Legacy of Secrecy (52 page)

death and the problems many experts have documented about the

shooting skills required to assassinate JFK, and the poor quality of the

Mannlicher-Carcano found in the Book Depository. As an internal Navy

and Defense Intelligence Agency matter, it was probably important for

officials involved with the surveillance of Oswald, and with whatever

operations he participated in after he returned from Russia, to cover

themselves with such an investigation. At the same time, the officials

and those conducting the investigation were probably unaware that

some of the people assisting with the surveillance and operations, like

Guy Banister, were actually working for Carlos Marcello.

Early results from the Naval Intelligence investigation, or the fact

that Naval Intelligence was keeping such close tabs on Oswald, might

account for an unusual “top secret, eyes only” memo about Oswald. Less

than two weeks after Oswald’s death, even as LBJ and McCone were still

worried that Oswald might have been acting for Cuba or the Soviets,

“Gordon Chase of the National Security Council staff” implied that the

“President’s Special Assistant for national security Affairs,” McGeorge

Bundy (who had held the same position under JFK), was able to pro-

vide some type of “assurances re: Oswald” that he was not an agent for

Castro. Only an official in an agency with access to the surveillance on

Oswald, like Naval Intelligence or the CIA, could have given Bundy the

information necessary to make such a claim.31

Following his brother’s death, Bobby Kennedy had the most difficult

task of all the people pursuing secret investigations of JFK’s murder.

Despite his sturdy and efficient manner immediately following JFK’s

murder, Bobby soon drained his reserves of strength and became a shat-

tered, tortured man, according to those who saw him away from the

public eye. Historian John H. Davis, Marcello’s biographer, was a cousin

of Jackie Kennedy who observed Bobby at the White House following

JFK’s funeral. In contrast to the stoic, solid demeanors of other fam-

ily members—like Jackie, Ted, and Rose—Davis described Bobby as “a

destroyed man . . . crushed by the death of his brother.” Other Kennedy

associates made similar observations. Yet at times Bobby would sum-

mon the resolve to have one of his trusted associates look into JFK’s

assassination. We’ve already noted his request to Chicago union expert

Julius Draznin to look into Mafia ties to JFK’s murder, even before Ruby

surfaced in the case. That was just the first of several attempts Bobby

made; others included investigations by his top Hoffa prosecutor, Walter

Sheridan; his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz; Daniel Patrick Moyni-

han, a former Los Angeles police chief; and at least one top Kennedy

aide. However, in each case except one, the investigators weren’t told

about the JFK-Almeida coup plan or about the initial suspicions Bobby

had voiced to McCone and Haynes Johnson.

We spoke to the one investigator for Bobby who did know about those

activities. He told us of his belief in a conspiracy involving Marcello,

Trafficante, and Rosselli, though he indicated his conclusion was based

on information that started coming out only in the mid-1970s, facts that

were unavailable to him or to Bobby in 1963 or 1964.32 So, Bobby was

left without definitive evidence, and at times seemed ambivalent about

knowing what his investigators had uncovered. After all, there was

little he could do with their conclusions without exposing Commander

Almeida, revealing the Tampa and Chicago plots he had covered up,

or giving Marcello or Hoffa ammunition to claim the US government’s

prosecutions of them were due to Bobby’s suspicions of their involve-

ment in JFK’s murder. Bobby knew what type of evidence he would need

to prosecute even a lower-level member of such a conspiracy, let alone a

godfather like Marcello. Based on his later remarks to close associates,

he knew that only the power of the presidency would allow him to

conduct a truly thorough, secret investigation of his brother’s murder.

It may be no coincidence that even as he decided to run for president in

1968, Bobby was helping a journalist prepare a major exposé of Carlos

Marcello.

