Legacy of Secrecy (147 page)

revealed only much later, to Bobby’s former Mafia prosecutor William

Hundley.22

On July 16, 1976, Rosselli had dinner with Trafficante and told the

godfather he’d had to mention his name during his most recent tes-

timony. Twelve days later, on July 28, 1976, Rosselli was seen alive in

public for the last time. When it was clear Rosselli was missing, Senator

Schweiker asked the FBI to look into the matter.23

On August 7, 1976, Rosselli’s body turned up in a fifty-five-gallon oil

drum, found in a canal near Miami. Rosselli had been shot and stabbed,

had his legs cut off, and been stuffed in the oil drum. It was shot with

holes, so it wouldn’t float, then weighted with chains, but somehow it

was still discovered. The police were officially baffled, and E. Howard

Hunt suggested that Fidel had killed Rosselli. However, three of Rossel-

li’s associates said that Trafficante had ordered the gruesome slaying.24

Rosselli’s murder was the kind of headline news that even the most

740

LEGACY OF SECRECY

jaded or intimidated reporter couldn’t ignore, especially after Jack

Anderson revealed information he couldn’t tell while Rosselli was alive.

In his September 7, 1976, column, Anderson wrote that Rosselli had said

those involved in the CIA-Mafia plots had killed JFK and even hinted

that shots from the grassy knoll were part of that plan.25

While the Senate Church Committee hearings had overshadowed

those in the House, on September 17, 1976, amid the furor created by

Rosselli’s murder, Congress seized the initiative and created the House

Select Committee on Assassinations. The HSCA was designed to inves-

tigate the assassinations of both JFK and Martin Luther King, the latter

because of the FBI problems relating to King uncovered by the Church

Committee. Unfortunately, the investigation’s first nine months would

be hampered by problems settling on a chief counsel to direct the probe

and determining which member of Congress would chair the Com-

mittee. It would take until the following summer for the House Select

Committee (HSCA) to finally have its permanent general counsel,

G. Robert Blakey, creator of the RICO racketeering law and a former

Mafia prosecutor for Bobby Kennedy.

While the public read stories about Rosselli’s murder and the resulting

Congressional investigation, other important stories played out in pri-

vate. CIA Director Bush and the Ford administration, including his Chief

of Staff Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, with-

held crucial information from all of the investigating committees. Ford’s

reelection in 1976—and the careers of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld—

depended on nothing coming out that would make it look like Ford

had been duped while on the Warren Commission or that he had

been part of a deliberate cover-up. The CIA had so far revealed to the

Church Committee only limited parts of AMTRUNK and the Cubela

and CIA-Mafia plots, and nothing about the JFK-Almeida coup plan

and AMWORLD.26

When the Miami police asked the CIA for information to help in their

investigation of Rosselli’s murder, the Agency was less than helpful.

An internal memo shows the Miami Police had two pages of questions,

including a request for the identity and whereabouts of a Cuban exile,

code-named “B-1” in the Church Report, who had been involved with

Rolando Cubela.27

On August 25, 1976, the Deputy Inspector General wrote to the Dep-

uty Director of the CIA about the Miami police request. The Deputy

IG said that “Artime and his group were supported by the CIA.” Only

because it was an internal communication not meant to ever be seen by

outside eyes, the memo admitted that Artime “was used by the Mafia in

the Castro operation. This information should not be released.” Since the

public knew that Rosselli had been the main Mafia figure “in the Castro

operation,” the CIA was refusing to provide information directly related

to the Miami Police investigation of Rosselli’s murder. The Artime-Mafia

CIA memo was withheld from all Congressional investigations, until we

revealed it in 2005’s
Ultimate Sacrifice
and told a Congressional committee

about it the following year.28

By the time the information in the memo left the office of CIA Director

Bush (as part of a memo for US Attorney General Edward Levi), the sen-

sitive portion about Artime and the CIA-Mafia plots had been deleted.

