The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (57 page)

A far more lowly member of the heroin network Mertz shared with Trafficante and Marcello did not live nearly as long. Rose Cheramie’s statements about a plot to kill JFK were finally taken seriously by authorities after JFK’s assassination. On Monday, November 25, she revealed new information about her sometime boss, Jack Ruby, to Louisiana State Police Lieutenant Francis Fruge. Fruge investigated and confirmed her claims about a heroin ring operating in Texas and that she had worked for Ruby as a B-girl. But authorities in Houston lost track of the heroin courier Cheramie had identified and closed the case. Congressional investigators found that in 1965, Cheramie
had tried to tell the FBI “about a heroin deal operating from a New Orleans ship,” and even though “the Coast Guard verified an ongoing narcotics investigation of the ship,” the FBI had decided not to pursue the case. One month after she contacted the FBI, Cheramie was found mortally wounded under unusual circumstances on a desolate road in Texas, and she died on September 4, 1965.

CARLOS MARCELLO, SANTO Trafficante, and most of their associates prospered after JFK’s murder. According to historian Richard Mahoney, “[a]s Bill Hundley, head of the [Justice Department’s] Organized Crime Section, put it, ‘The minute that bullet hit Jack Kennedy’s head, it was all over. Right then. The organized crime program just stopped, and Hoover took control back.’ Marcello had been right: Cut the dog’s head off and the rest of it would die.” More confirmation for the success of Marcello’s approach comes from the FBI’s “own electronic surveillance transcripts” of a “conversation between Sam Giancana and a lieutenant” two weeks after JFK’s death, in which the lieutenant told Giancana: “I will tell you something, in another 2 months from now, the FBI will be like it was 5 years ago.”

That wasn’t completely true, and the FBI did step up its efforts against organized crime after JFK’s murder. Also, while Robert Kennedy remained Attorney General, there were still prosecutions to continue against Marcello, for jury tampering, and multiple counts against Jimmy Hoffa. In 1964, the juror Marcello had bribed for his November 22, 1963, acquittal went to the authorities, since Marcello had paid him only $1,000 instead of the promised $25,000 (which would have attracted too much attention to the juror). Shortly after that, the US Attorney in New Orleans learned that Marcello “had threatened to kill” the government’s main witness during the same trial.

In late 1964, RFK resigned as Attorney General to run for the US Senate in New York, but he left the Justice Department in the hands of his trusted deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, who announced on October 6, 1964, that Carlos Marcello had been indicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice, including “seeking the murder of a government witness.” Four weeks later, RFK won his race to become a New York senator. Marcello would not be tried until the following year, and he would be found “not guilty” on August 17, 1965. John H. Davis wrote that “Carlos Marcello was well on his way to becoming the wealthiest and most influential Mafia leader in the US,” and his organization’s “estimated annual income of two billion dollars [made] it by far the largest industry in Louisiana.”

Jimmy Hoffa was not so lucky, and by the spring of 1964, Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department and the head of his “Get Hoffa Squad,” Walter Sheridan, had finally succeeded in convicting Jimmy Hoffa for the first time. Hoffa would also be convicted on separate charges, in Chicago, and only a flurry of appeals delayed the start of his long prison sentences.

In 1964, Jack Ruby faced murder charges for killing Lee Oswald. In the press at that time, Ruby was not connected to the Mafia or considered any type of mobster, which would remain true for more than ten years. Melvin Belli eventually took over Ruby’s defense; his law partner had first been called on November 24, 1963, by someone from Las Vegas connected with mobsters who’d had casinos in Havana. The call didn’t come from Johnny Rosselli, but it did come from his Las Vegas headquarters hotel, the Desert Inn. The Las Vegas caller wanted Belli to defend Ruby, who was described as “one of our guys.” Belli was close to Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, who was a good friend of Carlos Marcello. A CIA memo says that Belli “was
reportedly involved in illicit drug traffic.” Belli took Ruby’s case and kept any mention of Ruby’s Mafia contacts out of the trial. Instead of using the “sudden passion” defense available in Texas—which can result in a sentence as short as two years served, or even just probation—Belli use a bizarre “psycho-motor” defense that had never been attempted before, and they lost. Jack Ruby received his death sentence in Dallas on March 14, 1964.

