DURIE MALCOLM:
“In the 1950’s Joe Kennedy, concerned about the Kennedy image, tried to distance himself from his old cronies, not only those in New York, but throughout the mob.
In Chicago the consensus was, ‘If there ever was a crook, it was Joe Kennedy.’
Still earlier in 1947, he had called upon Sam Giancana to take care of a nasty problem. John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, had married Durie Malcolm, an Episcopalian and a Palm Beach socialite. Her maiden name was Kerr, but she took the name of her stepfather. She had divorced her first husband Fermin Des Ioge IV, and was divorced by her second husband, F. John Barsback, on January 24, 1947.
Joe Kennedy told Sam Giancana, ‘I need to have this marriage annulled without publicity and with absolutely no record of it – no trace of any legal documents.’
Sam directed mobster Johnny Roselli to handle that matter, a sixth link between the Kennedy’s and the Chicago mob.
Seymour Hersh, in his 1997 account, indicated that it was not the mob but Charles Spalding, a friend of JFK and local attorney in Palm Beach, Florida, who removed all the wedding documents related to the marriage by a justice of the peace in an early morning ceremony.
There was no evidence of a divorce here, and the well-known Cardinal Cushing of Boston once referred to the matter, claiming that marriage outside of the Catholic Church would not require an annulment, but only a ‘nullifying declaration.’
JFK and SAM, The Connection Between the Giancana and Kennedy Assassinations, p. 101, by Antoinette Giancana, John Hughe, DM OXON, MD, PhD., and Thomas Jobe, Md.