Legacy of Secrecy (134 page)

“discounted them as bragging on the part of Murray.” The FBI did a

cursory investigation after Bobby’s murder—talking only to Murray,

who denied contributing to the Mafia contract on Bobby—but made

no attempt to interview Murray’s Las Vegas associates. With Rosselli’s

long ties to Vegas, and Marcello’s contacts with the other mob bosses

represented there, it’s likely that one or both knew Murray’s “Mafia

friends [planning] to assassinate Robert Kennedy.”

In fact, given the reports of a contract on Bobby linked to Marcello,

Hoffa, and the Mafia in Las Vegas—plus Grant Cooper representation

of Sirhan—Johnny Rosselli could well have been involved in bringing

the hit to fruition. Marcello’s past history of eliminating people who got

in his way, as well as his perfect track record of getting away with mur-

der, could have convinced him that there was only one way to ensure

that his hated enemy Bobby never achieved the presidency. Marcello

had demonstrated in November 1963 that he was perfectly capable of

having a Kennedy contract executed while he was on trial—and using

Johnny Rosselli to help do it.

As with the contract on Dr. King, Marcello’s role could have been

to simply broker Hoffa’s RFK contract to Rosselli’s associates. It could

have been even less substantial than that, on the order of contribut-

ing money (either Marcello’s own or from the “Spring Hoffa” fund) or

simply ensuring that things went smoothly between Rosselli and the

new head of the Los Angeles Mafia. Horse walker Sirhan could have

become involved through any of several of his associates who were con-

nected to drugs or racetrack gambling, such as Frank Donneroummas.8

Such a scenario evokes the incident cited in Chapter 3 regarding FBI files

about a horse trainer for Carlos Marcello’s brother, who in the summer

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of 1963 overheard Marcello’s brother say, “The word is out to get the

Kennedy family.”9 Marcello would have known that Bobby’s frequent

visits to Los Angeles meant that Rosselli’s connections there could be

very useful before or after such a hit. Plus—as we note shortly—by 1968,

Rosselli needed money.

A snapshot of Johnny Rosselli in 1968, prior to Bobby’s murder, shows

that the Mafia don was in a unique position to have been used in a con-

tract on Bobby Kennedy. Rosselli’s legal and financial problems, coupled

with his dislike for RFK, would have made him receptive to helping

with such a hit.

Rosselli’s power in the Mafia was in decline in early 1968 because his

patron, Sam Giancana, had left the country in 1966 and hadn’t returned.

In addition, Rosselli had problems with the main Mafia family in Los

Angeles and was starting to be cut out of the Las Vegas casino deals.

By March 1968, Rosselli was very worried not only about the Friars

Club charges, but also about his immigration trial, scheduled for May.

Rosselli had so far been frustrated in his attempts to pressure the CIA to

intervene on his behalf. In March 1968, Rosselli had met with William

Harvey, and Harvey then told the CIA “he has a very strong feeling that

if either of the two trials that now threaten Johnny result in deportation,

he will blow the whistle on the Agency.” Because of his weakened posi-

tion, and the locally high-profile nature of the Friars Club case, Rosselli

was no longer trying to get both cases against him dropped. Rosselli’s

new demand to the CIA was much more realistic: to simply protect him

from being deported if he were convicted.10

We know that CIA Director Richard Helms was told about Rosselli’s

new demand, as well as his earlier ones, because the CIA’s Security

Chief who met with Harvey wrote that he “told [Harvey] on numerous

occasions . . . that I have passed his views on this to the Director.”11 Rich-

ard Helms knew what would happen to his career if Rosselli decided

to “blow the whistle on” Helms’s unauthorized operations from 1963.

