Legacy of Secrecy (133 page)

the Chevrolet’s front seat plus two passengers in the back. All seven

individuals were white males, and Saidallah didn’t recognize any of

the men, or either of the cars.37

Police would never solve the shooting case, but they advised Saidal-

lah to move from his apartment into his mother’s house, where they

already maintained a twenty-four-hour police guard. Before Saidal-

lah could move to his mother’s, however, he received a threatening

phone call from an unidentified man, about five hours after the freeway

shooting.38

Authorities were appropriately skeptical of Saidallah’s stated reason

for being out at 4:30 AM: to ask a female journalist for the
LA Free Press
,

whom he’d met just once, over a month earlier, if she would write a

story about him. Police confirmed that Saidallah had met the woman,

as he claimed, but he admitted he had no appointment and knew that a

court order prohibited “any story written about his family or himself at

this time.” Saidallah claimed that he went out as late as he did because

“during the day there are too many people on the street . . . and he felt

safer at 4:00 AM.”39

Though Saidallah denied owning any type of gun, a couple of his

associates whom police interviewed thought he owned a .38, but police

couldn’t confirm those assertions or find any such weapon. Saidallah

had asked a female friend about buying .38 bullets for him shortly before

the shooting, so the Pasadena police looked into the possibility that

Saidallah had staged the incident. However, Saidallah offered to take

a polygraph test about the incident and allowed his apartment to be

searched without a warrant. Also, in analyzing the bullet paths, the

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Pasadena police confirmed that the shots could have been fired from

one moving car into another, as Saidallah described. Police noted that if

Saidallah hadn’t ducked after seeing the gun, “the [second bullet] would

probably have passed through his neck.”40

The timing of the incident, just a month after Bobby’s shooting and

two weeks after Sirhan met with mob lawyer Russell Parsons, is suspi-

cious. While Saidallah was clearly not in the area to meet the
Free Press

writer, it’s unlikely, by the same token, that he was mixed up in some-

thing like a drug deal gone bad—otherwise, there would have been no

reason for him to go to the police, especially so quickly after the shoot-

ing. It’s possible that Saidallah was being stalked, or had been lured to

the largely deserted freeway at that particular time, when there would

be no witnesses.

While someone may have wanted to kill Saidallah, it’s also possible

that they wanted only to scare him, to send a message to him—or to

his brother in jail. Because the shooter allowed Saidallah to see the

gun before he fired it—giving Saidallah time to duck—and the shooter

stopped firing after just two shots, their goal was probably to frighten

Saidallah, not to kill him. If so, it would evoke the incident, one year

earlier, when Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante had two gunmen

blast Teamster official Allan Dorfman’s car in a Chicago suburb. Traf-

ficante told his attorney that incident “was just a warning,” because “if

they had wanted to kill him they would have.”41

In a bizarre parallel, noted here for the first time, Sirhan’s mob attor-

ney Russell Parsons had himself been the subject of a similar shooting.

It occurred in 1940, before he became a lawyer for the Mafia, when Par-

sons was working as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles district attorney’s

office. As the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
reported, “Parsons was the

target of two gunmen who fired at him . . . on a street. . . . One bullet broke

a wind wing on the car, and another hit the engine.” At the time of the

hit, Johnny Rosselli was a very prominent member of the Mafia in Los

Angeles. It was after the shooting that Parsons left the district attorney’s

office and started representing members of Mickey Cohen’s mob.42

Saidallah was probably the toughest of Sirhan’s brothers, and later

threatened one of Parsons’ investigators, a former policeman. Parsons

and his investigator went to the police, saying Saidallah’s threat might

relate to a message left at their answering service by a “Mr. C. Sirhan”

that said, “Step out of the case. If my brother is hurt, you will be hurt. I

will kill you.” However, Parsons told police he would handle the mat-

ter himself.43

Ultimately, Parsons wound up frustrating the LAPD by protecting

Saidallah and the other brothers from participating in police lineups.

