Legacy of Secrecy (139 page)

Rosselli still faced prison, but he was also free on appeal—and still had

potential leverage over the CIA to at least protect himself from being

deported on his immigration charge. Jimmy Hoffa was still in prison,

and for some reason had seemed unusually interested in following the

progress of the prosecution of James Earl Ray. Given Ray’s extensive

criminal background and knowledge of what happened to snitches in

prison, in addition to the assassination attempt on Sirhan’s brother, Mar-

cello and the others could be confident that neither convicted assassin

would reveal anything that pointed in their direction.40

With the resolution of the cases against Sirhan, Ray, and Shaw, no

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government agency seemed to be actively investigating any of the three

assassinations that had rocked the country over the past five years. The

same was true for the major news organizations. With the help of orga-

nized crime, illegal campaign contributions from US companies and

foreign governments, and scuttling a pre-election Vietnam peace agree-

ment, Richard Nixon had been elected president in November 1968, and

the Mafia had little to fear from his administration. Nixon had retained

Richard Helms as CIA Director, a decision which would further ensure

that information which might expose the Mafia’s role in the CIA-Mafia

plots and JFK’s assassination would stay hidden. Helms had E. How-

ard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips well positioned to help him in that

regard, while potentially problematic AMWORLD veterans like David

Morales were stationed far away, in Southeast Asia.

While prospects for further government or press investigations into

the murders of JFK, Bobby, or King looked bleak, important questions

lingered. In some ways, Jim Garrison’s best legacy was not his disas-

trous prosecution of Clay Shaw, but the information his investigators

developed pertaining to other matters (never used in court) and the

careers they pursued later. Some of the private citizens who had assisted

Garrison were continuing their own investigations. These included for-

mer FBI agent William Turner, who learned that a Cuban exile named

Harry Williams, who had worked for Bobby Kennedy, might have some

interesting information. Washington attorney Bernard Fensterwald was

organizing a group of people interested in the assassinations, and within

a few years would become James Earl Ray’s attorney. Former Senate

investigator Harold Weisberg had continued his work after leaving Gar-

rison, and would soon be the first journalist to name Joseph Milteer in

relation to JFK’s assassination.

Other private citizens and authors—Mary Ferrell, Sylvia Meagher,

Paul Hoch, Dr. Cyril Wecht, David Lifton, Richard Sprague, Gaeton

Fonzi, Peter Noyes, and several more—were also continuing their

efforts, looking primarily at JFK’s assassination but also aware of some

of the lingering issues surrounding Bobby’s and King’s murders. While

the government’s legacy of secrecy had prevented the American public

from learning the truth by the end of the 1960s, those men and women

were essentially continuing Bobby Kennedy’s quest to uncover his

brother’s killers.

PART FIVE

Chapter Sixty-one

As 1970 began, no one seemed close to exposing the roles that Marcello,

Trafficante, and Rosselli had played in the assassinations of the sixties.

It likewise didn’t appear that anyone would discover Richard Helms’s

unauthorized plots between the CIA and the Mafia to assassinate Fidel

Castro in 1963. No active government investigations were ongoing, leav-

ing only a few independent journalists and private researchers to pursue

leads in the murders of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy.

However, the illegal activities of President Richard Nixon would change

all that: In just a few years, the three Mafia bosses would be grilled by

Congressional committees about the JFK hit, Rosselli would be grue-

somely murdered, Helms would be fired and face prosecution, while

Hunt would be in prison.

For fifty-nine-year-old Carlos Marcello, the start of the seventies saw his

criminal empire continued to expand, even as he diversified into more

legitimate businesses. However, Marcello still ordered contract killings,

even while appealing his conviction and two-year sentence for slugging

an FBI agent.1 The Bureau had offered Marcello a deal to avoid prison, by

providing information in just one other case, but Marcello refused. Mar-

cello had backed Nixon for years, and one of Marcello’s “fixers”—who

treaded the thin line between politics and crime—was close to Nixon’s

own fixer, former mob attorney Murray Chotiner. According to John H.

Davis, Marcello “and his lawyers pulled every string at their command

to get Carlos’s two year sentence reduced . . . to six months and made

arrangements for him to spend that time at the Medical Center for Fed-

eral Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.”2

Marcello entered the Springfield facility on October 14, 1970. Since

it was one of the least secure and most comfortable federal prisons,

allowing more phone calls and visitors than others, Marcello had no

trouble running his empire from prison. When he was released on March

12, 1971—after serving just five months—Marcello emerged much

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

healthier and more fit, ready for what would be his most prosperous

decade.

Even before Marcello entered prison in 1970, reporters whispered

among themselves what they wouldn’t print: that the New Orleans

godfather was tied to JFK’s murder. While covering a Marcello court

appearance in 1970, journalist Peter Noyes heard “a newspaper reporter

[say] ‘There’s been a lot of talk about that guy being involved in the Ken-

nedy assassination.’”3 In fall 1971, Noyes learned from the Los Angeles

chief deputy district attorney that the Senate Judiciary Committee was

holding secret hearings on JFK’s and Bobby’s assassinations, following

California Senator George Murphy’s remarks that “the killers of John

and Robert Kennedy may have acted under orders from someone else.”

