The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (61 page)

For Carlos Marcello, the move would have been a crushing, devastating blow. And who was to blame? His brother Joe? Agent Kirk’s undercover businessman? Jack Van Laningham?

A FORMER FRIEND of Joe Marcello told me that he was with Joe when Carlos first learned his cellmate—Jack Van Laningham—was an
informant for the FBI. Joe Marcello’s friend was not a criminal, just a salesman who dealt with one of the legitimate businesses Joe Marcello managed for his brother’s empire in the mid-1980s. For obvious reasons, the salesman does not want his name used.

The salesman and his family were with Joe Marcello at his restaurant one afternoon, for a holiday meal. The salesman thought it odd that Joe would have such a meal with him, instead of with his family. Early in the meal, someone came out from the back of the restaurant and whispered to Joe Marcello. Joe excused himself, and an unusually long amount of time passed, more than an hour, with no sign of Joe.

Finally, an apologetic Joe Marcello re-emerged. He explained that he’d had to deal with something extremely serious—they had just learned that the inmate “next to” Carlos Marcello in prison was “an informant for the FBI.” Joe said nothing more, but the salesman thought it so unusual that he told another family member about it.

JACK VAN LANINGHAM knew nothing about that, when he called Carlos Marcello’s office in April 1988, shortly after Easter. Van Laningham, still in prison in California, was simply curious about what had happened to Marcello and assumed his secret was still safe. But the FBI’s CAMTEX file shows that the person Van Laningham spoke with at Marcello’s office “indicated to him in a very angry tone of voice that Mr. Marcello knew what he had done and of his cooperation with the FBI [and] hung up the phone.”

Van Laningham was frantic and remembered Marcello’s threat to him, after the godfather’s outburst about ordering JFK’s assassination. He knew enough about Marcello’s associates and connections to realize he was in danger, especially while he remained in prison.

Fearing for his life, Van Laningham wrote the first of a series of increasingly frantic letters to the Justice Department in Washington. He listed the important information he had obtained for the FBI, including Marcello’s JFK confession. Van Laningham said that “[Agent] Kirk told me during the investigation that the Attorney General knew what was going on. And that I would be released when the case was over. . . . I did a good job and I put my life on the line for you.”

Van Laningham also told the Justice Department, “Marcello knows all about what we did to him. He will never rest until he pays me back.” He pointed out that for almost two years, “I have worked with the San Francisco FBI.” He pleaded with the Justice Department, saying, “You are responsible for me.” He pointed out “It has been two years [since his work against Marcello and] why they have not been arrested?”

After recieving no reply, Van Laningham wrote to FBI headquarters in Washington, saying “the Justice Department has all of the evidence that we gathered . . . the bribe money that was paid to an undercover FBI Agent . . . all the tapes with hundreds of hours of conversations.” He reminded them about Marcello’s JFK confession “that he had John Kennedy murdered,” adding, “I believe that your office should make Senator Kennedy aware of this evidence.” Van Laningham reiterated his willingness to “go on the stand against [Carlos and his brother Joe] any time that I was asked to do so.”

San Francisco FBI Agent Carl Podsiadly weighed in on his behalf. Van Laningham also volunteered to take a lie-detector test about Marcello’s JFK confession. Finally, Van Laningham also threatened to tell the news media about his FBI work and about the Justice Department’s reluctance to prosecute Carlos Marcello or his brother.

Unknown to Van Laningham, in mid-1988 John H. Davis had been in contact with the FBI regarding his upcoming biography of
Carlos Marcello, scheduled for release in January 1989, since he was seeking the release of FBI files and the BRILAB surveillance tapes of Marcello. PBS and journalist Jack Anderson were also working on major television specials for the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s assassination in November 1988, which would include information linking Marcello to JFK’s murder.

A high official in the Reagan–Bush Justice Department apparently decided it was better not to add Van Laningham’s explosive Marcello confession to the mix. By September 1988, Van Laningham had been given a firm release date in January 1989, ending any talk of his going to the press—and any chance his explosive information could be added to Davis’s book.

