Legacy of Secrecy (151 page)

his work against Marcello, and the secret Marcello tapes, would remain

hidden away in FBI files. After Jorge Ochoa was suddenly freed from

his Colombia prison in 1996 without explanation, US officials targeted

Ochoa’s son, who was convicted in 2003. The younger Ochoa’s case

remains under appeal; thus, the Informant and his family are subject

to retaliation not only from members of the Marcello organization, but

also from the Ochoa clan—which is why we decided not to reveal his

name in this book.23

Press coverage of the November 1988 twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s

assassination included several television specials, news reports, and

high-profile articles that mentioned Carlos Marcello as one of several

possible suspects—but none of the journalists knew the FBI was sitting

on a trove of secret reports and tapes that included Marcello’s confes-

sion. Because of that, some authors continued to blame JFK’s murder on

Castro, anti-Castro Cubans, wealthy Texas oil men, LBJ, Hoover, or the

military-industrial complex, creating a confusing mix for mainstream

journalists to sort through at the time.

Half a dozen television specials—involving newsmen ranging from

Walter Cronkite to Geraldo Rivera—were aired around the anniversary,

and several featured information about the Mafia. But the most influ-

ential would prove to be Jack Anderson’s November 2, 1988, special,

American Exposé: Who Murdered JFK?
It focused extensively on Marcello,

Trafficante, and especially Rosselli, though it appeared to endorse Ros-

selli’s false claim that Castro was involved in JFK’s murder. However, at

the end of the program, Anderson revealed that thousands of JFK files

remained unreleased, which started to generate a movement calling

for their release. Because Anderson’s special aired three weeks before

the twenty-fifth anniversary, the movement was gaining traction by

November 22, and was further fueled by the January 1989 release of

John H. Davis’s Marcello biography and other books. The push to release

the files accelerated rapidly when Oliver Stone announced plans to dra-

matize the case in his film
JFK
. Essentially, the attention generated by

the twenty-fifth anniversary reignited public interest in JFK’s murder,

eventually leading to action by Congress.

For Carlos Marcello, the most serious of the growing tide of accounts

linking him to JFK’s murder was the January 1989 release of John H.

Davis’s
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Ken-

nedy
. Unlike most previous TV specials and books, Davis’s biography

presented Marcello not as one of many suspects in JFK’s murder, but

as
the
suspect. Even with so much material still withheld, Davis came

remarkably close to outlining how Marcello had murdered JFK and used

Jack Ruby in his plans.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in January 1989, Carlos Marcello had his first

of several small strokes. He was transferred to Rochester, Minnesota’s,

Medical Center for federal prisoners.24 There, on February 27, 1989, while

Marcello was “in a semi-coherent state,” an attendant overheard him

say, “That Kennedy, that smiling motherfucker, we’ll fix him in Dal-

las.” The FBI didn’t ask Marcello about his statement until September 6,

1989, when he denied “any involvement in the assassination of President

Kennedy.” Apparently, the Bureau didn’t question Marcello at that time

about his earlier remarks to the Informant.25

By that time, the debilitating effects of Marcello’s strokes, com-

pounded by Alzheimer’s, were clear. One of the FBI agents involved in

CAMTEX told us he had not noticed any signs of the latter four years

earlier, while listening to the Bureau’s undercover Marcello tapes. Agent

Kimmel said he thought some of Marcello’s remarks in 1985 showed

such indications; however, they weren’t enough to stop the dangerous

CAMTEX undercover operation, which continued against Marcello for

another six months. Marcello’s statements, as noted by the Informant in

the FBI files, are usually accurate and consistent with facts that weren’t

well known at the time, and the aging godfather demonstrated a firm

grasp of complex criminal, business, and government matters in the

1985 accounts, prior to his 1989 strokes.26

Marcello was released from prison on October 6, 1989, after his BRILAB

conviction was reversed unexpectedly. The government decided not

to retry him, so Marcello, increasingly incapacitated from the strokes

and his Alzheimer’s, returned to Louisiana. By the time of his strokes,

Marcello’s empire had begun to break apart, and be taken over by his

former associates, like Frank Joseph Caracci, because Marcello’s broth-

ers weren’t capable of managing the organization.

Carlos Marcello died on March 2, 1993, at age eighty-three, after

spending his final years at home, his mind ravaged increasingly by dis-

ease and his strokes. Marcello reportedly died peacefully in his sleep

at his home; his death was a far cry from the bloody executions he had

ordered for so many victims. His obituaries, such as the one the Asso-

ciated Press ran, noted that “Marcello’s name was often mentioned in

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

connection with the assassination of [JFK], but he was never charged.” It

would take until 2008—and the publication of this book—for the public

to know just how much information the FBI and the Justice Department

had about the secret Marcello tapes, Marcello’s confession to JFK’s mur-

der, and his talk of meeting with Oswald and Ruby.27

Around the time of Marcello’s death, his name was linked publicly to

Martin Luther King’s assassination for the first time by Lloyd Jowers,

an associate of Frank C. Liberto. Jowers ran a shop in Memphis across

from the Lorraine Motel and below Ray’s rooming house, but his

stories often shifted and evolved over time. James Earl Ray died in

prison in 1998, maintaining his innocence, and his belief in Raoul, until

the end. In 1999, a civil trial jury in Memphis found in favor of the King

family and decided that Jowers had been part of a Marcello-backed

conspiracy. However, the following year, a Justice Department report

on the case debunked many of Jowers’ and his associates’ claims. But

the Department’s report failed to mention information in its own files

linking Marcello to the brokering of a hit contract on King for a small

group of white racists—something that had not surfaced in the 1999

trial or in earlier Congressional investigations, nor in official efforts to

declassify JFK files in the 1990s. At that time, Joseph Milteer had not

been linked to either Marcello or to King’s murder in Memphis, so he

was not mentioned in the Justice Department’s report.

