Legacy of Secrecy (79 page)

invasion of Haiti, which Masferrer had continued after CBS backed out.

No journalist at the time noted that Ruby and Masferrer knew each

other, or that both men had worked with Santo Trafficante.1

Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli must also have breathed a sigh of

relief at Ruby’s death, since it removed any possibility that the increas-

ingly disturbed Ruby might blurt out something incriminating on the

stand or to a journalist. His death allowed the three Mafia bosses to focus

on diverting suspicion from themselves, keeping Rosselli and Hoffa

out of prison, and trying to restrain Bobby Kennedy from taking action

against them. As part of their efforts, they would soon have Rolando

Masferrer feeding disinformation to New Orleans DA Jim Garrison.

In early 1967, Masferrer’s drug-smuggling partner, Eladio del Valle,

was being tracked down by the Garrison investigator recommended by

Albert Fowler. Del Valle, Masferrer, and allegedly even Garrison’s Flor-

ida investigator all had ties to Santo Trafficante. In 1963, del Valle had

worked closely with David Ferrie. In the early 1990s, Cuban authorities

would accuse del Valle of having been involved in JFK’s assassination,

along with Trafficante bodyguard Herminio Diaz.2

Trafficante’s empire was thriving in many ways, from his profitable

operations smuggling heroin and cocaine to the illegal
bolita
lottery,

popular among Cuban exiles. Trafficante had long since given up any

hope of reopening his casinos in Cuba, and was preparing to open a large

casino in the Bahamas.3 However, Trafficante’s plans would all come

crashing down if he were linked to JFK’s assassination, so he couldn’t

afford for del Valle to become a person of interest, like Ferrie was. It was

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

a dangerous situation for del Valle, since his partner, Masferrer, was

under arrest and couldn’t intercede with Trafficante on his behalf. The

ruthless Trafficante would have been determined to squelch or spin any

JFK conspiracy information coming out of his territory.

Possibly as a result of Trafficante’s concerns, in early 1967 racist Joseph

Milteer was briefly the focus of several newspaper articles about JFK’s

assassination. Most historians have overlooked these stories because

they didn’t mention Milteer by name, and because more dramatic events

in New Orleans and Washington soon overshadowed the Miami articles.

Thus the stories were only a brief blip on the national radar and Milteer

was never identified in the media at that time. That left the white

supremacist free to pursue his violent, racist agenda into the following

year, when it would result in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther

King.

Although Milteer lived in the small South Georgia town of Quitman,

he traveled frequently to Atlanta, and less often to Miami, New Orleans,

and other towns in the South. For years, Milteer had subsisted primarily

on a slowly dwindling inheritance, but by 1967 he and three associates

in Atlanta had found a new way to fund their racist efforts while also

lining their pockets: Each Friday, on payday, they waited just outside

the gates of one of Atlanta’s largest factories, a General Motors plant

that employed more than seven thousand people. There, Milteer and

his three partners collected money from some of the well-paid, union-

ized work force for a fund they claimed was to battle civil rights. Only

their most regular contributors, once they trusted them, were told in

confidence the money was really for a fund to kill Martin Luther King.

An Atlanta race riot several months earlier had only increased their con-

tributions. In actuality, Milteer and his partners were using most of the

money to buy undeveloped mountain land in North Carolina, just over

the Georgia border. (The full story of Milteer’s involvement in King’s

murder begins in Chapter 38.)

Milteer had originally been drawn into the JFK conspiracy in 1963,

probably by his racist associate Guy Banister, when reports surfaced

about JFK’s plans to give a speech in Atlanta more than two months

before the President’s visit to Dallas. That was around the time of

Oswald’s visit to an Atlanta Klan associate of Milteer, and calls by David

Ferrie to Atlanta. Though JFK’s Atlanta speech was canceled due to local

officials’ security concerns because of JFK’s stance on civil rights, Milteer

had remained a small part of the JFK plot. Milteer’s involvement led to

the November 1963 tapes and reports by Miami police informant Wil-

liam Somersett that were detailed in earlier chapters.4

Somersett had not been in contact with Milteer since December 1963,

when an irate Milteer had called Somersett after being interviewed by

FBI agents. Somersett had continued to be an informant for various

agencies, since he was opposed to violence even though he was still

extremely conservative politically. Somersett published a small, inde-

pendent labor-union newspaper in Miami, which may have given Traf-

ficante a way to influence him, directly or indirectly. Trafficante had ties

to the Teamsters Union in Miami: He shared an office there with one of

Hoffa’s corrupt locals, and Trafficante was partners with at least two

Miami Teamster–Mafia criminals.5

On January 26, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover told the director of the Secret

Service that the Miami FBI office had just learned of an unusual request

from the Miami Police Intelligence Unit: The police had asked Somer-

sett if they could “release to the press information regarding the plot

to assassinate [JFK] made by J. A. Milteer to [Somersett] on Novem-

ber 9, 1963.” Somersett gave his okay to the Miami Police Intelligence

Unit, “provided the informant’s identity was concealed.” After that,

Somersett “was contacted by . . . a reporter for the
Miami News
,” and

Somersett “confirmed his conversation regarding the threat to President

Kennedy.”6

In a bizarre twist, to the reporter and consistently thereafter, Somer-

sett spun the story of Milteer’s talk of killing JFK not against the white

supremacist, but to slam Bobby Kennedy. Somersett claimed that since

he had told the government about Milteer’s threat, Bobby should have

taken action before Dallas—therefore, JFK’s death was Bobby’s fault.

