Rubicon Lies
Genre: Historical/Crime
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Jimmy Ellis
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Clarke, Jeremy Strong, James Norton, David Corenswet, Brendan Gleeson, Bobby Cannavale, David Krumholtz, John Lithgow, Tony Shalhoub
Plot: A flickering reel of footage plays across the screen—bright sun, swaying palms, revolutionaries in fatigues firing into the air as Batista’s soldiers flee Havana. Through the grain, we cut to January 1st, 1959, as a CIA transport boat rumbles out of the Havana docks under cover of night. Dominic Reese (Leonardo DiCaprio), pulls a wounded Cuban exile aboard, the man bleeding from a gunshot in the shoulder. Behind them, the city is a theater of fire and laughter—liberation and revenge colliding in the streets. Reese lights a cigarette as machine gun fire stutters in the hills.
Before dawn, in a crumbling Spanish Colonial safehouse overlooking the harbor, Reese binds the wound of the Cuban exile he pulled from the docks. The man winces, speaking in rushed, panicked Spanish about comrades still trapped in the city. Reese says nothing. He tightens the bandage. In the next room, a CIA field radio sputters with reports: the rebels have taken the palace, executions have begun. One name keeps surfacing—a former Batista general being hunted by Castro’s men. Reese listens, still expressionless. Then he stands, walks to a small closet, and opens it. Inside: a bloodied man in uniform, gagged, bound at the wrists and ankles. The general. Reese kneels, checks his pulse, then calmly suffocates him with a plastic bag. No anger. No words. Just necessity. Back in the kitchen, he tells the exile: “Your friend didn’t make it.” Then he boards the boat. The revolution is already over—for some.
Back in Washington, Cal Ryland (Jeremy Strong) stands in a gray government hallway beneath the humming fluorescents of Langley. He wears an expression that never quite relaxes. His suit is immaculate, his shoes too polished for comfort. Ryland watches the newsreel of Castro’s parade and mutters, “Not a loss—an opening.” In the next room, Reese arrives from Havana, still stained with someone else’s blood. The two exchange a look: old friends, now tools of empire.
Eli Travers (Jason Clarke), meticulous FBI agent steps into the New York offices of Director J. Edgar Hoover (Brendan Gleeson). They don’t shake hands. Hoover motions Eli to sit, already reading a file. He slides it across the desk. “Organized crime,” he says. “Teamsters Pension Fund. It’s being drained.” Eli asks who he’s allowed to follow. “Everyone,” Hoover replies, “except the President’s father.” Eli doesn’t smile.
That night, Eli returns to his small D.C. apartment. The kind of place that still smells like stale coffee no matter how often it’s cleaned. He drops his holster on the counter, peels off his jacket, and puts a frozen dinner into the oven. Across the room, a record spins—Mingus, slow and yearning. He watches a Kennedy campaign ad flicker across the screen: a smiling family, sunlit Americana, promises etched in charisma. He says nothing. On a shelf beside a dusty lamp sits a photo—Eli in uniform beside his younger brother, smiling and long dead, lost in Korea. Eli picks up the phone and dials. A woman’s voice answers—then hangs up without a word. He stands in the silence a long while, listening to nothing but the turn of the record.
In Chicago, Carlos Marcello (Bobby Cannavale), silver-haired, wolf-eyed, sits in a candlelit cathedral while mass is said in Latin. He speaks softly to a man in a dark overcoat beside him—arrangements about a port in New Orleans, a name for a contact in Havana. He makes no mention of the CIA, but we understand: this is how history moves, not with speeches, but nods in pews.
Eli’s investigation leads him to Jules Moret (Tony Shalhoub), a mid-tier mobster who lives like a man afraid of windows. He keeps his records in a back closet of his Queens brownstone, inside a hollowed-out stereo cabinet. Eli surveils for weeks, watching the man visit a mistress in midtown, drop envelopes in diners. Eventually, he leans on Jack Ruby (David Krumholtz), an overweight Dallas nightclub owner. Ruby owes favors. Eli makes the call.
In a smoky backroom, Reese meets with Ruby. Reese warns him to stay out of “government business.” Ruby laughs it off. But Reese’s face turns hard. “You think you’re just a clown with keys to the city,” he says. “You’re walking a tightrope with no net. Stay on script.”
That night, Ruby sneaks into Jules Moret’s house while he’s away with his mistress. He finds the stereo, removes the ledger, and replaces the backboard. Outside, in a parked car beneath a dead streetlamp, Eli waits. He breathes in silence, watching the house through fogged glass. He doesn’t see Reese’s reflection in the mirror until it’s too late.