HALF A DOZEN television specials aired around November 22, 1988, several featuring information about the Mafia, with two specifically highlighting Marcello. However, none of the journalists knew the FBI was sitting on a trove of secret reports and tapes that included Marcello’s confession. The most influential program was Jack Anderson’s November 2, 1988, TV special,
American Exposé: Who Murdered JFK?
It focused extensively on Marcello, Trafficante, and especially Rosselli, though it sometimes appeared to endorse Rosselli’s false claim that Castro was involved in JFK’s murder.

Anderson’s documentary revealed that much information—especially from the CIA—remained unreleased. His special, and the other programs and articles that appeared by November 22, 1988, started to generate a movement calling for the release of all the JFK assassination files. The movement was further fueled by the January 1989 release of John H. Davis’s Marcello biography,
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
. Unlike most other
books and articles published at the time, it presented Marcello not as one of many suspects in JFK’s murder but as THE suspect. Even with so much material still withheld, Davis came remarkably close to outlining how Marcello had murdered JFK, something that would have seriously alarmed Marcello and his men.

The push to release the files accelerated rapidly when director Oliver Stone announced plans to dramatize the case in his film JFK. Essentially, the attention generated by the twenty-fifth anniversary coverage reignited public interest in JFK’s murder, eventually leading to action by Congress.

In January 1989, Jack Van Laningham was paroled from federal prison and sent to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida, where Trafficante’s mob family was still active. Van Laningham started trying to put his life back together. Regarding the situation with Carlos Marcello, he made a call to Marcello’s office, in hopes of reaching some type of accommodation. Since Marcello remained in prison, his organization was still being run by Joe Marcello and underbosses like Frank Caracci, who’d met with Jack Ruby six weeks before JFK’s murder.

A few days after his call to Marcello’s office, Van Laningham had left work and was walking back to the half-way house. On a relatively deserted road, a car pulled up and two men got out. The two looked like mob “torpedoes” but initially seemed as if they were going to give him something—until they began savagely beating him.

While one of the men held the stunned Van Laningham on the ground, the other looked around and—seeing no one in the area—went back to the car to get his gun. Van Laningham was sure he was going to die.

Suddenly, a car pulled onto the street, and the driver—spying Van Laningham on the ground—stopped and called out. The two
hitmen jumped in their car and sped off while the driver helped him to his feet.

Van Laningham was helping the Tampa FBI at the time, and he reported the attack to them. Finally, the FBI gave Van Laningham a lie-detector test, not only about the attack but also about Carlos Marcello’s JFK confession, and he passed. He was eventually released from parole and kept a very low profile for twenty years, until he was finally located by NBC News, to appear in my 2009 special (Did
the Mob Kill JFK?
) that NBC produced for the Discovery Channel.

IN JANUARY 1989, Carlos Marcello also had the first of several small strokes. The godfather was transferred to Rochester, Minnesota’s, Medical Center for federal prisoners. There, on February 27, 1989, while Marcello was “in a semi-coherent state,” an attendant overheard him say, “That Kennedy, that smiling motherfucker, we’ll fix him in Dallas.” The FBI didn’t ask Marcello about his statement until September 6, 1989, when he denied “any involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy.” Apparently, the Bureau didn’t question Marcello at that time about his earlier remarks to Van Laningham.

By that time, the debilitating effects of Marcello’s strokes, compounded by Alzheimer’s, were clear. One of the CAMTEX FBI officials told us he had not noticed any signs of the latter four years earlier, while listening to all of the Bureau’s undercover Marcello tapes in 1985 and 1986. Agent Kimmel said he thought a few of Marcello’s remarks showed such indications; however, they weren’t enough to stop the dangerous CAMTEX undercover operation, which continued until May 1987. It’s important to note that both Van Laningham and Agent Kirk were risking their lives for the FBI at that time, something the Bureau would not have allowed if Marcello had shown serious signs of being senile.

