Quotes
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1114-16 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:33 PM
In addition, the New Orleans Mafia was one of the few mob families to conduct hits on government officials; the only others who dared to take such measures even occasionally were Trafficante’s Tampa mob and the Chicago Mafia, both allies of Marcello in drug trafficking and the JFK hit.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1120-23 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:35 PM
One hundred was also the number of members in the New Orleans Mafia by October 15, 1890, when mob hit men shot the city’s Police Chief, David Hennessey, using a shotgun and a revolver. He died the following day, and though nineteen mobsters were indicted for the hit, all were acquitted thanks to witness intimidation and bribed jurors. In response to Hennessey’s assassination and the resulting acquittals, the public rioted and killed eleven of the Mafia men. But within two years, the New Orleans Mafia had fully recovered and was stronger than ever.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1131-34 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:37 PM
Marcello quickly learned that it was better to have others commit his crimes, so he had two teenagers rob a grocery store. While Marcello was planning a follow-up crime with the two—another bank robbery—the teens were arrested. One of them told the authorities everything, and the police also arrested Marcello. In the future, Marcello would come to rely on only close family members and associates who could be trusted not to talk.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1213-20 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:50 PM
Marcello became more powerful, wealthier, and more influential in the Mafia—and in Louisiana politics—with each passing year. At that time, officials ranging from US Attorney General Howard McGrath to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly expressed skepticism that the Mafia even existed. However, Tennessee Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver knew the Mafia was a very real threat, so in 1950, as Chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, he began a well-publicized investigation. In addition to targeting national crime figures such as Frank Costello, Kefauver called Marcello “the evil genius of organized crime in New Orleans” and held hearings there, on the mob boss’s own turf. Kefauver possibly singled out Marcello not only because of New Orleans’s long-standing reputation for vice but also because of an article by prominent muckraking newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who described the low-public-profile Marcello as “the crime czar” of the city.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1230-31 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:51 PM
In the meantime, Marcello grew even more powerful under the new Republican administration of President Dwight Eisenhower and especially his vice president, Richard Nixon.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1251-52 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:56 PM
Trafficante “had a standard operating procedure for murder, which included the importation of hired killers from out of town and setting up patsies to take the fall.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 87 | Loc. 1261 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:57 PM
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1260-64 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:57 PM
Santo Trafficante spoke fluent Spanish and continued to spend time in Cuba as well as Tampa, with frequent visits to the “open” mob city of Miami. Because of his lack of a passport and US citizenship, Marcello could not easily or safely travel to Cuba, which by the 1950s was the Mafia’s gambling mecca for well-heeled travelers from the United States. Trafficante was one of the two main casino owners in Havana with the other being mob financial genius Meyer Lansky. Trafficante completely controlled one casino, the Sans Souci, and had shares in three more.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1265-68 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:58 PM
For years it was thought that Marcello’s inability to travel to Cuba prevented him from holding a share in the mob’s Havana gambling industry, but as revealed here for the first time, that wasn’t the case. Decades later, in prison, Marcello made an admission to Jack Van Laningham, who reported that “he was partners with a man that ran the Mafia in Florida, [Santo] Trafficante, [and] they were [also] partners in a casino in Cuba, and made millions before Castro took over and shut them down.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1269-73 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:58 PM
Mafia casinos in Cuba had flourished under the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose regime was embraced by Vice President Richard Nixon and tolerated by President Eisenhower. Nixon reportedly had business interests on the island with his mob-connected best friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo. Nixon had visited the Mafia casinos and had been given honors by Batista. The repressive Cuban dictator had partnered with mob bosses like Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, who gave him a lucrative piece of the growing Havana casino industry. Meanwhile, much of the Cuban populace suffered from bad nutrition, low wages, and Batista’s vicious police state.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1278 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:59 PM
Surprisingly, the CIA and Trafficante played both sides, providing small quantities of arms to Fidel Castro and his men.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1285-93 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:01 PM
The Administration’s tolerance of the Mafia was such that Trafficante felt safe to return to New York State for a meeting just two weeks later, along with almost a hundred other mob bosses from across the country. The ever-cautious Carlos Marcello didn’t attend and instead sent “his most trusted brother, Joe” and his top two Dallas lieutenants, Joseph Civello and Joe Campisi Sr. Their agenda ranged from replacing Anastasia to providing assistance for Batista and Fidel Castro. The mobsters met at a secluded country estate near the small town of Apalachin, New York. Marcello’s caution proved to be justified when local officers raided the unusual meeting, arresting fifty-eight mob leaders, including Trafficante and Joe Marcello. They were detained only briefly, but the huge meeting, combined with the recent sensational front-page news of Anastasia’s assassination, only served to fuel the frustration of many Americans—and some members of Congress—that the Mafia seemed to operate with near impunity under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the rest of the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1307-11 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:03 PM
The assassination of Attorney General–elect Patterson generated huge headlines across the country. Though the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had basically taken a hands-off approach to organized crime, National Guard General Walter Hanna pressured the Alabama Governor, who finally got Eisenhower to take action. Phenix City was placed under “Martial Rule” by the National Guard, putting the city under US military occupation. That drastic step finally ran the rackets out of Phenix City, though after a time they simply reorganized on a smaller scale across the river in Columbus, Georgia.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1319-24 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:04 PM
One might think the Phenix City assassination would have caused the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration to declare war on organized crime, but it didn’t. J. Edgar Hoover continued to turn a blind eye toward the Mafia in general and Marcello in particular. Time magazine in 1975 first revealed secret meetings and friendship between Hoover and mob boss Frank Costello, which were confirmed by William Hundley, the Justice Department organized crime chief during the Kennedy Administration. Hoover’s predilection for gambling on horse races is now well known, and it’s also possible Hoover was blackmailed by the Mafia over his closeted homosexuality.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1324-26 | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:05 PM
Carlos Marcello’s partners had gotten away with murder, but they had lost the lucrative cash cow that was Phenix City. However, they learned from their mistakes, and the next time Marcello’s associates assassinated a government official, a patsy would be on hand to be quickly blamed and killed to divert suspicion from organized crime.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 93 | Loc. 1340 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:36 AM
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1338-43 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:36 AM
Johnny Rosselli was very active in Guatemala in the mid-1950s, and his biographers documented from two sources that “Rosselli’s primary concern in Guatemala was to protect and advance the interests of” a New Orleans company with ties to Carlos Marcello. In 1956 Marcello decided that “Guatemala would be the most appropriate country” from which to obtain a fake birth certificate, since it “was easily accessible to New Orleans by air, telephone, and telegraph.” President Castillo Armas ruled the country, having been installed as dictator after the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration used the CIA to overthrow the liberal government of the democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. *
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1369-75 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:40 AM
As Marcello later explained to Jack Van Laningham, he “tried to get into gambling in Vegas” using a front man, and “all was going good until the Nevada Gaming Commission learned that Carlos Marcello was involved. They were shut down and lost a great deal of money in the venture [and] he stayed clear of Vegas after that.” Marcello always tried to stay out of the limelight and the newspapers, and he could have all the gambling he wanted in Louisiana without worrying about a state Gaming Commission. Marcello stayed out of Las Vegas after that, even in the 1970s when he had a chance to put up money for the real casino depicted in Martin Scorsese’s film Casino. Instead, Marcello simply brokered that deal to the Kansas City mob, getting an enormous onetime (and untraceable) “finder’s fee” in the process, something the FBI learned but never revealed to the public.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1378-80 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:40 AM
