The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (22 page)

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Carlos Marcello made more documented remarks about assassinating President Kennedy, only this time his comments were not to Ed Becker. They were made to a much closer associate and were not disclosed until the publication of John Davis’s biography of Marcello in 1989. At that time, Marcello had been carefully planning JFK’s murder with his allies for about six months. Davis wrote that one spring weekend in 1963, Marcello was “at his [fishing] lodge” at Grand Isle, Louisiana, with “close friends from the old Sicilian families of New Orleans.”

“While having a scotch with one of them in the kitchen,” a friend of Marcello’s friend “made a casual reference to an article he had read . . . about the Supreme Court upholding” Marcello’s deportation order. “At the mention of Robert Kennedy’s name, Carlos suddenly seemed to choke, spitting out his scotch on the floor. Recovering quickly, he formed the southern Italian symbol of . . . ‘the horn,’ with this left hand.” . . . “Holding the ancient symbol of hatred and revenge above his head, he shouted: ‘Don’t worry, man, ’bout dat Bobby. We goin’ to take care a dat sonofabitch.’”

The friend asked if Marcello was going to “give it to Bobby,” but Marcello replied, “What good dat do? You hit dat man and his brother calls out the National Guard. No, you gotta hit de top man and what happen with de next top man? He don’t like de brother.” Marcello declared to his friend, “Sure as I stand here somethin’ awful is gonna happen to dat man.”

Marcello knew that if he killed the Attorney General, JFK would simply order the National Guard or the Army into Marcello’s
strongholds, much as had happened in 1954 in Phenix City, Alabama, after Trafficante’s associates killed the Alabama Attorney General–elect. That would render powerless the political figures in Louisiana and elsewhere that Marcello had corrupted and relied on for protection. For Marcello and his associates, that meant the answer was to kill JFK, not RFK. The animosity between RFK and Vice President Lyndon Johnson—who would be the new president—was well known, and Johnson had never made prosecuting the Mafia any sort of priority. History would prove Marcello’s reasoning to be largely correct.

Confirmation of Marcello’s spring 1963 remarks about assassinating JFK comes from Atlanta businessman John Knight Sr., who grew up in Louisiana. Knight’s father, a merchant in Lafayette, owned one-third interest in a forty-five-foot boat docked at Grand Isle, a popular fishing area on the Gulf of Mexico, a hundred miles southwest of New Orleans. After one of the boat’s other owners sold his fishing camp at Grand Isle to Carlos Marcello, the teenaged Knight was introduced to Marcello by Felix Kiger, forty-three years old, who cooked and looked after the camp.

Later that spring, Knight’s father was angry when he heard that Marcello was going to be using his boat. Knight and his father raced to the dock, but the vessel was already pulling away. They were told that a Los Angeles mobster was also on the boat with Marcello and Kiger.
*

Many days later, Knight was talking to Kiger, and after a couple glasses of wine, Kiger became emotional when speaking about Marcello. Kiger said, “Something bad is going to happen to our
President.” The distraught cook said that he had been cooking while Marcello and the Los Angeles mobster were talking. “They don’t think Kiger hears ’em”—but the man gleaned from their conversation that JFK was going to be the target of an attack planned by Marcello.

Knight asked Kiger why Marcello would want to do such a thing to President Kennedy. Kiger replied that it was because of Robert Kennedy’s sudden deportation of Marcello and the harrowing ordeal Marcello had to endure. Not long after Marcello managed to sneak back into the United States, Kiger saw the godfather and said his hands and knees were still raw from injuries he had suffered in Central America.

Marcello wasn’t linked to JFK’s assassination in the press until the late 1970s, so Knight didn’t fully appreciate the ramifications of what Kiger had told him for years. Knight’s account appears credible and is full of additional specific names and details. Jack Ruby’s good friend Joe Campisi, a Marcello underboss, later testified to Congressional investigators that Marcello “goes to Grand Isle every year” since “he has a camp there.” Campisi admitted meeting with Marcello at the camp, showing that the godfather felt secure conducting mob business there.

IN 1963 CARLOS Marcello actually had at least one face-to-face meeting with Lee Oswald. Marcello’s meeting with the nephew of his longtime bookie, Dutz Murret, was revealed by the godfather to Jack Van Laningham twenty-two years later, during the CAMTEX undercover FBI operation. Van Laningham later explained to me how Marcello’s admission came about, but he prepared a written account three years after Marcello’s remarks that can be found in the FBI’s declassified CAMTEX file. In addition, a remarkable amount of independent evidence supports Marcello’s Oswald admission.

