The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (4 page)

That meant JFK had to be assassinated in Dallas, Marcello’s territory. As revealed later in this book for the first time, Carlos Marcello explained how his second-in-command lieutenant in Dallas—mobster and restaurateur Joe Campisi Sr.—played a key role in managing the shooters for JFK’s murder. The House Committee had been suspicious of Campisi, a close associate of Jack Ruby. (Ruby went to Campisi’s restaurant the night before JFK’s assassination, and Campisi visited Ruby in jail soon after Oswald was shot.) Ruby has long been reported to have been the Mafia’s “payoff man” for the Dallas Police, but the Dallas Chief of Detectives regularly conducted mob business with Campisi every Sunday night for years.

The book documents other associates of Marcello and Trafficante who were reportedly in Dallas to help with JFK’s assassination. They include Michel Victor Mertz, Trafficante’s French Connection heroin kingpin and a former assassin who had intelligence connections, as well as CIA agent and Cuban exile Bernard Barker, then working on the CIA’s most sensitive authorized anti-Castro operation.

Carlos Marcello’s own words, confided to his trusted friend, FBI informant Van Laningham, provide the final pieces to the JFK assassination puzzle. As part of setting up Oswald, Marcello had his pilot, David Ferrie, bring Oswald to meet the godfather personally—and secretly. The House Committee uncovered evidence that Oswald had
met Ferrie years earlier when Ferrie helped supervise Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol unit and that in the summer of 1963 Oswald was actually working with Ferrie.

Marcello also told Van Laningham about his meetings with Jack Ruby and said that Ruby’s club in Dallas was one of several in that city secretly owned by Marcello’s organization. Ruby just fronted the club for Marcello, and when Ruby was caught stealing from the till to pay his back taxes, Marcello summoned him to Churchill Farms and made the trembling Ruby an offer he couldn’t refuse. Essentially, Ruby had to arrange for a Dallas policeman to kill Oswald soon after JFK’s murder or else Ruby would have to do the job himself. Marcello’s meetings with Ruby and Oswald are contained in the declassified CAMTEX FBI files.

In addition, Marcello’s accounts of the two shooters and his meetings with Oswald and Ruby are backed up by much additional independent evidence, as described in later chapters. It all forms a consistent and credible story that finally makes sense of what until now has been a sprawling mass of evidence with several key gaps.

Much of the CAMTEX information appears for the first time in this book, since I am the only author to have extensively interviewed Van Laningham, CAMTEX FBI Supervisor Thomas Kimmel, and the CAMTEX FBI official who heard all the secretly recorded tapes of Marcello.

Further confirmation for Marcello’s story comes from my exclusive interviews with two noncriminal businessmen in Louisiana, men who had befriended Carlos Marcello in one case and his family in another. The interviews include the account of a friend of Carlos Marcello’s who heard an outburst very similar to the first time Marcello confessed to murdering JFK during CAMTEX. In addition, a Louisiana
man who dated Marcello’s daughter and shared a large fishing boat with the godfather, heard from a Marcello employee about the godfather’s plan to assassinate JFK.

Another new source is a businessman who became friends with Marcello’s brother Joe. The businessman was actually with Joe Marcello when Carlos first learned that Van Laningham was really an informant for the FBI. Carlos Marcello’s discovery of Van Laningham’s role eventually resulted in a documented hit attempt on the FBI’s CAMTEX informant when Van Laningham was on parole in Tampa.

In addition to Marcello’s explicit JFK confession, made in front of two witnesses, Santo Trafficante also confessed his involvement in JFK’s murder, and later chapters have new revelations about Trafficante’s admission. Also detailed are the confessions of two mob associates of Marcello’s, Johnny Rosselli and John Martino, who were both CIA assets, as were Marcello and Trafficante. According to former Justice Department prosecutor William Hundley, shortly before Rosselli was brutally murdered (following his last meeting with Trafficante), Rosselli confessed his involvement to his attorney. Not long before CIA asset John Martino died from natural causes, he also confessed to a reporter for
Newsday
. As the book shows, most of the mobsters Marcello and Trafficante used in the plot had worked for the CIA on anti-Castro operations, as did the two godfathers themselves. This enabled them to feed disinformation into US intelligence networks before and after JFK’s murder to force a government cover-up.

