The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (3 page)

Also hindering the 1966 and early 1967 investigations by mainstream news organizations was the JFK murder probe begun in late 1966 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film
JFK
). Though Garrison first focused on Carlos Marcello’s pilot and investigator in 1963—David Ferrie—Marcello’s name never publicly surfaced in Garrison’s probe. FBI files show that Garrison came close to publicly naming Marcello twice but never did.

After Ferrie’s sudden death early in Garrison’s investigation, the District Attorney took his inquiry far from the Mafia, and it soon became a media circus. None of the hundreds of articles in the mainstream press about it mentioned Ferrie’s work for Marcello in 1963 or raised the possibility of Mafia involvement in the assassination.

By mid-1967 the mainstream media had ended serious investigations of JFK’s assassination and had become highly critical of Garrison. Mainstream journalists didn’t resume writing about the assassination until late 1974 and early 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate investigations, when the first widespread reports emerged about CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro in the early 1960s emerged. Those revelations spawned new investigations such as the Rockefeller Commission and
the Senate Church Committee, which eventually added a JFK assassination subcommittee that included Senator Gary Hart. In the summer of 1975, the mob stymied those investigations by murdering two key figures in the CIA–Mafia plots—Rosselli’s former boss Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa—before they could testify. The investigations were also hindered by the massive amount of relevant information withheld by the FBI and CIA. When Johnny Rosselli, who was central to the CIA–Mafia plots, was gruesomely murdered the following year, the resulting media firestorm led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The House Committee also found itself thwarted by a spate of sudden deaths of mob-connected potential witnesses—some murders, some suicides, some (such as Martino and Morales) by natural causes—and the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence withheld even more relevant information. In the case of both the House Select Committee and the Church Committee, the CIA assigned as its Committee liaison an Agency veteran of the 1963 anti-Castro plotting who actually should have been called as a witness.

Still, due to books such as Dan Moldea’s
The Hoffa Wars
and the House Select Committee’s investigation, the press finally linked Marcello and Trafficante to JFK’s assassination. Surprisingly, only in the late 1970s did Jack Ruby first become widely identified in the press as a mobster, even though some journalists had known of his mob ties for years. After the House Committee ended with its 1979 conclusion of conspiracy, more books and lengthy mainstream articles with evidence of conspiracy followed, including works by former Senate and House investigator Gaeton Fonzi and former FBI agent William Turner, who had been the first agent to publicly confront J. Edgar Hoover. Both men gave me important, early assistance when I began researching JFK’s murder in the late 1980s.

In 1985 the FBI finally obtained Carlos Marcello’s confession to JFK’s assassination, including details of how it was carried out and the godfather’s meetings with Oswald and Ruby. Yet none of that information was released to the public at the time or during the intense media coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s murder in November 1988—and in fact it wouldn’t reach the public for years. Nonetheless, mainstream documentaries and articles casting suspicion on Marcello and the Mafia appeared at the time.

Oliver Stone left the Mafia—including the extensive work that David Ferrie (memorably played in the film by Joe Pesci) performed for Carlos Marcello in 1963—almost completely out of his 1991 film
JFK
. Still, it was superior filmmaking, using many documented facts, except for some of the remarks by District Attorney Jim Garrison (an associate of Marcello’s brother Joe) and all of the remarks by the fictional character “Mr. X.”
*

However, the popularity and cultural impact of Stone’s film did lead directly to passage of the 1992 JFK Records Act, designed to release all of the JFK assassination records. It took three years for the first releases to begin, and in the meantime, Gerald Posner’s 1993
Case Closed
was part of a well-orchestrated media campaign to push back against the views of
JFK
and the conspiracy books by Mark Lane and others that had become best sellers in its wake. Posner was criticized for presenting essentially a one-sided case against Oswald in championing the
Warren Report
’s “lone nut/single bullet” theory. (It would take seventeen years for Posner to issue a 2010 news release admitting
“. . . I’ve always believed that had Mark Lane represented Oswald, he would have won an acquittal.”) Similar criticisms were leveled fourteen years later against Vincent Bugliosi’s massive
Reclaiming History
, which—far from being an objective account—grew out of Bugliosi’s work as Oswald’s prosecutor in a televised mock trial.