Reese yanks Eli from the car. In the alley, beneath cold light, he beats Eli with precise, professional cruelty. Not rage—strategy. A warning. Eli spits blood on the concrete and stares up at him. “You don’t scare me,” he mutters. Reese pauses, then leans in close. “You’re not supposed to be scared. You’re supposed to stay out of the way.”
Ruby delivers the books to Eli two nights later. The pages are filled with coded names, shell companies, freight manifests. Eli decodes them at a motel desk in Queens, peeling back the layers of a vast financial machine. One name stops him cold: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., patriarch of the President-elect, has loaned millions to the fund.
In a dingy motel off Queens Boulevard, Eli sits at the desk with a glass of rye and a stack of ledgers. The room hums with neon and the soft rasp of traffic outside. His hands move steadily, decoding aliases, cross-referencing shell companies, unraveling the spiderweb of dark money flowing through the American body politic. In the corner, a tape recorder clicks on. His voice, tired but steady, fills the silence. “Teamsters Fund. Carlos Marcello. Joseph Kennedy Senior. Cross-border freight. Off-book Cuba payments.” He pauses. “Jack Ruby is the hinge.” He finishes the tape, places it in a manila envelope with a photo of his brother tucked inside, and addresses it to an anonymous P.O. box in Baltimore.
Eli, bandaged and bruised, returns to Washington. He lays the file before Director Hoover, expecting a bureaucratic storm. Instead, Hoover doesn’t even look up from his tea. “You’re off the case,” he says. “As of now, you’re on administrative leave. Permanent.” Eli stares in disbelief. “The President’s father is compromised.” Hoover shrugs. “Then the President is compromised. Let’s not make a Communist of you, Agent Travers.”
Outside the Hoover Building, Eli stands in the cold. No badge. No job. No allies. Just the bitter knowledge that the rules don’t apply to kings.
Meanwhile, Reese and Ryland meet in a Georgetown townhouse, watching John F. Kennedy (David Corenswet) give his inauguration speech. The words are beautiful, but Reese isn’t listening. “He’s got a weakness,” Ryland says. “We just haven’t built it yet.”
The motorcade rolls through the Capitol. A new age has begun. But underneath the marble, the knives are already out.
Later that week, Dominic Reese walks the grounds of a Palm Beach estate lined with white stone and silence. The Atlantic glitters beyond the hedges, and gulls cut the sky like flickering static. Inside, beneath the stillness of a ceiling fan, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (John Lithgow) sits in a high-backed chair, half-frozen by a stroke but fully in control. He speaks slowly, the words thick but unmissable. He tells Reese that winning an election is not the same as taking power—and keeping power is bloodier still. He does not mention the Teamsters ledger, because he doesn’t need to. He speaks of unions, offshore accounts, the Mob as a mirror of Washington, and the quiet costs of empire. Reese stands, cigarette in hand, not out of fear or reverence, but recognition. He is being given orders—not by a handler, but by the man who bought America wholesale and hung it on his son's wall. Outside, the wind lifts the flags just slightly. Inside, the deal is already done.
In a sun-bleached compound on the edge of jungle, Carlos Marcello paces barefoot across the tiled veranda. Central American heat beats down like judgment. He’s no longer a kingpin, just an exile in silk shirts. A black car pulls up. From it emerges Cal Ryland, pale and sweating in a suit unsuited to the tropics. He brings two things: news that the Justice Department has deported Marcello without trial, and an offer—dominion, if he cooperates with the CIA again. Marcello, amused, flicks ashes onto the tile.
Ryland’s next guest is Eli Travers. Brought by private plane, he walks through the decaying Spanish architecture with a limp from the earlier beating. Cal introduces him as Marcello’s new legal counsel. Eli is stunned but plays along. They speak in riddles—Eli calling it “representation,” Marcello calling it “insurance.” Before the meeting ends, Marcello opens a metal suitcase and hands it to Cal: it’s packed with cash. “For the revolution,” he says.
In the White House, President John F. Kennedy signs off on Operation Zapata—the planned invasion of Cuba by exiles trained in Florida and Guatemala. Ryland and Reese stand behind him, stony and unsmiling. Only Robert F. Kennedy (James Norton), the Attorney General, looks skeptical. “You better be right,” he warns Ryland, who says nothing. His silence is the sound of a man lying to history.
The training camps outside New Orleans are sun-scorched and raw. Reese oversees combat drills with former Havana gangsters, Miami Cubans, and a handful of mercenaries. He watches one man break down during live fire and quietly removes him from the roster—then has him drowned in the bayou. The operation must be clean. The math must balance.
