Betrayed Once Too Often? The Mafia and the Kennedy Assassination
O'Lessker, Karl
Karl O'Lessker BETRAYED ONCE TOO OFTEN? THE MAFIA AND THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION On June 3, 1960, FBI Director Hoover sent a memorandum to the State Department's Office of Security warning that...
...and the CIA was resolutely uncooperative with the Warren Commission and with both con gressional committees that were looking into intelligence aspects of the assassina tion...
...5. Most intriguing, in this connection, is that on the night of his arrest Oswald attempted to place a telephone call to a Raleigh, North Carolina number, but Secret Service agents listening in ordered the switchboard operator to tell Oswald the call could not be completed...
...Quickly granted, it was numbered FM 824085...
...On September 17 he applied for a tourist card at the Mexican consulate in New Orleans...
...From the mob's point of view, Kennedy had been compromised...
...It was also an address visited frequently by the violently anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy David Ferric, who not only worked for reputed Mafia boss Carlos Marcello but was reported by several different sources to have been a contract agent for the CIA...
...And it was Marcello who, according to an informant who was present, vowed in 1962 that both President and Attorney General Kennedy would "be taken care of" by killing the president and "setting up a nut to take the blame...
...And the acoustical evidence only confirms what a large number of eyewitnesses insisted all along about the source of at least one shot...
...carried out the murder of both Kennedy and his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald...
...6. Army Intelligence destroyed a file it had on Oswald...
...And one more point: Lifton has obtained, interview material from a number of people present at Bethesda that suggests, at the very least, great confusion as to when the body arrived, in what ambulance, and in what coffin...
...2. So far as anyone knows or has ever alleged, Oswald was only a mediocre marksman...
...Border Patrol to have been the pilot of the plane that brought Marcello back from exile in Guatemala in 1961...
...He corresponded with its national headquarters, reported that he was renting an office to operate out of, and distributed leaflets on busy street corners...
...For whatever else Lifton may have achieved, he has totally failed to come up with an even remotely intelligible explanation of the assassination...
...Blakey and Billings interpret all this to mean that Kennedy, in accepting the Mafia's women, gave it what it believed to be a tacit undertaking...
...The view here is that the Mafia, with or without help from other groups, engineered the assassination and then disposed of the alleged assassin...
...Outrageous as it may seem to us, the mob thought it enjoyed and had earned, if not a working relationship, then a live-and-let-live status with the Kennedy family...
...No one has to read through the whole vast bulk of BestEvidence to figure out the size and scope of the conspiracy that would be required to pull it off-the amount of planning, the split-second timing, the need to ensure absolute fidelity to the cover-up on the part of dozens of active participants...
...Second, examination by physicians and other medical personnel at Parkland Hospital in Dallas revealed a pattern of head and neck wounds consistent only with shots from the front and they duly reported that analysis...
...More importantly, many felt they had actually won the 1960 presidential election for John Kennedy through their control of votes on Chicago's West Side...
...A great many others who might also have provided key information have died of more or less natural causes and an alarming number have been murdered...
...But whatever his role in the actual assassination, it has now been established that there was at least one other gunman in Dealey Plaza that day...
...Nothing so earthy and explicable as the Mafia or angry Cuban exiles, but rather dozens of high-ranking federal officials, not necessarily excluding Vice President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, swarming together like maggots in "at least three separate conspiracies: 1. to murder the President...
...The Bethesda people saw just as clearly a pattern of wounds caused by shots from the rear...
...First, as I have said, Kennedy was shot from the front...
...That reads quickly, but the implications, especially of the second part, are staggering...
...but she admits to numerous meetings with the gangster during those two years, and it is difficult to imagine why Giancana would have been interested in only a platonic relationship with the beautiful and promiscuous young woman, even while finding her useful as a conduit to the White House...
...Oswald and Ruby are dead and so too now is Giancana -murdered in 1975 just before his scheduled appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence...
