Legacy of Secrecy (11 page)

Ray were well-known within the CIA, so Hunt couldn’t have an official

role with either of those exiles.

Harry told us about one occasion when Hunt sent one of his associates,

a CIA officer, to see him. Harry thinks Hunt sent the associate because

of the friction that existed between Hunt and Harry. Even though the

CIA officer was driving an old car, as Harry said they often did to avoid

attracting attention, the Agency man started telling Harry, “There is a

lot of money to be made.” Harry looked at him and said, “How?” The

CIA officer said, “There is a lot of money in the budget for this thing,

and some people have . . . ”

Harry didn’t realize it at the time, but the total budget for just the

AMWORLD part of the JFK-Almeida coup plan would total at least $7

million, and some agents estimated it was much higher. But Harry felt

the CIA man “was trying to buy me.” So Harry told him, “Look, when I

want to make money I [will] go back to my profession [as a mining engi-

neer]. I am not here to make money. I am not interested.” It’s important

to note that the CIA officer may have simply been testing Harry, to see if

he could be bought. The same Hunt associate later took Harry to a Miami

restaurant, where Trafficante himself tried to bribe Harry.52

By his own admission, Hunt’s assistant in the early 1960s was Ber-

nard Barker, who was also later involved in Watergate. Barker’s offi-

cial CIA position was as a Miami-based agent who frequently passed

along information from Frank Fiorini, a Trafficante bagman. (Fiorini had

changed his name to Frank Sturgis by the time he was apprehended at

the Watergate with Barker, McCord, and others). While Barker has never

acknowledged being officially privy to the JFK-Almeida coup plan, one

of his CIA reports from November 14, 1963, mentions “rumors” of an

“operation including Juan Almeida [to] overthrow” Fidel.53 In a televi-

sion interview, Barker told Bill Moyers, “I would have followed Howard

Hunt to hell and back,” and in another TV program, Barker said that “at

the time [of] the Kennedy assassination . . . President Kennedy’s govern-

ment had reached its ‘peak’ in its efforts to overthrow Castro.”54

tions concluded that mob bosses Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante

had the “motive and means” to kill JFK, but the committee was unable

to figure out how they did it, since crucial evidence was withheld from

them, especially regarding the JFK-Almeida coup plan.1 Based on con-

clusive evidence and testimonies that have come to light in recent years,

it’s now clear that Marcello and Trafficante worked together with Mafia

don Johnny Rosselli to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. All three

confessed their involvement to trusted associates shortly before their

deaths, including stunning admissions in FBI files detailed here for the

first time. It was the JFK-Almeida coup plan that gave the Mafia chiefs

the opportunity they needed: to kill JFK in such a way that any true

investigation would compromise the coup plan, exposing Commander

Almeida and triggering a confrontation with the Soviets and Cuba. The

committee was also denied important evidence about Johnny Rosselli,

one of the small group of US intelligence assets who helped the Mafia

infiltrate the coup plan, and use parts of it to kill JFK.

Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had all faced an unprecedented and

escalating onslaught throughout JFK’s administration. Bobby’s intense

pressure on the Mafia in general, and those three mob bosses in particu-

lar, was at its peak by November 1963. The Mafia had been exposed on

television in millions of homes in September 1963 by sensational Senate

crime hearings in which the star witness, Joe Valachi, became the first

“made” member of the Mafia to publicly reveal its secrets. Carlos Mar-

cello controlled Louisiana and much of Texas, but November 1963 found

him on trial in federal court in New Orleans by Bobby’s own prosecutors

and facing permanent deportation.

In Texas, Marcello and Trafficante’s portion of the French Connec-

tion heroin network had recently faced a major bust for the second time

in a year. All of Santo Trafficante’s operations in Florida, from drugs

to gambling, were under attack, and even his own brothers had been

arrested and indicted. Trafficante himself had been the subject of Con-

gressional hearings in October 1963, exposing him and his operations to

public scrutiny for the first time. Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, the Chicago

Mafia’s dealmaker in Las Vegas and Hollywood, was under attack on

several fronts
.
Bobby was getting ready to run the Mafia out of Las Vegas

and had gotten the FBI to put Rosselli under surveillance, which it was

able to do part of the time. Rosselli’s power flowed from Chicago mob

boss Sam Giancana, and Bobby had finally persuaded the FBI to go all

out after Giancana. Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had no options

for survival as long as JFK was President and Bobby Kennedy was his

crusading Attorney General.

The leading roles of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli in JFK’s mur-

der were first revealed to us in 1992 by a top Kennedy aide, one whose

personal integrity, honesty, and work for the Kennedys are confirmed by

declassified files and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Unlike FBI and

Congressional investigators, this Kennedy aide knew all about the JFK-

Almeida coup plan and the Cuba Contingency Plans to protect it.2 Since

his revelation, more than four million pages of assassination files have

been released, confirming what this aide and two dozen other Kennedy

associates told us about these events. Even though more than a thousand

pages about the coup plan and the Mafia’s infiltration of it have been

declassified, they are just a tiny fraction of the more than one million

CIA records related to JFK’s murder that will remain secret until 2017.

However, information from Kennedy associates, the most important of

the four million pages, and the findings of government investigators and

journalists allow us to show why the three Mafia chiefs killed JFK, how

they did it, and some of the most important people they used.

While all three Mafia bosses worked together to kill JFK, Marcello was

the driving force, since he had the most to lose in the shortest time.

