The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (21 page)

As explained in
Chapter Two
, it’s also important to keep in mind that Oswald was still under “tight” surveillance by Naval Intelligence, with the assistance of the CIA. Both during Oswald’s early 1963 trip to New Orleans and after he moved there in late April, Banister and Ferrie were well positioned to assist the CIA and Naval Intelligence with that surveillance.

Oswald was probably encouraged first to write and then to join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to further legitimate US intelligence objectives for the CIA and Naval Intelligence. These include making him more attractive for KGB recruitment, laying the groundwork for involving Oswald in anti-Castro operations, and making him part of CIA officer David Atlee Phillips’s efforts to penetrate and compromise the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald probably ordered the weapons at the behest of someone working for the Mafia, such as Banister or Ferrie. Given their work for Marcello at the time, it was all too easy for them to manipulate Oswald under the guise of furthering some US intelligence activity.

As for the shooting at General Walker’s home, Banister belonged to the same white supremacist circles as General Walker, and associates of the two had been at a white supremacist conference in New Orleans just four days before someone shot into Walker’s home. Any role Oswald had in that incident was probably at Banister’s behest, an effort to plant evidence that would make Oswald look murderously violent after he was arrested for JFK’s assassination.

A closer look at the timing of all these events shows just how intertwined they were and reveals other links to the Mafia’s role in
JFK’s assassination. First, here’s a brief summary: Someone using the alias Alek Hidell and Oswald’s post office box in Dallas ordered a .38-caliber pistol on January 28 from a Los Angeles company and ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a Chicago firm on March 12, 1963; both weapons were shipped the same day, March 20. On March 31 Oswald’s wife, Marina, photographed him in his backyard holding both weapons and the two Communist newspapers.
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In the first week of April, Oswald was fired from his job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas, and he wrote his first letter to the head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On April 10 a bullet was fired into the Dallas home of General Walker. On April 24 Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he initially lived with his uncle, a bookie for Carlos Marcello.

As for the guns, journalist Henry Hurt wrote that the theory “that Oswald chose to acquire his guns by mail order has never made much sense. Its only value is to the official version of events” by creating a “chain of documentary evidence to link Oswald to the weapons supposedly responsible for the murders of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit,” even though “the same make of rifle and revolver could have been purchased by Oswald at stores only a few blocks from where he worked in Dallas.” Hurt points out that under the laws at the time, “there would have been no record of his purchase and ownership” had he bought the guns at a store, as there would be for mail-order guns. By using the mails, Oswald appears to have deliberately left much more of a trail than if he had made the same purchase by spending a few minutes at a busy gun shop’s counter.

The mail-order guns also tied Oswald’s actions to a Senate committee investigating mail-order weapons; some of the committee’s
members were at the same time investigating the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Guy Banister had worked for racist Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, Chairman of the Senate committee investigating Fair Play for Cuba. Eastland would soon be working on a covert CIA operation involving John Martino, Johnny Rosselli, and Santo Trafficante. Trafficante operative Frank Fiorini “later admitted to having intelligence connections to” Eastland’s Senate committee.

Those connections and the newspaper headlines the hearings generated would have made it possible for Guy Banister to manipulate Oswald into thinking he was assisting those committees by ordering the guns and writing to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Historian George Michael Evica notes that between Oswald’s conveniently timed mail-order gun purchases and his contact with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, “Oswald could not have set up a more consistent pattern had he been working (whether directly or indirectly) for” the Senate committees. That may be exactly what Oswald thought he was doing. Oswald may well have thought that if he followed the orders of Banister and Ferrie, he might someday be testifying before Congress like his boyhood hero from
I Led Three Lives
. Under that scenario, Oswald would think he was assisting the committees—by showing that a former Russian defector and a Fair Play for Cuba Committee member could easily order a rifle and pistol through the mail—when in actuality he was being set up.

In addition, John Newman, historian and retired Army Intelligence major, discovered that the Chicago FBI office launched a major “investigation of the [Fair Play for Cuba Committee] on March 8 [1963], four days before Oswald” seems to have “ordered the rifle from Chicago.” (Recall that Banister was a former FBI chief in Chicago.) Newman also notes that word of the FBI investigation of the FPCC
“was transmitted to the CIA” for some reason, something that was not always the case. There were more Fair Play for Cuba Committee hearings on March 13, 1963—the same day Oswald appears to have ordered his rifle. On March 31 Lee Oswald wrote his first letter to the head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That was also the day Oswald had his wife, Marina, take the famous photos of him holding his recently arrived mail-order rifle. More Senate Fair Play for Cuba Committee hearings were held on April 3, 1963, and just over two weeks later Oswald wrote another letter to the head of that organization. In the meantime, someone had fired a shot into General Walker’s home on April 10. Oswald moved to New Orleans on April 24, 1963, after surreptitiously visiting the city earlier that year.

The shooting at General Walker’s was termed “an assassination attempt” by Walker and the Warren Commission, and when word of it emerged soon after JFK’s assassination, it seemed to some to clinch the case against the deceased Oswald. However, Walker’s background, the evidence, and the actions of Marcello associates such as Oswald and Ruby suggest a different interpretation of the shooting.

General Walker became controversial in 1961 when JFK removed him from command of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in Germany for indoctrinating his soldiers with inflammatory material from the John Birch Society. That material made ridiculous claims, such as saying that former President Dwight Eisenhower was “consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all his adult life.”

General Walker resigned, and in September 1962, when James Meredith tried to become the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, Walker went to the campus and delivered incendiary racist remarks, full of blatant lies and distortions. 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’s assassin. Walker moved in the same far-right, racist circles as Guy Banister (whose close friend wrote a book praising Walker).