This act left the LAPD unable to resolve whether Saidallah, or other

brothers, were with Sirhan when he bought his bullets and asked about

the armor-piercing shells, or if they were involved in sightings of a man

with the girl in the polka-dot dress. The other matter in which Par-

sons deliberately stymied police was their investigation of possible ties

between Sirhan and Jerry Owen, the preacher friend of Los Angeles

Mayor Sam Yorty.44

At the time of Sirhan’s trial, it didn’t appear to the press that Cooper

and Parsons were obviously throwing the case, which would have

raised suspicion and provided grounds for Sirhan’s future appeals. But

years later, one of Sirhan’s attorneys would claim that Cooper did pre-

cisely that.45 Cooper was subject to pressure because of his indictment

for the stolen grand jury transcripts in the Friars Club case. Parsons

had a much longer history with the Mafia, but the fact that Saidallah’s

shooting incident was similar to the one involving Parsons meant that

it could have served as a reminder to keep the seventy-three-year-old

attorney in line.

Was the attack on Saidallah a message meant for Sirhan, to cooper-

ate with his mob lawyers or see his family (or himself) killed? If so,

Sirhan got the message. Moldea recounts that Sirhan launched into an

“outburst on the opening day of his defense—which forced the judge to

send the jury out of the courtroom [as Sirhan pleaded,] ‘I, at this time,

sir, withdraw my original plea of not guilty and submit the plea of guilty

as charged on all counts.’” Sirhan stunned the court by saying, “I will

ask to be executed . . . I killed Robert Kennedy willfully, premeditatedly,

with twenty years of malice aforethought.” Sirhan also asked that his

two mob lawyers, Cooper and Parsons, “disassociate themselves from

this case completely.” Sirhan soon calmed down, but his outburst sug-

gests someone who had resigned himself to take the fall to protect his

family from harm.46

Grant Cooper was following orders from someone, but it clearly

wasn’t Sirhan. In hindsight, the most obvious person in a position to

influence Cooper was Johnny Rosselli. But that fact wasn’t obvious at

the time, because while Sirhan’s case was major news nationally and

in Los Angeles, the Friars Club case involving Rosselli and Cooper

was primarily a small, local story. In 1968 and 1969, the two cases were

almost never connected in the national media, and even locally, the few

times they were mentioned in the same article, it was mainly to note

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

scheduling issues. If Rosselli were influencing Grant Cooper’s defense of

Sirhan, his sway could explain why two of Johnny Rosselli’s associates

would later apparently confess to being involved in Bobby Kennedy’s

assassination.

Chapter Fifty-nine

A decade after Bobby’s murder, Carlos Marcello’s brother Joseph would

be discussing the Kennedys with FBI BRILAB informant Joe Hauser, a

highly trusted business partner of Carlos Marcello. When the subject of

John and Bobby Kennedy came up, Joseph Marcello declared to Hauser,

“We took care of ’em, didn’t we?”—implying that Carlos Marcello had a

hand in eliminating Bobby, as well as JFK. On October 25, 1979, Hauser

would record for the BRILAB operation a talk between Marcello and two

trusted associates, including the number-two man in the Los Angeles

mob. When one raised the subject of Edward Kennedy’s running for

president, Carlos Marcello shouted that “he better fuckin’ not. He better

stay the fuck out of it. . . . ”1

The Los Angeles mobster replied, “What a fuckin’ shithead dat

brother of his, Bobby, was . . . bastard thought he was gonna put us all

outa business, the motherfucker.”