EVEN WHILE RUBY’S trial was going on, and after it ended, several Warren Commission staff members tried to do a thorough investigation of Jack Ruby’s Mafia ties and Cuban gunrunning, but they were stymied. The FBI intimidated several witnesses who tried to talk about Ruby’s gunrunning, while FBI agents relied on Ruby’s mob associates to say that Ruby had no mob associates. After the two staffers investigating Ruby wrote a long memo to the the Commission’s General Counsel outlining numerous problems and stonewalling by the FBI and by Richard Helms, they were barred from interviewing Ruby in Dallas. The resulting interview by Earl Warren and Gerald Ford was marked by Ruby’s saying, “Unless you get me to Washington, you can’t get a fair shake out of me.” Anthony Summers writes that “repeatedly, eight times in all, [Ruby] begged the Chief Justice of the US to arrange his transfer to Washington for further questioning and lie-detector tests.” Warren and Ford refused, even when Ruby pleaded with them, saying, “Gentlemen, my life is in danger.” Given Sheriff Decker’s mob ties and Marcello’s control of Dallas, Ruby’s concerns were all too real.

THE WARREN COMMISSION staff lost another important source of information when mob associates of Trafficante’s and Rosselli’s
framed Chicago Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. Using information provided by two criminals he’d put in jail, Bolden was arrested on the day he went to Washington to tell Commission staff about the Secret Service’s laxity, as well as the Chicago and Tampa attempts. One of Bolden’s accusers worked for Sam DeStefano, a notorious associate of Richard Cain, the Chief Investigator for in the Cook County/Chicago sheriff’s office. Richard Cain’s brother, Michael, told me that Richard Cain had the “motive, means, and opportunity” to frame Bolden. Cain was part of the Chicago Mafia and had worked with Rosselli and Trafficante on the CIA–Mafia plots. Bolden was sentenced to six years in prison, even though his main accuser later admitted to committing perjury against him. Bolden’s judge told the jury before their deliberations that Bolden was guilty, but even after that misconduct resulted in a mistrial, the same judge was allowed to conduct Bolden’s second trial. The result was another conviction, and Bolden has been fighting to clear his name ever since his release from prison.

SOME OF THE many shortcomings of the Warren Commission were covered in Chapters 1 and 2. They are too numerous to cover here, though Professor Gerald McKnight’s
Breach of Trust
(2005) details the most definitive account of their many problems. Basically, the Commission was not given much crucial information and had to rely on the FBI for most of their investigative work. Like the CIA, the Bureau withheld much crucial information from the Commission—including the Tampa attempt, and much about Cuban exiles tied to Trafficante and Rosselli. Instead, the FBI flooded the Commission staff with reports of wild allegations and irrelevant paperwork. That’s why you’ll find Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental records in the twenty-six
volumes of supporting evidence for the one-volume
Warren Report
but nothing about the JFK–Almeida coup plan, the CIA–Mafia plots, or the threat against JFK by Marcello and Trafficante that informants reported to the FBI in 1962. Like Marcello, neither David Ferrie nor Guy Banister—who died of natural causes on June 6, 1964—is mentioned even once in the
Warren Report
.

I noted in early chapters the Commission’s internal struggles over their conclusion, but another problem surfaced just as the Commission had hoped to be wrapping up. Commission staffers and the FBI were under pressure to resolve the matter of Silvia Odio’s visit from Oswald and two exiles a couple of months prior to JFK’s murder. On September 16, 1964, the FBI apparently got a break. An anti-Castro soldier of fortune named Loran Hall allegedly told “the FBI that he” and two friends “were the people who visited Silvia Odio.” The soldier of fortune knew Santo Trafficante and had been under house arrest with the mob boss in Cuba in 1959, before being asked to join the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro in the spring of 1963. Hall’s convenient claim came just in time for the Warren Commission’s last meeting, two days later.

At that final meeting, three of the Commission members, led by Georgia Senator Richard Russell, tried to include a dissenting opinion about the “magic bullet” theory. However, effort failed, and the report was issued with no dissent. Over the next two days, Hall changed his story and denied having visited Odio, as did his two friends, but it was too late to change the Commission’s Final Report.

