On this day in 1968 Robert Kennedy was shot three times and killed in a crowded kitchen passageway at the Ambassador Hotel in LA. RFK pursued a relentless crusade against organized crime and the Mafia, including the Teamsters union President Jimmy Hoffa. Overall convictions rose by 800% during his term as Attorney General.

On this day in 1968, Robert Francis Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, succumbing to gunshot wounds inflicted the previous night by Sirhan Sirhan in a crowded kitchen passageway at the Ambassador Hotel. He was just 42 years old. The senator and former Attorney General had been celebrating his victory in the California Democratic primary, widely seen as a stepping stone to the presidency. His assassination robbed America of one of its most formidable enemies of organised crime, a man who had spent the better part of a decade making the lives of mob bosses extraordinarily uncomfortable.

Kennedy's war against the Mafia was deeply personal and relentlessly prosecutorial. As Attorney General under his brother President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1964, he transformed the Justice Department's approach to organised crime from a half-hearted enterprise into an all-out assault. Overall convictions of organised crime figures rose by an astonishing 800 percent during his tenure. He assembled a so-called "Get Hoffa Squad," a dedicated team of prosecutors targeting Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa, whom Kennedy despised and viewed as a corrupt figurehead propped up by mob money. Hoffa was eventually convicted of jury tampering and fraud in 1964, a victory Kennedy considered among his greatest achievements.

Beyond Hoffa, RFK set his sights on the broader infrastructure of American organised crime. The five New York families, the Chicago Outfit, and crime networks stretching from New Orleans to Las Vegas all felt the heat of his expanded FBI taskforces. Kennedy worked closely with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, though their relationship was famously strained, pushing for greater use of electronic surveillance and witness cooperation. The 1963 Senate testimony of Joseph Valachi, the first made member of the Cosa Nostra to publicly confirm the organisation's existence, was a direct product of the pressure Kennedy's Justice Department had applied. Valachi's revelations connected the dots between figures like Lucky Luciano, who had structured the modern American Mafia decades earlier, and the crime families still operating in every major American city.

There were those who noted, with no small amount of dark irony, that Kennedy's father Joseph had his own complicated history with bootleggers and shadowy figures from the Prohibition era, including rumoured associations with men connected to Al Capone's network. Whether that history informed Robert's crusading zeal or simply added a layer of complexity to his legacy remains a matter of historical debate.

Robert Kennedy's death left a vacuum in the prosecution of organised crime that took years to fill, and many historians argue the momentum his Justice Department built was never truly recaptured until the widespread use of the RICO Act in the 1980s.