Marcello’s statements, noted by Van Laningham in the FBI files, are usually accurate and consistent with facts not well known at the time. Van Laningham said Marcello was mentally “sharp” with no signs of Alzheimer’s while he knew him, and the aging godfather demonstrated a firm grasp of complex criminal matters in the 1985 and 1986 accounts. The earliest documented sign of Alzheimer’s was noted by John H. Davis, who indicated that by January 1, 1988, those visiting Marcello had begun to notice signs of the disease.

Carlos Marcello was released from prison on October 6, 1989, after his BRILAB conviction was reversed unexpectedly. The government decided not to retry him, so Marcello, increasingly incapacitated from the strokes and his Alzheimer’s, returned to Louisiana. By the time of his strokes, Marcello’s empire had begun to break apart.

After spending his final years at home, his mind ravaged increasingly by disease and strokes, Carlos Marcello died on March 2, 1993, at age eighty-three. He reportedly died peacefully at his home, a far cry from the bloody executions he had ordered for so many victims. A number of his obituaries, such as the one by Associated Press, noted that “Marcello’s name was often mentioned in connection with the assassination of [JFK], but he was never charged.”

IN 1989, COMMANDER Juan Almeida was still a revered figure in the Cuban government, and his secret work for JFK had not been exposed. However, some of his protégés were caught up in a major drug scandal in 1989. One may have bartered for his life by revealing Almeida’s work for JFK, because soon after the trials, Almeida largely disappeared from view in Cuba. There was no official explanation, though Almeida’s absence was noted by exiles and journalists.

It was after Almeida’s disappearance that JFK’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk first revealed JFK’s fall 1963 coup plan to me. With Almeida assumed dead, and with the 1992 passing of former exile (and Trafficante associate) Tony Varona, Harry Williams began telling Thom Hartman and me details about the coup plan. Williams revealed Bernard Barker’s work for Trafficante, and that he eventually learned both were involved in JFK’s assassination. Williams for the first time also named Almeida, whose identity as the coup leader was soon confirmed by a former JFK and RFK associate who later became a prominent Washington official.

Later in 1992, Congress unanimously passed the JFK Act, which created the JFK Assassination Records Review Board to identify and release the remaining files. In November 1994, I informed the Review Board very generally about JFK’s 1963 “plans for a coup in Cuba,” without revealing Almeida’s identity.

By 1995, Commander Almeida had resurfaced in Cuba, perhaps because his presence was needed to help stabilize the country, which was in dire financial straits after the fall of the Soviet empire. No official explanation for Almeida’s return, or his several-year fall from grace, was ever given. Harry Williams passed away on March 10, 1996, after Thom and I had extensively interviewed him as a confidential source more than half a dozen times. Though his own extensive CIA and FBI
files remain unreleased, he lived to see a few declassified AMWORLD memos about himself, which detailed and confirmed information he had first revealed to us four years earlier.

In 1997, the Review Board declassified hundreds of pages of military files about JFK’s 1963 “Plans for a Coup in Cuba” from the files of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Joseph Califano, but none named Almeida—they referred only generally to the high-ranking Cuban military officials who would lead the coup. However, after being contacted by a JFK Review Board official in late 1997 and 1998, I confidentially provided the official with the first information naming Almeida and AMWORLD, which the official tried to get released. The Board’s mandate expired in September 1998, and though it had declassified more than 4.5 million files, NBC News reported on September 29, 1998, that “millions” of pages remain unreleased.

DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS died in 1988. Shortly before Phillips’s death, he told an associate that in JFK’s murder, “there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” According to Phillips’s nephew, musician Shawn Phillips, when his father asked a dying David Atlee Phillips by phone “Were you in Dallas on that day?” David Atlee Phillips answered, “‘Yes,’ and then hung up.” Was Phillips confessing to JFK’s murder? AMWORLD operations were sometimes conducted out of Dallas in 1963. Also, Phillips grew up in Fort Worth and had friends and former classmates in the area, so it’s hard to believe Phillips would have met Lee Oswald in public, in Dallas, less than three months before JFK’s murder, if he knew Oswald was going to be blamed for the assassination. As with William Harvey, and E. Howard Hunt, only the release of the remaining JFK assassination files might clarify the matter.