Legacy of Secrecy (16 page)

ships with Harvey and Morales, which he would exploit to the fullest

in 1963 and for years afterward, were consistent with the high-level

dealmaking and calculated schmoozing Rosselli had been doing for

decades.

Rosselli had been the Chicago Mafia’s representative in Hollywood

during its golden age, controlling a key union for stagehands—until an

informant named Willie Bioff sent Rosselli to prison. After the Chicago

Mafia rigged an early release for Rosselli in 1947, Rosselli wanted a

more legitimate position in Hollywood, but his prison record barred him

from any position with a major studio. Court records confirm he was an

uncredited producer for three B films in the late 1940s, including a film

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

noir called
He Walked by Night,
about a young ex-serviceman who shoots

a cop by his patrol car on a lonely street, then flees. The murderous ex-

serviceman also keeps a rifle wrapped in a blanket and hidden away.24

While the public had largely forgotten the film by 1963 (it wasn’t even

issued on video until the 1990s), Rosselli apparently hadn’t, and echoes

of those events would unfold on November 22 in the real-life actions of

ex-serviceman Lee Oswald.

Rosselli was still a force with the major studios in Hollywood in the

1950s and early 1960s, but he could operate only in the shadows, behind

the scenes. Congressional investigators cite Rosselli as the inspiration

for the famous scene in
The Godfather
where a director finds a severed

horse’s head in his bed, because of the pressure exerted by Rosselli to

win Frank Sinatra his comeback role in
From Here to Eternity
. A grate-

ful Sinatra made Rosselli an unofficial member of his Rat Pack, while

Rosselli was becoming a major Mafia force in Las Vegas. According to

Rosselli’s biographers, in the 1950s Rosselli was linked to two notorious

murders in the area: the car bombing of Willie Bioff, who had sent Ros-

selli to prison; and the slaying of Gus Greenbaum, first mayor of the Las

Vegas strip (most of the major Vegas strip hotels are in the unincorpo-

rated town of Paradise, not in the actual city of Las Vegas). Both Bioff and

Greenbaum were very close to Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, but

Rosselli had no regard for government officials, as was made evident in

the earlier noted assassination of the president of Guatemala in 1957.

The Sinatra-Rosselli connection even reached JFK, via Judy Camp-

bell, a Hollywood beauty who slept with all three men (as well as with

Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana). But JFK’s affair with her had ended

in May 1962, and Rosselli’s attempt at having Campbell rekindle it had

been rejected by JFK in early November 1963. On November 20, Rosselli

moved Campbell into the Beverly Crest Hotel in Los Angeles, perhaps

so his men could make sure she didn’t do anything foolish after JFK

was killed.25

Rosselli had also been close to Marilyn Monroe, but by November

1963 she was dead, and Campbell and Sinatra were of no use in trying

to persuade the Kennedys to back off from their aggressive prosecution

of the Mafia and Rosselli’s boss, Giancana. Like Marcello, Rosselli was

not a US citizen, and could be deported if the government ever found

out about his status. The FBI’s lockstep surveillance of Giancana was

crippling the power of Rosselli’s boss, and thus of Rosselli. As noted

earlier, Rosselli was no doubt worried by headlines about Bobby’s plan

to run the Mafia and the Teamsters out of Las Vegas. With all of his

important associates—Giancana, Marcello, Trafficante, Hoffa—under

assault by the Kennedys, Rosselli joined Marcello and Trafficante in

plotting to kill JFK.

Even though JFK and Bobby had barred the Mafia both from the

JFK-Almeida coup plan and from reopening their casinos in Cuba after

the coup, Rosselli’s work on the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro

gave him the opening he needed. Rosselli’s two meetings with Jack

Ruby in Miami in the fall of 1963 were no doubt ostensibly about the

anti-Castro plots, which is why the routine FBI surveillance reports of

those meetings—like all of the FBI reports about Rosselli in Miami in the

late summer and fall of 1963—are missing. In the same way, Rosselli’s

close work with David Morales in the summer and fall of 1963 would

look to CIA superiors like they were plotting to kill Castro, but the two

conspirators really had another target in mind.

