Reclaiming History (215 page)

Oh, by the way, Chuck, who often speaks fondly of his late brother, Sam, informs the reader in his book that Sam had Marilyn Monroe murdered with a lethal dosage of sedatives, and had also been behind the murder of Robert Kennedy in California in 1968.
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I’d hate to read what type of book Chuck Giancana would write about his deceased brother if he hadn’t been so fond of him.

N
ot only are brothers fingering their supposedly beloved brothers as being behind the assassination, but sons, still loving their dead fathers, are fingering their fathers. Ricky White, a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed salesman, called a press conference on August 6, 1990, at the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas (a haven for conspiracy theorists and literature that is no longer in existence but at the time was run by Larry N. Howard, J. Gary Shaw, and Larry Ray Harris) and said his father, Roscoe White, a Dallas police officer at the time of the assassination,
*
was one of three CIA operatives who fired on the president that day.
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For good measure, he said his father also killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald, he said, was also part of the conspiracy but fired no shots. Jack Ruby was a co-conspirator, but his role was not specified.

Where did Ricky White learn about his father’s role in the assassination? His father’s diary, he said, which he found in 1982 in a footlocker inside a shed behind his grandfather’s home in Paris, Texas. But White was unable to produce the diary, the entire basis for his charge, for the throng of reporters at the press conference, claiming it was stolen by an FBI agent who came to his home in Midland, Texas, to interview him in 1988. Though he didn’t have the diary, he recalled for the reporters the diary’s entry for November 22, 1963. His father, a covert U.S. intelligence operative code-named “Mandarin” in the diary, fired the two shots that killed Kennedy from behind the picket fence using his7.65-millimeter Mauser. “Lebanon” was the man in the Book Depository Building that fired two more shots, and “Saul” (the name most likely picked up from Hugh McDonald’s 1978 book,
Appointment in Dallas
) fired two shots at the president from the Dallas County Records Building. The reason for the assassination, per his father’s diary, was “to eliminate a National Security threat to world-wide peace,” and it was a part of Roscoe White’s “assignment” to join the Dallas Police Department before the assassination.

White wasn’t content to merely tell a ridiculous story. He insisted on bringing a collective smile to his audience by saying that although he wasn’t quite three years old at the time of the assassination, he recalled seeing his father and four other men practice for the assassination by firing into an automobile on a remote ranch near Van Horn, Texas. Although his father died in 1971 from third-degree burns on 99 percent of his body sustained in an industrial fire and explosion at a site where he worked as a welder, White claimed his father was probably murdered because he wanted to leave his CIA unit.

None of the allegations Ricky White made at the 1990 press conference had been made in early 1988 when he first indicated to the authorities in Midland, Texas, that he might have some information relating to the assassination. In meetings with representatives of the Midland County DA’s office and FBI agents out of the El Paso office in January of 1988, he said nothing about his father being a CIA agent who was one of three people who shot Kennedy, or that his father had killed Officer J. D. Tippit. Nor did he say anything about his father being murdered because he wanted to leave the CIA. He did say he believed that his father and his father’s mistress, who worked at the Book Depository Building, arranged for Lee Harvey Oswald to get the job he got at the building, and that it was his opinion that his father, Officer J. D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald had conspired to kill Kennedy because all three were U.S. marines who were upset with JFK “for leaving Marines on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.”

He also had a box of materials he showed the FBI agents. What they found, among the miscellaneous items, was a “hodge-podge of late 1950’s vintage letters” from his father to his mother, miscellaneous receipts and insurance policies of his father, a key, a letter, his father’s military service papers, an address book, correspondence from the HSCA to his mother, Geneva, and two receipts from the HSCA to his mother for photographs she had sent them of Lee Harvey Oswald, one of which, it turned out, was a companion to the backyard photos of Oswald holding the Carcano rifle taken by Marina.
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How did Roscoe White’s widow, who told the FBI agents she was a distant relative of JFK’s, come into possession of such photos, particularly the backyard one? She told the FBI El Paso agents that her husband was a police photographer for the Dallas Homicide and Robbery Bureau, that he had access to the photographs and simply took some. She said he “put the pictures in a nice album and thought they would be valuable someday.” Dallas assistant DA Jim Owens told the Midland DA that many police officers of that era acquired various sets of photographs and other memorabilia concerning the JFK assassination.

