The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (58 page)

Richard Helms officially became CIA Director on June 30, 1966, putting him in an even stronger position to ensure that his unauthorized activities under JFK and LBJ were not exposed. In addition to firing Bernard Barker, Helms made sure that six CIA veterans of AMWORLD and his sensitive anti-Castro operations were reassigned to Laos in 1966, where the United States had been waging a secret war for years. These included Artime’s deputy Rafael “Chi Chi” Quintero,
former Miami CIA Chief Ted Shackley, and David Morales (after an assignment in South America involving the capture of Che Guevara).

1966 BROUGHT A wave of new challenges for Carlos Marcello and his associates, in addition to the spate of bestselling books critical of the
Warren Report
(though all of them avoided any mention of the Mafia). In May 1966, Sam Giancana left the country, after using his work on the CIA–Mafia plots to avoid spending another year in jail for refusing to testify about the Mafia to a grand jury after being granted immunity. His old pal Johnny Rosselli was not so lucky, when the FBI got a tip that his real name was Filippo Sacco and he wasn’t a US citizen. William Harvey tried to get the CIA to aid Rosselli, but to no avail, and Harvey was forced to resign from the CIA the following year.

Apparently, the younger FBI agents in New Orleans had grown tired of seeing Marcello literally get away with murder. After Marcello went to a Mafia summit in New York that included Trafficante and attorney Frank Ragano, Marcello returned to New Orleans on October 1, 1966. Apparently hoping to force Hoover to take action against Marcello, an FBI agent staged a public confrontation with the godfather at the airport. Accounts vary as to the reasons for what happened next, but the physical act was well documented by witnesses and a photographer: Marcello took a swing at the FBI agent and hit him. The resulting arrest and charges would dog Marcello for years, eventually sending him to a short stay in federal prison.

Marcello—and Trafficante—was dealt another blow on October 5, 1966, when the Texas Court of Appeals ordered a new trial for Jack Ruby. Two months later, the same court would order a change of venue to Wichita Falls, Texas, away from Dallas and its
mob-affiliated sheriff. Three days after winning that appeal, Ruby was diagnosed with cancer and died on January 3, 1967, before his trial could begin.

In November 1966, the
New York Times
was one of several major American newspapers and magazines investigating the JFK assassination anew. The
Times
wrote to a New Orleans Police Lieutenant, listing thirty-two questions about the assassination, primarily focused on David Ferrie but also including Carlos Marcello. The police chief gave a copy of the letter to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who then had Ferrie brought in for questioning in December 1966.

Garrison tried to conduct his investigation in secret at first, but it was leaked to the media, resulting in a firestorm of publicity that centered on Ferrie. At the height of the controversy on February 22, 1967, David Ferrie died, an apparent suicide. That same night, Ferrie’s friend Eladio del Valle—an associate of Trafficante and Masferrer—was murdered in Florida. In the weeks and months that followed, Garrison’s investigation was targeted by a variety of people offering to help, some of whom should have been investigated themselves, such as a bitter Cuban exile named Alberto Fowler and Trafficante associates Rolando Masferrer and Loran Hall.

After Ferrie’s death, Garrison focused on Clay Shaw, a coworker of Fowler. RFK asked his close associate Walter Sheridan to go to New Orleans and look into Garrison’s charges. However, Sheridan felt that Garrison was a fraud, and he soon began to undermine Garrison’s investigation in various ways, which included producing an NBC News special critical of Garrison. Recently released FBI files show that in the late spring of 1967, Garrison twice privately considered indicting Marcello for the assassination of JFK but decided not to. Instead,
Garrison’s investigation wound up becoming a media circus, and Clay Shaw was eventually acquitted.

In 1967, amid the Garrison firestorm, to pressure the CIA to help him, Johnny Rosselli began leaking information to columnist Jack Anderson, who was not yet the journalist superstar he would become before the Watergate scandal, five years later. Rosselli’s leaks to Anderson hinted at the CIA–Mafia plots, though the Mafia don attempted to tie them to Robert Kennedy. No other reporters followed up on Anderson’s stories, but President Johnson asked CIA Director Richard Helms for a report on the plots and any links they might have had to JFK’s assassination. Helms met with RFK around this time, and the resulting Inspector General’s report delivered by Helms contained no information about the JFK–Almeida coup plan or AMWORLD, Rosselli’s work for the CIA in the summer and fall of 1963, or the 1959 CIA–Mafia plots involving Jimmy Hoffa. In July 1967, CIA official Desmond FitzGerald, who had overseen the CIA–Mafia plots in 1963, died of natural causes.

