Reclaiming History (214 page)

The HSCA said it could find “no evidence to support Lorenz’ allegation.”
²⁶
Edwin Lopez, an HSCA researcher who testified for the defense at the London trial, told
Case Closed
author Gerald Posner, “Oh God, we spent a lot of time with Marita…It was hard to ignore her because she gave us so much crap, and we tried to verify it, but let me tell you—she is full of s——…Marita is not credible.”
²⁷

Not that they would be expected to acknowledge it if Lorenz were telling the truth, but Lorenz didn’t fare any better with members of the “assassin squad.” Bosch told the HSCA that the last time he saw Lorenz was in 1962 when she called him to get involved in anti-Castro activities, and he turned her down, adding he never traveled west of New Orleans in his life. The “Novo” brothers were never located, but Diaz and Hemming both denied ever taking any trip to Dallas with Lorenz. When the HSCA deposed Sturgis on Lorenz’s claim that he had participated in a plot to murder Kennedy, he responded, “Sir, that is an absolute lie…She is a liar. I took a polygraph examination to that effect that I have never been involved in any conspiracy to kill the president of the United States…nor was I with her in any automobile with these people or any other people going to Dallas to plot to kill the president of the United States. She is an absolute liar.”
²⁸
†

In late October of 1977, Lorenz succeeded in having Sturgis arrested in New York City for allegedly making threatening calls to her, which she taped. But when the Manhattan district attorney’s office heard the tapes (there were seven) Lorenz provided, they contained “no threats.” The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Alan Brooms, accordingly made a motion, which was granted, to dismiss the charges against Sturgis because “a lack of any substantiation of her [Mrs. Lorenz’s] charges impairs her credibility.”
²⁹

Even the wacky conspiracy theorist A. J. Weberman said he didn’t believe Lorenz’s story. A measure of Lorenz’s lack of credibility is that when her mother (whom, heretofore, not even Marita had alleged was a part of her far-reaching world of espionage and intrigue) died in 1977, Marita exclaimed, “She knew too much. They gave her a shot. Same as they gave Jack Ruby.”
³⁰

Marita should have known that quite apart from the fact that all the evidence shows precisely who killed Kennedy, and there is no evidence that shows her group did, she made it hard on herself by alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald, or “Ozzie,” was part of her group. The slightly inconvenient fact for poor Marita is that Oswald could not have been in Miami the week before the assassination and then traveling cross-country with her and the others thereafter, since Oswald was seen every day during this period in Dallas, where he was living. Indeed, every day of the week (except on Saturday and Sunday) he was working at the Book Depository Building and accounted for.

But who cares about these minor problems? Marita and her fable would live to see another day in the nurturing arms of someone who could give her a run for her money when it comes to a lack of credibility—the inimitable Mark Lane. In an August 1978 article in
Spotlight
, a small Washington, D.C., weekly published by the ultra-right Liberty Lobby, ex-CIA agent Victor Marchetti wrote that former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt’s assertion in a prior lawsuit that he was in Washington, D.C., not Dallas, on the day of the assassination “was not true,” and that when the HSCA held its open hearings later that month, his former employer, the CIA, would “admit” that Hunt (one of the Watergate burglars) “was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy.” Marchetti’s reasoning for why the CIA would do this made a lot of sense—to a child. The CIA, he said, had “decided to sacrifice him [Hunt] to protect its clandestine services.” Apart from the non sequitur (in what way would sacrificing Hunt “protect its clandestine services”?), the very strong likelihood is that the CIA would only be in a position to “admit” that Hunt was a part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy if the agency itself was involved in it. And if it was, the CIA would really be protecting its involvement in the assassination by sacrificing Hunt, wouldn’t it? Hunt, being a minnow in the conspiratorial pond, would be a ripe candidate for a plea bargain to implicate the higher-ups at the CIA. But Marchetti assured his readers that Hunt “will not dare to speak out—the CIA will see to that.” Right. Sacrifice someone who can implicate you, when he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing so, and then see to it (Marchetti doesn’t say how the CIA would accomplish this) that he doesn’t put the hat on you.