In a Louisiana motel, Eli Travers receives a copy of the Pension Fund’s books—duplicates made by Jack Ruby. He now knows more about the flow of mob money than anyone alive. He stares at the pages like a man looking at a map of buried graves. He’s using mob money to bankroll an anti-Castro mission. A contradiction he chooses not to resolve.
Then—April 17, 1961. The Bay of Pigs invasion begins and collapses within three days. The CIA's air support is pulled. Hundreds of exiles are captured. Ryland is summoned to the Oval Office where President Kennedy rages at the betrayal. “You told me it would look like we had nothing to do with it,” he shouts. Ryland says, “We didn’t.” The President replies, “No, we failed—that’s what we did.” The words scar everyone in the room.
That same night, in Miami, Ryland is involved in a covert heroin operation meant to muddy the waters—hot shipments that would be traced back to Cuba to justify another strike. But something goes wrong. In a warehouse full of chemical drums, he’s ambushed by a rival faction—gunmen not from Castro’s side, but from the mob. They shoot him twice and vanish. Ryland survives, bleeding in the back of a pick-up truck, driven by Reese.
That night, as the dust of failure settles in Washington, Robert F. Kennedy returns to Hickory Hill under a moonless sky, the quiet weight of betrayal thick on his shoulders. Inside, the hearth is lit, casting trembling shadows against the old wood and silent portraits. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. sits in his study, unmoved, a cardigan wrapped over his chest, sipping tea like nothing has shifted. But Robert does not enter quietly. His voice cuts into the stillness—sharp, direct, loaded with fury barely constrained. He lays it all out: the fund, the Mob, the true cost of winning the White House. But his father responds not with shame, but doctrine. He reminds Robert that the presidency was always a transaction. That ideals are window dressing. That Cal Ryland is not a mistake, but a mechanism. When Joseph rises, slow and deliberate, leaning on a cane, it is not with apology—but with command. He tells Robert to bury the story, protect the name, and remember who built the kingdom. Robert doesn’t respond. He just stares at his father, and for the first time, sees not a patriarch, but a machine.
As Ryland recovers, Reese returns to the warehouse—now empty—and finds traces of heroin packed for Cuban distribution. His mind races: this wasn’t just about sabotaging the op. It was a theft. Someone's trading with Castro.
Reese and Ryland steal the next shipment themselves—millions in heroin—intercepting it before it hits the Gulf docks. They store it in a CIA black site outside Baton Rouge. Ryland, pale and shaking from the bullet wounds, tells Reese: “This is the only hand we’ve got left.”
Meanwhile, Ruby installs a listening device in a D.C. hotel where President Kennedy is meeting a known socialite. The woman is a plant—sent by Ryland to entrap the President. On the recording, the President mocks Ryland openly: his ambition, his desperation to be a Kennedy himself. Ryland listens in silence, jaw clenched. Eli, when handed the tapes, listens too—but without expression. He’s keeping them as leverage, not as vengeance.
In Washington, Robert F. Kennedy gets wind of the wiretap. He investigates Ryland’s past, and what he finds sickens him: ties to Marcello, heroin shipments, offshore bank accounts. One morning, Ryland enters the White House and finds his badge revoked. Robert meets him at the gates.
Ryland spends that night in his hotel, shirtless and bruised, pouring bourbon into a stitched-up belly wound. Reese finds him there. Ryland’s speech slurs as he outlines a new idea: kill the President. “Take him down and the whole thing resets. Robert steps down. Marcello comes home. We write history.”
Reese doesn’t answer. He just looks out the window at the night skyline. The city, the lights, the monuments—they’re illusions. And he’s already killed for worse.
A week later, Reese receives a call from Eli Travers. They meet at a cemetery in Alexandria. Eli, now Marcello’s official lawyer, speaks flatly: “The boss wants it done. He thinks the Kennedy boys are killing the American dream one subpoena at a time.” Reese asks, “And you?” Eli lights a cigarette. “I don’t dream anymore.”
In a rented warehouse outside Miami, under a hanging bulb and the stink of salt and rot, Cal Ryland, Dominic Reese, and Eli Travers stand around a chalkboard covered in arrows and motorcade routes. The plan is simple in theory: kill President Kennedy during his upcoming Miami motorcade, frame it on a fabricated left-wing militia, and use the chaos to sever Robert F. Kennedy’ Justice Department authority. Marcello funds the logistics. Reese provides the shooters. Eli draws up the cover story—warrants, confessions, communiqués. A blueprint for deceit. None of them look each other in the eyes.
