Reclaiming History (268 page)

But for over a year and a half starting in February of 1979, the FBI was finally able to conduct electronic surveillance on Marcello at his office in New Orleans and wiretap his phone as part of its BRILAB (code name for “bribery of organized labor”) operation. On July 19, 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board released the transcript of thirteen conversations of Marcello that related to the Kennedy assassination. Most took place in the summer of 1979, when the HSCA released its report on the assassination. John Volz, the U.S. attorney in New Orleans at the time who got the court order for the electronic surveillance and wiretapping, told me, “There were nineteen months of BRILAB surveillance, and hundreds of hours. I didn’t listen to all the tapes, but the prosecutors I assigned to the case did. I can tell you, there was nothing on those tapes indicating any complicity by Marcello in the assassination.”
¹⁰⁰

The transcripts are revealing on several levels, one of the most important of which is that although the HSCA’s report suggested that it was “unlikely” that Marcello was involved in the assassination, reporters at the time like Jack Anderson strongly implied his involvement, and the articles on his possible involvement were on the front page of Marcello’s local paper, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
. Yet Marcello and his intimates, though angry at the negative publicity, treated the suggestion of his involvement in the assassination as absurd and, indeed, would bring it up in their conversations
after
more important discussions about business and, in one instance, women they were sharing. The following are some excerpts:

In a July 13, 1979, phone conversation between Isaac Irving Davidson and Marcello, Davidson, a close friend of Marcello’s who was a Washington lobbyist for organized labor (as well as the Dominican Republic), comments about an Anderson article in the
Washington Post
the previous day that erroneously reported that the imminent HSCA report would name Marcello as the “chief suspect” in the assassination.

Davidson: “You had as much to do with Kennedy as I have.”

Marcello: “Yeah, well, I ain’t worried about that.”

Marcello then proceeds to talk about something that is more real to him, a proposed civil lawsuit against a New Orleans figure named “Cronvich [phonetic spelling].”

On July 18, 1979, Marcello calls his office and speaks to his secretary, Loretta, to tell her to set up an appointment with someone for the next day.

Then, Marcello: “Let’s see what else I want…You’ve got the [
Times-Picayune
] newspaper there?”

Loretta: “Yeah, I got it.”

Marcello: “Okay, cut that uh.”

Loretta: “Yeah, I know.”

Marcello: “That Kennedy deal, that whole thing…And put it in the mail.”

(The HSCA Report came out the previous day and was all over the news. Knowing the HSCA at least considered the possibility of his involvement in the assassination, he apparently wasn’t even going to bother going out immediately to get the paper, content to have Loretta send it to him in the mail. He obviously was very worried.)

Later that day (July 18), Joe Campisi, the owner of the restaurant in Dallas (the Egyptian Lounge) where Jack Ruby dined frequently, and a friend of Marcello’s and other underworld figures throughout the country, calls Marcello.
After
a conversation about business and women, he tells Marcello about an article on the HSCA Report in the
Dallas Morning News
.

Campisi: “They had a big write-up here yesterday morning about all that shit, you know.”

Marcello: “That Kennedy deal?”

Campisi: “Oh yeah. And uh they said that Jack Ruby had all the connections. You wouldn’t know Jack Ruby if the mother fucker was uh crawl in your room.”

Marcello: “Shit, he never talked to me in his li…I don’t even know him.”

Later on that same day (July 18), an unknown male (UM) calls Marcello. After talking about business and contract matters for most of the conversation, the man talks about President Carter asking his cabinet to resign, then about Ted Kennedy being on television that morning talking about Mary Jo Kopechne. This incites Marcello. “Yeah, that mother fucker [Ted Kennedy]…If we’d uh done that we’d go in the penitentiary.” He then segues into newspapers talking about his alleged hatred for JFK and RFK, and he tells the man about his testimony before the HSCA.

Marcello: “They asked me that…I say I ain’t never hate nobody. I say I have a argument with people…You know what I mean? I can have argument with you…but I make up, maybe tomorrow, next week or next month.”

UM: “Yeah.”

Marcello: “But ain’t hatin’ ya to kill ya. I’m a kill somebody? Shit. President or (laugh) [It’s only a laugh to you, Carlos. Conspiracy theorists don’t know enough to laugh about something as silly as this] Attorney General?…I say I used to love John Kennedy President…I say he would a made the best President if he’d a lived.”