Marcello’s associate said, “Yeah, so we put HIM outa business!” as

all the mobsters laughed.2

Unlike in JFK’s assassination, there is not a clear, unequivocal con-

fession by Carlos Marcello to his being involved in Bobby Kennedy’s

assassination. Then again, unlike the mostly released BRILAB audio-

tapes, the hundreds of hours of CAMTEX audiotapes of Marcello that

were secretly recorded in prison in 1985 have never been released—and

crucial evidence about Bobby’s assassination has disappeared or been

destroyed by Los Angeles police. Still, by using only the evidence that

was available twenty years ago, John H. Davis and David E. Scheim

were able to make compelling cases that Marcello and the Mafia were

involved in Bobby’s murder. Aside from his close relationship to Mickey

Cohen, Marcello said that he considered other leaders of the Los Angeles

Mafia to be “personal friends of mine . . . good people. They part of the

family.”

Carlos Marcello had maintained his close ties to Jimmy Hoffa and the

Mafia’s $2 million “Spring Hoffa” fund. Hoffa shared Marcello’s hatred

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of Bobby Kennedy, and on July 23, 1968, the FBI finally interviewed

Hoffa about his earlier reported threats to have Bobby assassinated. In

addition to the May 1967 and May 1968 threats we’ve mentioned, Dan

Moldea wrote about another incident in June 1968, “eight days after

Robert Kennedy’s murder, [when] the FBI received information from a

confidential informant that James R. Hoffa . . . had said [before the assas-

sination], ‘If Hoffa isn’t out, Kennedy will never get in.’”3

When the FBI talked to Hoffa at Lewisburg Federal Prison, Hoffa did

not directly deny making the threats to have Bobby killed, probably

because he knew that lying to a federal officer was a crime. Hoffa also

refused to “sign the waiver” saying that he had been informed of his

rights. According to FBI reports, Hoffa was asked if “he had made the

statement that he had a contract out on Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and

if he, Kennedy, ever got in the primaries or ever got elected, the con-

tract would be fulfilled within six months.” In response, “Hoffa stated

he would not answer such a ‘stupid’ allegation. He stated, ‘You know

as well as I do how many nuts there are in this place who would say

anything.’ Hoffa said, ‘You have my statement,’ and refused to com-

ment further regarding this allegation or the assassination of Senator

Kennedy.”4

Hoffa’s threats to assassinate Bobby Kennedy were not reported in

the press at the time, and didn’t start to become public knowledge until

after Hoffa’s disappearance, seven years later, and some are quoted in

this book for the first time. If Hoffa’s contract on Bobby were put into

action, as a federal prisoner, Hoffa couldn’t have played any significant

role in implementing it—he would have needed others to do that.

In Chapter 54, we noted briefly police and FBI reports of a Las Vegas

Mafia contract on Bobby. Around May 1, 1968, a wealthy rancher and

farmer in Delano, California, named Roy Donald Murray was overheard

by the Chief of Police and another officer saying that “he had pledged

$2,000 . . . to pay off a contract to kill Senator Kennedy,” and that the

Mafia “was behind the letting of the contract.” Quoted for the first time

here, the Delano police confirmed that Murray had “supposed connec-

tions in Las Vegas” and was “a known gambler [who] frequently loses

several thousands of dollars at a time when he visits Las Vegas, but this

does not appear to bother him,” indicating that the “prosperous cotton

rancher” had money to burn.5

The two Delano police sources had heard Roy Donald Murray while

he was drinking heavily at the local Elks Club. Murray said that “he

received a telephone call from his ‘Mafia,’ friends in Las Vegas, request-

ing a contribution to help pay a $500,000 to $750,000 contract to assas-

sinate Robert Kennedy. Murray stated that the assassination was to

take place if it appeared Kennedy was to earn the Democratic presi-

dential nomination.” Murray said that according to the Mafia, “Cali-

fornia was considered as the conclusive proof point of that probable

nomination.”6

Like many wealthy farmers in the area, Murray was upset about Bob-

by’s support for migrant labor leader César Chávez, based in Delano.

Local law enforcement supported the farmers, so Murray felt comfort-

able telling the policemen about his “friends [who] were members of

the ‘Mafia.’”7 The two police officials who heard Murray’s comments