But unlike with Marcello, the US government didn’t realize Rosselli wasn’t a citizen, and it wouldn’t learn that until 1966, setting off a chain of events that would help trigger Watergate and lead to Rosselli’s gruesome 1976 murder on Trafficante’s orders, with Marcello’s support. But in 1957 the fifty-two-year-old Rosselli and the forty-seven-year-old Marcello still got along well.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1382-87 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:41 AM
Willie Bioff—the key witness whose testimony had sent Rosselli to prison and ended his glamorous Hollywood lifestyle—was living in Phoenix and was good friends with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Despite Bioff’s friendship with, and political support of, Senator Goldwater, Rosselli and the Mafia got their revenge: Bioff was killed when his truck exploded in his driveway at his Phoenix home on November 4, 1955, destroyed by “a dynamite bomb.” No one was arrested for the murder. Three years later Rosselli approved the murder of another good friend of Goldwater’s, Gus Greenbaum, owner of the Riviera casino and “mayor” of the Las Vegas strip.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1391-93 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:42 AM
Rosselli may well have used his mutual associate with Marcello—Santo Trafficante—to provide the hit men. Employing out-of-town hit men was a technique both Trafficante and Marcello increasingly used since it was difficult to tie them to a crime and locale. Five years later all three men would employ a variation of that approach against JFK.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1420-23 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:46 AM
Marcello’s main office had one other notable feature, “a sign on the door leading out” that according to his biographer gave visitors a chilling reminder of whom they “were dealing with”: THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO ARE DEAD
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 1436-44 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:48 AM
There appeared to be no concerns for Carlos Marcello on the federal front since Richard Nixon enjoyed increasing power and respect as the 1950s advanced, due to a series of health issues plaguing President Eisenhower. Nixon had weathered the only two potential scandals he’d recently faced, aided in one case by his long-time patron, billionaire Howard Hughes. The other scandal involved exposure of the mob ties of attorney Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s closest advisor. Richard Nixon and Murray Chotiner had longtime and well-documented links to the Mafia. Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen admitted giving Nixon $5,000 (nearly $50,000 in today’s money) in Nixon’s first race for Congress in California, in 1946. Cohen upped that to $75,000 (almost $700,000 today) for Nixon’s 1950 Senate run. Chotiner, Nixon’s chief political aide and strategist from 1946 until the time of Watergate, had arranged those payoffs. Chotiner, an attorney, and his brother had represented 221 of Cohen’s bookmakers in just one four-year period.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1452-55 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:50 AM
In 1957 Robert Kennedy teamed up with his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts. They were investigating Teamster corruption starting with union president Dave Beck, the only major union leader to support the generally anti-union Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. After corruption charges forced Beck to step down, John and Robert Kennedy focused on his successor, Jimmy Hoffa.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1463-64 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:51 AM
from newspaper headlines alone, there was clearly a need for someone to take on the Mafia in America since J. Edgar Hoover and the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration seemed so reluctant to do so. Starting in the late 1950s, John F. Kennedy took up that fight.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1495-1500 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:54 AM
his top Washington attorney, Jack Wasserman, one of the country’s best immigration attorneys. The fact that he chose Wasserman instead of a criminal defense attorney or a high-profile Washington power attorney showed that what Marcello feared most was his lack of citizenship. Unlike Santo Trafficante, Marcello couldn’t duck the Kennedys’ subpoena by traveling to another country. As a noncitizen, if Marcello ever left the United States he might be denied reentry, so Wasserman told him he had no other recourse than to report for the hearing. With his bow tie and glasses, Wasserman looked nothing like a typical mob lawyer and more like a university professor.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1522-28 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:57 AM
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina—later chairman of the famed Senate Watergate Committee—began by reminding Marcello of his two felony convictions and then asked “how a man with that kind of record can stay in the United States for five years, nine months, twenty-four days after he is found to be an undesirable alien. . . . How have you managed to stay here?” Marcello eventually answered, “I wouldn’t know.” Senator Ervin expressed his frustration at the current Eisenhower–Nixon Administration, saying, “[T]he American people are entitled to more protection at the hands of the law than to have an undesirable alien who has committed serious felonies remain in this country.” He summed up by essentially calling Marcello a leech who preyed “upon law-abiding people [and who] ought to be removed from this country.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1537-41 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:59 AM
On June 9, 1959, RFK verbally sparred with Sam Giancana, trying to draw him into a revealing response. RFK asked, “Would you tell us, if you have opposition from anybody, that you dispose of them by having them stuffed in a trunk? Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?” Giancana appeared to stifle a laugh, not taking the Committee and RFK’s questions seriously, leading RFK to ask, “Is there something funny about it, Mr. Giancana?” and “Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question? I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1545-51 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 09:00 AM
As they sought to question additional mob leaders, Senator Kennedy and RFK were stymied on one occasion by the CIA, foreshadowing problems with the Agency that would plague the two men even after JFK become President. In a 1975 report for the New York Times that was confirmed by two RFK aides, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour Hersh discovered that in 1959 the CIA had given a “free pass” to one mob boss for his help in trying to assassinate Fidel Castro for the US government. When RFK and his aides tried to question him in private, the Mafia chief replied, “You can’t touch me. I’ve got immunity.” Robert demanded to know “who gave you immunity?” The Mafia boss replied, “The CIA. I’m working for them, but I can’t talk about it. Top Secret.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1566-67 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:19 AM
To show he wasn’t afraid of the Kennedys or the Committee, Trafficante had ordered another mob hit the previous day, and Robert had to announce in the hearing that he had been informed “there was another one yesterday.” Like the others, it would never be solved
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1580-81 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:22 AM
In Marcello’s organization, there was a man well suited for the role of messenger and courier between the two godfathers: Jack Ruby.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1588-91 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:22 AM
Originally born Jack Rubenstein in Chicago on March 25, 1911, Jack Ruby dropped out of high school and began working for the mob. According to Seth Kantor—the respected journalist who saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital soon after JFK was shot—the young Ruby delivered “sealed envelopes at the rate of $1 per errand for Chicago’s No. 1 racketeer, Al Capone.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1594-96 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:23 AM
By 1939 Ruby was back in Chicago as a “secretary to the Waste Handlers Union” and was questioned “in connection with the murder of the secretary-treasurer of the local.” Even though the victim was Ruby’s friend, he gave no useful information to the police, showing those in power that he could be trusted not to talk.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1610-12 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:26 AM
This was the first of many times Ruby would appear to cooperate with authorities in return for protecting his—and his superiors’—criminal activities or to find out what authorities knew.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1618-20 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:26 AM
Jack Ruby’s close relationship to law enforcement, a major factor in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, began to develop in the 1950s. It continued to grow into the early 1960s, when—according to one Warren Commission file—Ruby “was well acquainted with virtually every officer of the Dallas Police force.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1622-25 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:27 AM
It’s clear now, and confirmed by Carlos Marcello’s own comments about Ruby during CAMTEX, that Ruby was Marcello’s pay-off man for the Dallas Police. The police corruption wasn’t just about money, since Ruby was soon involved in various nightclubs and with strippers and prostitutes. It was said that policemen never had to pay for a drink at Ruby’s club and sometimes were even provided with women.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1635-37 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:28 AM