UM: “Ya.”

Marcello: “I uh I say I was really hurt when they, when they killed him…Far as Bobby Kennedy, I didn’t hate him either…[but] I never did like him. How could I like a man that throwed me out to the dogs?”

(Marcello, the Tunisian-born immigrant, spoke broken English all his life.)

On August 1, 1979, another unknown man calls Marcello’s office. Apparently Marcello is not in and he speaks to Loretta about a recent Jack Anderson article about her boss. He reminds her that he has been a close friend of Marcello’s for “almost well, thirty-five years.” What is instructive about his remarks is that intimates of Marcello’s would obviously have a much, much better sense of whether Marcello had been involved in the assassination than anyone else. And if they knew, or thought, or even wondered about whether he did, it is rather unlikely they’d be talking like this in an unguarded and private (to them) conversation. The man complains bitterly that the Anderson article was “absolutely vicious…They got Carlos mixed up in this…And I wanta tell you something. Uh, Uh, it’s all I can do [to] restrain myself.”

Loretta: “Well, that’s right…It’s ridiculous, it really is.”

UM: “It is, but you see, at the same time, how is he gonna fight it, cause the minute he opens his mouth, he’s gonna lose.”

Loretta: “You just don’t pay any attention to him [Anderson]. Period.”

UM: “Well, but you see, a lot of people do.”

Loretta: “Well, that’s the sad part about it. People believe everything they read.”

With respect to this issue of how intimates of Marcello’s viewed the charges against him, in an earlier July 17, 1979, phone conversation between Marcello’s lobbyist friend Isaac Irving Davidson, calling from Marcello’s office at the Town and Country Motel in New Orleans, and a Jim Draykel, Davidson tells Draykel that he’s been close to Marcello for twenty-five years, that the HSCA Report scheduled to come out that day was “all bullshit” and that he had talked to Walter Sheridan (a top aide to RFK) “and he says it’s all bullshit too…The only reason it makes [Carlos] feel badly is because of his grandchildren, [they] all hear that bullshit.”

It
is
all bull…and will always be bull…to anyone who is using the gray matter between their ears. That, of course, automatically excludes virtually all of the resident habitues of the conspiracy community.

After reviewing several hundred hours of conversations recorded by telephonic wiretapping and bugs on the premises, the FBI concluded that “nothing developed in the Brilab investigation…could be considered evidence in the Kennedy assassination.”
¹⁰¹

It has to be repeated that even if we accept Becker’s allegation,
no evidence has ever surfaced that Marcello had Kennedy killed by Oswald or anyone else
. The HSCA, in its investigation of Marcello, said that although it could not positively conclude that “Marcello and his associates were not involved” in the assassination (i.e., the committee couldn’t prove a negative), it pointed out that “Marcello’s uniquely successful career in organized crime has been based to a large extent on a policy of prudence; he is not reckless. As with the case of the Soviet and Cuban Governments, a risk analysis indicated that he would be unlikely to undertake so dangerous a course of action as a Presidential assassination.”
¹⁰²
Speaking not just of Marcello, but also Trafficante,
Newsweek
pointed out that one of the big problems with “fingering them as the culprit” was “their own prudence. The two men lasted as dons for decades in part by being cagey, not by trying to kill the president of the United States.”
¹⁰³

It is noteworthy that Marcello, who died in New Orleans on March 2, 1993, at the age of eighty-three, was never charged with any murder during his storied career in organized crime. It is perhaps even more noteworthy that other than some early assault and robbery charges brought against him in his late teens and early twenties, over the almost sixty-year period between 1935 and his death in 1993, with one exception being a charge of assault in 1966 for taking a wild swing at someone he thought was impeding his way as he walked through a crowd at New Orleans International Airport, he was never charged with any crime involving physical violence of any kind.
¹⁰⁴
All of the charges against him were nonviolent in nature. In 1938, Marcello was convicted of selling marijuana to an FBI undercover officer. For the next forty-two years, other than the assault charge in 1966, there were no prosecutions of any kind against him. In 1981, he was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy to violate federal racketeering laws in his effort to win a multimillion-dollar state group insurance contract (later reversed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision that changed what constituted fraud under federal law), and in 1983, for conspiracy to bribe a federal judge in California presiding over the trial of underworld friends of his. After serving six and a half years in prison on these charges, and in very poor health, he was paroled in 1989.