Marcello and Trafficante used their inside knowledge of covert US operations to topple Fidel Castro in order to kill JFK in a way that forced high US officials—including President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, and the CIA—to withhold key information
from the press, public, and investigators. The officials did so to prevent another nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, because Marcello, Trafficante, and their allies had planted phony evidence implicating Fidel Castro in JFK’s murder. In the fall of 1963, the godfathers knew from their CIA associates that John and Robert Kennedy had formed a secret subcommittee of the National Security Council to make contingency plans in case Fidel attempted the “assassination of American officials” in response to US efforts to overthrow him. US officials were primed and ready when the phony evidence implicating Fidel in JFK’s murder quickly surfaced, triggering a cover-up to protect national security—a cover-up that in some ways continues today.

Also triggering cover-ups for national security reasons was the fact that JFK had a top-secret plan with the head of the Cuban Army, Commander Juan Almeida, to overthrow Fidel Castro on December 1, 1963—ten days after Dallas. JFK’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk first revealed that plan to me; it has since been confirmed in great detail by other JFK associates and hundreds of pages of files declassified in the 1990s. JFK had barred the Mafia from the coup and from reopening their casinos, but Marcello and Trafficante managed to penetrate the highly secret operation via their CIA associates who worked on it, such as Bernard Barker and David Morales. Later chapters quote FBI files showing that a surprising number of Marcello associates—including Jack Ruby, John Martino, and David Ferrie—knew about the top-secret coup plan, even though it was so secret that government committees, from the Warren Commission to the House Select Committee, never learned of it.

JFK’s goal for the coup was a democratic Cuba with no Mafia influence, but Marcello saw a way to use parts of the secret coup plan
to force a massive government cover-up after JFK’s murder. If made public, JFK’s role in the plan to overthrow Castro could have triggered World War III in those tense Cold War times. Even years later, the plan’s exposure could have cost the lives of JFK’s ally, Commander Almeida. That’s one reason the government kept so much about JFK’s murder so secret for so long, since Almeida remained in place and unexposed for decades, passing away in 2009 when he was still a revered figure and a high official in Cuba.

The secret coup plan, and the Contingency Plans to protect it, helps explain why reporters in Dallas were warned off, for national security reasons, when they were pursuing leads that could have led to the exposure of US covert actions against Cuba. According to an NBC cameraman, when Oswald’s link to David Ferrie began to surface two days after JFK’s assassination, “[a]n FBI agent said that I should never discuss what we discovered for the good of the country.” “For the good of the country” is the same phrase officials used to pressure Powers and O’Donnell to change their Warren Commission testimony about having seen shots from the grassy knoll. The same principle was at work in Dallas, and “members of NBC News” there told veteran TV journalist Peter Noyes that “they were convinced their superiors wanted certain evidence suppressed at the request of someone in Washington.”

In the same way, preventing World War III was the real goal of the Warren Commission, and in that it succeeded. It’s also one reason that even though a dozen of Marcello’s lieutenants and family were interviewed about JFK’s assassination or even arrested by law enforcement, Marcello’s name is nowhere to be found in the
Warren Report
.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the tragic events in Dallas approaches, it’s ironic to look back and realize how much important information the FBI had back in 1985, much of it from Marcello himself in the
CAMTEX undercover operation. Had it been released by the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s murder in 1988, the public’s view of JFK’s murder would have been vastly different then and certainly would be today. Instead, the Bureau initially withheld the information from the JFK Assassination Records Review Board for several years, giving Board members only a few dozen pages about CAMTEX and Marcello’s confession at the last minute, as their terms expired and their operation closed. I discovered those uncensored files seven years later, and this book represents the first full account of that operation and of Marcello’s startling admissions.