...For example, an X-ray technician named Jerrol Custer remembered the X-rays he helped take-and will forever remember passing within fifteen yards of Jacqueline Kennedy as he walked across the Bethesda lobby with the X-rays of her husband's body in his hands...
...All this is only a sampling of the overwhelming amount of material Summers reports in his book, much of it drawn from the work of the House Assassinations Committee, even more produced by his own hundreds of interviews with important, but heretofore neglected, witnesses...
...Kennedy and the (unknown to her) empty casket rode in an ambulance to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, while the corpse itself was airlifted by helicopter to Walter Reed Army Hospital...
...One of them was a 26-year-old named Judith Campbell, one of Sinatra's own mistresses...
...No record exists of Oswald's knowing anyone in that part of the country...
...The question of who killed John Kennedy has served as an ideological litmus test almost as well as have proposals for sharp increases in defense spending...
...His conclusion is that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy comprised of members of the Mafia, of Cuban exiles, and "renegade elements" of the CIA who had been associated with both...
...She had just entered the hospital after leaving the ambulance, parked out front, which contained the Dallas casket, and supposedly the body...
...And when he returned to the United States 30 months later with a Russian wife, the CIA showed no apparent interest in him and made no effort even routinely to debrief him...
...He had crossed the line...
...She insists she didn't go to bed with Giancana until her affair with the president was nearly over...
...Most compelling, in my view, is the starkly divergent testimony of the Parkland and Bethesda medical personnel...
...If you understand my way of talking, you have got to bring me to Washington...
...By contrast, the plot adduced in both our other books has the flavor of bitter reality about it, even if neither book successfully fills in all the gaps nor disposes of all major objections...
...What is more, two FBI agents who were present at the Bethesda autopsy noted in their official report evidence that "surgery of the head" had been performed prior to the autopsy...
...Why the differences...
...And was it only a coincidence that his employer at this time was one William Reily, "a wealthy American backer of the Crusade to Free Cuba Committee" ? 8. And then there was Oswald's mysteri ous trip to Mexico in September, 1963...
...What led the FBI in 1960 to think that someone might be impersonating Oswald...
...Merely having to ask the questions throws corrosive doubt on the Warren Commission's portrait of Oswald as a solitary malcontent...
...Rather, it's the demonic intricacy of the plot that removes it decisively from the realm of the possible...
...Third, the body was placed on board Air Force One for the flight to Washington, but at some point between 2:18 and 2:47 p.m...
...A journalist for the BBC at the time he undertook the research in 1977 (originally for a television documentary), he continued his interviews and reading for two more years...
...It has opened Commission critics all too easily to the charge of being cranks...
...Two or more gunmen equals prior planning and conspiracy...
...Thanks to Anthony Summers and the House Assassinations Committee, we now know that he was far from being a lonely drifter or Marxist misfit...
...Heretofore it has not done so...
...For one thing, Frank Costello always claimed he had been in the liquor business with Joseph Kennedy before the repeal of prohibition and had "helped Kennedy become wealthy...
...Whatever the final outcome of their labors, these books by Anthony Summers and by Robert Blakey and Richard Billings go a long way toward exposing the hoax and uncovering the plot it was designed to conceal...
...What no one has been able to do so far, however, is to move beyond motive to a persuasive account of how the actual plot was put together and by whom...
...Indeed, the Warren Commission now clearly stands as an effort to suppress the truth, to block any move toward a genuinely effective investigation...
...Chances are, we may never be able to do so...
...At last word (a phone call to Justice in late July, 1981) the Department was awaiting the imminent arrival of a National Science Foundation evaluation of the crucial acoustical evidence which Blakey's committee developed...
...Who then were the conspirators...
...That is hard but not altogether impossible to contemplate...
...Did Gaudet think Oswald killed the president...
...Yet Professor Blakey, whose academic specialty is evidence, believes that, given the investigatory resources, he "could come close to" bringing an indictment that would lead to the conviction of one or more persons involved in the assassination...