Helms’s reaction to Rosselli’s new demand can be gauged by the results:

Rosselli’s biographers discovered that a high FBI official wrote that in

1968, “certain efforts are being made to hamper the government’s inves-

tigation into Rosselli.” The biographers found that the United States

attorney in Los Angeles said “unnamed people in the circles in Wash-

ington [are] saying that John was a patriotic citizen who deserved some

form of consideration.” Though Johnny Rosselli would be convicted in

both trials, including the one proving that he was an illegal alien, Ros-

selli would never be deported.12

Rosselli was likely facing at least some prison time, and being

trapped in federal prison while Bobby reassembled his Justice Depart-

ment anti-Mafia team—and was free to engage in all manner of secret

investigations—would have been Rosselli’s worst nightmare. Bobby’s

quick, extralegal deportation of Marcello in April 1961 showed what

the potential president was capable of, and would have been a sword

of Damocles hanging over Rosselli’s (and Marcello’s) head as long as

Bobby was in the White House.

Rosselli was involved in three attempted contract killings in early

1968, but only the King hit involving Carlos Marcello had been success-

ful. Rosselli’s first 1968 target had been the FBI informant in his immi-

gration case, whose name Rosselli learned from Ed Morgan. Following

the usual mob procedure for a hit, Rosselli got approval from his boss,

Sam Giancana, then based in Mexico, and Giancana called the head of

the Los Angeles Mafia to give his permission. However, the new Los

Angeles mob boss was a former rival of Rosselli’s and took no action.

Rosselli let the matter drop, since he had a more important contract

killing to worry about; but this time, Rosselli bypassed the usual Mafia

hierarchy and hired his own hit man.13

For Rosselli’s second 1968 attempt, he asked Jimmy “the Weasel”

Fratianno, a notorious mob hit man, to kill the key witness in the Friars

Club cheating scandal. According to Fratianno, George Seach was the

“ex-convict [and] electronics engineer who had installed the cheating

devices” at the club, and had agreed to testify against Rosselli and his

four codefendants, including the former casino owner represented by

Grant Cooper.14 In January 1968, Rosselli discussed the hit with Frati-

anno in the Los Angeles office of Rosselli’s attorney, Jimmy Cantillon.

Rosselli and Fratianno talked in Cantillon’s law library, where they felt

safe from government surveillance—the type of secure location Rosselli

could have later used when he met with Grant Cooper.

Rosselli complained to Fratianno about his greatly reduced income,

caused by being cut out of his Las Vegas casino deals. Rosselli’s codefen-

dant, Grant Cooper’s client, advanced the apparently cash-short Rosselli

$2,000 in expense money for the hit, which he gave to Fratianno. Ros-

selli and Fratianno decided to do the hit in Las Vegas, where Rosselli

still had influence; Fratianno hired a trusted mutual associate, Frank

Bompensiero, to help with the killing. However, Rosselli’s biographers

write that, through Bompensiero, “the government had caught word

of the contract [and the target] entered the federal witness protection

program.”15

Rosselli’s first two 1968 hit attempts failed, but his involvement in a

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third was tragically successful: the Marcello-brokered contract on Mar-

tin Luther King. Johnny Rosselli’s role with James Earl Ray, likely some

type of monitoring, would remain secret for decades. Since Rosselli was

tied to both Ray and Sirhan’s attorney Grant Cooper, it’s worth noting

several interesting parallels between Ray and Sirhan. At the same time

Ray had arrived in Los Angeles in 1967 and begun his unusual pursuit

of self-hypnosis, Sirhan was deepening his long-standing interest in

self-hypnosis—even as he started to engage in uncharacteristic behavior,

such as trying to obtain armor-piercing bullets. It was as if both Sirhan

and James Earl Ray felt they needed to learn self-hypnosis to focus on

doing something they’d never done before. Both men had ties to the

underworld and to people who dealt in narcotics, and within the space

of six weeks, Sirhan bought his first pistol and Ray bought his first rifle.

