Legacy of Secrecy (132 page)

would usually have been subjected to similar surveillance—or other-

wise checked out—both in 1965 (when Crowe last saw Sirhan, at college)

and in 1968. But there is no record that happened to Sirhan. Unless the

FBI made an exception in Sirhan’s case, for some reason, then Sirhan had

been checked out or was under surveillance—and, like other informa-

tion about him, those files were suppressed or destroyed after he was

arrested for Bobby’s murder.19

It’s almost as if someone wanted authorities to think Sirhan was a

communist, since that might put him under surveillance, or at least

give the public and authorities some seeming motive for shooting at

Bobby. Melanson points out that “Sirhan’s notebook contained heavy

doses of pro-communist, revolutionary zeal, and anti-Americanism, as

if Sirhan were a member of the Communist Party or . . . interested in

communist ideology. But he wasn’t.” However, that was only the second

most frequent subject Sirhan scribbled about in his notebook. His pri-

mary topic was money and getting money, often very large sums.20

Before Bobby’s murder, Sirhan had been tied to people who could trig-

ger cover-ups by the LAPD or intelligence agencies—but after Bobby’s

death, the Mafia appeared to be a guiding force in Sirhan’s actions.

No more than four days after Bobby died, perhaps even before Bobby

passed away, Sirhan picked Los Angeles attorney Grant Cooper to be his

attorney—at the same time that Cooper was busy as part of the defense

team for Johnny Rosselli’s Friars Club trial. Although Cooper actually

represented one of Rosselli’s codefendants, a former casino owner (tied

to a recent hit attempt by Rosselli), author Lisa Pease noted that Cooper

“was in direct and extensive contact with Rosselli’s lawyer” throughout

much of 1968.21

Because of the way the press reported Sirhan’s selection of Grant

Cooper, the ties of Cooper to the Johnny Rosselli trial were largely over-

looked at the time. But Cooper’s representation of Sirhan would have a

huge impact on Sirhan’s trial, resulting in his receiving a death sentence

and ensuring that future appeals were fruitless. Sirhan himself would

later tell Dan Moldea that

Grant Cooper conned me to say that I killed Robert Kennedy [act-

ing alone and not as part of any conspiracy]. I went along with him

because he had my life in his hands. I was duped into believing he

had my best interests in mind. It was a futile defense. Cooper sold

me out . . . I remember Cooper once told me, “You’re getting the

best, and you’re not paying anything. Just shut up. I’m the lawyer

and you’re the client.”22

Grant Cooper was a respected attorney who had no criminal record

before joining the Friars Club defense team—but that changed when

Cooper became involved with Rosselli and his codefendant. Secret

grand jury transcripts about the case were somehow obtained and

given to Grant Cooper, but authorities were never able to learn who

provided them. Out of the five Friars Club defendants, Rosselli seems

the most likely source because of his long-standing connections to both

Los Angeles and the Mafia. The fact that Grant Cooper was later will-

ing to face charges (and an eventual conviction) for illegal possession

of the transcripts, rather than reveal their source, indicates they came

from someone from whom Cooper feared retribution—and Rosselli

was the only Mafioso among the Friars Club defendants. By giving the

transcripts to Cooper instead of to his own attorney, Rosselli not only

deflected suspicion away from himself, but also gained an important

hold over Cooper.23

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

According to the
New York Times
, Sirhan picked Grant Cooper’s name

“from a list given him by [the] chief local counsel for the American

Civil Liberties Union.”24 However, Rosselli’s involvement explains why

a pricey attorney like Grant Cooper would readily agree to represent

Sirhan for free. Because Cooper would be busy with the Friars Club

trial for months, he brought in Mafia attorney Russell Parsons to help

on Sirhan’s case. Dan Moldea notes that “Parsons was well known for

serving as counsel to southern California mobster Mickey Cohen and

members of his gang.”25 As he had with Cooper, Sirhan had selected

Parsons’ name from the list of lawyers provided by the ACLU local

counsel—raising the possibility that someone had told Sirhan prior to

Bobby’s murder to select the two mob-connected attorneys. Parsons

immediately agreed to represent Sirhan without being paid (at least,

not by Sirhan).

