The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (59 page)

In the case of each of those Committees, all the files about JFK–Almeida coup plan—and its infiltration by the Mafia—were withheld from Congress. That was ostensibly to protect Almeida, still a very high official in Cuba, from being exposed as a US asset. It also prevented the exposure of intelligence failures by agencies like the CIA and potentially embarrassing revelations about officials of both parties. For example, while crucial information was being withheld from the Church Committee, former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford was President, his Chief of Staff was Donald Rumsfeld, his senior White House adviser, Dick Cheney, and later, his CIA Director was George H. W. Bush. All four men had been part of the Nixon Administration during the Watergate scandal, which had involved numerous veterans of the anti-Castro plots, including those linked to the Mafia.

Of course, Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had the most to fear if their roles in JFK’s assassination were exposed by the Congressional investigations. The godfathers would try to prevent that at any cost, even if it meant murdering some of their own.

*
For extensive documentation about the criminal ties of Sirhan and some of his brothers, as well as FBI reports that Jimmy Hoffa had put a bounty on RFK, see
Legacy of Secrecy
.

*
For more about this, see the updated, trade paperback edition of
Watergate: The Hidden History
(2013).

CHAPTER 18

Mafia Murders, Confessions, and a Million Files Still Secret

T
HE CIA–MAFIA PLOTS to kill Fidel Castro became front-page news in June 1975. Even as the Rockefeller Commission issued its final report on June 11, 1975, the Senate Church Committee intensified its efforts. On June 13, the Church Committee again grilled Helms, this time exclusively about CIA assassination plots, including those with the Mafia. He testified in closed session, so the public had no way to know what he said—or didn’t say. Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante would have been extremely concerned, since Helms’s revelations about the CIA–Mafia plots could lead to the exposure of their roles in JFK’s murder. In the short term, Trafficante had the most to lose, since he’d played a much bigger role in the CIA–Mafia plots. Trafficante would have been especially worried when Sam Giancana was subpoenaed and slated to testify on June 26.

On June 19, 1975, Sam Giancana became the first of several Congressional witnesses to be murdered. The former mob boss was cooking a late-night meal for a trusted friend visiting his home in Chicago’s Oak Park neighborhood. His friend shot Giancana seven times with a silenced .22-caliber pistol, an unusually small gun for a
mob hit. Five of the shots were around Giancana’s chin and mouth, a sign that Mafiosi shouldn’t talk.

The gun was eventually traced to Florida, and some pointed the finger at Trafficante. One government informant, Charles Crimaldi, said that Giancana was killed by someone who worked for the CIA, though the hit man was acting on his own and not at the request of officials. Since several CIA assets and officials also worked with the Mafia, the hit man could have been someone with ties to both the mob and the Agency.

Giancana’s murder made headlines across the country, adding urgency to the Committees’ investigations. The day after Giancana’s death, CIA Director William Colby testified about CIA assassination plots, followed four days later by Johnny Rosselli. The transcripts—kept secret until the 1990s—show that Rosselli had mastered the art of saying a lot while revealing little, sticking to an incomplete version of the CIA–Mafia plots that mirrored the whitewashed version Helms had promulgated in his own testimony and in the 1967 Inspector General’s Report. On June 25, William Harvey testified to the Church Committee about the CIA–Mafia plots, followed by more testimony from Helms on July 17 and 18, both in closed sessions.

Jack Anderson wrote once more about Rosselli on July 7, and
Time
magazine ran an article touching on the original 1959 CIA–Mafia plots that Jimmy Hoffa had brokered—a story Hoffa himself had just leaked to someone with the Church Committee. Hoffa was now in the crosshairs of the Committee, because of
Time
’s article about the 1959 CIA–Mafia plots.

Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficane couldn’t afford to let Hoffa testify, continue his leaks to Committee staff, or continue his efforts to rejoin the Teamsters. According to the CAMTEX FBI file, Marcello
summoned Hoffa to Churchill Farms for a conference shortly before his disappearance, but Hoffa refused to back down.

On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa was spotted leaving a restaurant near Detroit, headed for what he thought was a meeting with New Jersey mobster Tony Provenzano, an associate of Carlos Marcello’s. Hoffa was never seen again, and his body has never been found.

