Legacy of Secrecy (75 page)

shortly before his own murder, Rosselli would admit to his attorney

the true version of the story: that Trafficante’s men involved in plots

to kill Fidel had actually killed JFK, a confession that may have caused

Rosselli’s own murder.

The whole strategy to divert suspicion from the three Mafia bosses

shared several characteristics with the JFK assassination plot: using

intermediaries and cutouts; infiltrating operations; compartmentaliz-

ing information on a “need-to-know” basis; paying bribes; planning for

contingencies and using backup plans to deal with evolving situations;

and trusting that people would act in their own self-interest.

For example, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana (not to be confused

with Senator Edward Long of Missouri, holding the wiretap hearings

to help Hoffa) was used only on the Hoffa portion of the strategy, with-

out being told about Rosselli’s phony story. The Mafia and Hoffa had

bought Russell Long the votes he needed to become Majority Whip in

the Senate, so it’s only natural that he would have wanted to keep Hoffa

out of prison.

The mob bosses were quick to adapt their strategy to new develop-

ments, such as when they learned that the
New York Times
was investigat-

ing David Ferrie. Their resulting moves, detailed shortly, complemented

what they were already doing with Rosselli’s story and forced Richard

Helms and other CIA officials into further cover-ups. Due to Helms’s

1966 housecleaning, the mob bosses no longer had multiple information

pipelines to and from the high levels of the CIA, as they did in 1963.

Rosselli’s friend Morales was out of the country, and William Harvey no

longer enjoyed Helms’s trust. However, there was at least one pipeline

left, since Hunt remained close to Helms, and two Trafficante associates

remained close to Hunt.8

Though their strategy had some risk, Marcello, Trafficante, and Ros-

selli had no choice but to try to find some leverage and get control of the

situation. In addition to the rising tide of JFK conspiracy books, articles,

and investigations, each of the three Mafia bosses had been arrested

in recent months. They had to ensure that prosecutors wouldn’t try to

pressure them or their associates by digging into their possible roles in

the JFK conspiracy. It was a matter of survival, and in their world only

the most careful and ruthless survived. For any who doubt the Mafia

bosses had the savvy to pull off their strategy, keep in mind that they

were not characters from
The Sopranos
: Marcello ran a $2 billion opera-

tion ($12 billion in today’s dollars), Trafficante was a major player in the

multibillion-dollar French Connection heroin network, and Rosselli was

about to best the world’s richest businessman—Howard Hughes—in a

series of casino deals.

Rosselli first floated his fake “Castro did it” story with some of the same

people helping Hoffa, who were also involved in setting up Rosselli’s

first deal with Howard Hughes. As a trial balloon for bigger things to

come, Rosselli used his old friend, Hoffa attorney Ed Morgan, to pass

a brief version of the phony “turned-around assassin” story to another

mutual friend, Hank Greenspun, the colorful owner of the
Las Vegas Sun

newspaper. Echoing the small-media-market strategy that John Martino

had used in 1963 and 1964, the small
Sun
article attracted no national

attention—except in Washington, which was Rosselli’s real target. The

FBI took notice, as did the CIA.9

Rosselli was also using Robert Maheu, who had originally brought

Rosselli into the 1960 CIA-Mafia plots, to get close to Maheu’s client

Howard Hughes. The eccentric billionaire wanted to enter the Las Vegas

casino business, and Rosselli needed a powerful ally with deep pockets

if he was going to avoid prison or deportation. The way the story is usu-

ally told, based on court records, is that Rosselli helped to arrange for

Hughes to move into the Desert Inn on November 27, 1966. The Desert

Inn had been Rosselli’s regular haunt for years, and Hughes was allowed

to rent two entire floors of their best suites. This act was a sacrifice for

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

the hotel/casino, since those suites were usually reserved for “whales,”

high-rolling gamblers whose losses yielded huge profits.

After two weeks, the mobster who supposedly controlled the hotel,

Moe Dalitz, wanted Hughes out—but the billionaire didn’t want to

leave. Rosselli came up with a solution, based on the fact that Dalitz

wanted to continue receiving loans from Hoffa’s Teamsters Pension

Fund. Rosselli asked Hoffa to call Dalitz and arrange for Hughes to

stay, and suggested that Hughes buy the casino so he could stay as long

as he liked. Howard Hughes then had Maheu arrange—with help from

Rosselli, Morgan, and Greenspun—to buy the Desert Inn from Dalitz

and his associates. But since Hughes had no experience running casinos,

he left Dalitz and his crew in charge. Also on the fringe of the deal was

Jack Anderson, the junior partner of America’s leading news columnist,

Drew Pearson.10

Everyone got what they wanted: Rosselli wound up with a $50,000

finder’s fee, Hughes soon put Morgan on a $100,000 annual retainer, and

Hughes owned the hotel/casino, while Dalitz and the Mafia stayed in

charge where they were still able to skim profits. In addition, the power-

ful Hughes now owed a debt of gratitude to Rosselli and Hoffa. (Rosselli

would not go to prison until after Hughes left Las Vegas and the coun-

try, following an acrimonious split with Maheu.) However, authors like

George Michael Evica feel that Rosselli had set up Hughes and Maheu

from the start, that Dalitz’s complaints about extending the two-week

stay were just an excuse, so that Rosselli and Hoffa could ingratiate

themselves with Hughes while making it clear that Hughes needed to

buy a hotel to have an assured base in Las Vegas.11

For the time being, Howard Hughes was satisfied with the deal, and

soon Rosselli was brokering additional deals for him, helping Hughes

buy the Sands (for which Rosselli received a $45,000 fee) and the Frontier

(Rosselli got a gift-shop concession that netted him $60,000 annually).