However, Marcello’s chief nemesis, Aaron Kohn, the former FBI agent out of Chicago who took over the privately financed New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission in 1953 and was its managing director for twenty-four years, doggedly investigated Marcello for years and became convinced, though he could not prove, that Marcello was behind three and possibly four murders in New Orleans.
¹⁰⁵
Even if true, this would be very small potatoes next to the murder-drenched Mafia families in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

No one was ever more respected in New Orleans law enforcement than John Volz. His outstanding resumé bespeaks enormous experience and stature. From 1963 to 1968 he was an assistant district attorney under Jim Garrison, heading up the section on narcotics enforcement. After a year as a special agent for the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the predecessor to today’s Drug Enforcement Administration), he returned to the DA’s office as Garrison’s chief assistant district attorney between 1970 and 1974. From 1974 to 1978 he was New Orleans’s first federal public defender and was the U.S. attorney in New Orleans from 1978 to 1991. From 1991 to 1993 he served as special counsel to the Department of Justice. No one has more of a background in New Orleans law enforcement than he, and no one knows the “players” any better than he. When I asked him about the notion that Marcello may have been behind Kennedy’s assassination, he had a one-word reply: “Absurd.” Marcello (whom Volz personally prosecuted in 1981 on the charge of conspiring to obtain an insurance contract by bribery), he acknowledged, was the head of organized crime in New Orleans, but he hastened to add that New Orleans organized crime wasn’t anything like “the Eastern Mafia families.” For instance, he said, “Marcello, almost exclusively, was into gambling,
*
not extortion, narcotics, or murder.”
¹⁰⁶

Extortion, of course, has been a staple of organized crime almost from its inception. The essence of Mafia extortion during the mob’s heyday was simple: either you paid for “protection” or you’d be murdered or maimed for life. Yet
Life
magazine, in an in-depth three-part series on organized crime in America in 1967, which was decidedly negative about Marcello, nonetheless reported, “[Marcello’s] Jefferson Music Company almost monopolizes vending machines and pinball games in Jefferson Parish. Each year he
lends
thousands of dollars to restaurant or tavern owners
if they agree to accept
his jukeboxes, cigarette machines or pinball games.”
¹⁰⁷
Some extortion. The thrust of
Life
’s investigation of Marcello was that through payoffs and favors extending all the way up to the governor’s office, Marcello’s gambling empire was permitted to flourish unimpeded.

When I mentioned Aaron Kohn’s allegation about murder, Volz said, “Aaron [now deceased] was a good man and his office and mine worked together on many cases, but many times he kind of went off half-cocked, basing conclusions on hearsay and unsubstantiated rumor.” Volz added that the federal authorities “investigated Marcello for thirty years, and let me tell you this, if they—and I was a part of that effort—had come up with any credible evidence that Marcello was responsible for any murders, or was involved in narcotics, I can guarantee you, we would have come down hard on him and there would have been prosecution.”

When I said I had heard that people feared Marcello, he confirmed that this was so, explaining that “Marcello was more a myth. His reputation was much worse than he was, and he enjoyed this and profited from it. He had a reputation for being violent, which he wasn’t, and he loved it because he scared a lot of people.”
¹⁰⁸
*

Since Marcello had no history of violence, the suggestion that he would start committing violent crimes by committing the most violent crime of all, murder, and do so against the most powerful man on earth, makes no sense at all.

O
ne important addendum to all of this: In their desperation to connect Oswald with organized crime (necessary because why would Ruby silence Oswald for the mob, as they claim, if Oswald hadn’t killed Kennedy for the mob?), the conspiracy theorists who allege in their books that Marcello had Kennedy killed, and that Oswald was his hit man, try to connect Oswald with Marcello through Oswald’s uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret. Since there is no evidence that Marcello had Kennedy killed, and the whole notion that he did makes no sense at all, what follows necessarily is a meaningless discussion. Nevertheless, let’s look at what the conspiracy theorists say. We know from the biography of Oswald in this book that Oswald had a moderately close relationship with his mother’s sister, Lillian Murret (his aunt), and her husband, Dutz, even staying at their home in New Orleans for two weeks in April of 1963 while he looked for a job and waited for Marina and their daughter, June, to join him from Dallas.