The FBI noted that Somersett’s comments “indicated that . . . his story

will be very critical of . . . Senator Robert F. Kennedy.” We spoke to the

Miami News
reporter who broke Somersett’s story, Bill Barry, who said

that when Somersett had first approached him with the story in early

1967, it already had its anti–Bobby Kennedy angle.

Barry refused to include Somersett’s anti-Bobby spin, and broke

the story in the
Miami News
on February 2, 1967, headlined “2 weeks

before JFK was Killed: Assassination Idea Taped.” The
Miami News

article included Milteer’s comments that JFK would be shot “from an

office building with a high-powered rifle,” and that “they will pick up

somebody within hours afterwards . . . just to throw the public off.” The

article didn’t identify Somersett or Milteer, though Milteer certainly

would have recognized his comments.7 Bill Barry’s article also quoted

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Milteer talking about a Klan associate who had “participated in the

bombing of the Birmingham church” in 1963 that killed four young

girls. The article also said Milteer’s associate had “tried to get Martin

Luther King [and] followed him for miles and miles, and couldn’t get

close enough to him.”8

The Miami Police played the surveillance tapes for the news media

the day the story broke. The next day, Barry and the
Miami News
pub-

lished a second story on the matter, and the
Miami Herald
ran its first.

However, despite the country’s rising interest in a JFK conspiracy, the

Miami story did not become major national news. The
Baltimore Sun

and a few major newspapers carried an AP version of the story, but it

didn’t generate any follow-up coverage in the national press, and soon

the allegations vanished from even the Miami newspapers.

The most unusual aspects of the incident are how the story came

out in the first place, and why it disappeared so quickly, before Milteer

was named. Regarding the latter, it’s possible that Hoover and the Secret

Service contributed to the story’s not becoming national news, since the

Milteer affair didn’t reflect well on either agency. Reporter Bill Barry

told us he wanted to name Milteer in the articles and go to Georgia to

interview Milteer, but officials at his newspaper denied both requests.

Instead, Barry was taken off the Milteer investigation to work with one of

Garrison’s men pursuing dead-end leads. Soon, Barry was taken off the

JFK assignment entirely. Left on his own to pursue Milteer, Barry might

well have uncovered Milteer’s ties to Guy Banister, or other important

information. Since Milteer’s name never surfaced in the press at that

time, it left him free to pursue the King assassination plot with Carlos

Marcello later in the year.9

The only official reaction to the Miami stories appears to have come

from the Birmingham police, who came to Miami to listen to the portion

of the tapes about the Birmingham bombing, and from the US Secret

Service, which began a new investigation of Milteer—which would be

closed several months later, after the Secret Service took no action. Also,

even though the articles discussed JFK’s Miami trip on November 18,

none of them mentioned JFK’s Tampa motorcade that same day. Just

as federal officials had stonewalled the
Miami Herald
’s attempt to do

an article about the Tampa threat two days after JFK’s murder—and

had squelched any follow-up about Tampa by the
Herald
or the
Tampa

Tribune
—they may have put a lid on this Miami story for the same reason.

None of the then recent JFK conspiracy books or articles had revealed

the Tampa attempt, and Hoover and the Secret Service wanted to keep

it that way. It’s also interesting that the large FBI folder at the National

Archives with the February 2, 1967, Milteer article also contains memos

about Johnny Rosselli’s 1966 and 1967 activities, as well as many files

about Commander Almeida. It’s as if whoever compiled this FBI folder

knew, or suspected, that all those files were related.10

As for how the Miami Somersett-Milteer story was leaked in the first

place, the FBI memo indicates that the Miami Police Intelligence Unit

first approached Somersett about revealing the story. Given the vio-

lent reputation of white supremacists at the time, Milteer’s associates

in particular, it seems odd that Somersett would have willingly exposed

himself to retaliation—unless he had something to gain. Even after the

Miami newspapers dropped the story, Somersett kept pushing it, even

talking about it on local television the following month. He even con-

tinued his anti-Bobby spin in a story in his own small labor newspaper,

headlined “I charge Robert F. Kennedy with Murder.”

If the Miami story were the only one blaming Bobby Kennedy for his

brother’s death, it might be more difficult to explain, but it was actually

one of two being peddled at the same time; Johnny Rosselli was trying

to leak the other. In fact, the Milteer story was printed at a time when

Rosselli’s effort to get his version into print in a major way seemed to

have stalled, almost as if the leak about Milteer were a backup plan. In

1967, Rosselli’s associate Santo Trafficante wielded tremendous influ-

ence in Miami, and still had a man in the Tampa Police Department, Sgt.

Jack de la Llana, who headed the statewide Police Intelligence network.

It would not have been difficult for Sgt. de la Llana to have learned

about the Milteer tapes and Somersett’s identity from the Miami Police

Intelligence Unit, or for de la Llana to have influenced the Miami Unit’s

actions.

Trafficante would have been concerned about Jim Garrison’s inter-

est in David Ferrie, since Ferrie had spent significant time with Eladio

del Valle in Miami during 1963, while dealing with his Eastern Airlines

dismissal hearing. Perhaps Trafficante and Marcello were laying the

groundwork to frame Ferrie as Banister’s flunky who aided Milteer’s

racist plot to kill JFK. Blaming JFK’s murder on right-wing extremists

would have sounded logical to the public while also diverting suspicion

away from the mob bosses. It’s also possible that Garrison’s investiga-

tor in Miami, or others, had learned of the existence of the Milteer tapes

and the articles were an attempt to get the story out with an anti–Bobby

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Kennedy spin. Trafficante had been in New Orleans on January 30 and

31, plotting strategy with Marcello, just before the Miami Milteer story

broke.

Santo Trafficante was arrested when he returned to Miami on Feb-