Legacy of Secrecy (127 page)

were too severe. He was pronounced dead at 1:44 PM on June 6. Bobby’s

press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, made the announcement to a wait-

ing world.

Meanwhile, three thousand miles away, something had made Presi-

dent Lyndon Johnson think of the Mafia as soon as he heard that Bobby

had been shot in Los Angeles. On his White House notepad, LBJ scrib-

bled, “[La] Cosa Nostra,” “Ed Morgan,” and “Send in to get Castro

planning.” LBJ must have thought there was some connection between

Bobby’s shooting and Johnny Rosselli’s CIA-Mafia plot stories that

Jack Anderson had described a year earlier. It’s ironic that when those

stories had appeared the previous year, Frank Mankiewicz had been

conducting his secret investigation of JFK’s murder for Bobby, which

would point to “the mob, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and maybe rogue

CIA agents.”25 Three people who would eventually confess or be linked

to Bobby’s murder would also fit into that same group.

Chapter Fifty-six

Several issues continue to make Bobby Kennedy’s assassination a topic

of controversy and debate four decades after that tragic night at the

Ambassador Hotel. Two of those issues—the number of bullets fired in

the pantry, and whether Sirhan ever got close enough to fire the shots

that struck Bobby—are central to whether or not there was another gun-

man that night.

Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi concluded that all the shots

that hit Bobby were fired at extremely close range, from the end of a gun

barrel in “contact” with Bobby or “near contact.” Shots leave a distinc-

tive “burn pattern,” a gunpowder tattoo based on how close the end

of the barrel is to the target. In Bobby’s case, extensive testing showed

Noguchi that the head shot would have been “between one inch and

one and a half inches” away from Bobby’s right ear. Regarding the other

shots that hit Bobby, Noguchi testified that the barrel was either touching

his coat or not more than an inch away.1

Dan Moldea pointed out that, according to Karl Uecker, who was

standing beside Bobby in the pantry and was the first to grab Sirhan’s

pistol, “Sirhan’s gun never got closer than one and a half to two feet from

the senator. Not a single witness who testified before the grand jury . . .

or at Sirhan’s subsequent trial said or would say that Sirhan’s gun ever

got closer to Kennedy than this.”2

Unlike Martin Luther King’s assassination, the actual shooting of

Bobby was witnessed at close range by a large number of reputable

people who saw Sirhan firing his pistol—and they were almost unani-

mous that it would have been physically impossible for Sirhan to have

fired the shots that struck Bobby. The list includes noted journalist Pete

Hamill, who said that Sirhan’s gun was at least two feet away from

Bobby. Kennedy campaign worker Lisa Urso told police that Bobby was

between “three and five feet” away from Sirhan’s gun. Other witnesses

with a good view of the shooting said Sirhan didn’t get closer than “three

to six feet” to Bobby. Moldea points out that “the only witness to claim

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Sirhan’s gun was within a foot of Kennedy’s head” was
Los Angeles

Times
photographer Boris Yaro. But Yaro told the FBI he was looking at

the scene through the viewfinder of his camera, which rendered Bobby

and Sirhan “little more than silhouettes.”3

Aside from Yaro, the fourteen witnesses who gave an estimate of

the distance stated figures that made it impossible for Sirhan to have

fired the shots that hit Bobby—and the vast majority of those witnesses

have been remarkably consistent over the years.4 Karl Uecker points

out that Bobby never made it to the steam table before he was shot, and

that Sirhan never passed the steam table to which Uecker pinned him,

meaning there was simply no way for Sirhan to have fired the gun at

Bobby from only an inch or so away.

The only explanation that accounted for how Sirhan could have fired

the fatal shot was offered by Dan Moldea, who wasn’t a witness but

developed his theory in the 1990s after years of research. Moldea specu-

lated that the witnesses saw only the first shot and, in the panic that fol-

lowed, didn’t realize that Bobby had been pushed (by the crowd behind

him) closer to Sirhan—who, in this scenario, fired as Bobby turned away

from him. However, with all those witnesses in a corridor that was little

more than six feet wide, no one there reported seeing that happen.5

Significant problems also exist with the bullets and bullet holes in the

pantry. The bullets recovered from Bobby and the other victims could

never be matched to Sirhan’s pistol. A later official review panel showed

that early testimony from Sirhan’s trial was erroneous, and no definitive

match could be made to Sirhan’s eight-shot revolver.6

Those conclusions lead to another problem: the number of bullets

fired that night, since everyone agrees that if more than eight bullets

were fired, there had to be another shooter. FBI veteran Bill Turner notes

that the LAPD said seven slugs were recovered from the victims, and one

was lost in the space above the ceiling. Thus, “the official LAPD position

was that no bullets were found at the assassination scene, and other than

an entry and exit hole in the ceiling caused by the lost bullet, there were

no bullet holes on any of the doors or walls of the pantry.” Yet crime

scene photographs taken in the pantry do show bullet holes—and any

additional bullet holes mean that someone besides Sirhan was firing.7

Many official LAPD and FBI photographs show bullet holes in the

pantry, some with officers pointing at the holes, and others showing

bullet holes marked by police. While these extra bullet holes appear

to be in several locations, including the ceiling, the most notable were

later described by FBI agent William Bailey. He said there were “two

bullet holes in the center divider between [the] two swinging doors . . .

that Senator Kennedy came through on his way through the pantry.”