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Officially Santo Trafficante Jr.

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Mr. X, played by Donald Sutherland, was based on retired Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, an advisor to the film. He was caught providing false information before filming was complete, as verified by the book of the
JFK
screenplay. His claims were later debunked in his interview with the JFK Assassination Records Review Board.

CHAPTER 2

“Single Bullet Theory” Demolished and a New Look at Oswald

T
HE TWO CORNERSTONES of the 1964
Warren Report
are the “single bullet theory” and its depiction of Oswald as a “lone nut”
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Communist who fired the only shots at JFK’s motorcade, all from the sixth floor of his workplace, the Texas School Book Depository. However, considerable evidence that calls into question both theories has been available to the general public since 1966. Additional information and files that demolish those key assertions have emerged in the succeeding decades. This chapter shows why the single bullet theory is impossible and then uses well-documented facts to present a completely different view of Oswald—the only one that accounts for all the known facts about him.

First, the single bullet theory of the 1964
Warren Report
—and authors supporting it since that time—maintains that only three shots were fired at the limousine on Elm Street holding President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie; Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, in the seat in front of them; and two Secret Service agents in the front seat. The Warren Commission’s theory says that one shot not only completely missed the
limo but missed the entire street, hitting a curb and knocking a piece of concrete (or a bullet fragment) up to hit a bystander, James Teague. The Commission said that another bullet, the first to strike Kennedy, entered his back, exited his throat just below his Adam’s apple, and then dived down to hit Governor Connally, who was sitting in front of JFK. That bullet caused multiple wounds in Connally—including shattering four inches of his rib, smashing into his wrist bones, and plowing into his thigh—before emerging in almost pristine condition. That remarkable bullet was supposedly found on Governor Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital just over an hour after the shooting and was later matched to Oswald’s cheap, mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, cinching the case against the ex-Marine marksman, as the Commission indicated it had unanimously concluded. The third and final shot—according to the Commission—was the horrible, fatal head shot, which the Commission said Oswald fired from behind the President.

In the
Warren Report
itself, the Commissioners—and the staff of lawyers that actually wrote the Report, primarily based on the FBI’s original investigation and additional testimony—claimed that the single bullet theory wasn’t essential to this conclusion, but that’s simply not correct. The only thing almost all authors and historians who have written about JFK’s murder agree on is that the single bullet theory is required for the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald did all the shooting. Given the timing of the shots, it was simply impossible for Oswald and his old rifle to have fired more than three shots quickly enough—and that’s not even giving him time to aim again for his second and third shots. So if there were four shots, or if any of the shots came from a location other than the “sniper’s nest” on sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository far behind President Kennedy’s limo, then there was at least one other shooter, and thus a conspiracy.

Even among the seven members of the Warren Commission, the belief in the single bullet theory was not unanimous. It’s now well documented that arch-conservative Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia strenuously objected to its inclusion and wanted to issue a dissenting opinion about it, until he was talked into compromise wording of the Report at the last minute. Commission members Senator Sherman Cooper of Kentucky and Senator Hale Boggs of Louisiana also doubted the theory.

Others who actually witnessed the shooting or its aftermath opposed the single bullet theory even more adamantly, and they understood that without it there must have been at least two shooters. Governor John Connally always stated that he was struck by the first shot and that a separate shot struck JFK, and Nellie Connally agreed in her testimony. JFK’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley, the only doctor present at both Parkland Hospital in Dallas and in the autopsy room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, just outside Washington, DC, filled out Kennedy’s death certificate. He described JFK’s back wound as being too low for the bullet to have exited just below his Adam’s apple, as the autopsy photos clearly show. Even the three official autopsy doctors—James Humes, Pierre Finck, and J. Thornton Boswell—testified to the Commission under oath that they did not believe the bullet that shattered Connally’s rib and wrist was the same one that struck JFK in the back. Noted forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht shared that conclusion when he served on the Forensic Pathology Panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.
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