Legacy of Secrecy (54 page)

Cheramie herself that she worked for Jack Ruby.10 Cheramie told Detec-

tive Fruge the same thing, also giving him detailed information about

the heroin transaction her companions were to complete after taking

care of things in Dallas. Cheramie named the ship and seaman bring-

ing the drugs to Galveston, saying the deal would be consummated at

the Rice Hotel in Houston. Fruge’s superior gave her information to US

Customs officials, who were initially very interested. In contrast, when

Dallas Homicide Chief Fritz was informed of Cheramie’s remarks about

JFK and Ruby, he told Customs he was “not interested.”11

Fruge and Cheramie flew to Houston to help Customs, and every-

thing she said about the heroin operation checked out: Customs found

her reservation at the Rice Hotel, and agents confirmed that the Dallas

man holding Cheramie’s child was a suspected drug dealer. Customs

also verified the name of the ship Cheramie had provided, and the iden-

tity of the seaman smuggler. Author Larry Hancock found that Customs

corroborated Cheramie’s information about the Houston and Dallas

Mafia families involved, which both “had records or reputations for

narcotics [and] white slavery [prostitution].”12

Everything seemed set for a major heroin bust that could have tied

members of Marcello’s heroin network, like Ruby and Mertz, to JFK’s

assassination. It would have been the third bust in Marcello’s South

Texas territory in just over a year, following the October 1963 Laredo

seizure and the 1962 Houston seizure bust, and would have dealt a

serious blow to Marcello’s heroin pipeline. Bobby’s Justice Department

was still prosecuting the first two seizures, but before it was told about

Cheramie’s information, the Houston investigation suddenly ground

to a halt, for reasons that were never explained.

Customs lost track of the seaman they were tailing, and the agents

didn’t bother to interview the implicated local Mafia families or place

them under surveillance. The Houston police entered the case and

wanted to drop the investigation. The Secret Service became involved,

and though its report about Cheramie is referenced in a Customs memo,

no Secret Service files about Cheramie have ever been released.13 Those

weren’t the only files about Cheramie that disappeared: Years later, Con-

gressional investigators wrote that when they looked into the matter,

“US Customs was unable to locate documents and reports related to its

involvement in the Cheramie investigation, although such involvement

was not denied. Nor could Customs officials locate those agents named

by Fruge as having participated in the original investigation.”14

On November 30, 1963, Customs dropped the case, despite having

confirmed all of Cheramie’s leads. Frustrated, Detective Fruge returned

to Louisiana, and Cheramie was left on the streets of Houston. After

reviewing all of the available material, we think it likely that someone

in the Houston Police Department or Customs called off the investiga-

tion in order to protect Marcello’s drug network. However, because the

investigation closed so quickly, with no arrests, Cheramie was eventu-

ally able to resume some of her former contacts. She would lay low for

a year, then try once more to get back at the heroin network of Marcello

and Mertz—only to meet a gruesome fate.

In the days following Oswald’s murder, Marcello, Trafficante, and

Rosselli continued having associates plant disinformation implicating

Castro in JFK’s assassination; it would trickle out to the press and offi-

cials over the coming year, and beyond. The stories in small-market

newspapers and radio, blaming Castro and hinting at the JFK-Almeida

coup plan, were just enough to get the attention of US officials, but not

enough to become major news stories. The mob bosses’ actions forced

top officials into a continuing cover-up about JFK’s assassination, to pre-

vent a public outcry to invade Cuba, and to avoid exposing Almeida.15

The most public spokesman for these efforts was John Martino. On

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

November 26, 1963, Martino began implicating Castro in JFK’s murder

and hinting at the JFK-Almeida coup plan in radio, newspaper, and

magazine appearances. Martino was touring the country as a promi-

nent member of the John Birch Society Speakers Bureau, ostensibly to

promote his book
I Was Castro’s Prisoner.
As noted earlier, Martino had

worked with Trafficante, Rosselli, and Rolando Masferrer, and had met

Carlos Marcello. It’s unlikely that David Atlee Phillips or others in the

CIA were behind Martino’s publicity efforts, because Martino’s book

actually mentioned the name of Phillips’s associate, David Morales, a

fact that the CIA wanted to keep secret. In addition, Phillips was capable

of generating much more publicity if he wanted to, and it seems unlikely

that the CIA would have risked exposing the coup plan, since Helms

would pursue a variation of it—with some of the same people, like

Artime—for another year and a half.

Martino’s phony stories started out mildly, claiming that Oswald had

gone to Cuba in the fall of 1963, and had passed out pro-Castro literature

in Miami and New Orleans. Those tales brought Martino a visit from

the FBI on November 29, but he refused to identify his sources.16 As

press reports about the JFK investigation continued, Martino ramped

up his rhetoric.