...Here again we can only speculate as to motives-and in this case hope they were honorable...
...9. Defenders of the Warren Commission have made great sport with the bizarre suggestion that there was a "second Os wald" involved in the case...
...In any case, the FBI soon became aware of the Kennedy-Campbell-Giancana triangle and kept it under surveillance for a year...
...The significance of this is not that it did or didn't find its mark (it apparently didn't), but that the existence of another gunman proves the existence of a conspiracy- precisely the conclusion that the Warren Commission strained so mightily to reject...
...Moreover, Oswald had pur chased the rifle by easily traceable mail order and carried identification in his wallet linking himself to it...
...But he refused to say more than that...
...Blakey and Billings don't deny the possibility of involvement by those others...
...Add to that Oswald's several reported links to the sinister David Ferrie, who not only worked for Marcello (and the CIA) but was said by the U.S...
...Yet, as Summers shows again and again, a number of solid citizens whose disinterestedness and sobri ety no one could impeach, have testified to encounters with someone calling himself Oswald at times and in places where the real Oswald could not have been...
...So many years later, so many trails gone cold, one would have to bet against the chances of our ever learning who really killed John Kennedy...
...Summers, as I have already said, is convinced the conspiracy drew from three different but related groups...
...I think he was set up on purpose...
...To see just how fearfully complex this kind of conspiracy would be, consider the scenario that Lifton developed after 15 years of full-time, obsessive research...
...There is a great deal of this sort of thing and it cannot be rejected as merely one overwrought authoi's invention...
...Both have been extensively questioned and both of course deny any part in it...
...And minutes after the shooting he was again positively identified as sitting with a Coke in the same room he insisted he had been in all along...
...At one point he got into a shouting match and near fist fight with anti-Castro Cubans...
...Kennedy's failure to support the overthrow of Castro is one, a failure that prevented restoration of the enormously lucrative gambling, drug, and prostitution trade in Cuba...
...In either case, organized crime played a major role in the assassination and both books provide abundant evidence as to motive...
...yet the Marine Corps ignored it all and even expedited his premature discharge...
...But two men remain alive who, if the theory of Mafia involvement in the assassination has any validity at all, must have been at the center of it: Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante...
...He is going to be hit...
...As one very irate reviewer commented, given the alleged involvement of "the executive branch" and most importantly the Secret Service, it would have been so much "easier to poison the president's soup instead...
...He continues to be hopeful that the Justice Department will finally proceed with a full-scale, truly unfettered investigation...
...One needn't place quite so melodramatic an interpretation on the fact of Kennedy's sharing a mistress with Sam Giancana in order to conclude that leading criminal elements in America had motive enough for wanting to kill him...
...Kennedy the pain of testifying in court- that that alone should have touched off the most massive conspiracy investigation in American history...
...Much less persuasive than the other two, it shares little in common with them besides the conviction that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy rather than to a lone deranged gunman...
...Apart from all the other evidence I have so far cited, he almost certainly had connections with organized crime through his favorite uncle, Charles Murret, a professional gambler associated with reputed New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello...
...The best of the three books, Anthony Summers' Conspiracy, argues that the Mafia was certainly involved but that it was aided to an important degree by anti-Castro Cuban refugees and lower-echelon "renegade elements" of the CIA...
...And in fact, more than three years, earlier, when Oswald himself was living in the Soviet Union, FBI Director Hoover had sent a memorandum, dated June 3, 1960, to the State Department's Office of Security warning that "there is a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald's birth certificate...
...Fifth, surgical alterations were then performed on the body making it appear that Kennedy had been shot from behind...
...Upon arriving in New Orleans in April, 1963, Oswald set about to establish a chapter of the (pro-Castro) Fair Play for Cuba Committee...
...And perhaps the answer itself isn't all that important, beyond the obviously desirable end of bringing criminals to justice...
