Legacy of Secrecy (69 page)

King’s home, where Mrs. King was the first to read the letter and hear

the tapes. However, most of the “highlights” were of poor quality, and

it was hard to determine what was being said or who was saying it.

With the support of Mrs. King and his advisors, Dr. King weathered

the storm. The FBI tried to leak the story to the
New York Times
, but the

paper wouldn’t run it without comments from King or his staff, who

refused to respond unless the
Times
revealed the FBI officials who were

leaking the information. The
Times
refused to give up its FBI sources, so

no story was written.9

Dr. King and other civil rights leaders had other enemies more deadly

than Hoover. On January 18, 1965, King was attacked and punched by

a member of the National States Rights Party, an often violent group

linked to Joseph Milteer. Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem on Feb-

ruary 21, 1965, though most historians ascribe his murder to members of

a rival faction within his own movement. That same month, police shot

and killed a black demonstrator near Selma when he tried to defend his

mother and eighty-two-year-old grandfather after both had been beaten

by police. On March 6, 1965, state troopers on horseback attacked peace-

ful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Soon afterward, a white Unitarian minister demonstrating in Alabama

was beaten with a club and died from his injuries.10

Even Dr. King’s triumphant march from Selma to the Alabama capi-

tal of Montgomery, which ended on March 25, 1965, was punctuated

with violence when Viola Liuzzo, a white homemaker from Detroit who

had been helping King’s marchers, was shot twice in the face. Former

Birmingham mayor Arthur Hanes Sr. defended her killer. The articulate,

Princeton-educated Hanes won an acquittal for him, which was one

reason James Earl Ray would later enlist Hanes Sr. as his first defense

attorney after Dr. King’s assassination.11

According to Delmar Dennis, a Ku Klux Klansman turned FBI infor-

mant, Martin Luther King himself was targeted for assassination. The

Klan group known as the White Knights, led by Sam Bowers, planned

to kill King when he crossed a bridge in East Mississippi. They planned

to use snipers and also dynamite the bridge. However, the Klan infor-

mant tipped off the FBI, and King avoided the area. The following year,

the same group targeted King during a march through Mississippi and,

according to the
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
, “killed a black man to lure King

to the Natchez area.” But that attempt also failed.12 That same year,

Joseph Milteer was speaking to Klan organizations in the South, and the

Secret Service and FBI were still monitoring his movements whenever

the president or vice president planned to visit the South.

The FBI was in the odd position of occasionally trying to protect Dr.

King (due to pressure from LBJ) while at the same time carrying out

Hoover’s desire to destroy King’s reputation. The previous year, when

Bobby Kennedy was still Attorney General, the Justice Department had

warned King of “credible reports of plans to assassinate him” on his trip

to a Mississippi town known as a Klan base. Dr. King refused to cancel

the trip, so Bobby called LBJ to get protection for the civil rights leader,

since the Mississippi Highway Patrol refused to help. LBJ suggested the

FBI, and Bobby had to sheepishly ask LBJ to make the call to Hoover,

since Bobby “had no dealings with the FBI anymore.” LBJ called Hoover,

who agreed to have FBI cars travel behind and in front of King’s.13

Hoover hated Dr. King, and many FBI agents and supervisors—

especially in the South, but even in Washington—shared his racist views

about King and civil rights. Some agents avoided that stain and tried to

enforce the law. Still, Dr. King and his entourage so distrusted the FBI

that by 1963, the FBI had stopped forwarding reports of threats against

King to his office. In Atlanta, such reports were provided to Police Chief

Herbert Jenkins, who was friendly with Dr. King’s father. In other South-

ern cities, this lack of trust and cooperation presented a problem that

would worsen in the coming years.14

The spate of violence against civil rights activists helped to propel

passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, but many blacks

outside the South saw it as too little too late. Simmering tensions over

racism and poverty exploded just a week later, resulting in huge race

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles (leaving thirty-four dead) and

in Chicago, where eighty people were injured. LBJ was crushed by the

violent outbreaks, but Dr. King was more determined than ever to press

for change, as was Bobby Kennedy.

The race riots had a large financial impact on Carlos Marcello’s Mafia

associates in Chicago and Los Angeles, because it disrupted their gam-

bling and vice operations that preyed on minorities. As for Marcello

himself, in the sweltering summer of 1965 in New Orleans, he focused

his attention on the final days of his trial for bribing a juror and threat-

ening to kill a witness. Those charges stemmed from his acquittal on

the day JFK was assassinated, and this time the verdict was the same.

Marcello was found “not guilty” on August 17, 1965, and was finally

free of the charges and immense pressure that had dogged him since JFK

and Bobby had taken office. Now that Bobby was no longer Attorney

General and many of his Justice Department prosecutors had left, John

H. Davis wrote that “Carlos Marcello was well on his way to becoming

the wealthiest and most influential Mafia leader in the US.” The Marcello

organization’s “estimated annual income of two billion dollars [made]

it by far the largest industry in Louisiana.”15 In addition, Marcello’s por-

tion of the heroin network he shared with Trafficante had prospered for

almost two years without suffering a major bust—but that was about

to change.

The same month Marcello was acquitted, one of the lowest members

of his heroin network attempted one last time to convince authorities to

take action against Marcello’s empire. Her efforts presaged a bust that

would send one of the JFK assassination conspirators to prison, and

begin a major shift in Marcello and Trafficante’s heroin network that

would eventually see Cuban exiles take an increasing role. In August

1965, sometime prostitute and occasional heroin courier Rose Cheramie

told FBI agents that “individuals associated with the syndicate were

running prostitution rings in several southern cities such as Houston

and Galveston, Texas . . . furthermore, she claimed she had information

about a heroin deal operating from a New Orleans ship.”