Ruby appears to have had a small role in making sure Marcello’s heroin that flowed through Dallas from Mexico and the Texas ports stayed en route to Chicago. Declassified files show that that same heroin network would play a role in JFK’s murder: One female heroin courier who worked for Ruby tried to expose the plot to assassinate JFK just prior to his murder.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1643-47 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:29 AM
Also in the late 1950s, FBI files—most provided to the Warren Commission—show that Ruby became involved in gunrunning to Cuba with several associates of Santo Trafficante, among them gangsters Norman Rothman and Dominick Bartone, as well as corrupt former Cuban president Carlos Prio. Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen was also running guns to Cuba at that time, and “Ruby told one of his business partners . . . he was a close friend of Mickey Cohen.” The FBI documented numerous ties between Ruby and Cohen’s girlfriend, a well-known burlesque dancer from Texas whose stage name was Candy Barr.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1651-55 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:30 AM
IN 1959 RUBY’S Cuban gunrunning and arms deals with Castro’s men made him an excellent candidate to be a courier/messenger between Ruby’s boss Marcello and the detained Trafficante. But Ruby had an even better cover for his activities because he’d recently become an informant for the FBI. In March of 1959, Ruby had been interviewed by the Bureau and asked to become an informant. Ruby, no doubt after checking with mob superiors in Dallas such as Civello or Campisi, agreed. Such an arrangement could give him an extra degree of protection for his illegal activities and a way to find out what crimes the FBI was interested in.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1656-57 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:30 AM
In 1959 Ruby reported to the FBI “on at least eight occasions,” but according to historian Gerald D. McKnight, the Warren Commission hid that fact from the American public.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1669-71 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:31 AM
While Trafficante was in jail in Cuba, Jack Ruby attempted arms deals to help secure Trafficante’s release, according to several accounts. Scott Malone found that “Congressional investigators” noted in a “briefing memorandum” that “in 1959 Jack Ruby traveled to Cuba and visited Santo Trafficante in jail.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1676-81 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:32 AM
Ruby had many associates in common with Trafficante, but the most likely person to have taken Ruby to see Trafficante was gambling supervisor Lewis McWillie, whom Ruby described as “high class.” Even after the Revolution, McWillie was one of many mobsters still operating in Cuba. While most people think that Fidel Castro shut all the Mafia casinos when he took over, that’s only partially true. For economic reasons, they were quickly reopened. Frank Fiorini (who later renamed himself Frank Sturgis), a Trafficante hoodlum who’d fought alongside Fidel, was made the liaison between the Cuban government and the mob bosses who still ran—even if they no longer owned—the casinos. The former mob casinos would remain open until the fall of 1961.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1700-1704 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:34 AM
Ruby had one more unusual role to play in Cuba, in early 1960. The Hoffa-brokered plots between the CIA and the Mafia to kill Fidel that began in 1959 were continuing in the early months of 1960, though neither Trafficante nor Ruby’s boss Marcello had any documented role in those plots. However, former Cuban mob powerhouse Meyer Lansky had reportedly placed a million-dollar bounty on killing Fidel Castro, since, unlike Trafficante, Lansky had been unable to reach an accommodation with the Castro brothers.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1713-15 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:35 AM
A few journalists have asked if Jack Ruby was “supplying the pistols to McWillie so they could be [used in an assassination] plot against Castro.” Some evidence does indicate that the episode could have been part of the continuing plots to kill Fidel brokered by Hoffa between the CIA and the Mafia.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1721-23 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:36 AM
One Colt Cobra definitely purchased by Jack Ruby in January 1960 would find greater infamy more than three years later. It was the pistol Ruby used to shoot accused assassin Lee Oswald on live television on November 24, 1963. Ruby’s notorious gun at the very least came out of his involvement with the Mafia and possibly from the mob’s early work with the CIA to kill Fidel.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1730-35 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:37 AM
Ruby also owed large sums to the IRS throughout the early 1960s, first approaching $20,000 and by 1963 $40,000. In today’s dollars, that’s $240,000. Yet the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that Paul repeatedly loaned Ruby money, “which eventually may have totaled $15,000” plus an additional “larger sum of money (allegedly $15,000 to $17,000) to assist Ruby” with his taxes. In today’s dollars, that’s at least $180,000. Yet Ralph Paul was only the owner of a relatively small restaurant in Dallas, the Bull-Pen Drive-In, and it’s impossible to imagine he could have come up with those sums let alone continue to loan money to a man who owed the IRS so much money.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1742-45 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:37 AM
House Select Committee investigators were confused when Joe Campisi said in an FBI interview that “Ralph Paul [was] his partner.” Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant was large and popular, and Campisi was powerful, so he certainly didn’t need Ralph Paul as a partner. However, Joe Campisi’s comment makes perfect sense if he was funneling Marcello money to Paul as part of Paul’s fronting ownership of the Carousel for the mobsters.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1746-49 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:38 AM
Still, by the later part of 1960, Ruby got to call the shots at the Carousel and act like a club owner, even though in reality he was simply taking a small percentage of the club’s revenues as a kind of salary for managing the club on behalf of Carlos Marcello. However, this arrangement would have huge ramifications for Marcello less than three years later, when it gave the godfather leverage to get Ruby to risk his life for the godfather after JFK’s murder.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 125 | Loc. 1762-69 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:40 AM
Eisenhower had left Washington the previous year when Fidel Castro had come to the United States, leaving it to Nixon to meet with the new Cuban leader. Instead of offering US financial aid as Castro had hoped (since the former US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista—a friend of Nixon—had fled with much of the Cuban treasury), Nixon had lectured Castro and offered no help. Nixon had also confided to others that he felt Castro was dangerous, and soon after that the CIA began working with Jimmy Hoffa to have the three northeastern mob leaders kill Fidel. Those plots had not worked, and now the 1960 election was rapidly approaching. Vice President Nixon apparently thought that if Castro was killed before the election, and US troops had to be sent into Cuba to protect Americans and American interests, the voting public would chose the eight-year veteran Vice President over the young and relatively inexperienced Senator Kennedy. Nixon told “a press aide [that] the toppling of Castro would be ‘a real trump card’” for the election, according to Anthony Summers.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1795-99 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:42 AM
Robert Maheu (an ex-FBI agent and former partner of Guy Banister) later admitted that Richard Nixon was personally behind the ramped-up CIA–Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and that Nixon had chosen Maheu to be the CIA’s new cutout to the Mafia. Eight years later Maheu confided to his friend Pierre Salinger “that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project. . . . It was Nixon who had him do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1823-26 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:46 AM
ONE IMPORTANT PART of the CIA–Mafia plots that began in 1960 wasn’t connected to those plots until 2012. This was the fact that the mob bosses involved in the plots—including Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana—paid a huge bribe to Vice President Richard Nixon the same month the plots began. Nixon’s background shows how that bribe came about and why Nixon turned to the Mafia to kill Castro in the first place.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1833-34 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:54 PM
Nixon also received support from his first race onward from billionaire Howard Hughes. Once Nixon became Vice President, he received even more favors and illicit money from Hughes. Twice Hughes had his top covert operative, Robert Maheu, help Nixon with difficult problems.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 1836-38 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:54 PM
“‘Santo,’ recalled his attorney Frank Ragano, ‘viewed Nixon as a realistic, conservative politician who was not a zealot and would not be hard on him and his mob friends. The Mafia had little to fear from Nixon.’”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Marcello and Trafficante wanted to do all they could to ensure a Nixon victory, especially since their ally Jimmy Hoffa was soon expected to face a federal indictment as a result of all the attention the Kennedys’ hearings had focused on him. Accordingly, Marcello began to gather money for Nixon, and in addition to Trafficante, Giancana later claimed that he had contributed, as did Tony Provenzano, a Mafia Teamster official in New Jersey who was close to Marcello.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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In September 1960, Richard Nixon received a bribe of at least $500,000 from the same mob bosses who began working that month on his CIA–Mafia plot to kill Fidel. Prior to September 26, 1960, Teamster President Hoffa—facing an expected indictment for crimes exposed by the Kennedys—went to Louisiana “to meet Carlos Marcello.” As first revealed by Hoffa expert Dan Moldea, a Louisiana-based Hoffa aide, Grady Edward Partin, who later “turned government informant,” was with Hoffa at the meeting. Partin said, “Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon.” That was only half of a promised total payment to Nixon of $1 million (more than $6 million in today’s dollars), with “the other half coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.” The Florida mobster contributing was Santo Trafficante, who was at the time joining the CIA–Mafia plots. Among the “mob boys” in New Jersey was Mafia capo Tony Provenzano, who was close to Marcello. In a boast to a family member, Sam Giancana claimed that he was also part of the group “giving the Nixon campaign a million bucks.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 1858-61 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:56 PM