Both men used their respective weapons in assassinations linked not

just to Rosselli, but also to Carlos Marcello.16

David Morales, Johnny Rosselli’s old friend from the CIA, made a clear

confession to being involved in Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, tell-

ing his attorney Robert Walton that “I was in Los Angeles when we

got Bobby.” In 1968, Morales was in the process of transitioning from

duty in Latin America to Southeast Asia. With CIA officials like Richard

Helms and David Atlee Phillips concerned with their own problems,

a supervisory gray area probably emerged that Morales exploited to

his advantage—and that of his friend Rosselli. After Bobby’s murder,

Morales would ultimately wind up in Vietnam, working once again

with AMWORLD veterans like Ted Shackley and soon helping future

CIA Director William Colby with the massive CIA Operation Phoenix

assassination program.

Two of Morales’s closest friends say he still visited Los Angeles on

occasion, where he had some family. As far as is known, Morales had no

official CIA duties in the city, so whatever lethal business he did there

was likely for himself and/or a crony like Rosselli, with whom Morales

had worked closely on the 1963 CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. When

those plots ended after their murder of JFK, Morales had continued to

meet with Rosselli, sometimes in Las Vegas. In addition to the hatred of

Bobby that Morales shared with Rosselli, Morales would have feared the

possibility of Bobby Kennedy’s being president, knowing it could yield

secret investigations or CIA housecleaning that might expose Morales’s

(self-confessed) role in JFK’s murder.17

Revealed here for the first time, based on CIA files only fully

declassified in 2003, David Morales had an earlier plan for killing Fidel

Castro—involving a shooter with a handgun in a pantry—that could

have been applied to Bobby Kennedy. As we mentioned briefly in

earlier chapters, from 1962 to 1964 the CIA had an asset in Cuba who

wanted to assassinate Fidel at one of his favorite restaurants, the Mon-

tecatini. On each of his monthly visits, the egalitarian Fidel always

went into the kitchen and pantry area to greet the busboys, dishwash-

ers, and cooks. Because of the crowded conditions, the CIA file says

that Fidel would leave his security escort “outside [so when Fidel]

visits kitchen alone [and] chats with employees [Fidel] is ‘a sitting

duck.’”18

The restaurant’s pantry/kitchen area was one of the only places

where an assassin could get close enough to kill Fidel without hav-

ing to get through his security detail of “about 20 [men] in about five

cars.” Fidel’s security team would precede “the arrival of Fidel by 10

to 15 minutes and [make] an inspection of the locale [before taking]

up strategic positions both inside and outside the restaurant. Even the

waiters are watched individually and are followed around.” However,

there was a “closet partially under the stairs . . . used [as a pantry] for

storage [where] a man could be hidden . . . comfortably.” While the res-

taurant staff was small—“3 waiters, 1 bus boy, 1 Chef [owner], 1 cook, 2

dishwashers”—the Chef-owner and his wife were reputedly anti-

Castro. They could have either allowed an assassin to hide in the closet,

or hired the assassin as kitchen help. When Castro came through the

kitchen and pantry area, the assassin could pull out a pistol and start

firing away at Fidel, at close range.19

The initial pantry/kitchen assassination plan was sent to William

Harvey on August 28, 1962, but the unfolding Cuban Missile Crisis and

Harvey’s subsequent removal likely prevented it from being consid-

ered seriously. The plan was raised again on November 8, 1963, but by

that time, the JFK-Almeida coup plan and AMWORLD were already

in place.20

As the CIA’s Operations Chief for their Miami Station at the time,

David Morales would have been involved in evaluating the pantry/

kitchen plan. It presented two main problems: The small closet pantry

might be able to hold only one assassin—and even if he were success-

ful in killing Fidel, he would certainly be killed or captured by Fidel’s

security forces. Finding someone willing to sacrifice his life like that,

someone who couldn’t be traced to the CIA, wouldn’t be easy. How-

ever, by the summer of 1964, the CIA might have been taking steps to

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implement the pantry/kitchen plan—but any chance of using it disap-

peared in August 1964, when a CIA asset learned the “owner [of the]

Montecatini Restaurant, Havana, [was] arrested and imprisoned . . . to