While Bobby’s focus would eventually settle on Marcello as being

responsible for his brother’s death, other suspects loomed in the days fol-

lowing Oswald’s murder. We mentioned earlier Bobby’s comment about

the many associates Jack Ruby shared with Jimmy Hoffa. On November

26, Bobby Kennedy talked with Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, possibly

to hear Hill’s reaction to Powers’s and O’Donnell’s accounts of seeing

shots from the grassy knoll.33 With all the evidence coming out of Mexico

City, Bobby considered Castro a possibility until at least December 9,

1963, along with “gangsters” and Hoffa.34

Bobby was aware of reports coming out of Chicago—some hinting at

the Chicago plot, and another saying that “Ruby had recently been in

Chicago [to] pick up a ‘bundle of money’ from Allen Dorfman, a close

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associate of Jimmy Hoffa.” This account surfaced the day Ruby shot

Oswald, and we are sure Bobby knew about it because it originated with

his most trusted Hoffa prosecutor, Walter Sheridan.35 As we discussed

previously, we spoke with two eyewitnesses who saw Ruby receive

approximately $7,000 from a Hoffa associate in Chicago, shortly before

JFK’s canceled November 2, 1963, motorcade there. Sheridan’s report

was apparently from someone familiar with that incident, at least on a

secondhand basis. The Hoffa associate who gave Ruby the money wasn’t

Allen Dorfman. However, Dorfman did handle complicated financial

transactions for Hoffa and the Mafia (he would later provide $500,000 to

Richard Nixon to secure Hoffa’s release from prison), and he may well

have provided the untraceable cash to Hoffa’s associate in 1963, to give

to Ruby. Also, Allen Dorfman’s father, Paul Dorfman, had known Jack

Ruby for years. In fact, Robert Kennedy had written in his anti-Mafia

book,
The Enemy Within,
about Paul Dorfman’s takeover of a union that

first cemented Hoffa’s relationship with the Mafia. As Bobby described

in his book, the union’s takeover was accomplished after the union’s

“founder and secretary-treasurer was murdered.” Not mentioned in

Bobby’s book, but confirmed by police files, is that a witness who kept

his mouth shut about the murder at the time was a young Jack Ruby.

However, the reaction of another one of Bobby’s Hoffa prosecutors

to Sheridan’s Ruby-Chicago story would set the tone for any allegations

that surfaced that could expose secrets like the Chicago plot against JFK,

or jeopardize ongoing prosecutions against the individuals Bobby felt

might have been responsible for JFK’s assassination. One of Bobby’s top

Justice Department prosecutors gave the order for “no further inquiry

into this matter [because] the story would give Hoffa an opportunity to

criticize the Justice Department for trying to tie Hoffa in with President

Kennedy’s murder.”36

Bobby apparently struggled with himself over this issue at times,

but in the end he seemed to decide that prosecuting targets like Hoffa

and Marcello for specific, easier-to-prove charges was better than risk-

ing tainting any prosecution of them by linking them publicly to JFK’s

assassination without adequate evidence. Also, Bobby appears not to

have told most of his Hoffa and Mafia prosecutors about things like the

Chicago plot, which was yet another reason Chicago-linked allegations

were not widely pursued or fully shared with the FBI. Hoover’s com-

ment on the whole Ruby-Chicago payoff matter was: “I do wish [the]

Justice Department would mind its own business.”37

Once the FBI took primary jurisdiction over JFK assassination matters,

the Secret Service was, in many ways, the odd man out in the investiga-

tion. Yet it continued to monitor suspects like Chicago ex-Marine Thomas

Vallee, though the released files about him are clearly incomplete. For

example, Vallee, arrested in Chicago with a carload of weapons and

ammo on the day of JFK’s canceled motorcade, apparently wasn’t even

interviewed by the Secret Service or FBI after another ex-Marine, Lee

Oswald, was arrested for JFK’s assassination. This omission occurred

despite the fact that Congressional investigators found a Secret Service

“notation on November 27, 1963, of the similarity between his back-

ground and that of Lee Harvey Oswald.” In spite of this apparent lack

of interest, Congress found that the Secret Service maintained “a record

of extensive, continued investigation of Vallee’s activities until 1968.”38

It’s likely that additional surveillance and investigative files about Vallee

were kept with the other files about the Chicago and Tampa plots, none

of which have been declassified or revealed to Congress.

