Legacy of Secrecy (129 page)

the RCMP from identifying “Sneyd” as Ray. Instead, the only thing Ray

had done to alter his appearance for his Canadian passport photo was

to comb his hair a bit differently and wear the glasses he usually wore

only for reading and driving.

The other factor in Ray’s capture was that he was running out of

money. If someone had wanted Ray to elude the worldwide search, pro-

viding him with money and a new alias (and ordering him to disguise

himself) would have prevented Ray from being captured. Also, either

remaining in teeming London or shipping out, under a new alias, on any

of the hundreds of freighters that docked there regularly, would have

been far safer for Ray than attempting to fly to Brussels. It’s almost as if

someone wanted Ray captured once the May 1968 trials of Carlos Mar-

cello and Johnny Rosselli were over. A continued, massive manhunt was

not in the interests of either Marcello or Joseph Milteer and his clique.

It would have only put more pressure on racist groups affiliated with

Milteer, and someone in law enforcement might have started looking

seriously into the Mafia leads that journalist William Sartor was uncov-

ering. The FBI had already started just such an investigation even before

Ray’s capture, since Sartor would soon tell the Justice Department that

the FBI had already visited some of his sources.35

As we noted earlier, according to the Justice Department memo cited

here for the first time, some of Sartor’s mob-linked sources told him

that “either the Mafia wanted [Ray] at large until the balance of the

[contract] was paid” by the racist group, or the mobsters in Memphis

“had not been paid, and it was they who wanted Ray at large as a lever

on higher-ups in the rackets.” In any event, the mobsters told Sartor

that “after the money problem was resolved, Ray deliberately permitted

himself to be arrested in London with the understanding that he will be

acquitted in Memphis.”36

On June 6, 1968, a grieving Senator Edward Kennedy summed up the

feelings of many Americans about the murder of his brother. As the body

of Robert F. Kennedy was being flown from Los Angeles to New York

City, Edward Kennedy talked to NBC TV newsman Sander Vanocur

during the grim flight. William Turner wrote that, to Vanocur, “Edward

Kennedy had remonstrated bitterly about the ‘faceless men’ who had

been charged with the slayings of his brothers and Martin Luther King.

. . . Always faceless men with no apparent motive. ‘There has to be more

to it,’ Ted Kennedy had told Vanocur,” who broadcast the Senator’s

comment after they landed.37

Bobby’s body lay in state at Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral until

the morning of June 8, with lines of mourners stretching more than two

dozen blocks. At a special Mass that morning, Coretta Scott King com-

forted Ethel Kennedy. Bobby’s widow was both stoic and gracious; later,

Mrs. King said, “I don’t see how she has been able to go through this

awful experience with such dignity.” César Chávez and his men joined

the other Kennedy friends, family, and associates for the Mass. Edward

Kennedy gave a heart-rending tribute to his brother, saying in a voice

quivering with emotion that Bobby “saw wrong and tried to right it, saw

suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”38

After Mass, a special train of twenty cars took Bobby’s body to Wash-

ington, moving slowly as crowds lining the tracks watched and wept. It

was night on June 8 by the time the funeral procession left Washington’s

Union Station, passing many national landmarks—two of which were

especially significant. One was the Justice Department building, where

Bobby had waged his war against Carlos Marcello, Jimmy Hoffa, and the

Mafia. The other was Resurrection City, the encampment from the Poor

People’s March, which Martin Luther King’s advisors had continued

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after their leader’s murder. Without Dr. King’s leadership and publicity

clout, the effort was largely considered a failure, but Bobby Kennedy had

been one of the only major politicians to support the attempt.39

After the funeral procession headed toward the burial site at Arling-

ton National Cemetery, network television coverage was interrupted

for the first report of James Earl Ray’s capture. Former assistant FBI

director William Sullivan later wrote that J. Edgar Hoover postponed

the announcement of Ray’s capture by “a full day,” just so “he could

interrupt Bobby’s funeral.” That Hoover delayed the announcement is

likely, but he couldn’t have put it off for an entire day, because Ray had

been arrested in London only that morning.40

Bobby Kennedy was laid to rest in a somber ceremony late at night,

under a full moon. His grave was about ninety feet down from the knoll

that held the more elaborate resting place he had ordered for his brother

the previous year. Later, across from Bobby’s grave, a marble monument

was erected that included the ancient Greek poem Bobby had quoted

on the night Martin Luther King was shot:

In our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon

the heart until, in our own despair . . . comes wisdom.41

President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed the following day, June 9, 1968,

a national day of mourning.42

Chapter Fifty-seven

In the days after Bobby’s murder, the LAPD began piecing together

the life of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, some of which would be leaked to the