However, Marcello’s illicit cash for Nixon had another important goal: According to Grady Partin, Marcello said he “hoped . . . to extract a pledge that a Nixon administration would not deport him.” Marcello’s huge bribe to the Vice President also raises the possibility that an earlier payment to Nixon might have been the reason Marcello hadn’t been deported during Nixon’s Vice Presidency.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1865-66 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:57 PM
That was really a primary reason the CIA wanted to use the Mafia in the first place, to give the public an entity other than the CIA or the US government to blame for the murder.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1869-74 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:58 PM
Two plots to poison Fidel can be documented in the weeks leading up to the 1960 Presidential election. One involved Richard Cain, a “made” Chicago mobster who also worked in Chicago law enforcement. The other effort included Frank Fiorini, the mob associate who had fought for Fidel’s forces and then become the liaison between Fidel and the mobsters who ran (and had owned) the Havana casinos. But Fiorini had since fled Cuba and was now working for the CIA. Years later Fiorini would change his name to Frank Sturgis and become infamous as one of the Watergate burglars working for E. Howard Hunt. Though Fiorini’s mob and CIA ties have since been documented, those links would not become widely known during the Watergate scandal.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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CIA officer E. Howard Hunt played a major role in the Agency’s covert plot to eliminate Fidel in the fall of 1960. If Castro was killed by mob assassins and US military forces were deployed to protect Americans in Cuba, it would take only a small group of trained exiles to help install another US-backed strongman or dictator. Hunt was helping oversee the political side of the training of such a small force (a few hundred men at that time). Though experienced with coups, at that point Hunt had no experience with the Mafia. To address that issue, in September 1960 longtime mob associate Bernard Barker was assigned as Hunt’s assistant, a position he would maintain for years.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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He originally had dual American–Cuban citizenship but because of his service in Cuba’s brutal and corrupt secret police, his US citizenship was revoked in the mid-1950s. Barker and Hunt say that Barker worked for the CIA for several years in the 1950s, though according to Barker’s released CIA file, he began working for the Agency only in the spring of 1959, when he was forty-one. After Barker left Cuba (and possibly before), he became a longtime associate of Santo Trafficante’s mob, though an FBI memo says that since “the late 1940’s” Barker had been involved “in gangster activities in Cuba.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 1885-89 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:00 PM
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got wind of the secret plots, as verified by an October 18, 1960, memo to a high CIA official overseeing the plots, in which Hoover said that “during recent conversations with several friends, [Sam] Giancana [said] the ‘assassin’ had arranged with a girl, not further described, to drop a ‘pill’ in some drink or food of Castro’s.” Hoover’s description perfectly matches other descriptions of Frank Fiorini’s part of the CIA–Mafia plot.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1892-93 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:00 PM
That the son of one of America’s richest men would need Giancana’s help to win in heavily Democratic Chicago, whose powerful Mayor, Richard Daley, was JFK’s close ally, strains credibility.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1901-4 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:01 PM
Despite those stories in the press, the Agency continued the CIA–Mafia assassination plots into December of 1960 and into 1961 without telling the new President. December 1960 was an especially active time. That month New Orleans private detective Guy Banister was linked to a CIA plot to stage a fake attack on the US naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba, to provide a pretext for a US attack on Cuba. However, Cuban authorities got wind of the plot and arrested forty Cubans involved.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1909-10 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:01 PM
In addition, “in late 1960, the Agency sent a sniper rifle to Havana via diplomatic pouch,” according to CIA Congressional testimony uncovered by historian David Kaiser.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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As the CIA would reluctantly admit years later in Congressional hearings, it had begun a program in 1960 to eliminate problematic foreign leaders, ominously named ZR/RIFLE. The CIA was also using ZR/RIFLE to try to assassinate another foreign leader, the charismatic Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, an attempt that succeeded shortly before JFK was sworn in. Involved in that assassination effort was a European assassin recruiter for the CIA code-named QJWIN. As detailed later, QJWIN would also be used in the plots to kill Fidel Castro and would surface in relation to JFK’s murder.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 1935-39 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:04 PM
The secret CIA exile training going on outside New Orleans gave Guy Banister and David Ferrie opportunities to become involved in the covert operation. In an unusual foreshadowing of events to come, it’s well documented that one of Banister’s associates even used the name “Oswald”—then in the Soviet Union—as an alias when trucks were purchased for Cuban exiles at a New Orleans Ford dealership. One of Banister’s associates involved had briefly employed Oswald when he was a teenager, which is probably why the name of the well-publicized defector was used.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 1939-40 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:04 PM
More important, as New Orleans became a center of covert Cuban exile activity—a role that would continue into 1963—Marcello became involved in those operations.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 1944-48 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:05 PM
Officially, Hunt worked with exile leaders such as Tony Varona and Manuel Artime (Hunt’s best friend), who were supposed to run Cuba after Fidel was gone. However, the CIA admits that Varona was also working at the same time on the CIA–Mafia plots with his associate Santo Trafficante, as was Artime. Much evidence shows the same was true for Hunt and Barker, who were also involved in the CIA–Mafia plots since the new exile leadership of Cuba would have to be ready to take over as soon as the Mafia assassinated Fidel. Barker’s work for Trafficante could help that coordination.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 1949-51 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:05 PM
Confirmation of Hunt’s CIA work with Rosselli in March 1961 came only in 2006, when former CIA Agent Bayard Stockton wrote that “in March 1961 [Johnny] Rosselli went to the Dominican Republic, accompanied by Howard Hunt of the CIA.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1968-70 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:07 PM
Even as the CIA Director ignored Commander Almeida’s comments and kept them—and the CIA–Mafia plots and fake Guantánamo attack plans—secret from JFK, President Kennedy expressed his dissatisfaction with the CIA’s proposed landing site near the city of Trinidad.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1971-75 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:07 PM
Accordingly, the CIA chose a new beachhead on Cuba’s southwest coast in an area called the Bay of Pigs. In a tragic irony of history, when Fidel divided command of Cuba into thirds for defense against the anticipated invasion, Commander Almeida was given control of the portion of Cuba that included the Bay of Pigs. If the CIA had told JFK about Almeida, who could have been encouraged to remain in place and assist the United States, history could have been radically different.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1977-78 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:08 PM
Tunisian-born Marcello, who wasn’t a citizen and had only falsified birth records from Guatemala.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1980-82 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:08 PM
On April 4, 1961, when Carlos Marcello went to the local INS office for what he thought was a routine visit, he was detained and then flown to Guatemala without a hearing. RFK publicly took full responsibility “for the expulsion of” Marcello and the following week had the IRS file “tax liens in excess of $835,000 against” Marcello and his wife.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1985-89 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:09 PM
The US-backed dictator of Guatemala, already under pressure from his country’s press and populace for allowing the US-supported Cuban exile training, faced new scrutiny for allowing a notorious American godfather to reside in the country. He ordered Marcello and his American attorney detained and escorted to the border. From there Marcello was taken “20 miles into Honduras [and] unceremoniously dumped . . . on a forested hilltop with no signs of civilization in sight.” The man who was America’s most powerful godfather now had to scramble through the jungle-lined back roads of Honduras in his expensive Gucci shoes.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1989-96 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:10 PM