An army ranger assigned to the CIA in the summer and fall of 1963,

Captain Bradley Ayers, wrote an account of his time in South Florida

training Cuban exiles. Ayers wrote about a “Col. Rosselli,” who also

worked with one of the exile groups, saying that Rosselli’s team included

“a sharpshooter” who “did daily marksmanship practice . . . rehearsing

for the day when he could center the crosshairs of this telescopic sight

on Fidel.” This individual was not a poor shot like Oswald, who some-

times missed the entire target, even when he practiced regularly in the

Marines. (Most people don’t realize, when news accounts say Oswald

was a Marine “marksman,” that “marksman” was the lowest ranking,

and Oswald scored only one point above the minimum required to

achieve even that.)26

In contrast, Rosselli’s “sharpshooter” was able to kill “three cormo-

rants at a range of nearly five hundred yards.” For someone like that,

shooting a head of state in an open vehicle from a safe distance would

be easy. Apparently, the CIA was preparing to have shooters available

to kill Fidel if Almeida had problems getting someone into place. Capt.

Ayers also documented Rosselli’s work with David Morales at the time.27

Rosselli’s contact with Morales—authorized only by Richard Helms and

not known by CIA Director McCone, JFK, or Bobby—also gave Rosselli

a way to learn about, infiltrate, and take advantage of the JFK-Almeida

coup plot. Rosselli could similarly compromise Helms’s other unauthor-

ized operations involving CIA assassin recruiter QJWIN and the attempt

to get Rolando Cubela to assassinate Fidel.

CIA files show that three of the five exile groups working on the

JFK-Almeida coup plan had groups in Dallas, who described things

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

like Manuel Artime’s looking into buying a large cargo plane from Traf-

ficante’s operative Frank Fiorini in Dallas. In light of these activities,

sending men or supplies to or through Dallas, or having Rosselli go to

Dallas himself, would not necessarily arouse any undue suspicion on

the part of CIA officials.

Veteran FBI agent William Turner was the first to write about a pilot,

an associate of John Martino, who says that he flew Rosselli from Tampa

to New Orleans on November 21, 1963, in a private plane. The pilot

then claims to have flown Rosselli to Houston around the time of JFK’s

motorcade there, then on to Dallas on the morning of November 22.28

John Martino, who worked with Johnny Rosselli in 1963 and was a

longtime casino electronics expert and wireman for Santo Trafficante,

later confessed his role in JFK’s murder, to two trusted associates, shortly

before his death.29 Martino also had meetings with Carlos Marcello and

Guy Banister in the summer of 1963, according to new witnesses uncov-

ered by Dr. Michael L. Kurtz. Kurtz cites the former superintendent of

the New Orleans Police Department as saying that Martino “met with

Marcello himself at the Town and Country Motel.”30

In addition to Martino’s confessed role in JFK’s assassination, FBI files

cite several accurate descriptions Martino gave of the JFK-Almeida coup

plan. Martino taunted the FBI with his knowledge that “President Ken-

nedy was engaged in a plot to overthrow the Castro regime by preparing

another invasion attempt against Cuba.”31 As well as helping with the

assassination plot, Martino would raise the specter of the coup plan to

selected media in the days, weeks, and months after JFK’s assassination,

to help ensure the investigation didn’t go beyond Oswald.