A Murphy aide confirmed the secret hearings to Noyes, who began writ-

ing a book about the assassinations,
Legacy of Doubt
. Most of the media

ignored Noyes’s book when it was published in 1973, even though it

featured new information tying Marcello to JFK’s slaying and raised

troubling questions about Bobby’s murder.4

William Sartor was also preparing a book in 1971, writing about Mar-

cello’s ties to Martin Luther King’s murder. Sartor went to Waco, Texas,

to interview Sam Termine, a nightclub owner and Marcello lieutenant

who had once been Marcello’s bodyguard and driver while serving as

a decorated member of the Louisiana State Police. Sartor was killed

the night before his interview with Termine, leaving his manuscript

unfinished—but it wasn’t until 1992 that the local district attorney ruled

Sartor’s death a “homicide.”5

Unlike Marcello, Santo Trafficante didn’t have legal issues to worry

about, which allowed his operations to grow throughout the 1970s and

into the early 1980s. Even though Jimmy Hoffa was still in prison, new

Teamster president Frank Fitzsimmons made sure that associates of

Trafficante and Marcello received generous multimillion-dollar loans

from the Teamster Pension fund. The fifty-five-year-old Trafficante also

greatly expanded his heroin network not just in America but interna-

tionally. Intelligence journalist Joseph Trento documented that after the

Mafia chief made a 1968 trip to South Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singa-

pore, Trafficante6

decided to have his Hong Kong-based deputy . . . take control of

every big Saigon nightspot catering to US servicemen. By 1970,

[Trafficante’s] Saigon-produced heroin was being sold directly to

American GI’s at bargain prices at each of these nightspots.7

Though largely forgotten today, the “Service Club Scandal” was major

news at the time, because Trento points out that “by 1970, Congress

estimated that a full fifteen percent of the US troops in Vietnam were

hooked on heroin.” Still, none of the mainstream press coverage linked

Trafficante’s name to the growing heroin problem or the service club

scandal, allowing him to once again prosper by staying in the shadows.

Trento finds it significant that AMWORLD veterans David Morales, for-

mer Artime aide “Chi Chi” Quintero, and CIA Station Chief Ted Shack-

ley were stationed in Saigon as the heroin problem exploded.8

Trafficante’s heroin network was undergoing a major shift by 1970,

with Cuban exiles playing an increasing role, as France finally began to

arrest some of their most notorious traffickers. Nixon’s official reaction

was to order the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) to

crack down on US heroin trafficking.9 Unofficially, Nixon would soon

build his own small antidrug squad, one that included Trafficante associ-

ates like Frank Fiorini and Manuel Artime.10

As documented by many journalists in the 1970s, and more recently

by Anthony Summers, Richard Nixon had numerous criminal ties, some

dating back to the 1940s. By the time Nixon became president, several

of his criminal business partners and contributors had links to Santo

Trafficante. That may explain why Trento found that “the BNDD could

not get the Nixon administration to go after Trafficante directly.”11

Trafficante had casino interests in the Bahamas, as did several Nixon

associates. Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo, a Miami Cuban exile

heavily involved in Nixon’s business affairs, also had links to organized

crime, though they were rarely reported in the press. Nixon’s personal

and business—and soon White House—affairs became so compromised

by criminal associates that the corruption made a mockery of Nixon’s

public “law and order” stance so often extolled by Vice President Spiro

Agnew.12

When US pressure finally resulted in the arrest of Michel Victor Mertz

on November 24, 1969, for the 1965 Fort Benning bust, Mertz was too

wealthy and powerful to suffer consequences for very long.13 Mertz’s

long-standing ties to French Intelligence (SDECE) gave him far more

leverage over the SDECE than Johnny Rosselli had over the CIA. Mertz

was released from his initial jailing after just seven months but was then

tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years for heroin trafficking in July

1971. However,
Newsday
reported he had to serve only eight months,

even though Mertz’s operation had shipped two tons of heroin, with a

street value of $400 million, into the US in the past eight years.14

Because of the heroin epidemic in the US,
Newsday
publisher William

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Attwood had devoted the resources of his newspaper to an unprec-

edented, globe-trotting narcotics exposé. Attwood had worked for JFK

and Bobby on Cuban matters, and though the prizewinning
Newsday

series didn’t mention any links between JFK’s murder and Mertz, it was

the first American press exposure of Mertz’s heroin trafficking—and his

soft treatment by the French government.15

Mertz’s brief prison stints had little impact on Trafficante, since his

Cuban exiles filled the void left by the French arrests to such an extent

that
Newsday
reported the BNDD had discovered that 8 percent of the

1,500 Bay of Pigs veterans had “been investigated or arrested for drug

dealing.” That total likely didn’t include prominent exiles like Manuel

Artime, who would never be arrested for his drug trafficking activities,

and whose reach soon extended into the White House.16

At sixty-five, Johnny Rosselli was not doing nearly as well as Traff-

icante and Marcello. Rosselli not only faced five years in prison for his

Friars Club scheme and immigration violations but INS was again try-

ing to deport him. Even worse, Rosselli’s former partner in the Friars

Club scam, the casino owner, had turned states evidence and was giv-

ing information to the government. Prosecutors in Los Angeles used a

grand jury in an attempt to pressure Rosselli, but the Mafia don gave

only vague answers that didn’t incriminate himself or anyone else.17

Rosselli’s new attorney, Tom Wadden, once again pressed the CIA

to intervene for their former asset, at least enough to prevent Rosselli’s

deportation. Toward that end, Rosselli had meetings with William

Harvey, CIA official Jim O’Connell, and Robert Maheu, recently fired by

Howard Hughes when the reclusive billionaire left the country.18 One

CIA memo says that “on November 18, 1970 . . . Mr. Helms flatly refused

to intercede with INS on Rosselli’s behalf.” However, the CIA admits

“meeting with INS regarding the status of the deportation proceedings

[in] March 1971,” and the INS deportation efforts were halted at that

time, after Rosselli entered prison on February 25, 1971. What happened