Even today, some authors continue to ignore the Mafia’s confessed role in JFK’s murder, the findings of the House Select Committee, and the new file releases. That’s true for Bill O’Reilly’s
Killing Kennedy
, which basically accepts the
Warren Report
’s conclusion, and for Brian Latell’s 2012
Castro’s Secrets
. Latell, who admits his work for the CIA’s Cold War against Cuba goes back to the 1960s, also implies that Fidel Castro’s government was somehow linked to JFK’s assassination, something CIA personnel have been unsuccessfully claiming for decades.

The evidence of Carlos Marcello’s guilt in JFK’s murder was extensive even before his confession, but the new information makes his motivation and methods even clearer. Marcello was far more powerful than any other godfather, and he remained so for an unusually long period of time. For almost forty years, he was the unchallenged ruler of a territory that included all of Louisiana, most of Texas, and much of Mississippi. Unlike the leaders of warring Mafia factions in cities like New York, Marcello didn’t need to fight with the surrounding mob bosses; he became partners with them, expanding his reach even farther. For example, government investigators showed that Marcello played a key role in the ruthless, highly lucrative French Connection heroin network run by Santo Trafficante—which is one reason several members of that network played roles in JFK’s murder.

Investigators determined that by the 1960s, the revenue of Marcello’s vast criminal empire was equal to that of the largest
American corporation of the time, General Motors. This vast wealth allowed Marcello to own mayors, judges, governors, members of Congress, and senators. Marcello even employed his own high-powered Washington lobbyist (the same one used by countries such as Nicaragua) and a powerful Washington law firm. Yet he maintained a very low public profile and managed to remain out of the spotlight—until John and Robert Kennedy dragged him in front of the TV cameras covering their Senate crime hearings in 1959. That started the Kennedys’ war against the Mafia, and against Marcello in particular. As described in later chapters, that war resulted in the Kennedys’ April 1961 deportation of Marcello to Central America.

This unprecedented—and apparently extralegal—act involved a law-enforcement convoy rushing Marcello to the New Orleans airport, where a waiting plane took him to Guatemala, where Marcello had obtained a fake birth certificate. Marcello, who had seemed untouchable under the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration, was furious over the Kennedys’ action. After Guatemala ordered Marcello out, his hatred of the Kennedy brothers soon became even more intense. The godfather had to trudge through the jungle in his Gucci shoes, accompanied only by his lawyer, all the while swearing eternal vengeance against President Kennedy and his brother. After sneaking back into the United States with the aid of his pilot, David Ferrie, Marcello faced increasing pressure from the President and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, culminating in his federal trial in New Orleans in November 1963.

Thanks to bribing a key juror, Marcello made sure he was acquitted on November 22, 1963, just after JFK’s murder. Knowing he would be acquitted, Marcello had even planned a celebration with his family and associates for the evening of JFK’s assassination. (The night
of JFK’s murder, Marcello’s partner in the crime, Santo Trafficante, publicly toasted JFK’s assassination with his attorney, Frank Ragano, at a posh restaurant in the same Tampa hotel where JFK had spoken just four days earlier.)

Because Marcello ruled the oldest mob family in the United States, he didn’t have to get approval from the national Mafia commission before undertaking major hits. Unlike most mob families (except for Chicago), Marcello and his close associates also had a history of targeting government officials who posed a threat, including the 1954 assassination of Alabama’s anti-mob Attorney General–elect.