Carlos Marcello would increasingly become the focus of unwanted attention in 1967 and the first half of 1968. On May 6, 1967, author Ed Reid showed a copy of the manuscript for his new book to the Los Angeles FBI Bureau. It mentioned for the first time Marcello’s fall 1962 assassination threat against JFK, heard by Ed Becker. Someone high in the Los Angeles mob learned about Reid’s manuscript, because the very next day the Mafia’s most powerful attorney—Sidney Korshak—provided the FBI with derogatory information about Becker.

Early in 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy began offering behind-the-scenes help to journalist Michael Dorman for an article about Carlos Marcello. According to one account, “Dorman received RFK’s personal attention, meeting with the Senator in his office.” Dorman
told author Gus Russo that “Robert Kennedy was enthusiastic about the article” and even offered to have one of his aides assist Dorman.

In March 1968, Robert Kennedy officially entered the race for the presidency. Just as his late-starting campaign was building impressive momentum, by winning the all-important California primary, he was tragically assassinated on June 4, 1968. His convicted assailant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, was first represented by Johnny Rosselli’s Los Angeles attorney, whose defense strategy included admitting in court that Sirhan had fired the fatal headshot (a claim some experts still contest today). Sirhan’s co-counsel was a lawyer whom David Scheim writes “had represented many Mob clients and had once been investigated himself by . . . Robert Kennedy.” Years later, Robert Kennedy’s friend and biographer Jack Newfield wrote that Joe Marcello, Carlos’s younger brother, made this remark about the Kennedys to FBI informant Joe Hauser: “We took care of ’em, didn’t we?”
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IN THE EARLY 1970s, the fifty-nine-year-old Carlos Marcello was continuing to expand his criminal empire, even as he diversified into more legitimate businesses. Marcello still ordered contract killings, even while appealing his assault conviction and two-year sentence for slugging an FBI agent. Mississippi’s
Sun Herald
reported that in just the first two months of 1970, Marcello’s hits included the murders of Jack Howard Joy and Donald Lester “Jimmy” James—and as usual for Marcello, “no one [was ever -] convicted of [either] murder.”

Marcello was under pressure because he’d been convicted of assaulting the FBI agent, and his appeals were running out. However,
Marcello had backed Nixon for years, and one of Marcello’s “fixers” was close to President Nixon’s own fixer, former mob attorney Murray Chotiner. According to John H. Davis, Marcello “and his lawyers pulled every string at their command to get Carlos’s two year sentence reduced…to six months and made arrangements for him to spend that time at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.” That was in stark contrast to his old friend Jimmy Hoffa, who was doing hard time at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

Marcello entered the Springfield facility on October 14, 1970. Since it was one of the least secure and most comfortable federal prisons, allowing more phone calls and visitors than others, Marcello had no trouble running his empire from prison. When he was released on March 12, 1971—after serving just five months—Marcello emerged much healthier and more fit, ready for what would be his most prosperous decade.

Even before Marcello entered prison in 1970, reporters whispered among themselves that the New Orleans godfather was tied to JFK’s murder. Television journalist Peter Noyes recalls covering a Marcello court appearance in 1970, when “a newspaper reporter [told him] ‘There’s been a lot of talk about that guy being involved in the Kennedy assassination.’” In fall 1971, Noyes learned from the Los Angeles Chief Deputy District Attorney that the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding secret hearings into the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. These were prompted by California Senator George Murphy’s speech in which he said “the killers of John and Robert Kennedy may have acted under orders from someone else.” An aide to Murphy confirmed the secret hearings to Noyes, who began writing a book about the assassinations,
Legacy of Doubt
.

At sixty-five, Johnny Rosselli was facing five years in prison after being caught and convicted for his Friars Club cheating scheme and
immigration violations. The INS was also again trying to deport him. A CIA memo says that “on November 18, 1970 . . . Mr. Helms flatly refused to intercede with INS on Rosselli’s behalf.” However, the CIA admits “meeting with INS regarding the status of the deportation proceedings [in] March 1971,” and the INS deportation efforts were halted at that time, after Rosselli entered prison on February 25, 1971.