Marchetti, who wrote that there were “many powerful special interests connected with the conspiracy to kill Kennedy,” most of whom “are already dead” (Marchetti doesn’t say who these special interests and dead conspirators are, nor does he say how he came by this information), also claimed in the article that the CIA “just happened to stumble across” a memo in its old files “dated 1966,” which said in essence “someday we will have to explain Hunt’s presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963.”
³¹
Marchetti doesn’t concern himself with why the CIA would put such a cover-up plot on paper, but he busily goes on in his article to embrace the fairy tale told by Marita Lorenz. One wonders how someone (Marchetti) with this type of fuzzy mind could have been a fourteen-year veteran of the CIA before his resignation in 1969, at one time serving as an assistant to the deputy director. None of Marchetti’s silly predictions in the
Spotlight
article
*
came true, of course. One also wonders why Hunt would pay any attention to this drivel in a low-circulation publication. But he did, suing Marchetti and Liberty Lobby for libel.

Mark Lane, whose politics are as far away from that of Liberty Lobby as night is from day, was the defense attorney for Liberty Lobby and wrote a book about the case,
Plausible Denial
. The book in substantial part deals with matters totally unrelated to the trial, providing Lane with yet another opportunity to regurgitate all of his conspiracy theories and allegations about the Kennedy assassination.
Plausible Denial
is poorly written, very superficial (but then again, maybe it’s not, since Lane had nothing to write about), and even lacking in citations (a cardinal sin for any book on the assassination) to give the precise sources of Lane’s allegations. Remarkably, Lane doesn’t even tell his readers whether or not Marchetti was a defendant in the lawsuit (he
was
in the original complaint, but the case was dismissed against him prior to the trial), waits until page 129 to tell his readers what the
Spotlight
article says, and never finds the space in his 393 pages to inform his readers what Hunt’s formal complaint, the basis for the defamation lawsuit, trial, and Lane’s book, said. But it is inferable from the book that the main issue at the trial seemed to be the
Spotlight
article allegation that Hunt was in Dallas, not Washington, D.C., on the day of the assassination. Hunt, being the plaintiff, had the legal burden of proving a negative, that he wasn’t in Dallas on November 22, 1963, some twenty-two years before the trial, which was held in a U.S. district court in Miami in 1985.
*
He was unable to prove this to the satisfaction of the jury, something that millions of others might be unable to do also, and on February 6, 1985, the federal jury found “for the defendant, Liberty Lobby, and against the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt.”

Consistent with his MO, Lane led his readers to believe that the reason for the verdict against Hunt was that the Miami jury believed the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s murder. But to support this, he only cites one juror, jury forewoman Leslie Armstrong, who said
she
believed this. But obviously, the issue of whether the CIA was behind the assassination was not for the jury to consider, and they apparently didn’t. The tireless and always industrious conspiracy researcher Harrison Edward Livingstone, in his book
Killing the Truth
, says that “UPI wrote that juror No. 11 (Cobb) ‘said the jury did not address the allegations brought out by Lane throughout the trial that Hunt was involved in a CIA conspiracy to kill Kennedy.’”
³²
And
Newsweek
reported that another juror, Suzanne Reach, told the
Miami Herald
(in support of what Cobb said) that what Armstrong said “wasn’t the reason for the verdict.”
³³

In classic understatement, Lane announces to his readers in the opening pages of his book that “there is no legal precedent for
Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby
. More than two decades after the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, the case against his killers was finally tried in a civil action suit brought in the federal courthouse in Miami.” And, of course, representing the people of this country in seeking justice was…Mark Lane.

