Legacy of Secrecy (150 page)

He came back into the room, and told me to sit down, that he had some-

thing to talk to me about. He said we have become good friends and I

want to tell you a story; he was dead serious and I was scared. He said

a Priest came to visit him from Italy, years before. The Priest was old

Mafia. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘if your enemies get in your way, you bury them

in the ground, the grass grows over them, and you go on about your

business.’ He was telling me that if I crossed him, the grass would grow

over me, as I would be dead. My god, if he had murdered the President,

he would have no trouble with me.”

While Agent Kimmel’s report of Marcello’s confession made its way

up through official channels, he and the others continued with their

sting against Marcello. A Marcello family member was to pay another

bribe to have Marcello moved from Seagoville to the federal facility at

Fort Worth, which John H. Davis described as “the paradise of the fed-

eral prison system, [a] minimum-security level-one facility” that even

boasted a swimming pool and tennis courts.14

After the godfather was moved to Fort Worth, a member of Marcello’s

family was to pay Kirk a final bribe, for Marcello’s early release from

prison. The Informant said that “Marcello wanted out so bad he believed

all that I told him.” Marcello was grateful for what the Informant was

doing, and told him “that after we were out, he was going to take me

into his organization. He said that he would set me up in off-track bet-

ting in Georgia.”

Marcello continued complaining to the Informant about the “run-

ning of his organization,” which had been left in the care of his brother

Joseph Marcello. Joseph simply lacked the ability to run such a huge

criminal empire, though he enjoyed the increased prestige and money,

now that the godfather was in prison. Marcello told the Informant “he

would move me up [in his organization] and that I would be running

things, as he trusted me. Here this man was offering me the world, and

I was working with the Feds.”

The Informant was soon transferred to a federal prison in California,

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

where he began helping the San Francisco FBI on the important Ochoa

drug case. Marcello’s family member paid the bribe, and Marcello was

moved to the Fort Worth facility. Now, only one step in the CAMTEX

sting remained: persuading Marcello’s family to pay the final bribe to

Kirk, which was supposed to get Marcello released from prison. As

weeks passed, the Informant waited anxiously for word that the bribe

had been paid—and that the Informant was finally going to get his

reward of freedom. But there was a problem.

The Informant was crushed to learn that while Marcello’s family

“paid the bribe money for the move, [they] would not pay the money

to Kirk to get Marcello released.” The reason was that a key Marcello

family member “did not want [Carlos] out of prison, as he would have

gotten kicked out of his soft job . . . he would have become a nothing.”

Marcello had railed to the Informant months earlier about this family

member, saying he “was a disappointment to him.”

Still, two bribes for the prison moves had been paid, so the Infor-

mant thought the FBI would soon file charges about those crimes. When

time passed and nothing happened, the Informant began to think “The

FBI did not seem to care what [Marcello] had done or what he was

doing. I was risking my life and they were playing games.”15 Between

the bribes and the other criminal activity Marcello had admitted to him

and on tape, the Informant says Marcello and one family member “could

have been convicted a dozen times with all the evidence that we put

together.”16

While Marcello sat in prison, his old partner Santo Trafficante made

a startling confession to his old attorney. As Anthony Summers later

reported in
Vanity Fair
, on March 13, 1987, the seventy-two-year-old

Trafficante called Frank Ragano, to arrange a meeting for the following

day. Trafficante had brought Ragano back into the fold, after smoothing

over their acrimonious split in the 1970s, and in 1986 Ragano had helped

Trafficante beat a federal RICO prosecution. But the Tampa godfather

had fallen seriously ill, was facing risky surgery, and wanted to talk to

his old confidant one last time.

During an hourlong drive in Ragano’s car, away from family and any

possibility of government bugs, Trafficante mused about his criminal

career and their long association. According to Ragano, when the subject

of John and Robert Kennedy came up, Trafficante said (in Italian), “God-

dam Bobby. I think Carlos fucked up in getting rid of John—maybe it

should have been Bobby.” Ragano was stunned, but Trafficante repeated

this admission, saying, “We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have

killed Bobby.”

Four days later, Trafficante passed away. Ragano held a news con-

ference in front of the Trafficante family home in Tampa’s posh Park-

land Estates. In discussing Trafficante’s illness, Ragano mentioned his

meeting with Trafficante four days earlier, as documented in a
Tampa

Tribune
article published the following day. But Ragano wouldn’t reveal

Trafficante’s confession to the public for almost five years, until 1992,

and it wouldn’t be detailed fully until his autobiography was published

in 1994.

Trafficante’s family remained silent when Ragano’s allegation first

surfaced, but in 1994 they denied Ragano’s account to Anthony Sum-

mers and other journalists. They claimed Trafficante had been receiving

medical treatment in Miami on March 13, and therefore couldn’t have

been in Tampa, where Ragano says his meeting took place. However,

while medical records prove that Trafficante was in Miami receiving

dialysis on March 12 and March 14, no medical records place him there

on March 13. In addition, the March 18, 1987,
Tampa
Tribune
article men-

tioning the March 13 meeting between Trafficante and Ragano is a near

contemporaneous indication that some type of meeting between the

two men did indeed take place. Also, as we’ve noted in earlier chapters,

Ragano may well have played a role in a payoff for JFK’s murder that

he never admitted.

Just over two months after Trafficante’s death, CAMTEX came to an end.