They test the weapons in the Everglades—sniper rifles wrapped in wax paper, a custom-built radio detonator, backup shooters with fake Cuban IDs. Reese moves like a ghost among the cypress trees. Ryland can barely lift his arm; he winces when he breathes. Eli watches it all with the numb expression of a priest hearing his hundredth confession.
But Eli has already tipped Director J. Edgar Hoover. In a quiet meeting in a Washington carriage house, Eli tells the Director that “elements of the mob and former intelligence” are planning something “beyond salvage.” The Director’s face does not change. “We’ll observe,” he says. “History doesn’t need heroes. It needs endings.” Eli leaves unsure whether he’s saved anything at all.
Then, one week before the Miami hit, the plan implodes. One of their Cuban shooters panics and tries to flee. Reese finds his body in a hotel sinkhole—his throat cut. Someone else is tying off loose ends. Someone inside the plan. Reese and Ryland panic. They burn the house they used for staging. Kill two more exiles. Dump bodies in sugarcane fields. Ryland loses control. “There’s a second plot,” he hisses. “They’re letting us take the fall.”
Reese leaves for Dallas, the air full of rumors and contradictions. There, in a dim-lit diner, he finds Jack Ruby, eating scrambled eggs and watching the waitress like she’s a threat. Ruby leans in. “There’s chatter,” he says. “Something’s happening here. Quiet. Clean. Not like Miami.” Reese asks who. Ruby just shrugs. “Doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger. It matters who signs the papers after.”
Back in D.C., Eli Travers meets Robert F. Kennedy in the National Gallery, among marble statues and shadowed columns. Eli hands over a manila envelope containing tapes, wire photos, and pages from the Pension Fund. “Your father was knee-deep,” Eli says. Robert listens in silence. “He bought unions, bought men, bought you the crown.” Robert nods once. “I know.” Eli watches him closely. “Then you know what’s coming for your brother.”
“I do,” Robert says, finally. “And I need you to help me survive it.” He offers Eli protection: immunity, a new identity, an offshore account. But there’s a price: Cal Ryland. “He’s the one who knows too much,” Robert says. “And he’s the one who keeps trying to matter.”
That night, Eli flies to New York under a false name. Rain lashes the taxi as he stares out the window, face unreadable. In a midtown hotel suite, Cal Ryland paces, shirtless, bandages peeking from beneath a silk robe, a revolver on the table beside two paper cups and a half-empty bottle of rye. They don’t speak much at first. They drink, share the silence of men who have lived too long in smoke and secrets. Eventually Cal says, “We got so close, didn’t we? We could’ve rewritten everything.” He smiles, a tired one. “Make the country honest again—even if it meant lying the whole way.” Eli doesn’t smile. He studies Cal, as if looking at a memory that stopped making sense. “That’s the problem, Cal. You never learned that nothing wants to be rewritten.” Cal shifts uncomfortably. “Is this about Bobby?” “No,” Eli says, standing slowly. “This is about all of it.” He draws the pistol and shoots Cal twice in the chest. But he doesn’t leave. He stands over the dying man, breathing heavily, jaw clenched. Cal blinks up at the ceiling, his mouth moving like he’s trying to apologize to someone already gone. Eli kneels, whispering—not with malice, but with quiet resignation—“Robert sends his love.” As the final breath leaves Cal Ryland, Eli closes his eyes and the rain doesn’t stop.
Dominic Reese, back in Dallas, walks the perimeter of Dealey Plaza. He notes the angles. The overpasses. The shadows cast at noon. He meets Carlos Marcello and three other mob lieutenants in a hotel room overlooking the city. They speak quietly. Marcello offers him a choice: leave the CIA, work for the family, and live like a king. “No flags. No lies. Just business.” Reese nods. “I’ll think about it.”
November 22nd, 1963. The streets hum with anticipation. Children on shoulders. Secret Service radios crackling. Flags trembling in still air. Reese watches from a window in the Texas School Book Depository, his eyes not on the President—but on the crowd. He’s not the shooter. He’s just there to witness.
Eli Travers sits in a small office in D.C., smoking. His new name is printed on a passport in his drawer. On the radio, a voice begins to falter—“…shots fired at the President’s motorcade…” In the hotel, Marcello lowers his espresso and mutters, “It’s done.” In a black car, Robert F. Kennedy stares out the window, tears in his eyes, but no expression on his face. And Reese, up above the city, closes his eyes. Then the shots. Then the screams. Then silence.