But because the Mafia men were left in place to run the casinos, they also

skimmed and stole $50 million from Hughes over the next three years.12

However, none of the skim went to Rosselli, and he knew that if he

were in prison or deported, even his finder’s fees would be of little use.

Rosselli would soon use Ed Morgan and Jack Anderson to ratchet up

the pressure on the CIA, as well as on LBJ and Bobby, in an attempt to

avoid that fate.

The recent flood of JFK assassination books had triggered new inves-

tigations by major newspapers and magazines in advance of the third

anniversary of JFK’s death. The last major reporter to look into the case

had been Dorothy Kilgallen, a well-known TV personality and crime

reporter for the
New York Journal-American
. In 1964, she scored an exclu-

sive private interview with Jack Ruby in the chambers of Ruby’s judge,

after which she wrote a column calling Ruby “a gangster,” a term jour-

nalists rarely applied to Ruby in those days. In early November 1965,

she reportedly told a friend “she was going to New Orleans in five days

and break the case wide open.” But on November 8, 1965, she died at

home of what was eventually determined to be a lethal combination of

alcohol and barbiturates.13

A year later, other reporters had picked up the torch, and by Novem-

ber 1966 both the
New York Times
and the
New York Observer
had begun

serious investigations into JFK’s murder. Also looking into the case were

two of America’s leading magazines,
Life
and the
Saturday Evening Post
.

This was a major reversal for some of these publications, whose coverage

had previously been extremely supportive of the Warren Report and its

“lone nut” scenario.14

The
New York Times
had begun its investigation by early November,

and it quickly focused on David Ferrie and even Carlos Marcello. On

November 21, Martin Waldron (no relation to the author), of the
Times

Houston Bureau, had developed enough information to write a stun-

ningly detailed list of questions to the New Orleans Police Department.

The thirty-two questions focused mostly on Ferrie, asking why he had

been arrested in November 1963, what he’d been charged with, if he’d

made a statement, and why the Warren Commission “did not call Mr.

Ferrie as a witness.” The
Times
especially wanted to know about any

contact between Oswald and Ferrie, both in 1963 and going back to

Oswald’s days in Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol squadron.15

Some of the
Times
’s questions suggest the New Orleans police had

been closer to charging Ferrie, and that their investigation continued far

longer, than previously known. The
Times
letter said the “former Asso-

ciated Press bureau chief in New Orleans . . . got the impression in late

November 1963, that New Orleans police officials were convinced that

Mr. Ferrie was involved in some manner in the Kennedy assassination,

and that a biographical sketch was made available for use if and when

Mr. Ferrie was so charged.” Despite that fact that the official investiga-

tion of Ferrie was supposedly over by the end of November 1963, the

reporter also asked about an incident in “February 1964 [when] police

officers asked” a service station operator if he’d “seen Oswald being in

the company of a man wearing a wig,” like Ferrie.16

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

The
Times
also brought Marcello into the mix, inquiring about “reports

that Mr. Ferrie has been acting as a pilot for Carlos Marcello, reputed to

be involved in various shady enterprises in southern Louisiana.” The

answer to one of the reporter’s questions involved Carlos Marcello,

when he queried: “Where was Mr. Ferrie on the day President Kennedy

was assassinated?”

As far as we can determine, the New Orleans police never answered

the
New York Times
’s questions. Their responses would have gone a long

way toward outlining the case that Congressional investigators and

journalists would start to build against Carlos Marcello a decade later.

However, the
Times
would soon fold its investigation, in part because of

another inquiry its own questions helped to trigger: that of New Orleans

District Attorney Jim Garrison.

The New Orleans police passed the
Times
questions to the District

Attorney, putting the responsibility for answering them in Garrison’s lap.

As we noted earlier, on Monday, November 25, 1963, the New Orleans

FBI had indicated to the press that its pursuit of Ferrie and his associates

had been Garrison’s responsibility. Even though the FBI—not Garri-

son—had interviewed Ferrie in 1963, when the
Times
or other reporters

dug through old New Orleans newspaper files, Garrison appeared to

be the one who had let Ferrie go.

Jim Garrison gave several different accounts of when and how he

came to launch his investigation of JFK’s murder in December 1966, an

inquiry that would finally explode in the nation’s press in late February

1967. However, Garrison never mentioned the
Times
questions from

November 21, though they were clearly a major factor and our copy of

the questions even came from Garrison’s files. In early December 1963,

Garrison told
Life
magazine’s Richard Billings that Louisiana Senator

“Russell Long [had] encouraged Garrison to take up [the] investigation

[just a] couple of weeks earlier.”

Senator Russell Long of Louisiana had long-standing ties with the

Marcello organization.17 The senator made remarks about his suspicions

to others besides Garrison, as reported in the November 22, 1966,
New

Orleans States-Item
in an article entitled “Second Person Aided Oswald,

Long Asserts.” It was quite unusual at the time for any member of Con-

gress to make such claims, especially the second-ranking senator of the

majority party. Within months, Senator Russell Long would be helping

Marcello’s associates in their attempt to get Hoffa released from jail.18

It might seem counterproductive for a Marcello-backed US senator

to have pushed conspiracy to newspapers and to Garrison, but it makes

sense in light of the strategy that Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had

apparently developed. The Mafia bosses wanted to divert attention

away from themselves and toward a suspect that high officials, like LBJ

and Hoover, had already shown a willingness to cover up in order to

avoid: Fidel Castro.

While none of the recent JFK conspiracy books so far had mentioned