According to Marcello biographer John Davis, “Still wearing their city clothes and their city shoes stuffed with cash,” Marcello and his associate “had little to drink or eat. . . . Marcello found breathing difficult along the mountain-top road. He collapsed three times in the dust, complaining that he could not go on any farther, that he was finished, and that it was that rich kid Bobby Kennedy who had done this to them. ‘If I don’t make it . . .’ Carlos told [his associate] at one point as he lay exhausted in a roadside gutter, ‘tell my brother when you get back, about what dat kid Bobby done to us. Tell ’em to do what dey have to do.’” Before arriving at a small airport, the exhausted Marcello plunged “down a pathless slope. They ended up in a burrow, bleeding from thorns, bruised by rocks, with Marcello complaining of a severe pain in his side” from “three broken ribs.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2006-8 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:11 PM
The link between the September 1960 Mafia–Nixon bribe and the fact that most of those contributing—Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana—were also working at the behest of Nixon on his CIA–Mafia plot to kill Fidel was not publicly made until the publication of my book Watergate: The Hidden History in 2012.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2017-19 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:12 PM
Shortly before President Kennedy took office, Eisenhower had closed the US Embassy in Havana, depriving the United States—and President Kennedy—of a valuable listening post (and spy base) in Cuba. This lack of clandestine information from observers on the scene left JFK almost completely at the mercy of CIA officials regarding the situation in Cuba.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Even without Hunt, the CIA–Mafia plots continued, with Cuban exile leader—and Trafficante associate—Tony Varona playing a key role.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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However, the abrupt departure of Hunt—who handled exile leaders like Varona—left only a few officials who knew about the highly secret CIA–Mafia plots. Because Hunt was no longer involved, Varona was placed in a secure US military facility with the other exile leaders to await the outcome of the invasion and was unable to give the signal to poison Castro. That still left Dulles the fake attack plan on Guantánamo, set to be staged by the exiles trained near New Orleans.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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They were there to risk their lives fighting Castro’s troops, not the US military.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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The failure of those two operations, along with the lack of real secrecy about the operation and the CIA’s refusal to take advantage of Cuban Army Commander Almeida’s offer, primarily caused the Bay of Pigs disaster. JFK publicly took responsibility, but privately he was furious. Internal investigations followed, though they would not uncover the CIA–Mafia plots, the fake Guantánamo attack, or Commander Almeida’s offers. However, CIA Director Dulles and his second-in-command were eventually forced to
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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resign.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Years later, after Watergate, Frank Fiorini—tired of the CIA’s spin that Hunt was a minor, bumbling CIA figure—said in a published interview that “Howard [Hunt] was in charge of other CIA operations involving ‘disposal’ [assassination] and . . . some of them worked.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2055-58 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:17 PM
The FBI was fairly certain Marcello had been flown to Miami on a Dominican air force jet. An FBI memo later uncovered by John Davis suggests that “a high-ranking US government official may have intervened with the Dominican Republic on Marcello’s behalf,” identifying a key player as “Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, who had received financial aid from Marcello, [and who] had been very much concerned with the Marcello deportation.” Long would later serve on the Warren Commission.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2074-77 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:19 PM
That may be why Helms wouldn’t tell McCone about his use of the Mafia even when Helms began to expand the plots. To a later Senate committee, John McCone “testified that he was not briefed about the assassination plots by Dulles, Bissell, Helms, or anyone else,” something Helms confirmed in his own testimony. Also kept in the dark about the plots’ continuation were President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2080-81 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:20 PM
Those plots would play a central role in helping Marcello and his partners kill JFK in a way that would force high CIA officials such as Richard Helms to cover up crucial information after JFK’s assassination.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2088-95 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:21 PM
The prosecution of Cain’s associate had to be suppressed to avoid exposing the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro, which meant that RFK would have to be told something about the plots. On May 7, 1962, the CIA’s General Counsel and the Agency’s Director of Security told an angry Robert Kennedy about the CIA–Mafia plots from October 1960 to the Bay of Pigs and even into early 1962. However, the two assured RFK that the plots had been stopped. There are indications that a year earlier, RFK had learned in general terms about the CIA’s use of Giancana in some capacity during the Bay of Pigs, but it’s unclear whether he knew that Giancana was involved in assassinations or thought he was just helping to provide intelligence. In any event, the CIA admits that RFK was not told the plots were continuing even after he was assured they were over.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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With lawyerly understatement, the CIA’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, later testified, “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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A frustrated Robert Kennedy said that because of the CIA, “It would be very difficult to initiate any prosecution against Giancana, as Giancana would immediately bring out the fact the US Government had approached him to arrange for the assassination of Castro.” That was a serious matter for Robert Kennedy, since the Chicago Mafia had been a particular target of his ever-increasing war against organized crime, along with Trafficante’s empire in Florida and Marcello’s organization in Louisiana.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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In 1960 Sinatra had also introduced JFK to Judith Campbell, who later became his mistress. Shortly before JFK ended his friendship with Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover sent “a top-secret memorandum to” Robert Kennedy “that summarized Judith Campbell’s telephone contact with the President as well as her association with Sam Giancana. A copy of the memo also went to a top JFK aide, with a cover note: ‘I thought you would be interested in learning of the following information which was developed in connection with the investigation of John Rosselli.’” * This event led to “Hoover’s lunch with the President on March 22, [1962],” which a JFK aide described as “bitter” and “which went on for no less than four hours.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2119-22 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:24 PM
The fact that President Kennedy ended his relationships with two of Johnny Rosselli’s close friends was a critical blow to Marcello and Trafficante. Campbell and Sinatra had potentially represented ways that John or Robert Kennedy might have been pressured—or blackmailed—to back off from their massive assault on the Mafia. Now the mob bosses had few options to stop the Kennedys’ ever-increasing pressure on them.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2148-52 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:26 PM
The Northwoods proposals shocked President Kennedy, and he rejected them all. The plan apparently showed JFK that some of the Joint Chiefs—especially its Chairman, General Lemnitzer—were very much out of touch with JFK’s view of the world. Within months, JFK replaced Lemnitzer with General Maxwell Taylor, who had headed JFK’s Bay of Pigs investigation. General Taylor would remain Chairman of the Joint Chiefs throughout JFK’s Presidency and was so admired by RFK that he named one of his sons after him.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2156-62 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:27 PM
At first no one knew whether or not the Soviet missiles had nuclear warheads, but by September 19 evidence that they did had started accumulating. On September 27 the US military began preparing contingency invasion plans for Cuba. JFK was briefed on October 16 that “hard photographic evidence” from a U-2 spy plane flight confirmed that Soviet medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles were being installed in Cuba. He made plans to reveal the Crisis to the nation six days later, after having daily consultations with a full range of top military and civilian advisors. On October 22, 1962, at 7 p.m. (eastern time), President John F. Kennedy went on national television to tell the American people the country was on the brink of nuclear war.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 154 | Loc. 2165-67 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:28 PM
As the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded during those tense times, it’s important to remember that this is when recently returned “defector” Lee Oswald was allowed to take the job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas. The firm’s sensitive work would be visible on television throughout the Crisis, which makes it incredible that Oswald would be allowed to work there unless he had US intelligence connections.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 2188-92 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:30 PM