Other FBI agents had accompanied Agent Bailey when he conducted

his inspection, and Bailey later stated in a sworn affidavit that “there

was no question in any of our minds as to the fact that they were bullet

holes . . . and they definitely [contained] bullets.” Dan Moldea says that

“if Bailey . . . is correct, then there is no doubt that at least two guns were

fired that night.” While Moldea thinks Bailey was mistaken, not only

did others see the bullet holes, but one police officer also marked them,

circling each hole and writing his badge number, as official photographs

clearly show.8

Noted reporter Robert Wiedrich wrote a story about the extra bullet

holes, that ran on June 6, 1968, the day Bobby died. Wiedrich said the

“strip of molding, torn by police from the center [divider] of the double

doors . . . thru which Sen. Kennedy had walked [now] bore the scars of

a crime laboratory technician’s probe as it had removed two .22 caliber

bullets that had gone wild” and been embedded in the wooden center

divider. As for the center divider, it was booked into evidence on June

28, 1968—and destroyed (along with the ceiling tiles) a year later by

the LAPD on June 27, 1969, after Sirhan’s trial.9 Those two extra bullets

meant a total of ten shots, two more than Sirhan’s eight-shot revolver

could have fired, so they couldn’t be entered into evidence as having

come from the wooden divider without destroying the case against

Sirhan as the lone shooter.

What became of the two bullets removed from the center divider?

As Bill Turner, Larry Hancock, and others have pointed out, the LAPD

reported having conveniently found two spent bullets in Sirhan’s car,

along with a box of unfired ammo. Hancock writes that “seven differ-

ent experts studied the two bullets, and all found that they had ‘wood’

embedded in the nose, sides, and base.” How or why the wood is on the

two bullets has never been explained, and Sirhan had no memory of—or

explanation for—having the two spent bullets in his car. But Hancock

points out that the presence of wood on those bullets is consistent with

the slugs’ having been removed from the center divider.10

At least ten witnesses reported seeing a man with a gun, or what could

have been a weapon, in the pantry at the time of the shooting, or flee-

ing the pantry just after. The witnesses were not referring to Sirhan or

guard Thane Cesar, so if any of their reports are true, there was a second

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gunman involved. In addition to Dr. McBroom (cited earlier), who saw

a man fleeing the pantry with “a newspaper over his arm [and] a pis-

tol underneath,” there are the statements of Lisa Urso, who was in the

pantry.11

Urso saw a man wearing a “gray suit” who “had a gun and . . . put it

back into a holster.” The only guard in the pantry was uniformed secu-

rity guard Thane Cesar, and Bobby’s personal bodyguard, Bill Barry,

wasn’t armed. Witness Don Schulman also saw the man in a suit with

a gun in the pantry. Author Larry Hancock has pointed out that Schul-

man was one of the few people who noticed that guard Thane Cesar had

actually drawn his pistol after Sirhan started shooting; Cesar himself

estimated he’d had it out for only about thirty seconds. As Hancock

notes, in addition to seeing Cesar, “Schulman was also certain that he

had seen men in regular clothes with drawn guns inside the pantry,”

something he tried repeatedly to tell authorities.12

However, witnesses who said they saw what might have been a sec-

ond gunman were either ignored (like Urso) or questioned repeatedly

and sometimes aggressively (like Schulman) until some backed off their

stories. However, years later, when some witnesses were finally shown

their recantations, as written by the LAPD, they denied ever backing off

what they had seen (McBroom is a good example).13

It would have been possible for another gunman to have been inside

the pantry prior to Bobby’s arrival, since Moldea points out that “neither

Cesar nor anyone else can explain how Sirhan managed to get into the

kitchen pantry.” Cesar himself “insisted, ‘I was the only guard in the

pantry, and I just never noticed him.’ He added that during his time

in the kitchen, he watched television with Roosevelt Grier and Rafer

Johnson and listened to Milton Berle’s jokes.” Distracted by celebrities,

Cesar could have missed someone else just as easily as he missed Sirhan,

especially if the person were wearing a business suit and looked like a

campaign aide or journalist.14

If there were a second gunman, how could he have shot Bobby in such

a crowded space? Few viable answers have been offered over the years.

However, after spending several years reviewing thousands of pages

of the most recently available files, Larry Hancock offers the following

possible scenario, after Bobby entered the pantry:

As [RFK and his group] passed beyond a half wall which butted up

against one side of a large ice machine, they came into Sirhan’s view,

and in a couple of steps Sirhan lunged at RFK. . . . The [other] shooter

was probably standing at the half wall and slipped in behind RFK

and Cesar to fire the fatal shots after Sirhan fired the first couple of

times. . . . This was when RFK was falling back from Sirhan—he had

not even been hit at that point. It’s probable that as two witnesses

describe, the shooter had a pistol in his hand concealed under a

folded newspaper and delivered the shots virtually execution style,

without having to wave his gun or make it very visible at all.15

Ace Security guard Eugene Thane Cesar has been the subject of much

controversy and investigation for decades, especially after Dan Moldea

tracked him down in the 1980s. Moldea noted that Cesar “gave contra-

dictory statements to the police and to the FBI about exactly when he

drew [his] weapon,” and one witness “claimed to have seen [Cesar]

fire the gun” he drew. Moldea points out that Cesar repeatedly gave

“different versions of his movements immediately after the shooting”;

that he “owned a .22 caliber revolver similar to Sirhan’s but gave false

statements to the police about when he sold it”; and that “Cesar was a

supporter of . . . George Wallace.”16

However, Moldea also points out that Cesar “had no criminal record,”

had been “called in to work at the last minute” that night, and “volun-

teered to be questioned [and] offered to surrender the gun in his holster,

a .38 caliber revolver, for police inspection during his questioning.” In

Cesar’s favor, Moldea says, the security guard “voluntarily told the

police that he owned the additional .22 revolver and gave them the name

and address of the man” he’d sold it to, and cooperated with the police

and the FBI, even offering to take a polygraph test. Cesar also allowed

Moldea to interview him, and he took a polygraph test that Moldea