Bush also made it clear to the Attorney General that he was reluctant to

help the police with Rosselli’s murder, claiming it was because of the

CIA’s “constraints on assistance to local law-enforcement authorities . . .

and the [CIA’s] proscriptions on police functions.” The police were ask-

ing for basic information that Bush refused to provide, such as the name

of the head of the CIA’s Miami station in 1963. That was Ted Shackley,

then a high CIA official working for Bush, who thus refused to give

Shackley’s name to the police.29

Former and current CIA exile Cubans were linked to two terrorist

bombings that also triggered further cover-ups. On July 21, 1976, for-

mer Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American coworker,

Ronni Moffit, were killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Numer-

ous accounts linked several CIA assets to the murders, but often over-

looked is information from Dade County officials which said that “at

the time of the investigation, authorities believed that [Felipe] Rivero

had planned Letelier’s assassination in conjunction with Augusto Pino-

chet’s security agents. Rivero was never charged or prosecuted due to

a lack of evidence.”30 On October 6, 1976, a Cubana airliner carrying

73 people was blown up by a group that included associates of Luis

Posada, who was arrested eight days later for the bombing. Scholars still

debate whether Posada was working—officially or unofficially—for the

CIA at the time. However, by the mid-1980s, Posada would be free and

working with several AMWORLD veterans like “Chi Chi” Quintero in

Iran-Contra.31

Jimmy Carter was elected president in November 1976, and though Bush

wanted to remain as CIA Director, Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield

Turner to replace Bush. Turner began a dramatic shake-up in the Agency

742

LEGACY OF SECRECY

by firing eight hundred people—though no foreign agents—from covert

operations.32 The reorganization left some longtime CIA personnel

worried, and former CIA assets like Santo Trafficante must have been

afraid of what old secrets the new CIA might give to Congress. Traf-

ficante had been interviewed once by the Church Committee, with no

record being kept at Trafficante’s request, but he couldn’t count on such

consideration in the future.

Hit man Charles Nicoletti, an associate of Johnny Rosselli, was slated

to talk to Congressional investigators. But on March 29, 1977, Nicoletti

was “the victim of a mob assassination” in Chicago, according to the

Miami Herald
. They said Nicoletti “was pulled from his burning car . . .

after being shot three times in the back of the head at point-blank range.”

The article mentioned that Nicoletti had once “been responsible for

drawing up CIA-ordered plans for the assassination of Castro . . . in

October, 1963.”33

Gaeton Fonzi had gone to work for the new HSCA, and the day Nico-

letti died, Fonzi was in south Florida to interview George DeMohren-

schildt, the sophisticated White Russian who had been Oswald’s best

friend for a time. DeMohrenschildt had known not only Jackie Kennedy

but also George H. W. Bush. Even as Fonzi spoke to DeMohrenschildt’s

daughter about arranging the interview, DeMohrenschildt was meeting

with a writer for the
Wall Street Journal
, Edward Epstein, telling Epstein

he’d told Dallas CIA official J. Walton Moore about Oswald’s activities.

That evening, before Fonzi could meet him, DeMohrenschildt com-

mitted suicide by putting the barrel of a .20-gauge shotgun in his mouth

and pulling the trigger.34

About a week later, Fonzi had also planned to set up an interview in

Miami with Carlos Prio, the mutual associate of Trafficante and Nixon.