This secrecy no doubt complicated the FBI’s job when rumors of the

Chicago plot surfaced among newsmen, some of whom had been aware

of the threat and Vallee’s arrest at the time, but had kept that information

away from the public.39 The Secret Service was less than forthcoming

in dealing with its rival, the FBI, about such matters.40 The FBI’s main

objective after JFK’s assassination appears to have been to discredit

such reports and ensure they didn’t make it into print, a goal the Secret

Service shared. Ironically, the source of some newspaper reports about

Oswald visiting Chicago was Rosselli’s associate Richard Cain, who

was still feeding information to the CIA at the time. (CIA reports about

Cain’s activities for them in the weeks after JFK’s death have never been

released.)

The Secret Service also obtained records from other agencies. The

Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) headquarters file on Jack Ruby didn’t

contain much—“just that he was a source on numerous occasions, on

unimportant suspects,” and had been an FBN source “since the 1940s.”

As with the Dallas police, Ruby had been gaming the system, giving

up small fish or problem dealers to gain information and protect his

bosses. However, FBN agents say that Secret Service Chief James Rowley

asked for Ruby’s FBN file on November 25 and, after getting it, never

returned it.41

After Ruby shot Oswald, things started looking up for Carlos Marcello,

who no doubt felt even more relieved about Oswald’s death than did

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Joseph Milteer. Ruby had shown that he could keep his mouth shut

about a murder investigation, and he knew that to cross Marcello would

mean death not just for him, but also for his family. Despite Ruby’s belief

that he would get a light sentence, Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli

made sure that Ruby would spend the rest of his life in prison, and pos-

sibly get the electric chair.

Former Mafia prosecutor G. Robert Blakey writes that shortly after

Ruby shot Oswald, an associate of flamboyant attorney Melvin Belli

got a “call from a Las Vegas attorney, saying that, ‘One of our guys just

bumped off the son of a bitch that gunned down the President. We can’t

move in to handle it, but there’s a million bucks net for Mel if he’ll take

it.’”42 The call didn’t come from Johnny Rosselli, but it did come from his

Las Vegas headquarters hotel, the Desert Inn. Belli soon took the case,

and kept any mention of Ruby’s Mafia contacts out of the trial. Instead

of using Texas’s “sudden passion” defense—the angle Ruby believed

would secure him a short sentence even if he were convicted—Belli used

a strange “psycho-motor defense” that had never been tried before. He

lost, and Ruby was sentenced to death. Belli then went to Mexico City,

where he met with a Mexican official whom the CIA says “directed drug

smuggling.”43 Another CIA file says that Belli himself “was reportedly

involved in illicit drug traffic.”44 Apparently, both Belli and Marcello

got what they wanted. As Marcello’s partner Jimmy Hoffa said in a TV

interview after Ruby shot Oswald, Bobby Kennedy had become “just

another lawyer.”45

Marcello still had the Ferrie and Banister situation to worry about, but

now that Oswald was dead and could never testify about working with

them (or about meeting Marcello), that situation could be contained.

Marcello’s pattern of only using people in the JFK hit who had been—

or were still—assets, informants, or agents for US intelligence or law

enforcement agencies would again prove helpful. Banister—the former

FBI chief for Chicago and once the number-two man in the New Orleans

Police Department, and who had ties to Naval Intelligence through his

friend Guy Johnson—could work behind the scenes to quiet the prob-

lem. After all, Banister had once worked with one of Bobby’s top Justice

Department associates, clearing suspected “reds” for employment. It

wouldn’t be hard for Banister to clear Ferrie, and himself, by saying their