Not reported at the time was the name of another lawyer Cooper

originally tried to enlist to represent Sirhan, while he finished the Friars

Club case: Washington power attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who

had established his reputation representing Jimmy Hoffa. Williams still

had the Teamsters as a client, though he hadn’t been Hoffa’s attorney

for several years. Edward Bennett Williams had also represented Sam

Giancana in his last bout with federal officials, helping to broker the

May 1966 deal that allowed Giancana to go free in return for leaving

the country and not divulging the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots.

However, by 1968 Williams was trying to develop a more legitimate

image, smoothing over his differences with Bobby Kennedy before his

death and becoming a part owner of the Washington Redskins, so Wil-

liams declined Cooper’s offer.26

That left Sirhan with two attorneys linked to the Mafia, though at the

time the press largely overlooked their mob ties, for several reasons.

First, the
New York Times
reported that Sirhan signed “the retainer for

the two lawyers . . . sometime between Sirhan’s arrest June 5 and June

10.” But that news wasn’t reported until June 20, and even then, only

Parsons’s name was released, not Cooper’s. In the
Times
article that

day, Parsons simply said that he would “be joined by another lawyer,

whom he described as ‘a very able man, a good lawyer who is involved

in something right now in which it would be detrimental if his name

were announced in connection with the Sirhan case.’”27

Parsons’ Mafia ties stemmed mainly from earlier times, since by that

time his primary mob client, Mickey Cohen, had been in prison for sev-

eral years. The
Times
article of June 20, 1968, didn’t mention the Mafia

or Cohen, saying only that Parsons was “best known . . . for his defense

of” a bookmaker, whose case helped to prevent the use “of evidence

secured by placing hidden microphones in private homes without a

search warrant.”28 On the same page, a much smaller article reported

that the United States government had asked the country of Jordan

not to allow “four Jordanian lawyers . . . to fly to Los Angeles to help

the defense of Sirhan.” Jordan complied with the US’s request, leaving

Sirhan’s defense in the hands of two attorneys tied to the mob.

The
Times
article, headlined “Lawyer, 73, Agrees to Defend Sirhan

Without Fee,” could have given readers the impression that Parsons

was simply an elderly attorney taking a case that might give him one

last turn in the limelight, and that he would be the main attorney at

trial, but Grant Cooper was actually calling the shots. It was Cooper

who decided to bring in Russell Parsons on the case, saying that he’d

“worked with Russ before.”29

As Mafia expert David Scheim pointed out, Russell Parsons had not

only “represented many Mob clients [but] had once been investigated

himself by . . . Robert Kennedy.” Parsons had called Bobby “a dirty son

of a bitch,” while praising former Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen.

When Parsons worked for Cohen, Scheim notes that Cohen had ties to

the Ambassador Hotel dating back to “the 1940s,” when Cohen “ran

a major gambling operation there.” In its secret internal reports, the

LAPD did briefly take note of Parsons’ Mafia ties years earlier, though

the department apparently never investigated Cooper’s link to the

Mafia.30

Parsons had an initial, two-hour private meeting with Sirhan on

June 19, 1968, so we can assume that from then on, Parsons and Cooper

exerted a major influence on what Sirhan said and did. In contrast to

Sirhan’s lack of openness with LAPD investigators, Sirhan “would con-

fide in Russell Parsons,” according to defense investigator and journalist

Robert Blair Kaiser.31 Moldea writes that “Kaiser, a respected journalist

and a former correspondent for
Time
, came into the case as an investiga-

tor—so that he could write about Sirhan’s defense ‘from the inside.’”