AFTER BECOMING PRESIDENT and Attorney General, John and Robert Kennedy had tried in vain to convict Marcello as part of their massive war against organized crime. Their war against the mob became Marcello’s reason for killing JFK, in order to end Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s power and prosecution of him. For years, historians believed the FBI had not followed up on the House Committee’s 1979 recommendation to investigate Marcello further for JFK’s murder. I was the first to discover the FBI’s uncensored CAMTEX files about Marcello in the National Archives in 2006 and revealed them in about a dozen pages of
Legacy of Secrecy
in 2008. However, the files contained so much information—and there was so much more from my exclusive interviews with the FBI supervisor for CAMTEX, with an additional key CAMTEX FBI official, and with another individual involved—that there wasn’t room to include all the CAMTEX revelations. NBC News tracked down CAMTEX informant Jack Van Laningham for a Discovery Channel special featuring me and
Legacy
. But there was room—and time—to insert only a few additional sentences naming Van Laningham in the updated trade
paperback of
Legacy
because three new chapters of other important new information had already been added.

However, since that time, I have had more than a dozen exclusive, probing talks with Van Laningham about Marcello, fleshing out even more material in the FBI’s CAMTEX files. Van Laningham—an ordinary businessman who went to prison after one drunken escapade (robbing a bank with a TV remote control and a bag of laundry, which he claimed were a detonator and a bomb)—was eventually made Marcello’s cellmate by the FBI. He drew Marcello out in numerous conversations over many months as the two became friends, all while Van Laningham was reporting to the FBI and recording Marcello’s remarks via a court-authorized, bugged transistor radio, supplied by the FBI.

Later chapters quote Marcello describing for the first time exactly how he had JFK killed, using Marcello’s own descriptions given to FBI informant Van Laningham, backed up with independent corroboration for many of the godfather’s statements. Marcello ordered the murder because of his often-voiced hatred of John and Robert Kennedy over his deportation, his ongoing prosecution, and their unrelenting and ever-escalating war against the Mafia, especially against his allies such as Santo Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa. Yet Marcello had not reached and maintained his powerful position by taking rash action, especially where hits were concerned. The House Committee found evidence that Marcello and Trafficante had carefully planned the JFK hit for more than a year.

Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, the Chicago Mafia’s man in Hollywood and Las Vegas, soon joined the godfathers’ plot, since his boss, Sam Giancana, was also under intense pressure from the Kennedy Justice Department. Ever cautious, Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli
developed one plan for shooting JFK in a motorcade that could be used in any of three cities: Chicago, home of Rosselli’s mob family, Trafficante’s base of Tampa, or Dallas, in Marcello’s territory. That way, even their backup plan (Tampa) had a backup (Dallas). Since the medical evidence in JFK’s murder shows at least two gunmen were involved—and the evidence against Oswald as a shooter falls apart under close examination, as the next chapter starts to show—who pulled the triggers?

Carlos Marcello said that he imported two of the hit men from Europe for the JFK assignment; an independent account shows this was a favored technique for Marcello in other hits as well—a way to use difficult-to-trace shooters for especially sensitive hits. Later chapters explain why the two men were chosen, how they obtained travel documents and aliases, and what the FBI was able to learn about their actual identities. They also detail why Marcello said the two shooters came into the United States from Canada, through Michigan, instead of making a border crossing much closer to Dallas.

Michigan was logical because the mob bosses planned their first attempt to kill JFK for Chicago, on November 2, 1963. JFK’s Chicago motorcade route passed by a warehouse that employed an ex-Marine with recent parallels to Oswald. After Chicago-based Secret Service agents learned that four hit men were at large in the city, the ex-Marine was arrested and the attempt called off. As detailed later, JFK canceled not just his motorcade but his entire visit at the last minute, and news of the threat was kept out of the press by the White House and Secret Service, even though it was known to some reporters.

Marcello’s next attempt was planned for Trafficante’s home base of Tampa, where the longest domestic motorcade of JFK’s Presidency was scheduled for November 18, 1963. However, Tampa’s police
chief, J. P. Mullins, told me that federal authorities learned about a plot to shoot JFK in the motorcade. Security precautions were intense as JFK (without Jackie) bravely went ahead with the motorcade for national security reasons. Once again, the President’s men insisted that no word of the threat appear in the press. Only one small article slipped out the day after JFK died, but it was quickly suppressed and never seen by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee.