The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (16 page)

Hunt, like Nixon, publicly denied knowing about, let alone working on, the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel. Yet Hunt’s mentor—and Nixon’s future CIA Director—Richard Helms disagrees. Much later,
Helms testified that the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel “were known ‘to almost everybody in high positions in government.’”

Robert Maheu (an ex-FBI agent and former partner of Guy Banister) later admitted that Richard Nixon was personally behind the ramped-up CIA–Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and that Nixon had chosen Maheu to be the CIA’s new cutout to the Mafia. Eight years later Maheu confided to his friend Pierre Salinger “that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project. . . . It was Nixon who had him do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.”

It was logical that Nixon would want Maheu on the project, since he’d worked with him on two previous, successful covert operations. Also, Howard Hughes, Maheu’s main client, was closer to Nixon than he was to any other politician. Though Hughes had vanished from public view, a Nixon memo confirms that the reclusive billionaire had actually met with Nixon the previous year.
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In 2013 I first published information showing that Santo Trafficante himself confirmed Nixon’s role in starting the new, ramped-up CIA–Mafia plots in the summer of 1960; those plots soon involved Trafficante, Johnny Rosselli, and eventually Carlos Marcello. In 1973, during the height of the Watergate investigation, Trafficante was being represented by famed attorney F. Lee Bailey, according to Daniel Sheehan, the noted activist lawyer who was then working for Bailey. Sheehan says that Trafficante explained to Bailey’s Chief Investigator that in the summer of 1960, Vice President Nixon had
originally reached out for help to his longtime patron, the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Hughes, who did extensive work for the US government, assigned his key aide, Robert Maheu, to handle the matter. Maheu, a longtime CIA asset, reached out to Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, who in turn asked Santo Trafficante to join the operation. Trafficante still maintained extensive contacts in Cuba, since his former casinos remained open.

However, Trafficante was leery of the operation, since he—of all the mob bosses who had left Cuba—had worked out a type of accommodation with the new Cuban regime. Trafficante told Rosselli and Maheu that he wanted some form of personal assurance that Vice President Nixon was actually behind the operation. At Trafficante’s third meeting about the plots with Rosselli in Miami, a CIA security official joined them and confirmed to Trafficante that Vice President Nixon had personally ordered the Castro assassination operation. Trafficante agreed to join the venture and to use his men in the operation. Rosselli’s boss Sam Giancana also joined the plots and, later, so did Carlos Marcello.

Nixon’s September 1960 CIA–Mafia plots with Trafficante, Rosselli, and Giancana were hidden from the Warren Commission and wouldn’t be officially exposed until Congressional hearings in 1975, a year after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign. Those CIA–Mafia plots were never publicly linked to Watergate, even though in 2012 I first published memos showing that Senate Watergate investigators had learned of the connection eight months before Nixon resigned. However, Marcello’s role in Nixon’s CIA–Mafia plots remained unexposed until 1989 and is still overlooked by most historians today. The CIA–Mafia plots were first linked to JFK’s assassination in 1975 and led to two Congressional investigations of
the assassination. But because Marcello’s role in the CIA–Mafia plots was hidden from those investigations, the full connection between those plots and JFK’s murder hasn’t been available until now.

ONE IMPORTANT PART of the CIA–Mafia plots that began in 1960 wasn’t connected to those plots until 2012. This was the fact that the mob bosses involved in the plots—including Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana—paid a huge bribe to Vice President Richard Nixon the same month the plots began. Nixon’s background shows how that bribe came about and why Nixon turned to the Mafia to kill Castro in the first place.

As noted earlier, Richard Nixon had extensive ties to the Mafia dating to 1946 and his first run for Congress, when Mickey Cohen, as the Los Angeles mob figure later admitted, gave Nixon $5,000 (over $40,000 in today’s dollars). Cohen confessed that Nixon received even more Mafia money for his races after that, while author Anthony Summers documented many additional Mafia ties that Nixon developed in the 1950s. When Nixon first ran for Vice President, with Dwight D. Eisenhower heading the ticket, “Sam Giancana, then a rising power in the national crime syndicate, [said] ‘I like Ike. But I like his running mate, Nixon, even better. . . . I’m hedging my bets. We got campaign contributions to both sides: Our guys out in California are backing Nixon.’” At that time, “Our guys out in California” meant Johnny Rosselli and his associates.

