, however, revealed that Marilyn occasionally associated with both Piscitelle (Summers 339) and another Cohen thug, Sam LoCigno, who, in 1960, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, if Piscitelle extorted Marilyn, why would she continue to associate with him? To assert that she would do so is more than nonsensical. Besides, Summers could not and therefore did not offer any form of corroboration for the testimony offered by the other observers. Furthermore, the author did not identify the other observers; but in his usual fashion he offered more uncorroborated assertions and speculation. In addition, he wrote, a senior law-enforcement source confirmed that the Cohen group were investigated for a ‘shakedown’ operation against stars. (Summers 339). Interesting, is it not, that all the officials of law-enforcement mentioned by Summers are of the senior variety. Summers then asserted that this senior law-enforcement source identified Marilyn Monroe as one of the Mafia’s targets (Summers 411). Yet again, Summers offered no corroborating testimony for what the senior law-enforcement source asserted or their idenity; instead, he proffered the following speculative paragraph:

Cohen and his relevant associates are long dead, and cannot be questioned. The silence they leave behind them, though, concerning their purpose with Marilyn, is heavy with evil. Authorities on organized crime say that, long before the Kennedy era, Mickey Cohen had links to Sam Giancana. He also met with, and by 1960 probably toed the line for, Giancana’s Hollywood representative, Johnny Roselli. Roselli, in turn, knew Marilyn (Summers 411).

Still, the preceding quoted paragraph has no evidentiary value whatsoever; and in fact, there was, and is, no verifiable evidence that Marilyn consorted with the MOB or any members of that criminal organization. None.

Briefly, Gareth “Gary” Wean started his law enforcement career as a Los Angeles police officer. He resigned from the LAPD in 1952 and joined the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Intelligence Unit, as an investigator. In 1970 he totally retired from law enforcement; and in 1987, he published A Fish In the Courthouse, an exposé on the corruption in law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system, similar to Lynn Franklin’s Sawed Off Justice. I have not read Wean’s philippic, only excerpts; and on its leaves, he tackles many subjects related to crime and corruption. He also wades very deeply into the Kennedy assassination and also claimed, I understand, that he was at Marilyn’s hacienda on a stake-out the night she was murdered, I assume, by the MOB. Obviously, he did not intervene nor was he mentioned in the 1982 Summary Report published by the district attorney’s office.

I do not believe Marilyn ever associated with, or would have associated with, known murderers or any known member of the MOB, despite Jeanne Carmen’s glaringly ridiculous contention that Marilyn was enamored of the mobsters. Allegedly Marilyn was excited by the fact that those men were authentic gangsters and murders, not actors portraying murderers but actual murderers who actually killed real persons!

By all accounts, Marilyn was an extremely empathetic and sympathetic person, childlike most professed, for whom the thought of harming plant or critter, much less a human being, was completely alien. She endeavored to save and rescue animals and dying trees and help the less fortunate. Considering her love for all things alive outside of herself, any assertion that she would have been excited by brutal murderers flies in the face of reality and would have been completely uncharacteristic. Still, I admit, two important questions remain: did the MOB or any of the accused mobsters have any motive to murder Marilyn Monroe and did elements of the underworld therefore murder the most famous movie star on Earth?