Yet William Turner reports that whenever “Kaiser had tried to open the

minds of the defense lawyers to the indications of a conspiracy, [he]

had run up against a stone wall, [and Kaiser said that] ‘Parsons simply

would not talk about [conspiracy,] let alone pursue it.’”32

The unusual actions, and lack of action, by Parsons and Cooper in the

time leading up to Sirhan’s trial have been documented by many writers,

but not at the time, only since the mid-1970s. William Turner points out

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

their odd defense strategy of “not contesting the state’s contention that

Sirhan had acted alone.”33 Thus, all the evidence that authors and jour-

nalists later found to be so controversial—or missing—would never be

tested at Sirhan’s trial. Philip Melanson said this evidence included the

many “eyewitness accounts that challenged whether it was physically

possible for Sirhan to have inflicted Kennedy’s wounds,” and several

witnesses who saw a second gunman. After a pretrial hearing on Octo-

ber 18, 1968, Russell Parsons would announce to the press that “‘We

have seen no evidence of a conspiracy.’ An
LA Herald
headline the fol-

lowing day declared, ‘Both Sides Agree Sirhan Acted Alone.’”34

To give the press and public a logical reason for Sirhan to have shot

Bobby, Lisa Pease points out that “it was Cooper who supplied Sirhan the

motive he lacked, claiming that Sirhan was angry that RFK was willing

to provide jets to Israel.” Melanson found it troubling that even though

“Chief defense attorney Grant Cooper and . . . Russell Parsons decided

on a diminished capacity plea,” supposedly “in order to avoid the death

penalty,” they didn’t try very hard “to obtain crucial audio tapes of

Sirhan’s interrogation sessions with police during the early morning

hours following his arrest” that were central to such a defense.35

Decades later, Sirhan would finally admit to journalist Dan Moldea

that “Cooper sold me out”—but even if Sirhan saw signs, in the summer

and fall of 1968, that their defense wasn’t going to be effective, Sirhan

had no real choice but to go along with the two mob-linked attorneys.

Because of Sirhan’s experiences in the world of racetrack gambling,

plus the criminal background and associates of some of his brothers,

Sirhan would have known what happened to those who crossed the

mob. Only two weeks after Sirhan first met with Russell Parsons, some-

one apparently attempted to murder one of his brothers, possibly to

make sure that Sirhan realized what could happen to his family if he

didn’t cooperate.

In a well-documented but rarely noted incident, on July 3, 1968, Saidal-

lah Sirhan was the victim of an unusual shooting. According to Pasa-

dena police reports, at approximately 4:30 AM, while driving the Sirhan

family’s 1955 DeSoto on the Pasadena freeway, Saidallah noticed two

cars signal each other with car horns. Saidallah sensed “he was possibly

being followed” by the two vehicles. Soon, one of them—a late-model

Volkswagen Beetle—pulled up along the right side of his car, while a

1959 Chevrolet came up beside his car on the left. The police report says

that Saidallah was worried “that the two vehicles were attempting to

box him in, in an attempt to slow his car.” Then Saidallah “saw a hand

gun being pointed out the [Volkswagen’s] driver’s window.”36

Seeing the pistol, Saidallah “immediately let go of the steering wheel

of his car and leaned over to the right, lying down on the front seat of

his car,” to get out of the way. Two shots were fired into Saidallah’s car,

both “through the right wind wing.” Saidallah stayed down in the seat

for about ten seconds as his car slowed, since he had also taken “his foot

off the gas.” When Saidallah looked up, he saw the Chevrolet turn left,

while the Volkswagen turned right. Saidallah went straight ahead, to

the Pasadena Police Department, to report the shooting, where at 4:45

AM it was written up as an attempted murder. Police recovered two

bullets, which appeared to be from a .38-caliber pistol, from Saidallah’s

car. Saidallah told the Pasadena police that he had seen two men in the

Volkswagen’s front seat and two in the back, as well as the driver in