Government informant Crimaldi said that “he had heard information that the same man that killed [Giancana] took care of Hoffa for the same reason: he knew about the Castro plots [and] it had been Hoffa who was the original liaison between the CIA and the [Mafia].” Hoffa was killed the same day Senator George McGovern released to the US news media an updated copy of the Cuban Dossier of CIA assassination attempts against Castro, which McGovern had recently received in Cuba.

Johnny Rosselli used Jack Anderson to ensure he didn’t meet the same fate as Giancana and Hoffa. Anderson’s September 1, 1975, column claimed that Rosselli had avoided deportation because of his war record, helping Rosselli show Trafficante and Marcello that he wasn’t getting preferential INS treatment because he was testifying. Rosselli was back in front of the Church Committee on September 22, ten days after Helms had faced the Committee yet again.

Trafficante’s old associate Rolando Masferrer—who was on the fringe of the JFK plot—was killed in a spectacular car bombing on October 31, 1975. His death could have been related to the Church Committee hearings or to the general upsurge of violence in Miami’s exile community, fueled by politics and the expanding drug trade. A current article about JFK’s assassination was on Masferrer’s desk when he died. John Martino, Masferrer’s mutual associate with Trafficante, had died of natural causes on August 3, 1975, three days after Hoffa
disappeared. In declining health, Martino had finally confessed his role in JFK’s murder to two friends, his business partner and reporter John Cummings. The Church Committee apparently never learned about Martino or his published statements about the Kennedys’ 1963 coup and invasion plan.

William Harvey, who had already testified to the Church Committee but had not revealed all he knew about the CIA–Mafia plots, died on June 9, 1976. Long out of the CIA, he had worked most recently at a book publisher, where he reportedly scrubbed information about Johnny Rosselli and the Miami CIA station from the memoir of an Army Ranger stationed there in 1963 (it was restored for a later edition).

In addition to the main Senate Church Committee, there was a subcommittee with Senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker that was devoted exclusively to exploring JFK’s assassination. Their report was issued on June 23, 1976, but Schweiker was determined to forge ahead with the investigation, which included the possibility of more interrogation of Johnny Rosselli by increasingly knowledgeable Senate staffers.

Rosselli had a problem he could have discussed only with his attorney, Tom Wadden: During intense questioning, he had reportedly given Congressional investigators Santo Trafficante’s name in relation to JFK’s assassination. Rosselli had to explain to Wadden why that, or further testimony, was so dangerous. According to historian Richard Mahoney, Rosselli confessed to Wadden his “role in plotting to kill the President”—something Wadden revealed only much later, to RFK’s former Mafia prosecutor William Hundley.

On July 16, 1976, Rosselli had dinner with Trafficante and told the godfather he’d had to mention his name during his most recent
testimony. Twelve days later, on July 28, 1976, Rosselli was seen alive in public for the last time. Once it was clear Rosselli was missing, Senator Schweiker asked the FBI to look into the matter.

Rosselli’s body finally turned up on August 7, 1976, in a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, found in a canal near Miami. Rosselli had been shot and stabbed, his legs cut off, and his body stuffed in the oil drum. It was shot with holes, so it wouldn’t float, then weighted with chains, but somehow it was still discovered. The police were officially baffled, and E. Howard Hunt suggested that Fidel had killed Rosselli. However, three of Rosselli’s associates said that Trafficante had ordered the gruesome slaying. Rosselli’s murder was the kind of headline news that even the most jaded or intimidated reporter couldn’t ignore, especially after Jack Anderson revealed information he had to keep secret while Rosselli was alive. In his September 7, 1976, column, Anderson wrote that Rosselli had said those involved in the CIA–Mafia plots had killed JFK and even hinted that shots from the grassy knoll were part of that plan.

The Senate Church Committee hearings had overshadowed those in the House by the Pike Committee, but on September 17, 1976—amid the furor created by Rosselli’s murder—the House created the Select Committee on Assassinations. Unfortunately, the investigation’s first nine months were hampered by problems in settling on a chief counsel to direct the probe and determining which member of Congress would chair the Committee. Not until the summer of 1977 did the House Select Committee finally have its permanent general counsel, G. Robert Blakey, creator of the RICO racketeering law and a former Mafia prosecutor for Robert Kennedy.