Jack Van Laningham explained that there was only one other inmate at the federal prison that Marcello felt comfortable talking to about his New Orleans activities. Van Laningham said, “I had another friend at Texarkana that had worked for Marcello’s brother, as a bartender. The ‘little man’ would let him come to our room and they would talk about New Orleans for hours. One night, Marcello was talking about the Kennedys. He told me and my friend about a meeting with Oswald. He had been introduced to Oswald by a man named Ferris [Ferrie], who was Marcello’s pilot. He said that the [meeting] had taken place in his brother’s restaurant. He said that he thought that Oswald [was] crazy. They had several meetings with Oswald before he left town.”

Additional confirmation of an Oswald–Marcello connection comes from another FBI informant. When the CAMTEX operation began targeting Marcello in 1985, he was in federal prison after being convicted of charges arising from a 1970s FBI undercover operation code-named BRILAB (for “bribery and labor”). BRILAB had grown out of the FBI investigation of a Teamster insurance scam involving Santo Trafficante. As a result of that investigation, a businessman named Joe Hauser agreed to become an informant for the FBI against Carlos Marcello. He wore a wire into Marcello’s office in the late 1970s, yielding the undercover BRILAB tapes that eventually sent Marcello to prison in the 1980s.

According to FBI informant Hauser, Marcello told him that he and some of his men did indeed know Oswald: “I used to know his fuckin’ family. His uncle he work for me. Dat kid work for me, too.” Marcello indicated that Oswald had worked for a time as a runner for his gambling network, the same one that involved Oswald’s uncle.

There are only two time periods when Oswald could have worked for Marcello as a runner: one in late April and early May 1963, while
he was living with Dutz Murret, and the other in late July, August, and early to mid-September 1963, when Oswald was not officially employed but when several witnesses saw him working with Guy Banister and David Ferrie. However, starting in early August, Oswald gained a high profile in the New Orleans media for his unusually well publicized pro-Castro activities, making it unlikely Oswald would have been used as a runner in politically conservative New Orleans at that time.

As for the meeting with Oswald that Marcello described to Van Laningham, the godfather may have ostensibly been talking to Oswald about gambling business while checking out for himself the person who would later take the blame for JFK’s murder. It’s clear from other accounts that mobsters sometimes conducted Mafia business at restaurants in both New Orleans and Dallas. Since the meeting place was his brother’s restaurant, Carlos Marcello would have felt secure there, especially since he could have had a private dining room and private entrance to avoid being seen with Oswald. Besides, meeting with an associate’s nephew and giving him a temporary job would appear even to the restaurant’s trusted staff to simply be routine business.

Marcello almost certainly did not discuss the assassination of John F. Kennedy with Oswald. It’s highly unlikely that an experienced godfather like Marcello would spend a year carefully planning JFK’s assassination only to entrust the shooting to an inexperienced young man who was out of practice with a rifle and was not a very good shot the last time he was tested in the Marines. In addition, Marcello told Van Laningham that he had brought two hit men over from Europe to shoot JFK, as mentioned in
Chapter One
and detailed in
Chapter Twelve
. Marcello’s admission about the two hit men was recorded on FBI undercover audiotape.

Carlos Marcello’s account to Van Laningham about meeting Oswald fits with much information that would only become public knowledge years later with the 1989 publication of
Mafia Kingfish
, Marcello’s biography by John H. Davis. (Van Laningham’s account of the Marcello–Oswald meeting in the FBI files was written the year BEFORE Davis’s book came out.) Long-overlooked FBI files from the days, weeks, and months after JFK’s assassination, including files that had not been published or cited in any book when Van Laningham’s written account for the FBI was prepared, also furnish collaboration for the meeting.

FBI memos first published in Davis’s Marcello biography describe Oswald getting money from one of Marcello’s men at the restaurant of the Town and Country Motel. The nondescript motel on Airline Highway—far from the tawdry glitz of the French Quarter—served as Marcello’s headquarters. The meeting occurred in late February or early March 1963. That fits the time frame when Oswald was briefly in New Orleans, where he was interviewed in jail by the INS agent and claimed to be Cuban. According to the FBI memos, Oswald was sitting in the mostly empty dining room when the FBI’s source saw the restaurant’s “owner remove [a] wad of bills from his pocket, which he passed under the table to the man sitting at the table,” whom the source identified as Oswald.