What about the diary White claimed, at his later press conference, that he found but was then stolen by an FBI agent who came to his home in Midland in 1988? The FBI never went to White’s home in Midland. White went to the Midland office of the FBI, but he told the FBI that in 1976 or 1977 “they” (he did not identify who “they” were, but he presumably meant HSCA investigators who picked up mostly photographs from his mother on December 31, 1976) took the diary and he never got it back, but his mother had a copy. However, neither White nor his mother were ever able to furnish this alleged copy of the alleged diary to the FBI.

The El Paso office of the FBI concluded that because of the photos of Oswald that his father had and because his mother told him his father was a friend of Officer J. D. Tippit’s on the Dallas Police Force, Ricky White was “trying to cash in” on the situation with his allegation of a conspiracy involving his father, Tippit, and Oswald. Finding there wasn’t “any basis in fact” in anything Ricky White had to say, the El Paso office of the FBI closed its file on the matter on January 26, 1988, unaware that two years later Ricky White would reemerge, full bore, with new and more sensational charges.
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Ricky White’s story, of course, was pure moonshine, and didn’t need any more assaults on its veracity, but assassination researchers Gary Mack and David Perry further exposed Ricky White’s claim as a complete hoax. Perry located Dr. Daniel Pearson, who, White claimed, had given electroshock treatments to his mother (since deceased) to force her to erase her memory of the conspiracy. Dr. Pearson told Perry that electroshock treatments can “affect” memory but “don’t erase memory,” and that although he did administer the treatments to Mrs. White in 1966, they were for her severe depression, not to erase or affect memory. This didn’t surprise Perry since he knew Roscoe White had gotten a hardship discharge from the army based on his wife’s depression.