...But if the testimony of private citizens seems insuf ficiently weighty, consider the following paragraph from an FBI report prepared for J. Edgar Hoover within 24 hours of the assassination: The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identifying himself as Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages...
...Sinatra introduced the girl to Senator Kennedy in February, 1960, and the following month they began two years of sexual intimacy...
...Anthony Summers' Conspiracy is much the better of the two books;-indeed, much the best ever written on the Kennedy assassination and a masterpiece by any standard of investigative reporting...
...But whoever shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository must have fired with astonish ing speed and accuracy, without even the advantage of a telescopic sight...
...It's not so much his "conclusion that there was a plot involving the executive branch of the government to remove Kennedy from office and, by fabricating the evidence, . . . make his death appear a historical quirk of fate...
...it was removed from the casket, placed in a body bag, and concealed somewhere on the plane...
...That will be small enough justification for what a brilliant conservative friend of mine, the late Indiana State Senator D. Russell Bontrager, told me many years ago was "the worst hoax ever perpetrated on the American people...
...The result is this superb book, on almost every page of which one finds carefully documented, coolly evaluated evidence that the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" theory is palpable nonsense...
...Newly developed acoustical techniques have disclosed beyond reasonable doubt that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll...
...Let me cite only a few of the points that Summers develops: 1. Though Lee Oswald was certainly involved in the conspiracy in some capacity, there is grave doubt that he fired any of the shots that struck the president...
...and you do not make the evidence go away by denouncing the scenario or its author...
...too much of it is firmly there on the public record...
...The problem, though, which Lifton's critics have largely ignored, is that he has accumulated a great deal of strongly suggestive evidence in support of the proposition that something awfully peculiar might have occurred between Dallas and Bethesda...
...I think he was a patsy...
...Fourth, upon arrival at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Mrs...
...Prior to his 1959 "defection" to the Soviet Union and especially during his Marine Corps service at two top-secret bases, he conformed with a kind of comic-book fidelity to the model of a potential Communist defector...
...while the Blakey and Billings book rests entirely on their committee's Final Report...
...The authors of The Plot to Kill the President, G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, think the Mafia was solely responsible...
...But as Summers reports, that was simply not true: "In 1975, thanks to a bureaucratic blunder during dedassification, the name of the holder was revealed...
...The FBI placed a note in the file declaring, "No record of FM 824084 located...
...Here let me mention only the address 544 Camp Street...
...Trafficante is reported to have said in 1962, "Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him . . . Kennedy's not going to make it to the election...
...The appalling complexity of the scheme Lifton envisions would not only invite but guarantee failure in the real world...
...But whatever in the world can it possibly signify...
...Following the assassination, the FBI ran a check on all applicants for Mexican entry papers that day...
...But all agree that, contrary to the Warren Commission and its few remaining defenders, at least one other shot was fired from the grassy knoll...
...But Sinatra had also introduced Miss Campbell to Sam Giancana...
...Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice...
...There is plenty of (not unambiguous) evidence linking Oswald to the murder weapon and of course to the scene of the crime...
...2. to alter the body...
...Strange surroundings, strange companions indeed for the idealistic young Castro enthusiast Lee Oswald...
...All were found and their names put on recordexcept the applicant next to Oswald on the list...
...But where did the enigmatic figure of Lee Harvey Oswald fit into their plans...
...Another was Attorney General Robert Kennedy's implacable and often successful campaign against organized crime...
...Oswald's executioner, a minor hoodlum with connections to major Mafia figures, gave so patently ludicrous a reason for shooting Oswald-to spare Mrs...
...Not surprisingly the former tend toward liberal opinions on most issues, the latter toward the conservative side...
...What happened to the finger and palm prints from the actual shooting...
...That confrontation led to a radio debate between Oswald and two of his antagonists...
...Leaving aside the madcap pranksters who dreamed up the plan to make Fidel Castro's beard fall out, I doubt there is a single serious covert-activities professional in the United States or elsewhere who would stake a dime on the chances for success of so fabulously intricate a plot as Best Evidence requires...
...Then, on March 22, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover had a private luncheon with the president and "White House records showed that the last telephone contact with Judith Campbell occurred a few hours after the luncheon.'' The following summer Kennedy also called off his friendship with Sinatra...
...3. No one has ever claimed that Oswald was stupid or crazy...
...And now, as Summers notes, "he was indelibly stamped as a Castro militant.'' There are several anomalies in this convenient picture and one of them is glaring...
...I confess I have no idea, other than the obvious, unsatisfactory one that Lifton's investigations have managed to uncover an extraordinary amount of human error-faulty observations, faultier memories-that add up, not to a plausible scenario, but to a hopeless mishmash from which practically any bizarre plot can be extracted...
...4. Oswald almost certainly had ties to one or more U.S...
...it occurred in August and ended Oswald's public displays on behalf of Castro...
...Instead, the Warren Commission blandly accepted Jack Ruby's grotesque "explanation," having first prohibited its own two Ruby experts from questioning him, and with Earl Warren himself having turned down Ruby's request to be moved to Washington: "I want to tell you the truth, and I can't tell it here...
...As already noted, the Dallas people almost without exception saw an unambiguous pattern of head and neck wounds caused by bullets entering from the right-front...
...Before examining the evidentiary highlights underlying that convergence of views, I should like to deal briefly with David Lifton's Best Evidence...
...be in the White House...
...Blakey and Billings argue that Mafia leaders would have tolerated Kennedy's softness toward Castro and hardness toward themselves but for one additional factor: his "betrayal" of them...
...Lifton at one point mutters darkly about the great technical skills of the CIA...
...What is more, if Marina Oswald's story is true about her husband's attempt on the life of General Edwin Walker a few months earlier, note that Oswald failed to hit a sitting target from much closer range...
...And almost 18 years after the event it is still easy to provoke an argument between those who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was an agent of the CIA and those who are certain he was an agent of Fidel Castro...
...The story of Os wald's activities there in the last months before the assassination is a long and fascinating one...
...The bank official who handled Ruby's account reported this to the House Assassinations Committee...
...A third motive is more speculative but needs at least to be taken into account...
...But what a conspiracy...
...Leaving aside the palpable absurdity of the claim that these could have been separate conspiracies, as if one group of conspirators cleverly picked up where the other left off, the essence of Lifton's 700-page, immensely convoluted account is this: Kennedy was shot, not from behind by a gunman in the Texas Book Depository, but from the front, by two or more gunmen firing from the infamous "grassy knoll" alongside Dealey Plaza, and the wounds to the dead president's body were then surgically altered to give a false impression as to the origin of the shots...
...Although disclaiming any involvement with Oswald in Mexico City, Gaudet admitted that he had known him in New Orleans and went on to identify him as having been associated with (former top FBI agent) Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Cuban exile leader Sergio Archacha Smith...
...Unlike Lifton, these authors accept the judgment of the official autopsy as to the origin of the fatal shots...
...Mobster Mickey Cohen declared that Frank Sinatra-whom Giancana considered "his hot line to the White House"- procured for Kennedy "all the broads he could ever have used...
...Sixth, the altered corpse was at last sent by ambulance to Bethesda for the official autopsy which "confirmed" that all shots had struck from behind and above the motorcade...
...They argue instead that they found no compelling evidence of such involvement and that in any case the Mafia was quite capable of executing the plot without aid...
...Sam Giancana once boasted to the mistress he shared with the president, "Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me, [Kennedy] wouldn't...
...The most recent of the books, The Plot to Kill the President,* by Notre Dame law professor and former chief counsel of the House Assassinations Committee, G. Robert Blakey, and the committee's former editorial director, Richard N. Billings, asserts flatly that organized crime-the Mafia-planned and Karl 0 'Lessker is senior editor of The American Spectator and Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University...
