The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (60 page)

The same month that Trafficante testified for the last time, author Dan Moldea had a revealing exchange with Frank Ragano, Trafficante’s former attorney who had gone through a very acrimonious split with the Tampa godfather. Possibly as part of a Teamster effort to suppress Moldea’s book, Ragano had offered Moldea a large sum for the rights to it. As part of their back and forth, in September 1978 Moldea had his attorney ask Ragano about his book’s theory that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante were behind JFK’s murder. Moldea said “that Ragano . . . corroborated my conclusions.”

Bernard Barker had been released from prison for his Watergate crimes in June 1974, but by 1978 he was being investigated by the
House Select Committee on Assassinations. According to a formerly secret Committee memorandum about Barker, “he was closely examined under oath by the [Committee about] allegations under investigation by the Committee that Barker associates . . . Hunt and [Frank] Sturgis [aka Fiorini] were in Dallas on November 22, 1963.” We can’t tell if the Committee investigated Barker’s possible presence in Dallas that day, because according to the National Archives website, Barker’s entire Committee testimony on August 29, 1978, remains withheld. That is highly unusual, since even the testimony of far more senior CIA figures like Richard Helms, E. Howard Hunt, and David Atlee Phillips has been released in full. For CIA figures, testimony can be released with any sensitive terms or identities censored, so it’s remarkable that all of Barker’s Committee testimony remains secret.

Even though the Committee conducted an investigation of Barker, it’s not mentioned in the Committee’s
Final Report
or in any of their supporting volumes. A six-page Committee memorandum about Barker, recently discovered among the million-plus pages of JFK files on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, is the only indication Barker was investigated by the Committee. However, the memorandum’s biography of Barker does not mention the FBI report of Barker’s gangster activity in Cuba, which may not have been provided to the Committee. There is no indication in the memo that the Committee investigated Barker’s Mafia ties. The CIA withheld much material from the Committee about the roles of Barker (and Hunt and Helms) in the JFK–Almeida coup plan and the CIA–Mafia plots. A CIA Office of Security memo says that “3 sealed envelopes” were deleted from the Barker file given to the Committee.

On April 22, 1978, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance—a veteran of the JFK–Almeida coup plan—had his representative meet with
Commander Juan Almeida at the UN in New York. A short time later, CIA officer George Joannides was assigned to be the Agency’s new liasion with the House Select Committee. Joannides had worked with David Atlee Phillips in 1963, running the DRE exile group involved in the altercation with Oswald. The Committee wanted to interview the CIA agent running the DRE in 1963, but Joannides claimed he couldn’t be found. It appears that some high CIA official, probably Ted Shackley, was using Joannides—and the excuse of protecting Almeida—to withhold important information from the Committee.

As the House Select Committee on Assassinations rushed to finish its work on the JFK assassination, acoustic tests indicated there had been at least one shot from the grassy knoll. Those highly technical findings have been the source of much debate ever since, so I have not factored them into my conclusions. When the House Committee submitted its
Final Report
on March 29, 1979, its ultimate conclusion about JFK’s murder was that it was likely a conspiracy, involving at least one shot from the grassy knoll. In addition:

The Committee found that Trafficante, like Marcello, had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.

For both Marcello and Trafficante, the Committee “was unable to establish direct evidence of Marcello’s complicity.” It could just as well have added “because of all the material the CIA, FBI, and other agencies withheld.” Investigator Gaeton Fonzi later wrote a book-length account of all the Agency stonewalling the Committee had faced, called
The Last Investigation
. The Committee also recommended the Justice Department investigate the possible involvement of Marcello and Trafficante in JFK’s murder.

BY 1981, CARLOS Marcello was feeling the full force of the FBI’s BRILAB undercover operation. Facing the biggest legal battle of his life, Marcello was under indictment in Louisiana for trying to bribe state officials in a multimillion-dollar insurance scam. In Los Angeles, he’d been indicted for trying to bribe a federal judge. Even worse, much of the evidence was in the godfather’s own words, recorded by a bug and phone taps the FBI had finally placed in Marcello’s office at the Town and Country Motel. They were augmented by secret recordings made by convicted insurance swindler Joe Hauser, who wore a wire for the FBI in hopes of securing an early release. He was aided by two undercover FBI agents, who pretended to be crooked businessmen.

