In Washington, DC, John F Kennedy has just been elected President. In Havana, Fidel Castro has been in office for a year, and with Cold War tensions rapidly heating up, the thought of a Communist leader so close to home is already raising American blood pressure. Anti-communist fever is rampant in the USA, with a paranoid establishment seeing reds under every bed. Nevertheless, the decision to snuff out the threat of Castro by hiring Tom Jefferson, America's best assassin, to kill him comes from an unusual quarter: the Mafia ... First published 1999.