After serving several years in prison in the early 1930s, Marcello had

risen through the ranks to become the Louisiana Mafia’s unchallenged

ruler by the 1950s. Marcello was sometimes referred to as “the little

man,” though never to his face. His height was reportedly 5’ 2”, upped

to 5’ 4” by elevator shoes. But what he lacked in size, he made up for in

ruthlessness and raw power. Traditional Mafia terminology can’t convey

the true measure of Marcello’s power by 1963.

Two of Bobby’s Mafia prosecutors used the term “godfather” to

describe Marcello. John Diuguid, who prosecuted Marcello in New

Orleans during much of November 1963, later read the transcript of

44

LEGACY OF SECRECY

the only instance in which Marcello’s conversation was ever bugged

during the 1960s. Since the FBI in New Orleans left Marcello alone, this

single instance involved one visit to Marcello’s headquarters by a very

scared wired informant for the Bureau of Narcotics. Diuguid described

the scene to fellow Mafia prosecutor, Ronald Goldfarb, who wrote that

“the overheard conversation between Marcello and other supplicants

who came to see him and seek his favors sounded like a scene from

The Godfather.”
Diuguid confirmed that to us, describing Marcello as a

“godfather” who was “holding court.”

However, Marcello was more powerful than any traditional god-

father, or even a fictional one such as Don Vito Corleone, the character

in
The Godfather
. Even he had to share New York City with the heads of

other Mafia families, and the real Mafia families of New York sometimes

feuded as they vied for power. In contrast, Marcello reigned supreme in

Louisiana and large portions of the surrounding states, including Texas,

where he controlled rackets in cities like Dallas and Houston. Instead

of feuding with Mafia bosses in adjacent territories, Marcello became

business partners with them, as he did with Florida’s Trafficante.

There was another very important difference between Marcello and

almost every other Mafia chief in America: As the head of America’s

oldest Mafia family, Marcello didn’t need permission from the informal

National Mafia Commission to stage major hits. This made Marcello

more powerful in 1963 than far more famous mob bosses who had held

sway over only a particular city, such as his friend Mickey Cohen (of Los

Angeles) and New York’s Vito Genovese, both of whom had still been

subject to the commission. Unlike most other Mafia families in America,

the Louisiana Mafia had a long tradition of murdering government offi-

cials, beginning with the assassination of a New Orleans Police Chief

in 1890. Marcello himself had attempted to have New Orleans Sheriff

Frank Clancy assassinated in 1955, and was linked to two successful hits

on much higher-ranking government officials.

The Mafia assassinations of an attorney general in 1954 and a presi-

dent in 1957 had a major impact on how Marcello, Trafficante, and

Rosselli assassinated JFK. Marcello had learned in the 1950s that by

working with other Mafia bosses like Trafficante and Rosselli, he could

extend his considerable power even further. While Trafficante had pri-

mary control of corrupt Phenix City, Alabama, in the 1950s, Marcello

also had vice interests in the town. Across the river from sprawling

Fort Benning, Georgia, Phenix City was so lawless that even General

George S. Patton had been unable to tame it. However, in 1954, an anti-

corruption attorney general for the state of Alabama, Albert Patterson,

was elected from the town, after he pledged to run the mobsters out of

Phenix City once and for all. The mobsters faced a huge loss of revenue,

so the state’s new attorney general–elect was assassinated in Phenix

City on June 18, 1954.

However, the vice lords had been so used to the lax attitudes toward

organized crime by the state of Alabama, J. Edgar Hoover, and the

Eisenhower-Nixon administration that they didn’t bother to use a patsy

to quickly take the heat and divert attention from the real culprits. This

was a serious mistake, and suspicion quickly focused on Trafficante’s

lieutenants and a corrupt official, one of whom fled to Marcello’s terri-

tory to hide, while two others went to Trafficante’s Florida. The brazen

assassination became a national scandal, causing a barrage of media

coverage. After nationwide calls for action, President Eisenhower finally

declared Martial Rule and sent in National Guard troops to clean up the

city once and for all. Though their names stayed out of the investiga-

tion, Trafficante and Marcello had suffered a rare setback and would not

repeat the same mistake.

The error was corrected when the president of Guatemala, Castillo

Armas, was assassinated in 1957, at a time when Johnny Rosselli was

very active in the country and Marcello was developing his extensive

ties to Guatemala and to Rosselli. Guatemala’s president was assas-

sinated just four days after trying to close a casino owned by one of

Rosselli’s criminal associates. A seemingly lone, apparently communist

patsy was quickly blamed and soon killed. Like Oswald, the patsy was

ex-military, and supposedly an ardent communist who had never both-

ered to join the Communist Party. The investigation essentially ended

with the death of the patsy, who was accepted as the sole assassin by the

world press and much of the public.3 Both Marcello and Rosselli would

remember the importance of having a patsy to quickly take the blame

and divert investigators.

Marcello’s fellow mobsters continued to target government officials

into 1963. Chicago Alderman Benjamin F. Lewis was assassinated on

February 28, 1963, “the back of his head . . . shot off by three bullets,”

according to Hoffa expert Dan Moldea. He wrote that the hit man was “a

close friend of [Jack] Ruby,” in addition to being an associate of Johnny

Rosselli.4 The 1961 Mafia assassination of UAW-AFL President John

Kilpatrick in Chicago was an important turning point, even though he

wasn’t a government official: It was the first Mafia murder solved in

the city since 1934, and the first Chicago mob hit the FBI investigated,

46

LEGACY OF SECRECY

all because of new Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Guy Banister, the

FBI’s Chicago chief before his drinking and erratic behavior sent him

on a downward spiral that eventually found him working for Marcello,

once noted in a speech that more than one thousand gangland slay-

ings in Chicago remained unsolved. Banister was exaggerating only