An article under Martino’s name appeared in the December 21, 1963,

issue of the right-wing journal
Human Events
, in which Martino took

credit for revealing that “the Kennedy Administration planned to elimi-

nate Fidel Castro. . . through a putsch, [and] the plan involved a more

or less token invasion from Central America to be synchronized with

the coup. A left-wing coalition government was to be set up, [and] the

plan involved [the] US [military] occupation of Cuba.” That was more

than most high US officials in the Johnson Administration knew at the

time.17

Martino knew about the involvement of Manolo Ray’s JURE exile

group, writing in the article that “Oswald made . . . approaches to JURE,

another organization of Cuban freedom fighters, but was rejected.” Three

months earlier, Martino and Masferrer had been linked to the attempt

to smear Ray’s group by tying it to Oswald via the incident with Dallas

JURE member Silvia Odio. When Martino’s article was published, only

the FBI and a handful of Odio’s closest family and friends knew about

Oswald’s visit; nothing about it had appeared in the press.18

In Martino’s first major article, he only hinted that Oswald was work-

ing for Fidel when he killed JFK. The following month, Martino revealed

new details about the coup plan and implicated Fidel more directly, in a

January 30, 1964,
Memphis Press-Scimitar
article headlined: “Oswald Was

Paid Gunman for Castro, Visitor Says.” It quotes John Martino as saying,

“Lee Harvey Oswald was paid by Castro to assassinate President Ken-

nedy,” and that the murder was in retaliation for JFK’s “plan to get rid of

Castro.” Martino described JFK’s coup plan with remarkable precision,

including information from documents that wouldn’t be declassified

for more than thirty-five years: “There was to be another invasion and

uprising in Cuba . . . and the Organization of American states . . . was to

go into Cuba . . . and control the country until an election could be set

up.” Martino even knew that “since the death of Kennedy, the work on

an invasion has virtually stopped.”

We can only imagine the consternation Martino’s increasingly pro-

vocative articles caused among some officials in Washington. They seem

to have gotten the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, since FBI agents inter-

viewed Martino yet again on February 15, 1964. In an era when presi-

dents and Congress treated Hoover and his FBI with deference, Martino

basically thumbed his nose at the agents. He declared that “President

Kennedy was engaged in a plot to overthrow the Castro regime by pre-

paring another invasion attempt against Cuba.” But the frustrated FBI

agents wrote that “Martino refused to divulge the sources of his infor-

mation or how they might know what plans President Kennedy might

have had.”19

Other Trafficante associates also leaked information to the press and

officials implicating Castro in JFK’s murder, but none of these other leaks

hinted at the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Martino was unique in that regard,

probably because (by his own admission) he had actually been part of

the assassination plot. Among the others planting stories implicating

Castro was Trafficante’s man Frank Fiorini, whose story appeared in a

Florida newspaper on November 26, 1963, though Fiorini later admitted

he’d gotten his information from John Martino.20

It’s important to note that no credible evidence or testimony has yet

turned up that identifies Fiorini as having played a role in JFK’s assas-

sination. Speculation that Fiorini was one of the “three tramps” arrested

in Dealey Plaza has been disproven, as was an allegation that Fiorini,

Oswald, and others drove from Miami to Dallas in the days before JFK’s

murder. (Numerous witnesses saw Oswald at work during that time.)

A recent alleged confession by E. Howard Hunt places Fiorini in a posi-

tion of trust within the CIA that he never had. Also, Fiorini was such

a publicity seeker (resulting in his friendship with top columnist Jack

Anderson) that no one as careful as Trafficante would have used him

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in any significant way in the JFK hit. However, Fiorini was a trusted

functionary, able to spread disinformation about Oswald and Castro

that helped to divert attention away from the real killers. Though Fiorini

provided a steady stream of other information in 1963 and 1964 to CIA

agent Bernard Barker (code-named AMCLATTER-1), Fiorini never took

that route to spread his phony “Castro did it” stories to the CIA.

Others who spread stories tying Castro to JFK’s assassination included

Rolando Masferrer and drug-linked associates of Manuel Artime. With

so many of Trafficante’s and Rosselli’s associates planting phony stories

implicating Castro, it raises the question of whether they were also feed-

ing phony stories to David Atlee Phillips. Because of their work together

on AMWORLD (and earlier), David Morales knew what type of material

Phillips would be receptive to, and that Phillips had a direct pipeline

to Desmond FitzGerald, who could immediately bring information to

Richard Helms’s attention. Using Phillips as a pipeline for disinforma-

tion would allow it to reach very high levels, with more credibility, very

quickly.

Other efforts to link Oswald and Ruby to Fidel were less sophis-

ticated. These range from the fake “Pedro Charles” letter mailed to

Oswald from Havana on November 28, 1963, to stories linking Ruby

to Cuban plots. It’s amazing how many dozens, sometimes hundreds,

of pages of follow-up FBI and CIA memos were generated because of

one or two obviously false letters or stories. It’s likely that even more

phony information implicating Fidel, with hundreds of pages of official

follow-up memos, remains unreleased.

A well-timed leak that clinched the case against Oswald for much of the

American press and public appears to have been part of the same disin-

formation plan as John Martino, since it also involved people who had

worked for Carlos Marcello. By late November 1963, the mainstream

news media focused on Oswald as JFK’s lone assassin, and on Jack Ruby

as a patriotic nightclub owner with no Mafia ties. However, we noted

earlier the private concerns of officials like Dallas Police Chief Curry

about the weak case against Oswald.21 As if to provide officials with an

ironclad case that Oswald was a cold-blooded killer, a new murderous

accusation against him suddenly surfaced. Spread quickly by the US

news media, it is still repeated today as evidence of Oswald’s guilt as

a “lone assassin.”

The December 7, 1963,
New York Times
reported that on April 10, 1963,

Lee Oswald—acting alone and using the same rifle found after JFK’s

murder—tried to assassinate recently retired General Edwin Walker, a

far-right spokesman. The FBI claimed to have made the discovery in its

December 3, 1963, interrogation of Oswald’s widow, Marina. This news

sealed the question of Oswald’s guilt for most people.22

However, Walker’s background, the evidence, and the actions of Mar-

cello associates like Oswald and Ruby suggest a different interpretation

of the shooting. General Walker became controversial in 1961, when JFK

removed him from command of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany

for indoctrinating his soldiers with inflammatory material from the John

Birch Society. The group and its leader made ridiculous claims, saying