In Miami, Santo Trafficante was under indictment for a $1 million labor union fraud scheme. Both Trafficante and Marcello were also hit with RICO racketeering charges, using the statute that G. Robert Blakey had helped create. Trafficante would avoid conviction, but Marcello’s luck had finally run out.

Marcello’s BRILAB battles were covered by the press in New Orleans, and by some national media like the
New York Times
, but the coverage rarely mentioned his name in conjunction with JFK’s assassination. The 1,200 hours of BRILAB recordings, along with unrecorded information from Hauser, contained tantalizing hints about Marcello and the assassination. They weren’t mentioned in the press and were barred from the trial, at Marcello’s lawyers’ request, so they wouldn’t prejudice the jury. Still, the jury was able to hear hours of Marcello discussing the blatant corruption and crimes he had been committing for years.

Marcello was convicted in Louisiana on August 4, 1981, and in Los Angeles on December 11, 1981. The following year, he was sentenced to seven years for the Louisiana counts and ten years for the
Los Angeles counts. His powerful attorneys did everything they could, but on April 15, 1983, Marcello’s BRILAB appeal was denied and he was ordered to begin serving his sentence immediately.

At age seventy-three, Marcello faced seventeen years in prison. He was initially sent to familiar territory: the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, in Springfield, Missouri, where Marcello had spent six months a decade earlier. The prison and its park-like grounds were designated as level one, meaning it was one of the least secure and most comfortable federal prisons. But after a year, Marcello was transferred to the far more secure federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, an imposing level-three facility where most prisoners had few comforts. However, Marcello was not like most other prisoners, and he soon found ways to receive extraordinary privileges.

AS DETAILED IN
Chapter Three
, by December 1985, Jack Van Laningham was Carlos Marcello’s cellmate at Texarkana, as part of the FBI’s highly secret CAMTEX undercover operation. Van Laningham had placed a court-authorized, bugged transistor radio in their cell, and the Bureau was recording everything the two said there. Supervising the operation was FBI agent Thomas Kimmel. Agent Tom Kirk worked undercover, pretending to be a sleazy businessman with a friend in the Bureau of Prisons who—for the right price—could get Marcello transferred to a nicer prison and, eventually, even released. While Carlos was in prison, his younger brother, Joe
*
, ran the parts of Carlos’s empire that the godfather couldn’t run from prison.

Carlos Marcello had grown close to his trusted cellmate Jack Van Laningham, and it was on December 15, 1987, that FBI files confirm
that the godfather made his dramatic confession to having ordered JFK’s assassination, to Van Laningham and other witness: “Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.”

That night, in their cell, Marcello said, “Jack, you can never mention to anybody that I had Kennedy killed.” Van Laningham tried to mollify the godfather and reassured him his secret was safe, all while knowing the FBI was recording their coversation through the bugged transitor radio.

Van Laningham was even more nervous about his undercover role after Marcello’s admission. Agent Kirk told him that they had heard Marcello’s remarks in the cell and that “it had even gone as far as the Attorney General.” Van Laningham offered to take a lie detector test about Marcello’s admission, and he wanted to drop out of CAMTEX. But Agent Kirk convinced him to stay. Marcello’s family had paid the first bribe, and the godfather wanted Jack to be the first to go to the nicer level-two Seagoville Prison near Dallas, where Marcello would join him a few days later.

Though Van Laningham was still afraid, he also wanted to know more about what Marcello had done to JFK. The next time Marcello brought up the Kennedys and his deportation while they were in their cell, Jack encouraged him to talk about his hatred of the Kennedys. That resulted in Marcello’s making a few more revelations about the assassination, including the two hitmen he imported from Europe, which were all recorded by the FBI’s bugged radio.

Van Laningham said in his FBI file that “on the 17th of December [1985] I was packing, to leave the next day” for Seagoville Prison, when “Marcello told me to sit down, that he had something to talk to me about. He said we have become good friends and I want to tell you
a story; he was dead serious and I was scared. He said a Priest came to visit him from Italy, years before. The Priest was old Mafia. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘if your enemies get in your way, you bury them in the ground, the grass grows over them, and you go on about your business.’ He was telling me that if I crossed him, the grass would grow over me, as I would be dead. My god, if he had murdered the President, he would have no trouble with me.”