By May 21, 1987, it was clear that Marcello’s family was never going to

pay the final bribe for Marcello’s release. That night, federal marshals

removed Marcello from his comfortable room at the Fort Worth prison.

John H. Davis writes that Marcello was then “driven under heavily

armed escort (back) to the federal prison at Texarkana.”17 Carlos Mar-

cello had come full circle and was now back serving hard time where

CAMTEX had begun.

To Marcello, his family, and his attorneys, the sudden move from

level-one Fort Worth to the remote level-three Texarkana must have

seemed like a nightmare. They no doubt tried to contact Kirk for an

explanation, but his undercover role for CAMTEX had ended, and Agent

Kimmel had left Tyler, Texas, by 1987.

In the first week of April 1988, as described in FBI files, the Informant

“called Mr. Marcello’s office,” apparently to see what was happening

to Marcello. But the person he spoke with “indicated to him in a very

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

angry tone of voice that Mr. Marcello knew what he had done and of his

cooperation with the FBI [and] hung up the phone” before the Informant

could respond.18 The Informant was frantic and remembered Marcello’s

threat, two days after his outburst about having JFK killed. Though

he was halfway across the country, he knew enough about Marcello’s

associates and connections to realize he was in danger, especially while

he remained in prison.

Fearing for his life, the Informant wrote the Justice Department in

Washington. He listed the important information he had obtained for the

FBI, including Marcello’s JFK confession. The Informant said that “Kirk

told me during the investigation that the Attorney General knew what

was going on. And that I would be released when the case was over. . . .

I did a good job and I put my life on the line for you.”

The Informant also told the Justice Department, “Marcello knows all

about what we did to him. He will never rest until he pays me back. . . .

I also have a family to think of.” He pointed out that for almost two

years, “I have worked with the San Francisco FBI . . . and bad people

have been put in jail. We are still working on some things that are very

important. Agent [Carl] Podsiadly [said] if I am released I shall be work-

ing for him to put some drug dealers away.” He pleaded with the Justice

Department, saying, “You are responsible for me, I asked to be released.

Given a new name and enough money to make a new start in my life

after I have finished helping Agent Podsiadly.” He pointed out that “a

lot of mistakes have been made in the investigation of Carlos Marcello,

but they were not my mistakes. . . . It has been two years [since his work

against Marcello] and nothing has happened . . . why they have not been

arrested?”19

When almost two weeks passed with no reply, the Informant wrote

to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., on April 18, 1988. He told

them about Marcello’s discovery of his work for the FBI. He managed

to persuade Agent Podsiadly, an FBI agent in San Francisco, to call one

of the Texas CAMTEX agents. But the Texas agent said “he did not think

that Marcello could have found out what we did to him, as all docu-

ments are sealed.” The Informant reminded the FBI of Marcello’s many

“connections at Texarkana [that allowed him to] find out anything that

he wants.”

The frustrated Informant couldn’t understand why Marcello or his

family had not been prosecuted, since “the Justice Department has all of

the evidence that we gathered in the investigation . . . the bribe money

that was paid to an undercover FBI Agent . . . all the tapes with hundreds

of hours of conversations.”

He reminded them about Marcello’s JFK confession “that he had John

Kennedy murdered,” adding, “I believe that your office should make

Senator Kennedy aware of this evidence.” The Informant reiterated his

willingness to “go on the stand against [Marcello and his family] any

time that I was asked to do so.”20

After the Informant failed to win his release at his July 6, 1988, parole

hearing, he wrote an increasingly urgent series of letters to federal

authorities throughout the summer of 1988. San Francisco FBI Agent

Carl Podsiadly, who was receiving valuable information from the Infor-

mant in the case of Colombian drug lord Jorge Luis Ochoa, weighed in

on the Informant’s behalf and the Informant also volunteered to take a

lie-detector test about Marcello’s JFK confession, as had been suggested

by the Dallas FBI office.21 The Informant also threatened to tell the news

media about his work for the FBI against Carlos Marcello, and about

the Justice Department’s reluctance to use the secret tapes to prosecute

Marcello or members of his family.22

At that very time, the FBI was becoming aware of a growing num-

ber of journalists and historians who were interested in Marcello, in

advance of the upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s assassina-

tion, in November 1988. John H. Davis had been in contact with the FBI

regarding his upcoming biography of Carlos Marcello, since it featured

the FBI extensively (often in an unflattering light), and he was seek-

ing the release of FBI files and the BRILAB surveillance tapes of Mar-

cello. Davis’s book was scheduled for an early January 1989 release, just

weeks after the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s death. The FBI would

also have been concerned about a JFK special being prepared by Jack

Anderson, slated to run in November 1988. A wide variety of officials

and witnesses were being interviewed for the program, including Ed

Becker, talking about Marcello’s threat to kill JFK that had so concerned

the FBI back in 1967.

Someone in Washington may have decided it was better not to add

the Informant’s explosive Marcello confession to the mix. By September

1988, the Informant had been given a firm release date in January 1989,

ending any talk of his going to the press—and putting him beyond the

reach of twenty-fifth anniversary coverage and any chance his informa-

tion could be added to Davis’s book or to launch its publicity.

The Informant appears to have received federal protection while he

was on parole, because he was still helping FBI agent Carl Podsiadly

with the case of Jorge Luis Ochoa, head of one of the world’s largest

drug-trafficking families. Jorge Ochoa was convicted in Colombia in

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1991, apparently based on some information from the Informant. The

following year, the Informant was released from parole, though all of