press or come out at his trial. However, today a new and more complete

picture of the life and 1968 activities of Sirhan Sirhan has now emerged,

thanks to declassified files that became available in easily searchable

form for the first time in 2008. When paired with the earlier work of

Turner, Melanson, Moldea, and, most recently, Hancock, it presents a

view of Sirhan that is at odds with the image of an enigmatic young man

the media presented in 1968 or the proto–Middle Eastern terrorist some

authors have tried to depict.1

Though Sirhan’s family emigrated from East Jerusalem when he was

thirteen, he was a quintessential American in many ways. Sirhan was

raised a Christian, and he regularly drove his mother to the Baptist

church where they both belonged. He lived in Pasadena with his mother

and two of his four brothers. He liked to shoot pool and eat at Bob’s Big

Boy, where he loved to talk about horse racing. He also enjoyed visiting

topless bars, and especially gambling on horses. As Sirhan now says,

“I had as many all-American values as the next guy.” He dreamed of

getting a Ford Mustang to replace his weathered pink-and-white 1956

DeSoto. Sirhan told one of his friends that his main goal in life was to

make lots of money.2

Though he was insecure about being short (his height is variously

given as 5’ 2” and 5’ 4”) and having little money, by the mid-1960s,

Sirhan was on his way to fulfilling his dream of becoming a jockey. He

worked as a horse walker at racetracks and breeding farms, including

one connected to Cuban-born entertainer Desi Arnez, and eventually

became an apprentice jockey. However, after Sirhan sustained two in-

juries caused by falls from horses (the first on September 24, 1966), his

personality seemed to change, according to his family and friends. He

became resentful of authority and developed an interest in mysticism,

especially self-hypnosis.3

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In late 1967, Sirhan had largely dropped from sight. An LAPD offi-

cer confirmed a mysterious three-month gap in Sirhan’s life to William

Turner, and an FBI summary says that Sirhan’s mother was “extremely

worried [because] she did not know his whereabouts for quite some

time”—which was unusual because he usually lived at her house and

spent much of his free time there. Sirhan didn’t vanish completely, but he

apparently stopped visiting his usual haunts and was away from home

for stretches of time. Sirhan’s activities have never been fully accounted

for during that time, but once he returned home and to his usual rou-

tines, Sirhan’s interest in self-hypnosis increased. It was as if Sirhan

needed to learn self-hypnosis to focus on an important task, something

he was afraid he might not be able to complete.

In some ways, Sirhan seems similar to Lee Harvey Oswald, since,

on the surface, both young men seem like quiet loners, lost souls

adrift in society. But upon closer inspection, both had unusual associ-

ates, engaged in seemingly contradictory actions in the months lead-

ing up to the respective assassinations, and were the subject of covert

surveillance.

Sirhan was definitely under some type of covert surveillance prior to

Bobby’s assassination. LAPD reports show that after Bobby’s murder,

the department received information from “Military Intelligence in San

Francisco . . . that Sirhan was a student at . . . Pasadena [Community

College].” The memo then lists accurately all of Sirhan’s earlier school-

ing, then says that “Sirhan active in gaining support for Shah of Iran’s

visit.” However, no other released files about Sirhan mirror this com-

ment about his support for the Shah. Such support also runs counter

to Sirhan’s professed beliefs, which were supportive of the Arab cause

and not Israel, which the US-backed Shah supported. No CIA files about

Sirhan have been released, nor have the reports that served as the basis

for this brief Army Intelligence report, which, Philip Melanson notes,

“seems clearly to have been in federal intelligence files before the assas-

sination.” This timeline indicates the existence of significant unreleased

files and pre-assassination information about Sirhan that was never fully

explored in the original investigation.4

Still more covert surveillance of Sirhan occurred in late 1967, about six

months before Bobby’s murder. A year after the assassination, secretly

filmed sixteen-millimeter film footage of Sirhan surfaced, taken during

his odd partial disappearance for three months in late 1967. The footage,

found in the vacated office of a private detective in a “canister labeled

‘Sirhan B. Sirhan—1967,’” showed Sirhan, filmed at a distance, walking

on a Pasadena street. Sixteen-millimeter cameras and processing were

quite expensive and not easy to obtain, unlike the much smaller eight-

millimeter home-movie cameras of the time (such as the one Abraham

Zapruder used). Sixteen-millimeter cameras were usually used for

documentary films, or sometimes for crowd surveillance by military

intelligence or police, where the film’s higher resolution could allow for

the recognition of individual faces even at a distance.5

While Sirhan did have a small claim for his horse fall pending with

Argonaut Insurance at the time, Turner points out that “Sirhan’s injuries

had been minor and he did not claim to be disabled.” Sirhan would

receive $1,705 a few months later, and Argonaut Insurance “denied

knowing anything about the film.” In addition, the cost of hiring a pri-

vate detective to track and film Sirhan using expensive equipment that

was large and difficult to conceal wouldn’t have made sense financially.

The footage has never been explained.6

Sirhan had no criminal record when he was arrested, and at the time

the press and public didn’t view him as being connected to organized

crime in any way—despite his compulsive gambling, his work around

racetracks, and the fact that the two men who would soon become his

main attorneys had ties to the Mafia.7 Building on the leads journalists

Peter Noyes and William Turner tried to persuade police to pursue in

1968, a fuller picture emerged gradually over the years, with some con-

nections published here for the first time.

One of Sirhan’s unusual associates among the racetrack crowd was

a former jockey whom Sirhan knew by his alias, Frank Donneroum-

mas. His real name was Henry R. Ramistella, and he had “a record of

narcotics violations in New York and Florida,” according to G. Robert

Blakey, the organized-crime expert who directed the HSCA. Under his

real name, Ramistella’s jockey license had been revoked for giving “false

testimony,” so he obtained a new license in California as Frank Donner-

oummas. He had hired Sirhan to exercise and groom horses, and Sirhan

worked for Donneroummas until December 1966, though Sirhan says

he would sometimes see his former boss at the races after that. Sirhan

says the man “always seemed to be having financial problems, which

probably stemmed from his [heavy] gambling.”8

Author David E. Scheim documented that the first racetrack where

Sirhan worked was “a Syndicate meeting place,” and that another track

“was frequented by some of the nation’s most infamous racketeers.”

That milieu was ripe for organized crime, which ran the illegal bookie

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network that extended gamblers credit for large bets in a way that legal