After Marcello joined Van Laningham at the Seagoville prison, Joe Marcello was supposed to pay another bribe to have Marcello moved from Seagoville to the federal facility at Fort Worth, which John H. Davis described as “the paradise of the federal prison system, [a] minimum-security level-one facility.” After the godfather was moved to Fort Worth, a final bribe—$1 million—was to be paid to Kirk, for Marcello’s early release from prison.

Van Laningham said that Marcello was grateful for what Van Laningham was doing and told him “that after we were out, he was going to take me into his organization.” Marcello complained to Van Laningham about the “running of his organization,” by his brother, Joe Marcello, who lacked the ability to run such a huge criminal empire.

Soon Van Laningham was transferred to a federal prison in California, where he began helping the San Francisco FBI. Marcello’s family member paid the bribe, and Marcello was moved to the Fort Worth facility. However, when it came for Joe Marcello to pay the final bribe, to get his older brother released from prison, it wasn’t paid. Van Laningham heard that Joe “did not want [Carlos] out of prison, as he would have gotten kicked out of his soft job . . . he would have become a nothing.”

Still, two bribes for the prison moves had been paid, so Van Laningham thought the FBI would soon file charges. Van Laningham
said in his FBI file that Carlos Marcello and his brother Joe “could have been convicted a dozen times with all the evidence that we put together.”

WHILE MARCELLO SAT in prison, his old partner Santo Trafficante made a startling confession to his old attorney. On March 13, 1987, the seventy-two-year-old Trafficante called Frank Ragano to arrange a meeting for the following day. Trafficante had brought Ragano back into the fold, after smoothing over their acrimonious split in the 1970s, and in 1986 Ragano had helped Trafficante beat a federal RICO prosecution. But the Tampa godfather had fallen seriously ill, was facing risky surgery, and wanted to talk to his old confidant one last time.

During an hour-long drive in Ragano’s car, away from family and any possibility of government bugs, Trafficante mused about his criminal career and their long association. According to Ragano, when the subject of John and Robert Kennedy came up, Trafficante said (in Italian), “Goddam Bobby. I think Carlos fucked up in getting rid of John—maybe it should have been Bobby.” Ragano later claimed he was stunned that Trafficante was admitting a role in JFK’s murder. While I think Ragano was accurately reporting what Trafficante said, information I’ve cited earlier indicates that Ragano already knew about Trafficane’s role in JFK’s assassination.

Four days later, on March 17, 1987, Santo Trafficante passed away. Ragano held a news conference in front of the Trafficante family home in Tampa’s posh Parkland Estates. In discussing Trafficante’s illness, Ragano mentioned his meeting with Trafficante four days earlier, as documented in a
Tampa Tribune
article published the following day. Ragano wouldn’t reveal Trafficante’s confession to the public
until 1992, and it wouldn’t be detailed fully until his 1994 autobiography was published.

Trafficante’s family remained silent when Ragano’s allegation first surfaced, but in 1994 they denied Ragano’s account to Anthony Summers and other journalists. They claimed Trafficante had been receiving medical treatment in Miami on March 13 and therefore couldn’t have been in Tampa, where Ragano says his meeting took place. However, while medical records prove that Trafficante was in Miami receiving dialysis on March 12 and March 14, no medical records place him there on March 13.
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Just over two months after Trafficante’s death, CAMTEX came to an end. By May 21, 1987, it was clear that Marcello’s family was never going to pay the final bribe for Marcello’s release. That night, federal marshals removed Marcello from his comfortable room at the Fort Worth prison. John H. Davis writes that Marcello was then “driven under heavily armed escort (back) to the federal prison at Texarkana.”

To Marcello, his family, and his attorneys, the sudden move from level-one Fort Worth to the remote level-three Texarkana must have seemed like a nightmare. They no doubt tried to contact Kirk for an explanation, but his undercover role for CAMTEX had ended.