Legacy of Secrecy (55 page)

that former president Dwight Eisenhower was “abiding by Communist

orders, and consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all his

adult life.”23

General Walker resigned, and in September 1962, when James Mer-

edith tried to become the first black student to enroll at the Univer-

sity of Mississippi, Walker’s opposition march erupted into a riot that

left two dead and seventy injured. The Kennedys had Walker arrested

and placed under psychological observation, but after his release, he

returned to his home in Dallas and ran for governor of Texas. Following

his defeat, Walker continued making outrageous claims in speeches as

he railed against the Kennedys, civil rights, and Castro. Walker flew the

Confederate flag in front of his home and later made a well-publicized

visit of support to Byron de la Beckwith, Medgar Evers’ assassin.24

Walker was in the same far-right, racist circles as Marcello’s associ-

ates John Martino, Guy Banister (whose close friend wrote a book about

Walker), and Joseph Milteer.25 Walker knew another Marcello subordi-

nate, Jack Ruby. Walker’s handyman told the FBI he saw “Jack Ruby vis-

iting General Walker on several occasions. . . . Ruby called at the Walker

residence on a monthly basis from December 1962 through March 1963.

. . . Ruby stayed approximately one hour at Walker’s home and talked

with Walker behind closed doors.” The Walker shooting occurred soon

after Ruby’s last visit to Walker’s house.26

Also during the first three months of 1963, while Lee Oswald

was in Dallas with Marina and working for the U-2 map firm

Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, Oswald began a series of unusual actions that

led to his being blamed for JFK’s murder. At least ten days prior to the

Walker shooting incident, Oswald visited New Orleans on an unusual

mission related to Cuba. An INS inspector told Senate investigators that

prior to April 1, he interviewed Oswald in a New Orleans jail, where

Oswald claimed to be a Cuban who couldn’t speak Spanish.27

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Earlier, Oswald had ordered his rifle and pistol through the mail

(using an alias) and begun corresponding with the Fair Play for Cuba

Committee (FPCC). Both the FPCC and mail-order guns were the subject

of well-publicized Congressional hearings at the time; some speculate

that Oswald was told his actions were assisting those efforts—something

that was true for Martino and Fiorini. After the rifle arrived, Oswald had

Marina take the infamous photograph of him holding the gun in one

hand and newspapers from two rival communist groups in the other.28

Oswald gave one of the photographs to his friend George DeMohren-

schildt, the aristocratic White Russian who later admitted to being a

CIA informant. Oswald also photographed the back of Walker’s house,

though the car tag of a 1957 Chevrolet was cut out before the Warren

Commission published the picture.29

On April 6, 1963, a Walker aide told police he saw two prowlers near

the house. Around the same time, another Walker aide saw a suspi-

cious “Cuban or dark-complected man in 1957 Chevrolet,” casing the

property.30 The FBI notes that one of the men who always accompanied

Ruby on his visits to Walker had a “dark complexion.”31

On the night of April 10, someone fired a rifle shot into a large win-

dow of Walker’s house. A witness saw two men, in two cars, flee the

scene. The next day’s newspaper reported that Walker’s window was

shattered by a 30.06 bullet, a different caliber than that of Oswald’s

rifle. The burst of local and national publicity after the shooting earned

Walker a few more months of national fame before he faded from view.32

In 1976, the
Washington Post
reported the intolerant Walker’s arrest for

“making a homosexual advance to a plainclothes policeman in a men’s

room.”33

After Oswald’s death, Marina told the FBI that Oswald had gone out

that evening and returned saying he’d shot at Walker, then buried his

rifle. Oswald had no car or driver’s license, so he would have had to take

a bus or a cab, or walked each leg of the seven-mile journey to Walker’s

house—yet no one ever reported having seen anyone suspicious, carry-

ing a rifle or a large package, in the vicinity.34 The bullet recovered from

Walker’s home cannot be matched to Oswald’s rifle, and even Walker

said the Warren Commission’s bullet was not the one he recovered.35

DeMohrenschildt told a writer for the
Wall Street Journal
that he

informed the CIA about the matter shortly after the shooting, and one of

DeMohrenschildt’s friends says she told the FBI about it. Nine days after

the shooting, DeMohrenschildt moved away from Dallas, and shortly

after that, Oswald moved to New Orleans to live with his uncle “Dutz”

Murret, a Marcello bookie.36

Despite the FBI’s claim, Marina was not the first to link Oswald to

the Walker shooting incident after JFK’s murder—an article about it

appeared on November 29, 1963, in the right-wing, West German news-

paper
Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung
. The newspaper

had called General Walker six days earlier, the day after JFK’s murder,

and reached him in Louisiana, where Walker was giving a talk to the

local White Citizens’ Council (Milteer was a member of the Atlanta

chapter).37

Walker liked to tell the dramatic story of how he avoided death by

lowering his head only a moment before the bullet came whizzing

by—but we have only Walker’s word that he was even in the room at

the time. Given the outrageous claims in Walker’s speeches, his cred-

ibility seems doubtful. Walker told Dick Russell that his two young

aides were involved in the shooting incident “one way or another.”

Ultimately, there is no proof the original shooting was anything more

than a publicity stunt.38

Before Oswald’s tie to the Walker shooting was reported in the US

press, the
New York Times
quoted Walker “as having said that President

Kennedy’s assassination was a Communist plot organized by Cuban

Premier Fidel Castro,” the same line John Martino was propagating.39

European writer Joachim Joesten points out that when most Americans

first heard of JFK’s death, they immediately suspected those in “the John

Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Councils, General

Walker’s henchmen.” But the timely leak of the Walker story steered

suspicions away from those types—including Martino, Banister, and

Milteer.40

The Walker story also diverted attention from Marcello and his many

associates who had recently been questioned or arrested. Oswald was

involved in the Walker incident somehow, but given the timing, Banister

could have told Oswald it was something he had to do to be considered

for his next assignment. The bottom line is that when the Walker story

became public after JFK’s murder, it was the final nail in the coffin prov-

ing Oswald’s guilt to the American press and public.

Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli needed to com-

pensate those who had participated in JFK’s murder, but they had to

do so carefully to avoid attracting attention. Marcello was so cautious

after his acquittal that he initially refused to pay the juror he had bribed,

eventually giving him only $1,000 instead of the $25,000 he had prom-

ised. Because of David Ferrie’s brief arrest, Marcello had to be even more

careful in rewarding him. John Davis says that Ferrie began working for

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a Marcello-owned air-taxi service and, later, for a “Marcello-financed

New Orleans air cargo service.” Then Ferrie “suddenly turned up as the

owner of a lucrative service station franchise in an ideal location . . . the

FBI found that the franchise had been financed by Carlos Marcello.”41

Some who later admitted their involvement in JFK’s murder, like John

Martino and David Morales, may have been rewarded though later busi-

ness deals in Central America. Others, like Guy Banister, didn’t receive a

significant financial reward and had participated because they hated JFK

and his support of civil rights. The same may have been true for Joseph

Milteer, who in 1963 still had the inheritance from his father. Unlike

Banister and Milteer, Michel Victor Mertz had no ideological stake in

JFK’s death and participated solely for money. Mertz was apparently

well paid for his role in JFK’s murder, and would soon begin an ascent

to staggering wealth in France.42

Exile leader Tony Varona had already received $200,000 (well over

$1 million in today’s dollars) from Trafficante and Rosselli’s associates

three months before JFK’s murder. The entire $200,000 was likely not all

for Varona, and portions of it went to one or more of the other partici-

pants. However, laundering the money through the Kennedy-backed

Varona, in a transaction that Trafficante/Rosselli associate Richard Cain

reported to the CIA, helped to ensure that Helms and the CIA would

later have to cover up much about the matter.

Varona’s $200,000 may have been related to a problem with an identical

amount that Santo Trafficante dealt with in early December 1963. Known

about only in recent years, it raises the possibility that Frank Ragano,

Trafficante’s and Hoffa’s attorney, was more actively involved in JFK’s

murder than he ever admitted. That idea would be consistent with the

trust Ragano shared with Trafficante and Hoffa, and with the shield of

attorney-client privilege, which could have been useful in plotting and

paying for JFK’s murder.

FBI files contain a report about a December 1963 dispute over the JFK

assassination between Santo Trafficante, Frank Ragano, and a Tampa

mob figure close to one of Trafficante’s brothers. The FBI’s source, a

criminal who was a teenager at the time, later told the assistant US

Attorney in Dallas what he saw at a Tampa club:

Two men came in carrying briefcases; one I recognized as Santo

Trafficante and the other I didn’t recognize [until] a few years later,

attorney Frank Ragano. [The owner] told me immediately I had to

leave; [he was] screaming at me, so I walked out of the front door,

and, being nosy, I sneaked in the side door of the building. Anyway,

both briefcases were opened with stacks of money in each one, and

[the owner] was arguing with Santo, saying that was not their agree-

ment, the money was $200,000 short, and he had already paid off the

two men who killed President Kennedy.43

Much about the story checks out: The FBI’s source named the club, the

site of a book-making operation that the owner ran with one of Traff-

icante’s brothers. The Tampa FBI said it was “well known [the club’s

owner was] associated . . . with organized crime.”44 The $200,000 figure

cited in the FBI report matches the amount listed in CIA files as what

Trafficante’s associates gave Varona, but those CIA files had not been

released when the FBI’s source made his allegation.

In December 1963, the FBI’s source tried to tell a policeman about

seeing Trafficante and the money, but the officer “told me to keep my

mouth closed because . . . it could get my family killed.”45 Years later,

the FBI questioned the policeman, who admitted knowing the source

but denied having heard the story about Trafficante. However, the FBI

noted that it “had already received a similar story to the one” the source

had told. The FBI files about the “similar story” have apparently never

been released.46

The problem between the club owner, Trafficante, and Ragano was

resolved, because the owner stayed partners with Trafficante’s brother,

while Ragano and Trafficante remained close for years. Before Ragano’s

death, he admitted to only limited involvement in JFK’s murder: carry-

ing messages between Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante.

In Ragano’s autobiography, he described meeting with Carlos Mar-

cello and Santo Trafficante in New Orleans approximately two weeks

after JFK’s assassination. Ragano said Marcello and Trafficante told him

they hoped that Jimmy Hoffa would show his gratitude for JFK’s mur-

der. Marcello said, “When you see Jimmy . . . you tell him he owes me

and he owes me big.” An FBI memo quotes Ragano as saying, “While

driving through New Orleans in Carlos Marcello’s car . . . I heard Santo

remark to Marcello, ‘Carlos, the next thing you know, they will be blam-

ing the President’s assassination on us.’”47

Trafficante and Marcello knew that using CIA operatives and operations

as part of their plot to kill JFK could keep them from being blamed for

JFK’s murder, and in the first week of December 1963, they took another

step in that direction. In a possible continuation of the unauthorized

CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, Trafficante bodyguard Herminio Diaz

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reportedly returned to Cuba to assassinate Fidel.48 Several years ear-

lier, in Havana, Diaz had worked for Rosselli at a Trafficante-owned