Rosselli had forced Helms to intervene by resuming his leaks to muckraking columnist Jack Anderson. On January 18, 1971, Anderson ran the first of two new articles about the CIA–Mafia plots, asking again, “Could the plot against Castro have backfired against President Kennedy?” The new articles discussed “six [CIA] attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro,” including those involving rifles. Anderson said the Castro assassination plot he was writing about “began as part of the Bay of Pigs operation . . . to eliminate the Cuban dictator before the motley invaders landed.” Anderson’s linking the Bay of Pigs and the CIA–Mafia plots to JFK’s assassination would hit President Nixon especially hard, since it referred to events during his tenure as Vice President. Nixon’s alarm at the time was confirmed by long-secret Senate Watergate Committee files that I published for the first time in 2012.
*
Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, also Nixon’s de facto campaign manager, was reportedly in tears after talking with former Howard Hughes aide Robert Maheu about the plots.

In addition, Jack Anderson wrote that the plots continued until March 1963 and for the first time named some of the participants: Rosselli, Harvey, and Maheu. However, Anderson’s column didn’t
mention Trafficante, Giancana, Marcello, or David Morales—meaning that someone as knowledgeable as Helms would realize Rosselli had more bombshells to drop, if he chose.

Soon after the Rosselli-Anderson articles, E. Howard Hunt began working as a White House consultant. The conventional wisdom is that Nixon formed “the Plumbers” with Hunt, to plug leaks like these of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. However, Hunt began working for Nixon—and recruiting former colleagues like Bernard Barker—in mid-April 1971, before the Pentagon Papers were first published. Clearly, as a veteran of the CIA–Mafia plots that Nixon had begun back in 1960, Hunt’s first priority was to make sure that Nixon’s role in those plots didn’t surface. Testimony shows that Hunt was even ordered by the White House to look into assassinating Jack Anderson.

Later in 1971, CIA official David Atlee Phillips was apparently overseeing a new assassination attempt against Fidel Castro, once more involving Cuban exile Antonio Veciana. The site was Chile, which had a new socialist government. The attempt failed, but Fidel was apparently so angry that he ordered the compilation of a huge Dossier of the CIA’s attempts to kill him. The Dossier—with extensive details, including photos of captured weapons and assassins—began when Nixon was Vice President in 1960 and continued under Nixon’s Presidency.

As the new Senate Watergate files indicate, and Watergate burglar Frank Fiorini confirmed in a long-overlooked published interview, the Watergate break-ins were all about trying to see if that Dossier had fallen into the hands of Nixon’s enemies. The first break-in involving Hunt, Barker, Fiorini (using the name Frank Sturgis), and the other “Plumbers” occurred at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. That burglary, which
Nixon talked about on a White House tape, occurred two weeks before the first Watergate break-in. As Trafficante later revealed to the Chief Investigator for his attorney, that’s also why almost all of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the CIA–Mafia plots.

Remarkably, six months before the first Watergate break-in, President Nixon had received a new Mafia bribe of $1 million involving Jimmy Hoffa. Just as in 1960, this new Mafia–Hoffa bribe again involved Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and New Jersey mobster Tony Provenzano. As documented by the FBI and
Time
magazine, the bribe was for Hoffa’s release from prison, only with the condition that he couldn’t return to the Teamsters for eight years. The mob bosses preferred to deal with Hoffa’s easygoing replacement, Frank Fitzsimons, instead of the volatile Hoffa, hence the special stipulation barring Hoffa from the Teamsters.

In late 1973, Hoffa—angry that Nixon had kept him from the Teamsters—tipped Senate Watergate Committee investigators about Nixon, Johnny Rosselli, and the CIA–Mafia plots. Committee investigators interviewed Johnny Rosselli in a secret session about those plots. However, for reasons that are still unclear, that part of the investigation was shut down in early 1974 and was withheld from the press. However, following Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, leaks about assassinations coming from new President Gerald Ford resulted in news articles that caused Ford to create the Rockefeller Commission on January 4, 1975, to investigate CIA activities, including assassination plots and JFK’s assassination. However, the Rockefeller Commission was stacked with conservative establishment figures like Ronald Reagan, so Congress created their own investigating committees: the Pike Committee (originally the Nedzi Committee) and the far better-known Church Committee, named for liberal Senator
Frank Church, of Idaho. Their goal was to investigate CIA operations, domestic surveillance, and assassination plots.