The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (35 page)

Additionally, Oswald’s time in Russia would have made it possible to blame any problem he had in Cuba on the Russians, something CIA notes by William Harvey indicate was always essential for an assassination mission. After analyzing many recently declassified files, Naval War College professor and historian David Kaiser concluded in 2008 that “in all probability, Oswald’s attempt to reach Cuba via Mexico City . . . was designed to give him an opportunity to assassinate Castro.” I agree with Kaiser that Oswald was trying to get into Cuba as part of an effort to eliminate Castro. But I disagree that Oswald intended “to assassinate Castro.” He didn’t have the experience necessary for such a task, and he’d never killed anyone. But he could have had a supporting role in a Castro elimination plot, and he would have made an excellent fall guy. Oswald had been part of an operation against Fidel when he was in Mexico City, and after his failure to get into Cuba, Oswald had probably been told—likely by Banister, Ferrie, or Martino—that he still was part of such an operation.

Even as Lee Oswald prepared to return to Dallas from Mexico City in early October 1963, one more important link was being forged between Oswald, JFK’s assassination, and the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The training camp outside New Orleans where David Ferrie reportedly took Oswald was a sort of minor-league training camp for Manual Artime’s AMWORLD portion of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The camp’s owner later said that “he bought arms from Ferrie,
who in turn got them from US Army personnel who had stolen them.” Declassified files show that some arms reported stolen from National Guard armories in the Texas area were actually being supplied to Cuban exile leaders like Manolo Ray’s JURE group, which JFK and RFK wanted for their coup plan. Other military personnel were taking advantage of that situation by stealing and selling arms and keeping the money.

In October 1963 the Treasury Department tried to stop the trafficking in stolen arms with an undercover sting. Surprisingly, FBI and Treasury Department memos from that operation quote a Dallas gun dealer as giving a fairly accurate description of the upcoming JFK–Almeida coup plan. The Dallas gun dealer said that in “the last week of November 1963 . . . a large scale amphibious operation would take place against the Cuba mainland” and “United States military forces or government agencies would possibly be involved in this operation [which] involved an attack by rebel Cuban forces.” Writers for the
Washington Post
linked longtime gunrunner Jack Ruby to that same stolen-military-arms ring. As for the gun dealer who accurately described the upcoming US action against Cuba, the
Washington Post
said he was the gun dealer who sold the bullets used in Oswald’s rifle on November 22, 1963. That means even the bullet found in Oswald’s rifle after JFK’s assassination had been connected to the JFK–Almeida coup plan.

BY OCTOBER 1963, Carlos Marcello faced losing his empire, his freedom, and even the ability to stay in America—unless he ended Robert Kennedy’s extraordinary power by killing JFK. Two dates in particular now loomed large for Marcello. He was scheduled to be tried in New Orleans on federal charges on November 1, 1963,
with one of RFK’s own Mafia prosecutors—John Diuguid—handling the trial. Anxious to avoid the deportation a conviction could bring, Marcello would soon begin efforts to bribe a key juror. However, that was at best only a temporary solution, since the godfather knew that even if he was not convicted, RFK would launch a new investigation as soon as that trial ended. (Indeed, the Justice Department would later prosecute him for bribing the juror.) RFK was already focusing on serious tax charges against Marcello, and the Mafia chief knew he would have no respite while JFK was alive.

Carlos Marcello knew he had to act before the coup took place and removed his only opportunity to force a cover-up by top US officials. Marcello had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the JFK–Almeida coup plan to go forward. Robert Kennedy and aides such as Harry Williams had made it clear that as long as JFK was President, Cuba would never be a safe haven for Marcello, Trafficante, or any other Mafia boss.

The date for the coup was firming up to be sometime in early December 1963, something Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli could have learned from their CIA allies in the JFK plot, like David Morales and Bernard Barker. If Marcello killed JFK before the coup, it would force Robert Kennedy, CIA Director McCone, military leaders like General Maxwell Taylor, and others to withhold critical information from investigators, the press, and the public to prevent a confrontation with the Soviets that could go nuclear.

With the coup date looming, Marcello and the others organized attempts to kill JFK in November 1963 during motorcades in three different cities: Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas. Marcello relied on his trusted associates—the Chicago mob’s Rosselli and Trafficante in Tampa—to help him oversee the plot.