Walker also apparently knew another Marcello subordinate, Jack Ruby. According to an FBI memo, Walker’s handyman said he saw “Jack Ruby visiting 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.
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For the April 10 shooting at Walker’s, we have only the word of Walker that he was even in the room where the shot was fired. Otherwise, a shot fired into an empty room would be little more than a case of serious vandalism. Walker’s long-standing pattern of public lies and exaggerations in regard to civil rights and minorities calls into question his overly dramatic story of lowering his head just as the bullet was fired into the room.

The Warren Commission and others have tried to pin the Walker shooting exclusively on Oswald to show a propensity for murderous
violence that is otherwise missing in Oswald’s background. But numerous journalists and authors have pointed out serious problems with that theory. Witnesses saw at least two people at the shooting, and at least two cars were involved in suspicious activity around Walker’s house. None of the witnesses said any of the men looked like Oswald, and Walker’s night watchman said the driver of a suspicious 1957 Chevrolet he spotted casing the house a few days earlier looked “Cuban.”

In addition, Oswald couldn’t drive and didn’t own a car, raising the ludicrous spectacle of Oswald walking along the sidewalk or suspiciously skulking through suburban alleys with his rifle, or else taking his rifle on the bus to Walker’s home. Even disassembled, the rifle would have been so long as to provoke the suspicions of those he encountered, at least the following day when they learned about the shooting and recalled seeing a young man in the area with an unusually long package.

While others were involved in the incident, Lee Oswald’s statements to Marina and to his CIA monitor George DeMohrenschildt make it clear that Oswald was as well. Since others were involved in the Walker incident with Oswald—meaning it was a conspiracy—that’s a strong indication that others were involved in what happened to JFK. In addition, research by Dick Russell and Anthony Summers strongly indicates that the Walker shooting was not an assassination attempt at all. Instead, it was a stunt to publicize General Walker, who faced a fading career as a reactionary extremist. Walker’s breathless story to reporters that he was almost killed—and would have been shot in the head if he hadn’t bent down at just the right moment—generated tremendous regional and national publicity.

Guy Banister got what he wanted: publicity for a white supremacist ally, a test of whether he could manipulate Oswald into dealing with firearms, and several actions on Oswald’s part that would incriminate
him after JFK’s death. Since Oswald had begun the Cuban phase of his covert activity just ten days before the Walker incident—with a letter to the national chairman of the small Fair Play for Cuba Committee—his actions in relation to Walker were probably designed to test his abilities for his new assignment. Unlike Oswald’s previous “defect and return” Russian assignment, anti-Castro operations demanded a new set of skills, from surreptitiously arranging and attending meetings (and keeping them secret from his wife) to dealing with firearms in a covert way. The Walker incident was a chance to see if Oswald, who had never served in combat, could handle that type of assignment. Given Oswald’s dramatic increase in Cuban activity in the months after the Walker incident, he obviously passed the test, whether he fired the shot or was involved in some other capacity. By late April 1963, Oswald was living with his uncle Dutz Murret, a bookie for Carlos Marcello, and he would do so for two weeks, until Marina Oswald joined him in New Orleans and they got their own apartment.

WHEN OSWALD MOVED in with Carlos Marcello’s bookie, the godfather himself was waiting on word about his appeal to the Supreme Court regarding a new deportation order, which had been spearheaded by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Soon after, John Davis said that Marcello received word that the “Supreme Court . . . declined to review the Marcello deportation action.” The decision was “prominently reported in the New Orleans papers” and “meant that all Carlos’s appeals were exhausted.” With that defeat, “the pressure increased many times over” on Marcello to take action against the Kennedys in order to preserve his freedom and his empire.

As 1963 wore on, Marcello’s allies in the plot to murder JFK faced similar pressure from the Kennedys. Santo Trafficante came under
ever-increasing scrutiny from the Kennedys, who busted his operations and made increasing use of IRS tax liens against him. RFK also made the very private and reclusive Trafficante the focus of major Congressional hearings. Finally, by subpoenaing Trafficante’s wife, the Kennedys had broken what Trafficante considered an unwritten law. Trafficante did plenty of philandering, as did Marcello, but the godfathers liked to maintain the image of being traditional family men, and their wives had been considered off-limits during the previous decade.

The FBI also still dogged Johnny Rosselli, except when he was working on the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro. His boss, Sam Giancana, was put under “lockstep” surveillance by the FBI at the urging of Robert Kennedy, crippling Giancana’s ability to function (and preventing him from having an active role in JFK’s assassination). Rosselli’s power in Las Vegas and Hollywood flowed from Sam Giancana’s high position with the Chicago mob, so unless Rosselli could eliminate RFK’s pressure on Giancana, Rosselli’s own future looked dim.

Remarkably, even as the Kennedy brothers increased their attacks on the mob bosses, the crime families still conducted their deadly business as usual, even assassinating a government official in the United States. A Chicago mobster who was a “close friend of Ruby” was “credited by law enforcement officials with the murder of [Chicago alderman] Benjamin F. Lewis,” as documented by investigative journalist Dan Moldea. The Chicago official was found dead on “February 28, 1963 . . . face down in a four-foot-wide pool of blood” after “the back of his head had been shot off by three bullets.” His assassination was “the 977th unsolved underworld hit in Chicago since the early 1900s.” While law-enforcement officials knew who did the killing, no one was ever tried and convicted for the crime. Such killings showed why Rosselli, Marcello, and Trafficante viewed a much more
carefully planned hit on a much higher official as a viable solution to their mutual problems with the Kennedys.