Reckless – Mike Rothmiller

Drawing on new interviews and previously hidden police and intelligence files, Reckless finally reveals the full corruption of America’s Camelot.

For a time, John F. Kennedy ran the US and the world like a player with loaded dice. All his life, he expected to be serviced. For most, sex is an optional side order; for JFK, it was demanded: a manifestation of his majesty, his power, a display of entitlement and godlike behaviour – the resulting mess was for others to clean up. For the Kennedy men, beginning with prolific philanderer Joe Kennedy Senior, risk was a turn-on.

As another Kennedy, Bobby Junior – son of a would-be president, nephew of another – runs for the White House, Reckless reveals how a dynasty’s arrogance led to tragedy.

Drawing on new interviews and previously protected police and US government intelligence files – tens of thousands of documents from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Organised Crime Intelligence Division, the CIA and the FBI, Rothmiller and Thompson reveal quite how tarnished America’s Camelot was.

The files corroborate how the Kennedys connived with the American Mafia, greedy corporations and Latin American tyrants to gain and hold power. All the usual suspects from FBI titan J. Edgar Hoover and billionaire Howard Hughes to CIA rogue agents and Mob hitmen appear in an narrative which sweeps from the salons of Washington to dictator Rafael Trujillo’s torture chambers in the Dominican Republic (where a dwarf called Snowball specialised in biting off men’s genitals).