Legacy of Secrecy (14 page)

By November 1963, Carlos Marcello was confident that he could get

away with assassinating the President of the United States, because he’d

made sure that JFK’s murder couldn’t be fully or publicly investigated

without exposing the coup plan. As documented earlier, even the bullets

in Oswald’s rifle could have led investigators to the plan with Almeida.

Knowledge of the coup plan enabled Marcello and his associates to com-

promise each of Bobby and Harry’s exile groups in some way. The Mafia

chiefs used money to essentially bribe Artime and Varona, while they

compromised Ray’s and Menoyo’s groups by linking them to Oswald.

As for Harry Williams, Marcello left him to his friend Trafficante. On

one occasion, former death-squad leader Rolando Masferrer confronted

Harry at Bobby Kennedy’s New York apartment. As we noted previ-

ously, a CIA associate of E. Howard Hunt took Harry to an impromptu

meeting with Trafficante, who fruitlessly offered Harry a bribe. Still

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

later, on a trip to Guatemala to meet with Artime, Harry was attacked

by two gunmen in a restaurant, and he barely escaped after shooting

one of them.

The CIA ties of Guy Banister and David Ferrie, documented in Chapter

6, using new information from the CIA’s Deputy Chief in New Orleans,

also enabled Marcello to take advantage of US intelligence operations

for his own ends. Memos show that the CIA almost recruited Banister

in the summer of 1960, when the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots

with Trafficante and Rosselli began. Guy Banister’s secretary says that

Rosselli visited their office in the summer of 1963, while the CIA-Mafia

plots continued. Banister also had ties to Naval Intelligence through

his close friend Guy Johnson. In addition, Banister had also served in

the FBI on a major case with General Joseph Carroll, JFK’s trusted head

of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which included Naval Intelligence.

Several years before JFK’s assassination, Banister had even been busi-

ness partners with Carmine Bellino, a close advisor to JFK who was part

of Bobby’s Get Hoffa Squad in 1963. In short, Banister had numerous

ways to feed disinformation into various agencies.33

As for David Ferrie, Anthony Summers writes that “the former

Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA [confirmed that]

Ferrie had been a contract agent to the Agency [CIA] in the early sixties

. . . in some of the Cuban activities, [and Richard] Helms stated that

David Ferrie was a CIA agent [in the fall of 1963].”34 In the summer of

1963, Manuel Artime briefly had a training camp near New Orleans,

and Summers writes that Guy Banister’s secretary said that “Ferrie not

only met Oswald but took him on at least one visit to an anti-Castro

guerrilla training camp outside New Orleans.”35 A CIA note card about

Lee Harvey Oswald, declassified in the mid-1990s, said “there had been

no secret, as far as anyone was concerned, in regard to the fact that Ban-

ister, David William Ferrie, and Subj[ect, Oswald] may have known or

been acquainted with one another.”36 Given all those connections, when

Oswald talked to Marcello in the meeting the Informant described, the

young man may have thought he was being brought into the CIA-Mafia

plots by Marcello and his associates.

Marcello faced losing his empire, his freedom, and even the ability

to stay in America—unless he ended Bobby Kennedy’s extraordinary

power by killing JFK. In November 1963, when Marcello was being tried

on federal charges that Bobby had brought against him, even a minor

conviction could have resulted in his deportation. Marcello had already

found a way to evade justice, by bribing a key juror. However, he knew

that a new investigation would begin as soon as that trial was over (and

Bobby did later prosecute him for bribing the juror). Bobby was already

focusing on tax charges against Marcello, the same technique used to

send Al Capone to prison, and the Mafia chief knew he would have no

respite while JFK was alive.

Doing nothing about JFK and Bobby simply was not an option for

Marcello. He knew that the JFK-Almeida coup plan was perhaps the

only thing so sensitive that it could trigger a cover-up by high-ranking

US officials. Just as the Kennedys felt they had to stage their coup with

Almeida soon, Marcello knew he had to act before the coup took place

and removed his only opportunity to force a cover-up by officials like

Bobby Kennedy.

Marcello had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the

JFK-Almeida coup plan to go forward. As long as JFK was President,

Cuba would not be a safe haven for Marcello or any other Mafia boss.

Hence, Marcello had to kill JFK before December 1, 1963, the scheduled

date for the coup. That’s why Marcello organized three attempts to kill

JFK during November 1963, in Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas.

Marcello relied on his trusted associates to help him: the Chicago

mob’s Rosselli, and Trafficante in Tampa. The men sometimes met at a

secluded resort outside Tampa, the Safety Harbor Spa, whose exclusive

clientele and distinctive staff freed the mob bosses from any possibility

of law enforcement surveillance.37 Trafficante also met with Marcello in

New Orleans once or twice a year, and we noted earlier Rosselli’s trip to

New Orleans in 1963. In the JFK hit, these Mafia chiefs were only doing

on a larger scale what they had done successfully in the past, and using

only associates they knew they could trust.

Chapter Four

Though Carlos Marcello was the driving force behind JFK’s assassina-

tion, he was joined at the highest level by Tampa crime boss Santo Traf-

ficante and the Chicago Mafia’s Johnny Rosselli. As Chapter 5 explains,

in November 1963 they first attempted to kill JFK in Chicago and then

in Tampa, before finally succeeding in Dallas. Their careful year of plan-

ning meant that even their backup plan (Tampa) had a backup (Dallas),

and each city’s Mafia family shared the risk. As with Marcello, both

Trafficante and Rosselli also confessed their roles in JFK’s murder to

trusted associates shortly before their deaths. The same was true of some

of the operatives they had used in the JFK hit, some of whose roles are

described in this chapter.