Congressional investigators found that her story checked out, just as

her November 1963 information had. An FBI “call to the Coast Guard

verified an ongoing narcotics investigation of the ship” Cheramie had

named. The prostitution ring Cheramie described sounds very much

like an operation run by Marcello lieutenant Nofio Pecora (whom Jack

Ruby, Cheramie’s old boss, called just three weeks before JFK’s murder).

However, as in 1963, local agents dropped the case—this time it was the

New Orleans FBI, still notoriously lax in their treatment of Marcello. The

Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in New Orleans also didn’t pry into

Marcello’s heroin network.16 If the FBI and FBN had seriously inves-

tigated Cheramie’s allegations, they would have uncovered a heroin

trail through New Orleans that reached all the way to France. This drug

pipeline was about to be used again for a major delivery, which would

eventually result in Michel Victor Mertz’s finally going to prison.

However, Rose Cheramie didn’t live to see Mertz, Marcello, or any of

the men whose vice operations enslaved her go to prison. One month

after Rose contacted the FBI in August 1965, she was killed. Congres-

sional investigators noted that “ironically, the circumstances of Rose

Cheramie’s death are strikingly similar to the circumstances surround-

ing her original involvement in the assassination investigation,” when

she was left for dead by the side of the road shortly before JFK’s murder.

They found that “Cheramie died of injuries received from an automobile

accident on a strip of highway near Big Sandy, Tex., in the early morning

of September 4, 1965. The driver stated Cheramie had been lying in the

roadway and although he attempted to avoid hitting her, he ran over

the top of her skull, causing fatal injuries.”17 Though her official autopsy

records had disappeared by the time investigators tried to find them,

one extant medical file says that Rose had a “deep punctuate stellate

[star-shaped] wound above her right forehead.” Such a wound would

not have been caused by a car or a tire, but could been caused by a pistol

fired next to her skull.18

While Rose lay dying in a Texas hospital, Michel Victor Mertz hosted

a party at his father-in-law’s estate in France. In attendance was a US

Army major, described by
Newsday
as “a close friend of Mertz,” who

suggested using a new contact to get a load of heroin into Fort Benning,

Georgia, one of their regular smuggling points. A Warrant Officer mov-

ing to Fort Benning was offered $10,000 to have a special freezer shipped

to the US as his own property. Told only that it contained diamonds, he

agreed. In actuality, hidden in the freezer were two hundred small bags,

each containing five hundred grams of almost pure heroin.19

The heroin-laden freezer would travel first by ship to Marcello’s New

Orleans, then by truck to Fort Benning. From there, Mertz’s associates

would take it to Miami, where the heroin would be distributed by one of

Trafficante’s men named Frank Dioguardi (Frankie Dio), who was also

a Teamster associate of Jimmy Hoffa. One of Mertz’s French smugglers

who would meet with Dioguardi was given a Hispanic cover identity to

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

use on his trip to Fort Benning, even though he spoke only French and

English. The alias was “Almeida.”20

After Mertz’s heroin had left France, but before it arrived in the US, a

French Inspector in Marseilles was tipped off about the shipment. The

US Bureaus of Narcotics in New York and Washington were notified, and

began shadowing both the heroin and Mertz’s operatives. Five of them

were arrested, including Dioguardi and the man using the “Almeida”

alias. Mertz was identified as the source of the heroin, but it would take

French authorities more than three years after the Fort Benning bust to

finally arrest Mertz.21

On February 28, 1966, Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) was arrested in

Cuba, due in part to information from Fidel’s agent in Artime’s camp.

The CIA hadn’t used Cubela for months, but Richard Helms would

have been disappointed that Cubela’s arrest also compromised the

“entire AMTRUNK . . . network” in Cuba, according to a CIA memo.

Gus Russo writes that Cubela was “arrested simultaneously [with]

an important early recruit in the AMTRUNK project [who] was a co-

defendant at Cubela’s trial.”22 Eloy Menoyo, who had confessed after

beatings a year earlier and was serving essentially a life sentence, was

not part of Cubela’s trial, possibly indicating that Fidel didn’t realize

Menoyo and Artime had been working together just prior to Menoyo’s

capture.

Castro made sure Cubela’s trial was a highly publicized spectacle,

but Che Guevara was conspicuously absent, even though he was appar-

ently back in Cuba.23 Almeida was present for Cubela’s trial, and the CIA

worried that its highest asset in Cuba might be exposed. Five days after

Cubela’s arrest was announced, a cable sent from the CIA Director’s

office said that CIA headquarters was “most interested [in] ascertaining

Almeida’s current status [in] view [of] AMLASH and other arrests.” It

asked for a friend of Almeida “to write . . . to Almeida in hopes of elicit-

ing [an] interesting response.”24

Almeida’s name didn’t come out in the trial, much to CIA officials’

relief, as expressed in an April 14, 1966, memo saying there had been

“no indication whatsoever that Rolando Cubela revealed anything more

than his ‘weakness, playboy attitude,’ in plotting with a man like Man-

uel Artime to assassinate Fidel Castro. Under private interrogation to

date there is no known possibility that Rolando Cubela has revealed the

names of the real military leaders with whom he really was in contact. . . .

None of these major individuals, whose names are known to us, have

been arrested or detained.”25 Because of Cubela’s public contrition, he

was spared execution and sentenced to thirty years.

Richard Helms knew that as long as Almeida remained in place and

unexposed, he had a possible asset to use in the future—if he could keep