The FBI’s source was a businessman from Darien, Georgia, named Gene Sumner. His brother-in-law was a police lieutenant in the area, and several days after JFK’s murder, Sumner told him what he had seen the previous winter. Sumner’s brother-in-law then contacted the FBI, as recorded in a November 26, 1963, memo. As with all the dozen-plus associates of Carlos Marcello that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI interviewed following JFK’s assassination, the investigation of this incident
was cursory and routine. (Hoover had stated publicly that Oswald had acted alone, and agents knew that crossing Hoover would end their careers.) Sumner described the man he thought was the owner of the restaurant—the man he saw giving Oswald money—as being six feet tall, which means he wasn’t Carlos Marcello. One of Marcello’s brothers was the legal owner of the Town and Country, while a top lieutenant for Marcello—Joseph Poretto—managed the restaurant. The FBI interviewed both, and of course they denied knowing Oswald. Davis notes a variety of logical avenues of investigation that the FBI did not pursue: interviewing Sumner’s companions that night, checking the records of the hotel where Sumner stayed to establish the exact date, and showing Sumner a photo of the restaurant’s manager.

When the FBI sent the information to the Warren Commission, it excluded important details about the Mafia from the report. These included the facts that the man who gave Oswald money admitted involvement “in the rackets,” that Sumner’s associate that night had a father who “was formerly a racketeer and was known to the restaurant’s owner,” and that the Town and Country was “a known hangout for the hoodlum element.” This fits the pattern—noted by Congressional investigators and Hoover expert Anthony Summers—of Hoover’s FBI downplaying the organized crime ties of Marcello and his associates. Hoover also withheld FBI field reports like this one from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who would have immediately grasped its significance.

John H. Davis was also the first to report that Marcello briefly mentioned the FBI interviews of his brother and Poretto to the FBI’s BRILAB informant, Joe Hauser. Carlos Marcello told Hauser, “The Feds came up to de motel askin’ about him, but my people didn’t tell ’em nuttin’. Like we never heard of the guy, y’know?” Hauser’s
credibility on this point is enhanced because at the time he heard the remarks, the Sumner incident had never been mentioned in any book. Shortly after the payoff Sumner witnessed, Oswald moved to New Orleans to stay with his bookie uncle, Dutz Murret.

Murret, Banister, and Ferrie weren’t the only links between Marcello and Oswald. The House Select Committee on Assassinations uncovered other ties between Oswald, his family, and the Marcello organization. As summarized in
Vanity Fair
, Oswald’s “childhood and youth had been spent in New Orleans [where] Oswald’s mother’s friends included a corrupt lawyer linked to Marcello’s crime operation and a man who served Marcello as bodyguard and chauffeur.” In the summer of 1963, Oswald was bailed out of jail by a man close to “one of Marcello’s oldest friends, Nofio Pecora,” the same man who was “called three weeks before the assassination by Jack Ruby.”

Lending further credence to Marcello’s remarks about Oswald is that fact that FBI files contain other accurate information that Van Laningham had written down that Marcello told him about Ferrie. The godfather said that Ferrie “was an ex-airline pilot. It seems that he flew to Guatemala to pick up some new papers that Marcello needed to fight the INS in a court case.” Ferrie admitted to authorities soon after JFK’s assassination that shortly before JFK was murdered, he had flown to Guatemala twice for Marcello regarding his deportation case. At the time Van Laningham reported Marcello’s account to the FBI, Ferrie’s work for Marcello was not well known by the general public or even most historians.

CARLOS MARCELLO ALSO told Jack Van Laningham about his control of Jack Ruby, including an important meeting that took place in 1963, more than five months before JFK’s murder. Marcello’s 1985
remarks about Ruby are briefly summarized in the CAMTEX FBI file, but Van Laningham added more important information in our talks.

By the spring of 1963, Jack Ruby owed a small fortune to the IRS—almost $160,000 in today’s dollars—and was desperate for money. The IRS filed tax liens against Ruby on March 13, 1963, and Ruby faced ruin unless he could find another source of money to pay his bills.