By Lane’s own admission, his “most important” witness at the trial was none other than Ms. Lorenz, who, Lane writes, “traveled with the assassins from Miami to Dallas just before the murder.” Lorenz’s New York deposition on January 11, 1985, was read to the Miami jury. Since Lorenz’s original story was so much of a lulu, one would have thought that there wasn’t too much room for improvement. But with Lane holding her hand, she managed to do so, big time. After recounting the meeting at Orlando Bosch’s home, the car trip to Dallas (the group no longer had just three or four automatic weapons, but “cases of machine guns, rifles, thirty-eights [and] forty-fives”), and the arrival at the Dallas motel, she testified that not only did Jack Ruby come to the door during her very short overnight stay at the Dallas motel, but the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt, whom she knew as “Eduardo,” also came to the room, and she saw Hunt deliver an envelope of cash to her friend Sturgis, obviously, the payoff for the assassination. (She testified she had seen Eduardo make previous payments to Sturgis.) And Sturgis, who Marita had previously indicated wouldn’t tell her anything, told her Hunt “had made [all] the arrangements” for their mission and “would provide the operating funds, cover, and plans for exit from the area once the assignment was completed.” And though, in her HSCA testimony, she indicated she only
assumed
that the Sturgis-led group had killed Kennedy, she testified in the defamation trial that Sturgis later told her that by leaving Dallas she had missed “the really big one” in Dallas. “We killed the President that day. You could have been a part of it—you know, part of history. You should have stayed. It was safe. Everything was covered in advance. No arrests…it was all covered. Very professional.” Lane, in his book, adds triumphantly, “It may have been very professional, but after the testimony of Marita Lorenz was read to a jury in a United States courthouse, it was no longer all covered.”
³⁴

In other words, Lane, in 1966, informed the world in his book
Rush to Judgment
that the Warren Commission had covered up the identity of the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy, and then, in 1991, finally informed the world in his book
Plausible Denial
just who those conspirators were. The quarter-of-a-century wait was worth it, at least for me. Lane’s undoubtedly innocent and unsuspecting publisher for
Plausible Denial
, Thunder’s Mouth Press, laments on the book’s dust jacket that the Miami trial was “historic, yet curiously unpublicized.” I can’t imagine why.

O
ne of the most amusing stories on the assassination was told by Chicago mobster Sam Giancana’s brother, Chuck, in his 1992 book (written with Sam Giancana’s grandson, Sam Giancana),
Double Cross
. I could make a few sardonic asides about the story as it progresses, but I’ll respectfully defer to Chuck here. He doesn’t need me to make his story funny.

It seems that one day after pasta at Chuck’s home three years after the assassination, older brother Sam told Chuck what really went down. Sam started out by saying that he and the CIA “took care of Kennedy…together.” But as he continued his tale, Sam said a great many other people were also involved. Jack Ruby (who needed help crossing the street on a green light—here I go again—that’s the last interruption) was put in charge of overall coordination of the assassination in Dallas because he was Sam’s representative in Dallas. (Ruby and Oswald, Sam added, “were queer for each other.”) Sam said that “Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson knew about the whole damn thing” because he, Sam, told them about it when he met with them in Dallas several times before the assassination. A “half-dozen fanatical right-wing Texans” were also involved in the assassination, per Sam. The nuts-and-bolts planning for the assassination involved some of the top people on the Dallas police force as well as Mayor Earle Cabell.

Chuck writes that his brother solicited from several quarters professional killers who were required to be top-notch marksmen. The killers? Two of New Orleans mafioso Carlos Marcello’s men, Charles Harrelson and Jack Lawrence, as well as two of Tampa mafioso Santo Trafficante’s Cuban exile friends. Sam told Chuck that he sent three of his killers down too: Richard Cain, Chuckie Nicoletti, and a fellow named Milwaukee Phil (Felix Anthony Alderisio). So seven assassins in all were sent to Dallas to kill Kennedy, but the actual killers, Sam told Chuck, were Cain and Nicoletti, both firing from the Book Depository Building. Chuck writes that “during the operation, Moonie [Sam’s nickname] said the CIA upper echelon sequestered themselves in a hotel, surrounded by electronic equipment. With the aid of walkie-talkies, the [killers] were able to secure their firing positions.” The CIA, Sam said, had arranged for Dallas police officers J. D. Tippit and Roscoe White to murder Oswald after the assassination, but when Tippit wavered, White was forced to murder Tippit. Oswald’s survival, Sam told Chuck, was “probably the only real screw-up in the whole goddamned deal,” but it was a big one. Since Ruby was assigned to make sure everything went right and it didn’t, he knew that to avoid dying at the hands of “one of Moonie’s vengeful enforcers for a screwed-up job,” he himself would have to silence Oswald, which he did. Sam told Chuck that after the assassination, “for once, we didn’t have to worry about J. Edgar Hoover.” Hoover, Sam said, covered up anything and everything his “boy scouts” found because “he hated the Kennedys as much as anybody and he wasn’t about to have Bobby find his brother’s killers.”