Santo Trafficante’s exclusive territory was not as large as Marcello’s,

but because of the groundwork laid by his crime-boss father, Santos

Trafficante Sr., the Tampa crime godfather’s reach stretched far beyond

Florida and US borders. In the 1920s, the senior Trafficante began import-

ing heroin from France into Cuba, and then into Florida. By the 1940s,

the Trafficante network had worked out partnerships with other Mafia

families that allowed them to bring in heroin through New York City.

The elder Trafficante started his son in the Havana casino business in

1946. After his father died in 1954, Santo Trafficante became boss of

the Tampa Mafia and prospered during the golden age of Cuban mob

casinos in the mid- to late 1950s.1

Trafficante’s Havana casino empire slowly crumbled after Castro

ascended to power. Castro initially closed all the casinos, but then

allowed them to reopen for more than two years before finally closing

the last one in 1961, several months after the Bay of Pigs. However, Traf-

ficante was still able to prosper by expanding his gambling and other

criminal activities, which included smuggling contraband through Cuba

while bringing in black-market goods barred by the American embargo.

Trafficante controlled the rackets in most of Florida, and though Miami

was considered an “open city” like Las Vegas, Trafficante’s heavy pres-

ence there made him first among equals. While Trafficante lived in

Tampa, he maintained a base in Miami, where he shared an office with

a Hoffa Teamster local.

Trafficante also greatly expanded the French Connection heroin

network, in partnership with Marcello and other associates, including

Jimmy Hoffa.2 By 1963, this heroin-importation network stretched from

France to entry points like New York City, Montreal, Mexico City, New

Orleans, Houston, and Miami. One of Trafficante’s most common tech-

niques for smuggling heroin was to hide it in special compartments in

cars, bringing them into the United States at border crossings in Texas

or from Canada, or on ocean liners, as depicted in the
French Connec-

tion
movie. Investigations by the Bureau of Narcotics and a Pulitzer

Prize–winning team from
Newsday
show that the French criminal who

perfected the car technique, Michel Victor Mertz, was an important part

of Trafficante’s network.3

Trafficante’s heroin network was his most secure and ruthless opera-

tion because of the tremendous amounts of money it involved. It was a

high-stakes, deadly enterprise in which one mistake could mean death.

Although importing heroin was one of the most profitable operations

that Trafficante and Marcello shared, it was under increasing attack by

the Kennedys. This helps to explain why the mob bosses used trusted

members of this network in the JFK hit, from Mertz to Ruby—and why

one of the lowliest members of the network was almost able to prevent

JFK’s assassination.

Santo Trafficante talked about his decision to kill JFK in the fall of

1962, around the same time Carlos Marcello told Ed Becker that JFK

should be killed to end Bobby’s power. In Miami, Trafficante told a

different FBI informant, Jose Aleman, that “JFK was going to be hit”

and would never survive until the 1964 election. After that, the two

Mafia chiefs began working together to target JFK, meeting several times

in 1963 with Frank Ragano, the lawyer Trafficante shared with Hoffa.

Years later, Ragano told Robert Kennedy’s biographer and associate Jack

Newfield that Hoffa had him take messages about JFK’s assassination

to Marcello and Trafficante in 1963.4 Hoffa himself was under too much

scrutiny to actively participate in the JFK plot, but he made it clear to

Marcello and Trafficante that they would be well rewarded for carrying

out their plan.

As explained in later chapters, Trafficante confessed his part in

JFK’s assassination to Frank Ragano, though the lawyer’s account of

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Trafficante’s confession minimized Ragano’s own role in the hit. In addi-

tion, Harry Williams told us that one of Trafficante’s men, who also

worked for the CIA, was involved in JFK’s murder.5

By November 1963, Trafficante had even more compelling reasons

to kill JFK in order to end Bobby’s war against him and his Mafia allies.

These ranged from the major busts that had disrupted Trafficante’s part

of the French Connection drug network to Bobby’s relentless pressure

on his associates, including Marcello, Hoffa, and Giancana. Both of Traf-

ficante’s own brothers were under indictment for tax violations, and two

of his cousins had been arrested.6 Bureau of Narcotics agents had even

monitored the wedding of Trafficante’s daughter, something that would

have been unheard of just a few years earlier.7 Also, Trafficante’s opera-

tions had been exposed in Congressional hearings just five weeks earlier.

While the testimony regarding Trafficante’s activities hadn’t received

the same national exposure and live TV coverage as the Valachi hearings,

such Congressional scrutiny threatened to generate further unwanted

attention for Trafficante’s normally secretive operations.

The October 15, 1963, hearings not only provide a good overview of

some of Trafficante’s operations, but also include details that presage

how JFK was killed. The hearings were conducted by JFK’s former men-

tor, Senator John McClellan. Bobby Kennedy had provided information

for the hearings, which targeted many of the same Mafiosi his prosecu-

tors were going after.

We can now reveal that Trafficante managed to have at the hearings

his main operative on the Tampa police force, Sergeant Jack de la Llana,

who was far more than just a corrupt cop for Trafficante. In Washington,

Sgt. de la Llana not only monitored what witnesses said for Trafficante,

but even testified himself, as a seemingly upright member of the force.

In Tampa, Sgt. de la Llana’s work for Trafficante extended to the whole

state of Florida and beyond. That’s because de la Llana, no doubt on Traf-

ficante’s behalf, had formed the Tampa Police Department’s first crimi-

nal intelligence unit, and became its director. Neil G. Brown, Tampa’s

Police Chief in October 1963, proudly testified that Sgt. de la Llana was

also the “chairman of the Florida Intelligence Unit, a statewide agency

which coordinates information . . . throughout the State of Florida.”8

This cooperation even extended to other states, such as when Sgt. de la

Llana exchanged information with the New Orleans Police Department

about the Fair Play for Cuba committee.

Sgt. de la Llana’s position allowed him to monitor developments in