First they would try to kill JFK during his long Chicago motorcade on November 2, 1963, the day after Marcello’s trial was set to begin. The mob bosses’ year of careful planning meant that even their backup plan (Tampa during JFK’s November 18 motorcade) had a backup (Dallas on November 22) and that each city’s Mafia family equally shared the risk. That risk would be minimized by the mob bosses’ using only experienced men they knew they could trust.

The Mafiosi had come up with one basic plan that could be applied in each of the three cities. Because the opportunities were so close together, the bosses could use most of the same personnel for each attempt. Each of the three target cities had a key Mafia operative close to law enforcement who would monitor any leaks about—or investigations into—the JFK hit.

In Chicago, the mob’s top “made” man in law enforcement was Richard Cain, who was also chief investigator for the Cook County Sheriff. The CIA continued to deal with Cain in the fall of 1963, giving him a pipeline not only into law enforcement but into intelligence as well. In Tampa, Trafficante’s man was Sergeant Jack de la Llana, who had formed and become director of the Tampa Police Department’s first criminal intelligence unit. As revealed in Senate hearings in October 1963, when de la Llana testified while posing as an honest cop, he was also “chairman of the Florida Intelligence Unit, a statewide agency which coordinates information . . . throughout the State of Florida.” This cooperation even extended to other states, as shown when Sergeant de la Llana exchanged information with the New Orleans Police Department about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As described to me by Chief Mullins and others (who didn’t realize de la Llana was working for Trafficante in 1963), de la Llana was the perfect man for the Tampa godfather to have on the force.

In Dallas, Jack Ruby could serve a similar function. Though Ruby wasn’t a member of law enforcement, his friendly contacts with Dallas Police were long-standing and ran deep. According to government files, Ruby knew at least seven hundred of the twelve hundred Dallas policemen; several officers and Ruby associates claimed that Ruby actually knew EVERY Dallas policeman. Ruby was particularly close to several corrupt cops, and as noted earlier, one Warren Commission document called Ruby “the pay-off man for the Dallas Police Department.”

One key requirement of the assassination plan was the same for Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas: JFK would be killed in public in a moving car. Shooting JFK in a moving car gave the Mafia several advantages. The mob bosses knew from earlier motorcades—like JFK’s spring 1963 trip to Chicago—that Secret Service agents rode with the motorcade and were not on the ground except at the beginning and end of the route. This meant that if JFK was shot en route, no Secret Service would be stationed at the site of the shooting. Even better for them, shooting JFK in a car—as opposed to blowing it up—would take the Secret Service agents away from the crime scene, since they would have to stay with the motorcade to protect the President on the way to the hospital.

The Mafia’s plan to kill JFK was very similar to the CIA’s plan to kill Castro in the CIA–Mafia plots, and likely to Almeida’s part of the coup plan. For top US officials who knew about the coup or the CIA–Mafia plots, hearing how JFK had been shot would be an additional shock that would make maintaining the secrecy surrounding the coup plan a top priority. That cloak of secrecy would also help obscure the Mafia’s role in JFK’s death.

We noted earlier David Atlee Phillips’s autobiographical manuscript about the CIA’s decision to have Fidel shot “with a sniper’s rifle
from an upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro [was riding] in an open jeep.” The sad irony is that the Mafia may have taken the very plan the CIA had intended to use against Castro in his jeep and adapted it to kill JFK in an open limousine.

More confirmation for the CIA’s approach to killing Castro comes from declassified CIA files and from Manuel Artime’s top lieutenant from AMWORLD, Cuban exile Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero. Speaking of a later version of an AMWORLD plot to kill Fidel, Quintero said the plan was to shoot Castro at Varadero Beach. Still another, later CIA AMWORLD document, which mentions Commander Almeida, says “the assassination [of Fidel] is to take place in public so that everyone can see that the leaders have been killed.”

Killing JFK in public, in a car, would ensure that the CIA, Robert Kennedy, and other high officials recognized immediately on hearing the first reports of the tragedy the similarity between JFK’s death and the plans to eliminate Castro.