Jimmy Hoffa, who had a number of criminal activities with Marcello and Trafficante, was under such intense pressure from the Kennedys that he decided to kill Robert Kennedy. In September 1962 Edward Partin, the Justice Department informant who had witnessed Marcello’s $500,000 bribe to Hoffa for Nixon, approached officials about becoming an informant after he heard Jimmy Hoffa discuss plans to assassinate Attorney General Kennedy. Partin had passed “a meticulous FBI polygraph examination” and had provided to RFK’s Justice Department a stream of information about Hoffa’s crimes.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 2208-10 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:31 PM
Not content to depend on the aging and imperious Hoover, RFK had hired ten times more Justice Department Mafia prosecutors than were employed during the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration. The Kennedys’ pressure on Marcello, and on his close partners Santo Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa, was unrelenting. Something had to be done.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2221-25 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:33 PM
Becker told the godfather that killing RFK would get Marcello “into a hell of a lot of trouble.” In answer, “Marcello invoked an old Italian proverb: ‘If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.’” Becker says the implication was that “Bobby was the tail” and “if the President were killed then Bobby would lose his bite. Marcello added that he had a plan, to use ‘a nut’ to take the fall for the murder . . . then Marcello abruptly changed the subject, and the Kennedys were not mentioned again.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2211-25 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:33 PM
In October 1962, Marcello briefly and unexpectedly explained his solution to the Kennedys’ war on the Mafia. The godfather was with two of his most trusted associates in the place he felt safest, the middle of his secluded sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms property outside New Orleans. With Marcello were his trusted longtime driver, Jack Liberto, and his favorite nephew, Carlo Roppolo. Joining the three was Ed Becker, a former public relations man for two Las Vegas casinos. Marcello felt comfortable talking to Becker not only because he’d worked for mob-run casinos but because Becker was now in business with Roppolo, who vouched for him. According to Becker, Marcello “pulled out a bottle and poured a generous round of scotch. The conversation wandered until Becker made an off-hand remark about Robert Kennedy and Marcello’s deportation. The reference struck a nerve, and Carlos jumped to his feet, exclaiming the Sicilian oath, ‘Livarsi na pietra di la scarpa!’ (Take the stone out of my shoe!).” Marcello didn’t speak Sicilian but was repeating an old saying he had heard many times from those who did. * As Becker later wrote, “Reverting to English, Marcello shouted, ‘Don’t worry about that Bobby son-of-a-bitch. He’s going to be taken care of.’” Becker told the godfather that killing RFK would get Marcello “into a hell of a lot of trouble.” In answer, “Marcello invoked an old Italian proverb: ‘If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.’” Becker says the implication was that “Bobby was the tail” and “if the President were killed then Bobby would lose his bite. Marcello added that he had a plan, to use ‘a nut’ to take the fall for the murder . . . then Marcello abruptly changed the subject, and the Kennedys were not mentioned again.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Many people knew that Robert Kennedy and Vice President Johnson hated each other, and one of them was the politically savvy Marcello, who “owned” US Senators, members of Congress, governors, and judges. If Marcello killed President Kennedy, then RFK’s status as the second-most-powerful man in America—with far more power than a typical Attorney General—would end, and with it so would RFK’s extraordinary war on Marcello and the Mafia.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2250-53 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:40 PM
“Aleman said that Trafficante” made the threat against JFK as “part of a long conversation that lasted from sometime during the day until late at night.” Aleman said the conversation with Trafficante “came about because” his cousin had helped get “someone out of a Cuban jail,” and Trafficante “wanted to help Aleman get out of his financial difficulties in return.”
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- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2261-65 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:41 PM
Trafficante complained about JFK: “[H]ave you seen how his brother is hitting Hoffa . . . mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble and he will get what is coming to him.’ When Aleman disagreed with Trafficante and said he thought . . . Kennedy would be re-elected,” Trafficante said, “You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.” Aleman told the government investigators “that Trafficante ‘made it clear . . . he was not guessing about the killing, rather he was giving the impression that he knew Kennedy was going to be killed.’”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2318-29 | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:47 PM
Williams was near death when Castro’s army brought him to a makeshift field hospital. What happened next became the stuff of legend among Cuban exiles. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Haynes Johnson wrote, Williams and the other wounded men in a makeshift field hospital “were suddenly confronted by the person of Fidel Castro.” The badly wounded “Williams . . . recognized him at once. He groped under his thin mattress and tried to reach a .45 pistol he had concealed there earlier in the afternoon.” As Williams told me, and as other exiles confirmed to Haynes, Williams gathered enough strength to point the weapon at Castro and—at almost point-blank range—to pull the trigger. But the weapon only clicked—it was empty. Earlier, William’s compatriots had worried that he might be in such pain from his wounds and so depressed over the failure of the invasion and their capture that he might use the gun on himself, so they removed the bullets while Williams was unconscious. Castro’s men quickly set upon Williams, but Fidel ordered them not to harm the gravely injured man and instead ordered that Williams and the other wounded men be taken to a hospital in a nearby city. There, an old friend, Cuban Army Commander Juan Almeida, visited Williams. Almeida was no doubt frustrated that the United States had never acted on his clear signals of dissatisfaction with Castro. Commander Almeida told Williams that the time for action against Fidel was not right, that he was too powerful in the wake of his victory at the Bay of Pigs.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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JFK, RFK, their aides, and Williams were successful, and $53 million in food and medicine was transferred to Cuba. On Christmas Eve, the 1,113 prisoners returned to Miami. The Orange Bowl hosted a lavish ceremony for all the freed prisoners and their families, during which JFK made an impromptu pledge, promising to return the brigade’s flag to them “in a free Havana.” For President Kennedy, those weren’t just words. Operation Mongoose was officially over, but six months later, JFK, RFK, and Williams would have a new plan to topple Fidel, one that would trigger much of the secrecy that still surrounds JFK’s assassination.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Even though the official record shows that Oswald moved to New Orleans on April 24, 1963, he had made at least one trip to the city well before that date, according to Congressional testimony cited in Chapter Two . The testimony was first obtained in 1975, meaning that critical information was not available to the Warren Commission. Oswald’s visit had occurred in March, February, or perhaps as early as January. His trip there involved some sort of Cuba-related activity, resulting in his being jailed in New Orleans and claiming to the INS to be a Cuban exile, even though he couldn’t speak Spanish. Within a few months, numerous witnesses would place Oswald as working with Guy Banister and David Ferrie.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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In early 1963—as Marcello and Trafficante were making plans to assassinate JFK—two related Congressional committees were looking into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and into mail-order gun sales by the very firms from which Oswald ordered. Not only were both hearings in the newspapers of the time—making it easy to see where Banister or his associates got the idea to take advantage of them—but members of both Congressional committees had ties to Trafficante operatives Frank Fiorini and John Martino. Martino, who had finally been released from his Cuban prison the previous fall, was very bitter over his experience, blaming the Kennedy Administration for not securing his release sooner. In addition to his work for Trafficante, in 1963 Martino also became close to Johnny Rosselli, and the CIA admits that Martino—like Rosselli—became a CIA asset. Also like Rosselli (and Marcello and Trafficante), late in life Martino admitted his involvement in the JFK assassination plot.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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As for the shooting at General Walker’s home, Banister belonged to the same white supremacist circles as General Walker, and associates of the two had been at a white supremacist conference in New Orleans just four days before someone shot into Walker’s home. Any role Oswald had in that incident was probably at Banister’s behest, an effort to plant evidence that would make Oswald look murderously violent after he was arrested for JFK’s assassination.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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A closer look at the timing of all these events shows just how intertwined they were and reveals other links to the Mafia’s role in JFK’s assassination. First, here’s a brief summary: Someone using the alias Alek Hidell and Oswald’s post office box in Dallas ordered a .38-caliber pistol on January 28 from a Los Angeles company and ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a Chicago firm on March 12, 1963; both weapons were shipped the same day, March 20. On March 31 Oswald’s wife, Marina, photographed him in his backyard holding both weapons and the two Communist newspapers. * In the first week of April, Oswald was fired from his job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas, and he wrote his first letter to the head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On April 10 a bullet was fired into the Dallas home of General Walker. On April 24 Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he initially lived with his uncle, a bookie for Carlos Marcello.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Hurt points out that under the laws at the time, “there would have been no record of his purchase and ownership” had he bought the guns at a store, as there would be for mail-order guns. By using the mails, Oswald appears to have deliberately left much more of a trail than if he had made the same purchase by spending a few minutes at a busy gun shop’s counter.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Oswald may well have thought that if he followed the orders of Banister and Ferrie, he might someday be testifying before Congress like his boyhood hero from I Led Three Lives. Under that scenario, Oswald would think he was assisting the committees—by showing that a former Russian defector and a Fair Play for Cuba Committee member could easily order a rifle and pistol through the mail—when in actuality he was being set up.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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The shooting at General Walker’s was termed “an assassination attempt” by Walker and the Warren Commission, and when word of it emerged soon after JFK’s assassination, it seemed to some to clinch the case against the deceased Oswald. However, Walker’s background, the evidence, and the actions of Marcello associates such as Oswald and Ruby suggest a different interpretation of the shooting. General Walker became controversial in 1961 when JFK removed him from command of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in Germany for indoctrinating his soldiers with inflammatory material from the John Birch Society. That material made ridiculous claims, such as saying that former President Dwight Eisenhower was “consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all his adult life.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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For the April 10 shooting at Walker’s, we have only the word of Walker that he was even in the room where the shot was fired. Otherwise, a shot fired into an empty room would be little more than a case of serious vandalism. Walker’s long-standing pattern of public lies and exaggerations in regard to civil rights and minorities calls into question his overly dramatic story of lowering his head just as the bullet was fired into the room. The Warren Commission and others have tried to pin the Walker shooting exclusively on Oswald to show a propensity for murderous violence that is otherwise missing in Oswald’s background. But numerous journalists and authors have pointed out serious problems with that theory. Witnesses saw at least two people at the shooting, and at least two cars were involved in suspicious activity around Walker’s house. None of the witnesses said any of the men looked like Oswald, and Walker’s night watchman said the driver of a suspicious 1957 Chevrolet he spotted casing the house a few days earlier looked “Cuban.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Guy Banister got what he wanted: publicity for a white supremacist ally, a test of whether he could manipulate Oswald into dealing with firearms, and several actions on Oswald’s part that would incriminate him after JFK’s death. Since Oswald had begun the Cuban phase of his covert activity just ten days before the Walker incident—with a letter to the national chairman of the small Fair Play for Cuba Committee—his actions in relation to Walker were probably designed to test his abilities for his new assignment. Unlike Oswald’s previous “defect and return” Russian assignment, anti-Castro operations demanded a new set of skills, from surreptitiously arranging and attending meetings (and keeping them secret from his wife) to dealing with firearms in a covert way. The Walker incident was a chance to see if Oswald, who had never served in combat, could handle that type of
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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would incriminate him after JFK’s death. Since Oswald had begun the Cuban phase of his covert activity just ten days before the Walker incident—with a letter to the national chairman of the small Fair Play for Cuba Committee—his actions in relation to Walker were probably designed to test his abilities for his new assignment. Unlike Oswald’s previous “defect and return” Russian assignment, anti-Castro operations demanded a new set of skills, from surreptitiously arranging and attending meetings (and keeping them secret from his wife) to dealing with firearms in a covert way. The Walker incident was a chance to see if Oswald, who had never served in combat, could handle that type of assignment.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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John Davis said that Marcello received word that the “Supreme Court . . . declined to review the Marcello deportation action.” The decision was “prominently reported in the New Orleans papers” and “meant that all Carlos’s appeals were exhausted.” With that defeat, “the pressure increased many times over” on Marcello to take action against the Kennedys in order to preserve his freedom and his empire.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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His boss, Sam Giancana, was put under “lockstep” surveillance by the FBI at the urging of Robert Kennedy, crippling Giancana’s ability to function (and preventing him from having an active role in JFK’s assassination). Rosselli’s power in Las Vegas and Hollywood flowed from Sam Giancana’s high position with the Chicago mob, so unless Rosselli could eliminate RFK’s pressure on Giancana, Rosselli’s own future looked dim.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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While law-enforcement officials knew who did the killing, no one was ever tried and convicted for the crime. Such killings showed why Rosselli, Marcello, and Trafficante viewed a much more carefully planned hit on a much higher official as a viable solution to their mutual problems with the Kennedys.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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IN THE SPRING of 1963, Carlos Marcello made more documented remarks about assassinating President Kennedy, only this time his comments were not to Ed Becker. They were made to a much closer associate and were not disclosed until the publication of John Davis’s biography of Marcello in 1989. At that time, Marcello had been carefully planning JFK’s murder with his allies for about six months. Davis wrote that one spring weekend in 1963, Marcello was “at his [fishing] lodge” at Grand Isle, Louisiana, with “close friends from the old Sicilian families of New Orleans.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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“While having a scotch with one of them in the kitchen,” a friend of Marcello’s friend “made a casual reference to an article he had read . . . about the Supreme Court upholding” Marcello’s deportation order. “At the mention of Robert Kennedy’s name, Carlos suddenly seemed to choke, spitting out his scotch on the floor. Recovering quickly, he formed the southern Italian symbol of . . . ‘the horn,’ with this left hand.” . . . “Holding the ancient symbol of hatred and revenge above his head, he shouted: ‘Don’t worry, man, ’bout dat Bobby. We goin’ to take care a dat sonofabitch.’” The friend asked if Marcello was going to “give it to Bobby,” but Marcello replied, “What good dat do? You hit dat man and his brother calls out the National Guard. No, you gotta hit de top man and what happen with de next top man? He don’t like de brother.” Marcello declared to his friend, “Sure as I stand here somethin’ awful is gonna happen to dat man.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Marcello knew that if he killed the Attorney General, JFK would simply order the National Guard or the Army into Marcello’s strongholds, much as had happened in 1954 in Phenix City, Alabama, after Trafficante’s associates killed the Alabama Attorney General–elect. That would render powerless the political figures in Louisiana and elsewhere that Marcello had corrupted and relied on for protection. For Marcello and his associates, that meant the answer was to kill JFK, not RFK.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Many days later, Knight was talking to Kiger, and after a couple glasses of wine, Kiger became emotional when speaking about Marcello. Kiger said, “Something bad is going to happen to our President.” The distraught cook said that he had been cooking while Marcello and the Los Angeles mobster were talking. “They don’t think Kiger hears ’em”—but the man gleaned from their conversation that JFK was going to be the target of an attack planned by Marcello. Knight asked Kiger why Marcello would want to do such a thing to President Kennedy. Kiger replied that it was because of Robert Kennedy’s sudden deportation of Marcello and the harrowing ordeal Marcello had to endure. Not long after Marcello managed to sneak back into the United States, Kiger saw the godfather and said his hands and knees were still raw from injuries he had suffered in Central America.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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IN 1963 CARLOS Marcello actually had at least one face-to-face meeting with Lee Oswald. Marcello’s meeting with the nephew of his longtime bookie, Dutz Murret, was revealed by the godfather to Jack Van Laningham twenty-two years later, during the CAMTEX undercover FBI operation.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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BRILAB had grown out of the FBI investigation of a Teamster insurance scam involving Santo Trafficante. As a result of that investigation, a businessman named Joe Hauser agreed to become an informant for the FBI against Carlos Marcello. He wore a wire into Marcello’s office in the late 1970s, yielding the undercover BRILAB tapes that eventually sent Marcello to prison in the 1980s. According to FBI informant Hauser, Marcello told him that he and some of his men did indeed know Oswald: “I used to know his fuckin’ family. His uncle he work for me. Dat kid work for me, too.” Marcello indicated that Oswald had worked for a time as a runner for his gambling network, the same one that involved Oswald’s uncle.