Carlos Marcello’s self-professed role with Trafficante and Rosselli in

the CIA-Mafia plots was only revealed by John H. Davis in 1989, and

was never addressed by Richard Helms or any of the relevant CIA offi-

cials. Before Marcello’s involvement was exposed, legendary CIA spy-

master James Angleton passed away in 1987 and David Atlee Phillips

died in 1988. Shortly before Phillips’s death, he told an associate that

in JFK’s murder, “there was a conspiracy, likely including American

intelligence officers.” Phillips’s remarks wouldn’t be published until

six years later.28

The deaths of Angleton and Phillips left a dwindling number of

people in a position to know about the darkest secret of Richard Helms

and the CIA: how Helms’s unauthorized 1963 CIA-Mafia plots had

compromised the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and resulted in JFK’s assas-

sination. Michel Victor Mertz died in France on January 15, 1995, but

the FBI and the CIA withheld the news of his death from a fresh set of

government investigators, allowing Mertz’s files to remain unreleased

even today.

When Richard Helms died on October 23, 2002, he seemed to have

taken his most important secrets to the grave. The media savvy, and

political clout, of Helms and the CIA had successfully maintained his

decades-long cover-up in the public eye, and rebuilt his reputation in

the process. Helms’s autobiography, released six months after his death,

was even less revealing than Thomas Powers’s 1979 biography: Helms

devoted only one line to a brief mention of a 1963 coup plot against Fidel,

and another to his belief that Fidel had not killed JFK.29

As we noted in
Legacy of Secrecy
’s introduction, E. Howard Hunt was

somewhat more revealing in his 2007 autobiography, published after

Hunt’s January 23, 2007, death. Hunt essentially admitted that David

Atlee Phillips had acted as Maurice Bishop, and that Richard Helms

“made a confidant out of me [and I was] the first person” Helms told

about “important events in his life.” However, Hunt also said that Helms

always kept his eye on “his future,” and that if Helms were involved in

something negative, “he would lie about it later.”30

Hunt limited his JFK assassination revelations in the book to specula-

tion, some of which was inconsistent with remarks he made to his son in

a later-publicized tape. Other of Hunt’s claims are demonstrably false.

Hunt had tried to make millions selling his story to actor Kevin Cost-

ner before his death, and some of Hunt’s account appears to have been

cribbed from existing JFK conspiracy books, as he speculates about—

but claims no direct knowledge of—a large conspiracy that could have

included LBJ, Cord Meyer, William Harvey, David Phillips, David

Morales, Frank Fiorini, and French hit man Lucien Sarti. Most tellingly,

Hunt never mentioned—in his autobiography or in his son’s tape—the

Mafia ties of his closest friends, like Manuel Artime, or Artime’s work on

the CIA-Mafia plots. Likewise, Hunt avoided any mention of his work

on the JFK-Almeida coup plan, even though the first revelation of it and

Hunt’s role had been published in
Ultimate Sacrifice
well before Hunt

completed his autobiography.

Now that Helms and Hunt are dead, perhaps only two people are

still alive that have significant firsthand knowledge about the opera-

tions that allowed Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli to infiltrate the

JFK-Almeida coup plan and murder JFK. One is a man with a reputation

for integrity, while the other worked for Trafficante on JFK’s assassina-

tion. While some secrets died with the participants who have already

passed away, or in records that were destroyed, other information has

yet to be exposed. The Washington think tank OMB Watch found that

“well over one million CIA records” pertaining to JFK’s assassination

remain unreleased. But despite a 1992 law requiring their release, the

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

CIA intends to keep them secret until at least 2017—unless the public

and Congress demand action. Otherwise, as the history revealed in this

book has shown, the legacy of secrecy surrounding the events of 1963

will continue to extact its tragic toll on America.31

Epilogue

The JFK assassination files still withheld today, material that could

also shed new light on the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby

Kennedy, are inexorably intertwined with events in Cuba. That was

true in 1963 just as it is in 2008, when several key players in the JFK-

Almeida coup plan could still play important roles in resolving the

forty-seven-year-old impasse between the US and Cuba. Developments

from the late 1980s until today, involving both Cuba and the withheld

files, help to illuminate why so much was secret for so long, and how

each issue affects the other.

After serving twenty-one years in a Cuban prison, former exile leader

Eloy Menoyo was released in 1986, the same year the last prisoner from

the Bay of Pigs was released due to Senator Edward Kennedy’s efforts.

Commander Juan Almeida, still a revered figure in the Cuban govern-

ment, was untainted by a 1989 drug scandal in the higher ranks of the

Cuban military. However, several top officers were executed and others

imprisoned, including some of Almeida’s former protégés. One of them

may have bartered for his life by revealing Almeida’s secret work for

JFK in 1963—because soon after the trials, Almeida largely disappeared

from view in Cuba. There was no official explanation, though Almeida’s

absence was noted by exiles and journalists. Some rumors said Almeida

had been executed, while others claimed he was under house arrest, trot-

ted out only for rare public appearances before returning to custody.1

In the US, the success of Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
in late 1991 amplified

the growing movement to open the remaining assassination files. In an

attempt to preclude Congressional action, President George H. W. Bush

ordered the CIA to quickly declassify thousands of CIA files in 1992. The

first few AMWORLD documents slipped through in the rush and were