How the mob could have applied the CIA’s Castro plan to instead assassinate JFK becomes clear when we consider the October 1963 Senate testimony of Neil G. Brown, who was stepping down as Tampa Police Chief at the end of the month, to be replaced by J. P. Mullins. Chief Brown provided the Senators, and the press, with a remarkable summary of how Tampa’s Trafficante conducted and got away with mob hits; much of it reads almost like a script for what happened in Dallas the following month. Brown’s Senate testimony makes it clear that Trafficante—as well as Marcello and Rosselli—would do on a larger scale with JFK’s assassination what they had already done successfully in the past.

Brown testified about Trafficante’s ties to Rosselli’s boss, Giancana, and to a French Connection heroin partner Michel Victor
Mertz. Next came his accounts of Trafficante’s direct links to several murders, in addition to many others he had ordered.

After noting Trafficante’s role in the still officially unsolved barbershop slaying of New York mob boss Albert Anastasia, Brown explained that Trafficante had “been picked up by the police for questioning about the gangland slayings of three [other] men” over the years, but authorities were unable to prosecute Trafficante for those hits because the godfather took care to insulate himself from mob executions, using intermediaries and professional hit men to carry out his dirty work.

Brown pointed out the “relative infrequency with which such professional murders are successfully prosecuted” and explained why. He said that police had solved only one of twenty-three Mafia murders in Tampa, and the lone exception was not a typical Mafia hit. Brown said it was very “difficult to obtain evidence sufficient for successful prosecution of Mafia members, because the witnesses who might offer such evidence have always been reluctant to do so [due to] fear of Mafia reprisals, since it is common knowledge in Tampa that the Mafia does not hesitate to murder” those who talk to the authorities or testify.

One of the Trafficante hits described by Brown in his testimony is very similar to what happened to JFK and Oswald. Brown said Trafficante targeted a victim whose “head was blown off [while he] was seated in his automobile.” Then the main “suspect in this murder was himself murdered,” as happened with Oswald.

CHAPTER 12

Carlos Marcello and the Hit Men for JFK’s Murder

E
VEN AS JFK’S plan with Almeida proceeded in the fall of 1963, he and Robert Kennedy looked for a way to find a peaceful solution to the problem of Cuba that wouldn’t involve what one memo called “a bloody coup.” Historians have long known that the Kennedys initiated two separate back-channel attempts to negotiate with Fidel in the fall of 1963, one using pioneering TV journalist Lisa Howard and special UN envoy William Attwood, and the other through French journalist Jean Daniel. The JFK–Almeida coup plan helps explain the urgency of those efforts at that particular time.

However, neither of the Kennedys’ secret peace efforts had produced any breakthroughs, and that would continue to be the case up until JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963. To maintain deniability in case the secret talks were exposed, JFK had to work through William Attwood, who in turn talked to Fidel’s doctor, who dealt with Fidel. The parties were wary of each other, and the negotiations slow. Fidel also had to deal with factions within his own regime, with one Attwood memo to JFK noting that Fidel didn’t want Che Guevara to find out about the secret talks because “there was a rift between Castro and the Guevara [and] Almeida group on the question
of Cuba’s future course.” JFK kept his own secrets from Attwood, not telling him that, barring some dramatic breakthrough in the secret talks, JFK and Bobby planned to allow Almeida to overthrow Fidel in December 1963.

Frustrated by the slow pace of the Attwood negotiations yet anxious to avoid a violent coup if possible, in late October 1963 JFK asked French journalist Jean Daniel to talk to Fidel on his behalf. But Fidel had kept Daniel cooling his heels in Havana for weeks. Daniel would not get to see Fidel until November 21, the day before JFK’s trip to Dallas. No real progress was made in their talk, but Fidel was intrigued enough by Daniel’s message from JFK that he invited the journalist to a follow-up lunch on November 22 at Castro’s villa at Varadero Beach. However, Daniel could not securely communicate directly with JFK or Bobby about his talks with Castro, so the Kennedys would have no way to know that Daniel was finally speaking with the Cuban leader.

John and Robert Kennedy had basically one overall goal for Cuba by late October 1963: to resolve the situation so that the United States could peacefully coexist with Cuba. That could come about with a peacefully negotiated settlement if possible, but if not, they would try to bring it about by supporting Commander Almeida and the Cuban exile leaders with their coup, hopefully leading to eventual free elections and democracy in Cuba.