By November 1963, Martino needed little extra incentive to want

to see JFK dead. After being arrested in Cuba in 1959, when he was

working with Santo Trafficante and Rolando Masferrer, Martino had to

remain in a Cuban prison until 1962. Bitter toward the US government

after that experience, Martino was working with Trafficante and Ros-

selli on various schemes by the spring of 1963.32 By the fall of 1963, he

was speaking for the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society and touring

the country, promoting his book,
I Was Castro’s Prisoner.
Martino lived in

Miami, but he was conveniently in New Orleans in time to see Oswald

passing out pro-Castro leaflets, and in Dallas, talking to the sister of

Silvia Odio, a member of Ray’s JURE exile group, around the time

Oswald visited Silvia. At the time, Silvia Odio was living in the same

apartment complex as the brother of Rolando Masferrer, Martino’s asso-

ciate, which was probably how she came to be targeted.33

In addition to Trafficante and Rosselli, Martino had numerous ties

to other people linked to JFK’s murder. He had known David Morales

since at least 1959, and had even mentioned Morales by name in his

book. According to witnesses Dr. Michael Kurtz interviewed, Martino

was also seen with Oswald’s uncle (and Marcello bookie) Dutz Murret

and another Marcello associate, Emile Bruneau, who bailed Oswald out

of jail after his arrest for the pro-Castro-leafleting incident. According

to Kurtz, Martino “appeared to serve almost as a courier between Traf-

ficante and Marcello.”34

Martino would later admit to award-winning
Newsday
reporter John

Cummings that “he’d been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He

wasn’t in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that

his role was delivering money, facilitating things.”

According to a CIA memo detailed in Chapters 8 and 17, notorious

French Connection heroin trafficker and assassin Michel Victor Mertz

was in Dallas at the time of JFK’s assassination, and was deported from

Dallas approximately forty-eight hours later.35 Unlike the Cuban exiles

working for Trafficante, Mertz’s motivation was mostly financial. The

Kennedys’ war on the Mafia had resulted in two heroin busts in the

network he shared with Marcello and Trafficante, resulting in the loss

of millions of dollars’ worth of heroin and of potential profits. Mertz

had to make up for that disaster and prevent future losses. Also, 1963

newspaper headlines blared the findings of JFK’s special commission on

drug abuse, which recommended treating heroin addition as a medical

problem; if the recommendation were adopted, the losses to Mertz, Traf-

ficante, and Marcello would be enormous. All this made Mertz amenable

to helping his heroin partners in their plot to kill JFK. Conveniently, all

three mob kingpins shared heroin routes through Texas and Florida, as

well as one through Fort Benning, Georgia, where the Cuban American

troops were trained and ready for the coup.36

In the summer and fall of 1963, Mertz had been using the name of

“Jean Souetre,” an old associate from 1959, when Mertz had undertaken

a mission for French Intelligence (the SDECE). Mertz, who won the

French Legion of Honor for killing twenty Nazis for the French resis-

tance in World War II, sometimes did work for French Intelligence to

avoid prosecution for his crimes. His most famous exploit for the French

government was in 1961, when he saved French president Charles de

Gaulle from an assassination attempt by rebellious French military

officers.37

The alias Mertz used in Dallas on November 22, 1963, “Jean Souetre,”

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was the name of a fugitive French officer who in 1962 had participated

in the attempted assassination of de Gaulle that inspired Frederick For-

syth’s novel
The Day of the Jackal.
This attempt was more serious than

the one Mertz had foiled a year earlier, since Soutre’s group was able to

hit de Gaulle’s car with numerous bullets, though the French president

survived. Souetre was one of several men imprisoned for the attempt,

though he later escaped. Souetre himself did not travel to America in

the 1960s; on November 22, 1963, the real Souetre was in Barcelona,

Spain, and has witnesses to prove it. On the other hand, INS records

that INS provided to the French show that Mertz traveled frequently

to America as part of his heroin-smuggling activities. Former Senate

investigator Bud Fensterwald found that “the FBI had traced [the man

they thought was] Souetre to Dallas a day before the assassination and

then lost him.”38

Souetre has been consistent for almost twenty-five years in his claim

to Fensterwald’s associates and to us (via French journalist Stephane

Risset) that Mertz was impersonating him in Dallas at the time of JFK’s

assassination. Souetre not only has been willing to talk with journalists