...It is not an answer from which conservatives will draw much comfort,, but that is largely irrelevant today...
...Whatever reasons the plotters had to dispose of Kennedy (and Lifton doesn't even hint at a reason), people so highly placed and so skillful could surely have devised a much simpler, and therefore far safer, plan of attack...
...The Warren Commission hadn't bothered to ask...
...Now the easiest way to deal with such a scenario is to dismiss it as either deluded or deceitful...
...It is therefore almost impossible to believe that he would have left the murder weapon and three empty shell casings where they would quickly be discovered...
...intelligence agencies...
...THE MAFIA AND THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION On June 3, 1960, FBI Director Hoover sent a memorandum to the State Department's Office of Security warning that "there is a possibility that an imposter is using [Lee Harvey] Oswald's birth certificate.'' The assassination of President Kennedy continues to disturb and perplex us...
...Moreover, they deny having made the threats against Kennedy's life that have been attributed to them by reliable informants...
...A shabby building in a rundown part of town, it had recently served as the headquarters of "the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the umbrella organization of the anti-Castro exiles, and Guy Banister Associates, a detective agency which was, in fact, a known meeting place for Cuban exiles and their links to American intelligence...
...But according to a former high-ranking CIA official, Vincent Marchetti, Naval Intelligence during the period operated a secret camp near Raleigh for training phony defectors to the Soviet Union...
...What is important is that this government make the very best effort it can to solve the greatest unsolved crime of the century...
...To be sure, his palm print was found on the barrel of the rifle, but at a place that could be reached only when the weapon was disassembled...
...Who was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City barely seven weeks before the assassination-and why...
...And that really is the heart of the objection to Lifton's wild scenario...
...the FBI withheld some material and destroyed other...
...Would an assassin have been so careful about re moving them-and so careless about everything else concerning the rifle's provenance...
...But in the past year three major books have been published, two of which seem to me to represent an emerging consensus in answer to that bitterly vexed question...
...Summers located the now-retired Gaudet in 1978 and interviewed him twice...
...Stamped in the back of some of the pamphlets Oswald was distributing was the address of the FPCC chapter he had briefly established and of which he was the only member: 544 Camp Street...
...His other "betrayals" have to be seen in this context, the authors tell us, and when they are we can more readily understand why the Mafia accepted the immense burden and risks of a presidential assassination...
...And no one today, 18 years later, has a clue as to where Ruby got that money...
...Now the fact that Oswald insisted to the end that he had not shot Kennedy, that he had been "set up" and was a "patsy," is not in itself terribly persuasive...
...7. Summers believes that the key to unlocking the entire puzzle is likely to be found in New Orleans...
...But both books are in agreement far more often than not, Summers having relied heavily on the findings of the House Assassinations Committee and then having gone on to follow up other leads...
...He was William Gaudet, and he worked for the CIA...
...3. to hide the fact that the body was altered...
...And then there were the women...
...But that eminent truthseeker, the Chief Justice of the United States, only replied "it could not be done...
...Of the latter Gaudet said, "I know he knew Oswald and knows more about the Kennedy affair than he ever admitted...
...Other crime figures, too, claimed business associations with the elder Kennedy...
...These Special Agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald...
...For one thing, he was positively identified by a reliable witness as calmly drinking a Coke in the second-floor lunchroom of the Texas Book Depository less than ten minutes before the motorcade was scheduled to pass by-almost incomprehensible behavior for a man waiting to assassinate the President of the United States...
...The two accounts are not really at odds...
...What should also have sparked frenetic interest in Ruby's affairs is the fact that, three hours after the president's death, the perpetually broke Jack Ruby showed up at his bank (where the balance in his business account was only $246) with $7,000 in large bills stuffed in his pockets...
...Each of the three had plenty of reason to feel mortally betrayed by Kennedy, and given their well-established working interrelationship it is not too difficult to imagine their coming together to eliminate their hated common enemy in the White House...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