THE
REPORT
WAS submitted to President Johnson on September 24, given to Hoover the following day, and released to the public on September 28, 1964. The press widely proclaimed the
Warren Report
,
as it came to be known, to be the definitive account of Oswald’s guilt as a lone assassin.

IN ADDITION TO his anti-Castro duties, E. Howard Hunt later admitted that during the 1960s, one of his duties for the CIA had been press and publisher relations. Both Richard Helms and his protégé Hunt played behind-the-scenes roles with the press and publishers during 1964 and afterward, and that likely applied to the reporting of matters relating to the CIA, Cuban exiles, and JFK’s assassination. Hunt later wrote that the Church Committee “identified me as an important figure in the [CIA’s press] operation, pointing out [that] one of my ongoing responsibilities [was] to get certain books reviewed by particular writers who would be either sympathetic or hostile to works we hoped to popularize or suppress.” Hunt admitted that “[m]ost of my work involved publishing and publications, in which we supported an entire division of [one publisher] and subsidized books that we felt the American public should read.” Hunt acknowledges that the CIA “also ran a couple of national newswire services.”

The authors of two early books about JFK’s assassination, Thomas Buchanan and Joachim Joesten, a left-wing European journalist and concentration-camp survivor, were the targets of CIA attempts to discredit them. The CIA even dug up Nazi files to use against Joesten, foreshadowing the more extensive efforts Helms and the CIA would launch against
Warren Report
critics just two years later. After the first wave of well-researched, bestselling books critical of the Warren Commission emerged in 1966, early the following year, the CIA issued a fifty-three-page memo detailing how CIA officials could attack critics and bolster the “lone nut” theory in the press.

In the 1970s, the Senate Church Committee was able to document that “the CIA maintained covert relationships with about 50 American journalists or employees of US media organizations” from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. However, Carl Bernstein, in a major piece for
Rolling Stone
, was able to document there were actually “400 journalists who maintained covert relationships with the Agency.” Bernstein wrote that even that figure “refers only to those who were ‘tasked’ in their undercover assignments or had a mutual understanding that they would help the Agency or were subject to some form of CIA contractual control. It does not include even larger numbers of journalists who occasionally traded favors with CIA officers in the normal give-and-take that exists between reporters and their sources.” In E. Howard Hunt’s final autobiography, he confirmed Bernstein’s much higher figures and the other information in his article.

In the mid-1960s, Hunt, and his assistant Bernard Barker, was still involved with the Manuel Artime side of the CIA–Mafia plots, which had now been officially merged with the Rolando Cubela assassination operation. RFK’s liberal exile leader Manolo Ray was no longer working with the CIA, and Eloy Menoyo had been captured while on a mission into Cuba and had been given a life sentence.

However, the CIA started getting reports from Trafficante associates showing that the Cubela operation was insecure. In addition to the mob-linked security breaches surrounding the Cubela operation, Fidel Castro’s intelligence agents had actually penetrated Artime’s group a year earlier. Richard Helms was no doubt livid when he saw a January 25, 1965, article in
The Nation
that gave an all-too-accurate description of the expensive scope of Artime’s operation.

That publicity, various problems with Artime, and the insecurity of Cubela’s operation due to Trafficante’s associates proved too
much for Helms, and he began the gradual process of shutting down Artime’s operation. Harry Williams had one last encounter with his former colleague Manuel Artime, after Artime’s CIA-backed operations had been ended, in part because of financial irregularities. In Miami, Williams happened to drop by a friend’s house—and was surprised to find Artime, Hunt, and Barker there, along with a Trafficante associate. Williams told me “they were planning the selling of the equipment” for Artime. He advised them not to, and after declining their offer to join their venture, he quickly left. Instead, Artime, Hunt, and Barker sold the supplies and apparently kept the money.

On February 28, 1966, Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) was arrested in Cuba, due in part to information from Fidel’s agent in Artime’s camp. Two CIA cables in the following weeks mentioned or alluded to Almeida, with one expressing relief that none of the “real military leaders” in Cuba had “been arrested or detained.” When the
New York Times
reported on March 6, 1966, that Cubela planned “to shoot Premier Castro with a high-powered telescopic rifle and later share [power] with Mr. Artime,” LBJ’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, asked Richard Helms if that was true. Helms lied to him, saying, “The Agency was not involved with Cubela in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, nor did it ever encourage him to attempt such an act.”