Santo Trafficante had been interviewed once by the Church Committee, with no record kept at Trafficante’s request, but he couldn’t
count on such consideration from the new House Select Committee. Hit man Charles Nicoletti, an associate of Johnny Rosselli’s and a veteran of the CIA–Mafia plots with Trafficante, was slated to talk to Congressional investigators. But on March 29, 1977, Nicoletti was “the victim of a mob assassination” in Chicago, according to the
Miami Herald
. They said Nicoletti “was pulled from his burning car . . . after being shot three times in the back of the head at point-blank range.” The article mentioned that Nicoletti had once “been responsible for drawing up CIA-ordered plans for the assassination of Castro . . . in October, 1963,” though at that time, Nicoletti’s mob superiors were far more focused on assassinating JFK than Castro.

Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the Church Committee, had gone to work for the new House Select Committee on Assassinations. On the same day that Nicoletti died, Fonzi was in south Florida to interview George DeMohrenschildt, the sophisticated White Russian who had been Oswald’s best friend for a time. DeMohrenschildt had known not only Jackie Kennedy but also George H. W. Bush. Even as Fonzi spoke to DeMohrenschildt’s daughter about arranging the interview, DeMohrenschildt was meeting with a writer for the
Wall Street Journal
, Edward Epstein, telling Epstein he’d informed Dallas CIA official J. Walton Moore about Oswald’s activities. That evening, before Fonzi could meet him, DeMohrenschildt committed suicide by putting the barrel of a .20-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

About a week later, Fonzi had also planned to set up an interview in Miami with former Cuban president Carlos Prio, also an associate of Trafficante’s. On April 5, 1977, before Fonzi could interview him, Prio committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart with a .38 pistol.

That fall, Fonzi tried to arrange an interview with Cuban exile Manuel Artime after being tipped that Artime had “guilty knowledge” of JFK’s assassination. Artime, one of E. Howard Hunt’s best friends and a supplier of “hush money” to Hunt and the other Watergate burglars, had become a player in Miami’s exploding drug market. Fonzi’s partner talked to Artime in early November about scheduling an interview, but Artime entered the hospital the following week, was diagnosed with cancer, and died two weeks later, on November 18, 1977, at only forty-five.

The following spring, Fonzi tried to track down David Morales, though the CIA made it difficult for the House Select Committee to determine even Morales’s CIA position in 1963. Two weeks after David Atlee Phillips and Antonio Veciana testified to the Select Committee in executive session—and after Morales was added to the list of CIA personnel the Committee wanted to interview—Morales died, apparently of natural causes, on May 8, 1978.

In less than three years, Congressional investigations had been thwarted by the deaths of at least nine actual or potential witnesses, from the sensational murders of Rosselli, Giancana, and Hoffa to the unexpected deaths of Morales, Artime, and DeMohrenschildt. Those important witnesses died before they could testify fully or, in most cases, testify at all. Surprisingly, even after Harry Williams had seen those headlines, he still volunteered to talk to the House Select Committee, but he never heard back from them.

THE REMAINING PROBLEMS for Fonzi, Blakey, and the rest of the Committee centered on the CIA and the Mafia, as well as on critical files being withheld from them by the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Naval Intelligence (and Marine Intelligence). Richard Helms faced
charges about lying to Congress that needed to be resolved before he could testify. After a major White House meeting about the issue in July 1977, Helms agreed to plead guilty to making a false statement to Congress and was fined $2,000 on November 4, 1977. Later that day, he went to a CIA reception where his current and former CIA colleagues donated an even larger amount.

Santo Trafficante had primarily pleaded the Fifth in his first House Select Committee appearance on March 16, 1977, but Blakey arranged to grant him and Marcello limited immunity, in an effort to get them to talk. The situation was complicated because Trafficante was under indictment for charges relating to the FBI’s BRILAB investigation, which had grown out of the Watergate-era prosecution of Nixon’s former attorney general, Richard Kleindienst. Carlos Marcello didn’t realize his new business partner, Joe Hauser, would soon be a wired FBI informant for that operation. Nonetheless, Trafficante testified on November 14, 1977, and September 28, 1978, and Marcello testified in January 1978. Both gave cautious statements and denied having anything to do with JFK’s murder.