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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There are only two time periods when Oswald could have worked for Marcello as a runner: one in late April and early May 1963, while he was living with Dutz Murret, and the other in late July, August, and early to mid-September 1963, when Oswald was not officially employed but when several witnesses saw him working with Guy Banister and David Ferrie.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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In addition, Marcello told Van Laningham that he had brought two hit men over from Europe to shoot JFK, as mentioned in Chapter One and detailed in Chapter Twelve . Marcello’s admission about the two hit men was recorded on FBI undercover audiotape.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Murret, Banister, and Ferrie weren’t the only links between Marcello and Oswald. The House Select Committee on Assassinations uncovered other ties between Oswald, his family, and the Marcello organization. As summarized in Vanity Fair, Oswald’s “childhood and youth had been spent in New Orleans [where] Oswald’s mother’s friends included a corrupt lawyer linked to Marcello’s crime operation and a man who served Marcello as bodyguard and chauffeur.” In the summer of 1963, Oswald was bailed out of jail by a man close to “one of Marcello’s oldest friends, Nofio Pecora,” the same man who was “called three weeks before the assassination by Jack Ruby.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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By the spring of 1963, Jack Ruby owed a small fortune to the IRS—almost $160,000 in today’s dollars—and was desperate for money. The IRS filed tax liens against Ruby on March 13, 1963, and Ruby faced ruin unless he could find another source of money to pay his bills. According to Carlos Marcello, Ruby found the money he needed by taking it from cash that flowed through the Carousel Club. As Marcello explained to Jack Van Laningham years later, his organization actually controlled the Carousel strip club; Ruby merely managed it. Since the club was across the street from Dallas’s most distinguished hotel, the Adolphus, whenever conventions or company meetings were held at the hotel, business at the Carousel was especially brisk, and Ruby probably figured it would be easy to skim some of the proceeds for his own pressing financial needs. Marcello had hidden ownership of several clubs in Dallas, and his financial operatives would have known what all the clubs should be making at particular times of the year. When the Carousel came up short compared to in previous years or other clubs, it wouldn’t have been hard for Marcello’s people to confirm Jack’s ongoing theft. Marcello would have been furious that a longtime mobster like Ruby would take such action, knowing the deadly consequences if caught.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Beginning in late April 1963, Ruby became of great interest to Marcello, and not just for his skimming. The former director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote that “though the [Warren] Commission apparently believed that press speculation about the President’s trip [to Dallas] did not begin until September 13, 1963 . . . a story in the Dallas Times Herald on April 24, 1963 . . . quoted Vice President Johnson as saying that President Kennedy might ‘visit Dallas and other major Texas cities [that] . . . summer.’”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Jack Ruby’s well-documented long-distance phone calls provide a clear record that he was becoming involved in something quite unusual by May 1963. After making fewer than ten long-distance calls in April 1963, Ruby suddenly more than doubled that total to twenty-five in May and more than thirty in June. He continued on that approximate pace through September, but after JFK’s trip to Dallas began firming up for November, Ruby’s total skyrocketed to more than 80 long-distance calls in October 1963 and more than 110 in just the first three weeks of November. Even in those calls, Ruby would have relied on coded words and phrases common in transacting Mafia business, often going through one or more intermediaries to get information to its ultimate destination.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Carlos Marcello gave Jack Van Laningham the godfather’s own unvarnished view of Jack Ruby. According to the FBI file, in talking “about Jack Ruby,” Marcello said he “had met him in Dallas, Texas. He set him up in the bar business there. He said that Ruby was a homo son-of-a-bitch but good to have around to report to him what was happening in town. Marcello told us that all the police were on the take, and as long as he kept the money flowing they let him operate anything in Dallas that he wanted to. Ruby would come to Churchill Farms to report to Marcello, so the little man knew what was happening all the time.”
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Even the landmark biography of Ruby by Seth Kantor, 1978’s Who Was Jack Ruby?, doesn’t mention Marcello, though it was the first book to outline Ruby’s ties to numerous other mobsters. Dallas reporter Earl Golz was one of the first to clearly make the connection between Ruby and Marcello’s organization and Marcello’s control of vice in Dallas, a link soon confirmed by the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report. However, it was not until the extensive print and television coverage that accompanied the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s murder in November 1988—and publication of Marcello’s biography by John Davis in January 1989—that the general public really began to learn about Ruby’s ties to the mob. It’s important to note that Van Laningham’s report on Marcello’s remarks about Ruby was written up and in FBI files well before that.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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With the FBI holding such information close to its vest, journalists and historians had to ferret out the details of Ruby’s involvement with the mob and Marcello’s men bit by bit. Almost four years after Marcello’s 1985 admission to Jack Van Laningham—which was withheld from the public at the time and for the next twenty years—John H. Davis detailed tantalizing connections between Ruby and several Marcello associates.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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The most startling admission about Ruby that Carlos Marcello made to Van Laningham concerned a dramatic meeting that Ruby was summoned to, where the godfather confronted Ruby about stealing his money—and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Van Laningham is a large man with a deep voice, and he is normally good natured. However, when he first related to me what Marcello told him about that meeting, he took on the menacing tone that Marcello conveyed to Ruby at that meeting. Marcello confronted Ruby in the old farmhouse in the middle of his sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms property. Most of it had once been swampland, and some of it still was. Marcello disposed of the bodies of men who crossed him at Churchill Farms, a fact not lost on any member of the godfather’s organization summoned there for a meeting. Recall Marcello’s murder of Thomas Siracusa described in Chapter Four ; his body, according to the FBI, was “thrown into a tub of lye and after decomposition, the partially liquefied remains were poured into the swamp.” Ruby, knowing he was stealing money from Marcello, was probably already nervous when he arrived at the isolated farmhouse. One can only imagine his fear and pleading when Marcello confronted him about his thievery, and the fury Marcello unleashed on him.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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As Marcello described the scene to Van Laningham, Ruby was trembling and begging, willing to do anything to keep from paying the ultimate price for stealing from the godfather. If it eventually meant going into a crowded police basement full of well-armed cops, pulling out his gun, and shooting a prisoner, Ruby had no choice but to do it. As indicated by Ruby’s later remarks, it was likely not just Ruby’s life that was on the line but those of his family (two brothers, a sister, nieces, and nephews) as well. An undoubtedly grateful Ruby left the meeting with his life but would become increasingly involved in the dangerous JFK plot. As with any sensitive Mafia operation, Ruby’s participation would be on a need-to-know basis, getting only limited amounts of information about the plot when he needed to know it.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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In 1963 as in 1959, Jack Ruby was not a major player but had been given an offer he couldn’t refuse because he knew the right people in the right places. Ruby worked in a city controlled by Carlos Marcello, a city that was expected to be visited by JFK. In Cuba, Ruby had met and tried to help Santo Trafficante, and he was familiar with Tampa, having once lived there and sometimes visiting the city while scouting strip acts. Ruby had worked for Johnny Rosselli’s Chicago Mafia and knew that city well. Jimmy Hoffa’s son admits that his father knew Jack Ruby. The mob bosses and Hoffa had more than a dozen associates in common with Ruby, making it easy to communicate with Ruby through intermediaries, as Ruby’s phone records confirm. Ruby was also a small part of Marcello and Trafficante’s drug network, which would also figure into the JFK plot. Finally, Ruby had the connections with the Dallas Police to arrange for anyone blamed for the assassination in Dallas to be quickly killed. If that didn’t happen, Ruby would have to do the job himself, and the same would likely be true if the assassination occurred in a city besides Dallas.
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
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Ruby had one more set of skills that made him valuable to Marcello and Trafficante in their JFK plot: his experience with Cuba and gunrunning. Cuba would provide the godfathers the key they needed to kill JFK in a way that would prevent high US officials from conducting a truly thorough investigation to avoid exposing secrets that could trigger—in the words of one memo—“World War III.”
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