Nixon also received support from his first race onward from billionaire Howard Hughes. Once Nixon became Vice President, he received even more favors and illicit money from Hughes. Twice Hughes had his top covert operative, Robert Maheu, help Nixon with difficult problems.

Marcello clearly had every reason to want to see JFK defeated and Nixon become president. Santo Trafficante also viewed Nixon favorably. “‘Santo,’ recalled his attorney Frank Ragano, ‘viewed Nixon as a realistic, conservative politician who was not a zealot and would not be hard on him and his mob friends. The Mafia had little to fear from Nixon.’”

Marcello and Trafficante wanted to do all they could to ensure a Nixon victory, especially since their ally Jimmy Hoffa was soon expected to face a federal indictment as a result of all the attention the Kennedys’ hearings had focused on him. Accordingly, Marcello began to gather money for Nixon, and in addition to Trafficante, Giancana later claimed that he had contributed, as did Tony Provenzano, a Mafia Teamster official in New Jersey who was close to Marcello.

In September 1960, Richard Nixon received a bribe of at least $500,000 from the same mob bosses who began working that month on his CIA–Mafia plot to kill Fidel. Prior to September 26, 1960, Teamster President Hoffa—facing an expected indictment for crimes exposed by the Kennedys—went to Louisiana “to meet Carlos Marcello.” As first revealed by Hoffa expert Dan Moldea, a Louisiana-based Hoffa aide, Grady Edward Partin, who later “turned government informant,” was with Hoffa at the meeting. Partin said, “Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon.” That was only half of a promised total payment to Nixon of $1 million (more than $6 million in today’s dollars), with “the other half coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.” The Florida mobster contributing was Santo Trafficante, who was at the time joining the CIA–Mafia plots. Among the “mob boys” in New Jersey was Mafia capo Tony Provenzano, who was close to Marcello. In a boast to a family member, Sam Giancana claimed
that he was also part of the group “giving the Nixon campaign a million bucks.”

The September 1960 Mafia–Hoffa–Nixon bribe was extensively documented by the Justice Department. The man who witnessed Hoffa accepting $500,000 from Marcello for Nixon was Louisiana Teamster official Grady Partin. Two years later Partin became a trusted informant for the Justice Department, and his testimony against Hoffa eventually sent the Teamster President to prison. Partin passed a government polygraph test about the bribe, and the Justice Department found independent “information confirming the Marcello donation” to Hoffa for Nixon. Though the 1960 Mafia–Hoffa–Nixon bribe would also be independently verified by Senate investigator Michael Ewing, the public would not learn about Nixon’s bribe until 1978, long after the Watergate investigations ended.
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Marcello and his associates’ bribe to Richard Nixon produced immediate results. “Almost coincident with the Marcello donation [to Nixon], the Eisenhower-Nixon Justice Department abruptly stopped the indictment process [against] Hoffa.” However, Marcello’s illicit cash for Nixon had another important goal: According to Grady Partin, Marcello said he “hoped . . . to extract a pledge that a Nixon administration would not deport him.” Marcello’s huge bribe to the Vice President also raises the possibility that an earlier payment to Nixon might have been the reason Marcello hadn’t been deported during Nixon’s Vice Presidency. The bribe given by Marcello, Trafficante, and the others produced other benefits as well. It garnered the Republican
Nixon some of his only union backing when the Teamsters, that same month, “gave [Nixon] the union’s official support.”

DECLASSIFIED CIA FILES and reports show that Nixon’s CIA–Mafia plots had kicked into high gear by late September 1960, with the CIA wanting Trafficante and the others to kill Fidel Castro in classic gangland fashion. That was really a primary reason the CIA wanted to use the Mafia in the first place, to give the public an entity other than the CIA or the US government to blame for the murder. Because the mob bosses knew the Cuban people wouldn’t tolerate the mob retaking control of its casinos if they blamed the Mafia for the death of the popular Cuban leader, Trafficante, Rosselli, and the others focused on low-profile types of assassination, such as poisoning. The CIA later admitted having its scientists work on developing deadly toxins to use in the plots.