On April 5, 1977, before Fonzi could interview him, Prio committed

suicide by shooting himself in the heart with a .38 pistol.35

That fall, Fonzi tried to arrange an interview with Manuel Artime

after being tipped that Artime had “guilty knowledge” of JFK’s assas-

sination. Fonzi’s partner talked to Artime in early November about

arranging an interview, but Artime entered the hospital the follow-

ing week, was diagnosed with cancer, and died two weeks later, on

November 18, 1977, at only forty-five. Artime had become a player in

Miami’s exploding drug market, and his young accounting protégé, Mil-

ian Rodriguez, would become a major cocaine dealer in the Iran-Contra

operation, which also involved Artime’s former AMWORLD lieutenant

“Chi Chi” Quintero.36

The following spring, Fonzi tried to track down David Morales,

though the CIA made it hard for the HSCA to even determine Morales’s

CIA position in 1963. Two weeks after David Atlee Phillips and Antonio

Veciana testified to the HSCA in executive session—and after Morales

was added to the list of CIA personnel the HSCA wanted to interview—

Morales died, apparently of natural causes, on May 8, 1978.37

In less than three years, Congressional investigations had been

thwarted by the deaths of nine actual or potential witnesses, from the

sensational murders of Rosselli, Giancana, Hoffa, Masferrer, and Nico-

letti to the unexpected deaths of Morales, Artime, DeMohrenschildt,

and Prio. Yet even after the headlines Harry Williams had seen, and the

sometimes violent deaths of some he had known, he still volunteered

to talk to the HSCA. Richard E. Sprague conveyed Harry’s offer, but he

never heard back from the HSCA.

While work proceeded on the JFK side of the HSCA, Fonzi noted that the

“Martin Luther King [group] had a parallel staff of deputies, counsels,

investigators and researchers.”38 However, James Earl Ray’s attempt to

retract his guilty plea and appeal his life sentence complicated matters,

making Ray unwilling to cooperate in certain ways, such as by refus-

ing to waive his attorney-client privilege with his former lawyer, J. B.

Stoner.

On June 10, 1977, two months after Carlos Marcello’s name was first

connected to JFK’s murder in the HSCA investigation, James Earl Ray

and six fellow inmates escaped from the Brushy Mountain State Prison.

Two days later, Ray was captured in a wooded area after traveling

approximately eight miles. The HSCA later learned that as recently as

1975, one of Ray’s brothers had been given $1,000 by a criminal that Ray

had known in New Orleans.39

The remaining problems for Fonzi, Blakey, and the rest of the HSCA cen-

tered on the CIA and the Mafia. Richard Helms faced charges about lying

to Congress that needed to be resolved before he could testify. After a

major White House meeting about the issue in July 1977, Helms agreed

to plead guilty to making a false statement to Congress and was fined

$2,000 on November 4, 1977. Later that day, he went to a CIA reception

where his current and former CIA colleagues donated an even larger

amount. Helms was represented by Edward Bennett Williams, whose

former law partner, Joseph Califano, was then Jimmy Carter’s Secre-

tary for Health, Education, and Welfare. Califano’s former boss in 1963,

744

LEGACY OF SECRECY

Cyrus Vance—a key strategist for the JFK-Almeida coup plan—was

Carter’s Secretary of State.40

Trafficante had primarily pleaded the Fifth in his first HSCA appear-

ance on March 16, 1977, but Blakey arranged to grant him and Marcello

limited immunity, in an effort to get them to talk. The situation was

complicated because Trafficante was under indictment for charges relat-

ing to the FBI’s BRILAB investigation, while Marcello didn’t realize his

new business partner Joe Hauser would soon be a wired FBI informant

for that operation. Nonetheless, Trafficante testified on November 14,

1977, and September 28, 1978, and Marcello testified on January 1978.

Both gave cautious statements and denied having anything to do with

JFK’s murder.

The same month that Trafficante testified for the last time, author

Dan Moldea had a revealing exchange with Frank Ragano, Trafficante’s

former attorney who had gone through a very acrimonious split with

the Tampa godfather. Possibly as part of a Teamster effort to suppress

Moldea’s book, Ragano had offered Moldea a large sum for the rights

to it. As part of their back and forth in September 1978, Moldea had his

attorney ask Ragano about his book’s theory that Hoffa, Marcello, and

Trafficante were behind JFK’s murder. Moldea was pleased to learn “that

Ragano had corroborated my conclusions.”41

In his book about the HSCA,
The Last Investigation
, Fonzi wrote about the