And Perry and Mack located a man White had said was a hit man in the conspiracy, but he turned out to be a blueberry farmer.
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When Mack told White three weeks after White’s press conference that he and Perry “have good news for you. We’re convinced your father didn’t kill the president,” Mack said that White obviously “should have been overjoyed and relieved.” Instead, Mack said, White was shocked and speechless. “I waited for him to ask me ‘What do you have that convinces you of my father’s innocence?’ but he never asked. That’s when I knew the story was a hoax.”
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White had previously tried to sell his story as a book and movie. His efforts from the beginning had been financed by a group of seven young oil millionaires from Midland, Texas, incorporated under the name MATSU. Under its 1989 contract with White, the group was to receive an eight-to-one return until they received their eighty-thousand-dollar original investment back, then 20 percent of “any and all income generated from the story.”
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But nothing came of the effort. One member of the group would later say, “Ricky sounded sincere, and if what he said was true, he had the key to the biggest mystery in American history. We were young and naive, and being in Midland, had nothing much better to do. We figured we could spend about as much on this project as it would cost to drill a dry hole.”
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After some national television appearances by White (e.g., on
Larry King Live
), media interest in his story quickly died, but a conspiracy theorist named Joe West tried to revive interest in the story by calling a press conference claiming that before she died, Roscoe White’s widow had found a second diary of his (which Oliver Stone paid $5,300 for) at her home. “Almost everyone who saw the journal believed that it was a fraud,” wrote Gary Cartwright in
Texas Monthly
. The belief, he said, was that “Geneva created the journal.” The journal refers to the last assignment for Roscoe by his handlers (the ones who supposedly got him to murder Kennedy) as “Watergate.” The only problem, Cartwright writes, “is that the break-in at the Watergate apartment complex [June 17, 1972] didn’t occur until [close to nine] months after Roscoe died.” Further, though the entries were “supposedly written between 1957 and 1971, it appeared to be written in the same felt pen.” Cartwright did confirm that in August of 1957, White and Oswald, coincidentally, sailed aboard the same ship, the USS
Bexar
, from San Diego to Yokosuka, Japan. “White was in the same military division as Lee Harvey Oswald,” Cartwright wrote, “the 1st Marine Air Wing. So were about seven thousand other Marines. Geneva swears that her husband and Oswald were friends, but except for her word, there is no proof they even knew each other.” It should be noted that White and Oswald were also stationed in late 1957 at Subic Bay in the Philippines and it is certainly possible they could have run into each other at that time.
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After White’s press conference at the JFK Assassination Information Center back in 1990, the center turned over the key “evidence” in support of White to the Texas attorney general’s office so the attorney general could conduct an investigation of the matter. In February 1991, the attorney general’s office said that everything it had looked at had “not given any credibility to anything these people have been trying to say.”
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Though virtually everyone saw that Ricky White’s story was fraudulent, one person, predictably, was impressed with his allegation: Oliver Stone’s hero, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. Garrison told the media that White’s story “rings true.”
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A
nother alleged assassin is James E. Files (true name, James Sutton), the Rodney Dangerfield of Kennedy assassins. For years Files has been begging people to believe that he killed Kennedy, but with a few exceptions, no one, not even those on the fringes of the conspiracy community, respects him or his story. Indeed, Files has fallen on such hard times that few buffs will even talk to him. However, a few promoters and publicity seekers have tried to exploit Files’s pathetic story. On August 17, 1992, the late Joe West, who had just failed in trying to promote the Ricky White story, interviewed Files at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, where Files is serving a fifty-year sentence for the attempted murders of two Illinois police officers in 1991.
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West died in 1993, and Bob Vernon, a Houston producer, took over the Files story at the request of West’s family. Vernon videotaped an interview with Files at Stateville on March 22, 1994, in while Files confessed to firing the fatal head shot on November 22, 1963, and the tape, called
Confession of an Assassin
, was sold commercially.
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Also, between 1996 and 2001, conspiracy author Jerry Kroth visited and interviewed Files at the prison on three occasions as well as corresponded with him, and treats Files seriously in his book on the assassination,
Conspiracy in Camelot
. Most recently, in 2005, mobster Sam Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette, and two co-authors have featured Files in their book on the assassination,
JFK and Sam
, calling Files “The Real Assassin.”
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The following is a brief synopsis of Files’s story, which I feel is just as good or better than the hugely successful
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
. What I’m saying is that I feel Files is entitled to more respect from the buffs than he is getting, and they should perk up and listen when he talks. I know I do. (I’m being sarcastic.) Files (“Jim” hereafter) says he was a bodyguard and driver for Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti, a hit man for Chicago mobster Tony Ascardo and, later, Sam Giancana. Six months before the assassination, Chuckie told Jim that Kennedy was going to be killed and Jim was supposed to help out in whatever way he was told. Files said he “never liked Kennedy since he backed out on us” at the Bay of Pigs. A week before the assassination, Jim drove the weapons for the assassination from Chicago (where, Jim says, the assassination was originally scheduled to take place) down to Mesquite, Texas. The next day, Lee Harvey Oswald came by Jim’s motel (Files said he was confident Oswald was sent by David Atlee Phillips, who Files said was Oswald’s as well as his CIA handler) and took him out to a place near Mesquite where Jim fired the weapons and calibrated the scopes. The next “five days” Oswald and he drove around Dealey Plaza and Dallas (apparently Oswald wasn’t at work these days; his supervisors and coworkers only
thought
they saw him) so Jim would know all the streets and not run into any dead-ends “if anything went wrong and we had to flee from the area.” He said, “Lee Harvey Oswald and I never discussed the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” (That’s one statement I’d be willing to bet every penny I have was true.)
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On the morning of the assassination, he and mobster Johnny Roselli met Jack Ruby at a pancake house in Fort Worth, where Ruby gave Roselli an envelope that contained Secret Service identification badges and a map of the presidential motorcade route. Per Jim, at the time of the shooting, Nicoletti was firing at Kennedy from the second floor of the Dal-Tex Building (Roselli was present with Nicoletti but did not fire), while he (Jim) was behind the fence at the grassy knoll (Ruby, he said, was at the bottom of the grassy knoll) with instructions from Nicoletti to be a backup shooter
only
if the shots from the Dal-Tex Building didn’t kill Kennedy. Since it appeared to him that the Dal-Tex shots had only hurt Kennedy (Jim says Nicoletti hit Kennedy from behind with a 7.62-millimeter rifle), Jim fired the fatal head shot with his “Remington Fire Ball” XP-100 pistol, which he says CIA agent David Atlee Phillips gave to him when he worked for the CIA with anti-Castro Cubans at “No Name Key” in Florida. After Jim killed Kennedy, he said he wanted to leave his personal calling card, so he bit the empty shell that had been the casing for the bullet that killed Kennedy and placed it on top of the picket fence.