Two plots to poison Fidel can be documented in the weeks leading up to the 1960 Presidential election. One involved Richard Cain, a “made” Chicago mobster who also worked in Chicago law enforcement. The other effort included Frank Fiorini, the mob associate who had fought for Fidel’s forces and then become the liaison between Fidel and the mobsters who ran (and had owned) the Havana casinos. But Fiorini had since fled Cuba and was now working for the CIA. Years later Fiorini would change his name to Frank Sturgis and become infamous as one of the Watergate burglars working for E. Howard Hunt. Though Fiorini’s mob and CIA ties have since been documented, those links would not become widely known during the Watergate scandal.

CIA officer E. Howard Hunt played a major role in the Agency’s covert plot to eliminate Fidel in the fall of 1960. If Castro was killed
by mob assassins and US military forces were deployed to protect Americans in Cuba, it would take only a small group of trained exiles to help install another US-backed strongman or dictator. Hunt was helping oversee the political side of the training of such a small force (a few hundred men at that time). Though experienced with coups, at that point Hunt had no experience with the Mafia.

To address that issue, in September 1960 longtime mob associate Bernard Barker was assigned as Hunt’s assistant, a position he would maintain for years. The son of an American father, Barker had been born in Cuba and had attended school in the United States. He originally had dual American–Cuban citizenship but because of his service in Cuba’s brutal and corrupt secret police, his US citizenship was revoked in the mid-1950s. Barker and Hunt say that Barker worked for the CIA for several years in the 1950s, though according to Barker’s released CIA file, he began working for the Agency only in the spring of 1959, when he was forty-one. After Barker left Cuba (and possibly before), he became a longtime associate of Santo Trafficante’s mob, though an FBI memo says that since “the late 1940’s” Barker had been involved “in gangster activities in Cuba.”

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got wind of the secret plots, as verified by an October 18, 1960, memo to a high CIA official overseeing the plots, in which Hoover said that “during recent conversations with several friends, [Sam] Giancana [said] the ‘assassin’ had arranged with a girl, not further described, to drop a ‘pill’ in some drink or food of Castro’s.” Hoover’s description perfectly matches other descriptions of Frank Fiorini’s part of the CIA–Mafia plot.

Nixon’s plotting with the CIA and the Mafia continued right up until the 1960 election, but his effort was not successful. JFK won a narrow victory against the Vice President. Sam Giancana would later
claim that he gave Kennedy his close win, but Giancana’s boast has since been debunked. That the son of one of America’s richest men would need Giancana’s help to win in heavily Democratic Chicago, whose powerful Mayor, Richard Daley, was JFK’s close ally, strains credibility. Historian Michael Beschloss found that “Daley’s citywide control counted for more than the mob-run wards, which were solidly Democratic in any case.” A published statistical analysis by political scientist Edmund Kallina shows “clearly that the Illinois Presidential vote was not stolen for Kennedy by the mob or anybody else.” Unlike Marcello, Giancana was open to the possibility of a Kennedy presidency, and had tried—and would continue to try—to use mutual associate Frank Sinatra to influence JFK’s tough stand on the Mafia. Sinatra had also introduced JFK to one of his mistresses, Judith Campbell, earlier in 1960.

However, it was to no avail, since JFK—and his new Attorney General Robert Kennedy—wasted no time in declaring war on the Mafia. Press accounts show that singled out for special attention in that war were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, who were soon targeted by RFK’s hugely increased staff of Justice Department Mafia prosecutors.

Despite those stories in the press, the Agency continued the CIA–Mafia assassination plots into December of 1960 and into 1961 without telling the new President. December 1960 was an especially active time. That month New Orleans private detective Guy Banister was linked to a CIA plot to stage a fake attack on the US naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba, to provide a pretext for a US attack on Cuba. However, Cuban authorities got wind of the plot and arrested forty Cubans involved. In the press, the Cuban government “unmasked the CIA’s participation” and denounced the organization involved in the
fake attack, “the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean,” which was largely controlled by Banister.

The CIA also began working with a mid-level, relatively powerless Cuban official named Rolando Cubela, and a cable from December 1960 “referred to the possibility of giving a [poison] ‘H capsule’ to Rolando Cubela, the former [student group] leader who was now a disaffected associate of Castro.” Cubela had several ties to the CIA–Mafia plots and to Trafficante associates. In addition, “in late 1960, the Agency sent a sniper rifle to Havana via diplomatic pouch,” according to CIA Congressional testimony uncovered by historian David Kaiser.