Legacy of Secrecy (83 page)

Ragano “to get in touch with Carlos [Marcello] and have him set up

that meeting with Ed Partin,” the government’s prime witness against

Hoffa. Hoffa hoped Partin could be bribed to declare that his testimony

was false, or that the government had illegally wiretapped Hoffa during

the trial. In return, Marcello would get a huge loan from the Teamster

Pension Fund to build a new French Quarter hotel. Hoffa told Ragano

that “Al Dorfman will take care of that while I’m gone. I told Al to give

Carlos whatever he wants.”28

With mere days remaining before Hoffa went to prison, Marcello and

his men were already arranging an attempt to bribe Partin. An aide to

Louisiana’s governor set up a meeting between Partin and a close associ-

ate of Marcello. Marcello’s man told Partin that if he changed sides and

helped Hoffa, “the sky’s the limit. It’s worth at least a million bucks.”

During their talk, Marcello’s associate called Allen Dorfman, explain-

ing that while Dorfman was running the bribe attempt, Marcello was

actually “holding the money.” Marcello’s man then boasted to Partin of

Marcello’s and Dorfman’s political power, saying that they “had helped

Senator Russell Long (of Louisiana) get elected whip” in the US Senate

by paying for the votes of seven US senators.29

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Marcello’s man used a carrot-and-stick approach with Partin. While

dangling the million-dollar carrot, he also told Partin that one or more

Mafia hit contracts had been let on Partin’s life. However, if Partin took

the bribe and helped Hoffa, the Mafia would make sure he was pro-

tected. A few days later, when Partin proved reluctant to lie to help

Hoffa, Marcello’s envoy told him “that Jim Garrison was going to sub-

poena Partin in connection with his assassination probe.” However,

if Partin helped Hoffa, that subpoena could be avoided. Still, Partin

refused.30

At the same time Allen Dorfman—the Teamsters’ money supplier

to the Mafia—was trying to bribe another key Hoffa witness to change

his testimony. Dorfman’s attitude and connections can be summed up

by an encounter that took place the following year at a lavish dinner

party at columnist Drew Pearson’s Washington home. In addition to the

political figures attending were Allen Dorfman and Frank Sinatra, who

announced his opposition to Bobby Kennedy at the party. The
Washing-

ton Post
’s society reporter, Maxine Cheshire, covered the posh event and

recognizing Dorfman, she told him, “I’ve heard you are here to try to get

Jimmy Hoffa out of jail.” Dorfman replied, “That’s right, baby. I’m here

to buy anyone who can be bought. Are you for sale?”31

On March 2, 1967, New York Senator Bobby Kennedy was wrestling

with even more issues than Chavez’s assassination threat, Marcello’s

attempt to bribe Partin, and Ferrie’s recent death. Though Bobby’s public-

approval ratings and his relationship with LBJ were already at a low

point, he took a step that risked making both much worse. That day,

Bobby gave a major speech in the Senate in which he publicly broke with

LBJ over Vietnam. Bobby announced his support for a suspension of

the bombing of North Vietnam as part of an effort to bring that country

into peace talks.

Bobby surprised many by apologizing in his speech for his past sup-

port of the war, saying that during JFK’s administration he had partici-

pated in some of the decisions that had led to the current problem: “If

fault is to be found, or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go

around for all—including myself.” Bobby’s new position was a tremen-

dous political risk, since the same day the other chamber of Congress

defeated, by a resounding 372 to 18 votes, a nonbinding resolution to

stop the bombing. LBJ was livid at Bobby’s Vietnam speech, and the

president gave two hastily scheduled talks that day in order to distract

press attention from Bobby.32

Bobby had arrived at his stance on Vietnam after much soul search-

ing, and it represented a major step in his political growth as a Senator.

After his relatively low level of accomplishment during his first two

years in the Senate, the speech marked a turning point that would see

him come into his own in 1967 as a national political force to be reckoned

with. Yet within hours of his courageous speech, he faced yet another

public crisis, this one stemming from his brother’s murder and his own

secret work on the JFK-Almeida coup plan.

Chapter Thirty-three

Three related news reports about JFK’s assassination that appeared on

March 2 and 3, 1967, would have a tremendous impact not just on Bobby

Kennedy, but also on Richard Helms, President Lyndon Johnson, and

even later presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For decades, most

historians have focused only on Jack Anderson’s explosive March 3,

1967, newspaper column about Bobby, Castro, and JFK’s murder—but

recently declassified files and presidential tapes now show the story

emerged the day before, March 2, on radio and television in New York

and Washington, D.C.

The story that broke on March 2 was Rosselli’s tale that Castro had

killed JFK in retaliation for Bobby Kennedy’s secret efforts to assassi-

nate Fidel, and its release was part of a coordinated effort by associates

of Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante. The leaks to Jack Anderson,

New York City’s WINS radio, and Jim Garrison were designed to divert

suspicion for JFK’s assassination away from the Mafia dons, while also

trying to keep Rosselli and Hoffa out of jail. They also wanted to damage

Bobby politically, to lessen the chance he could run for president or lead

a public outcry for a new government investigation into his brother’s

death. Aiding Rosselli in this effort was CIA official William Harvey, in

the last, sad days of his once notable CIA career.

By the end of February 1967, Rosselli’s initial leak to Anderson and

Pearson—about Bobby’s ordering CIA assassins to kill Fidel—had pro-

duced no tangible results. Though it had traveled to President Johnson,

Chief Justice Earl Warren, Secret Service Chief James Rowley, and J.

Edgar Hoover, Rosselli had nothing to show for it. So Rosselli’s associ-

ates leaked parts of the same story to Jim Garrison and to a reporter with

New York’s WINS radio.

The version given to WINS radio was similar to Rosselli’s Anderson

leak and to a discredited tale briefly promoted in 1964 by associates of

Trafficante, Masferrer, and Artime. These similarities have become clear

only recently, since WINS didn’t broadcast all the information it had. The

station gave the unbroadcast portion to Texas governor John Connally,

who relayed it to President Lyndon Johnson in a phone call recorded on

LBJ’s White House taping system.1

On March 2, 1967, at 9:55 PM, John Connally called his old friend

LBJ from New York. Connally told LBJ there had been a “long story on

[WINS] tonight . . . from a man who saw the files in Garrison’s office . . .

that there were four assassins in the U.S. sent here by Castro or Castro’s

people.”2 Since the two Texans had been in JFK’s Dallas motorcade, they

shared a personal interest in the WINS story.

Connally told LBJ confidential information from a WINS executive,

who not only had “a team of reporters in New Orleans with Garrison,”

but also claimed to have two reporters in Cuba, though only for one

day. The executive had explained to Connally the radio reporters “were

working from different angles [but] came together with exactly the same

story” implicating Castro. It’s hard to believe that in just one day, or

even several days, American reporters could turn up information inside

Castro’s Cuba that implicated Fidel’s men in JFK’s murder—and even

LBJ would soon voice similar skepticism. More likely, someone had fed

Rosselli’s information to the reporters, since FBI files show that Rolando

Masferrer and an associate of John Martino had fed a similar story to a

New York City radio station three years earlier.3

The reporters’ confidential information, which Connally said was

“not going on the air,” was that “six months after the Missile Crisis was

over, the CIA was instructed to assassinate Castro.” That time frame

matches the one Rosselli gave to Pearson and Anderson, and it coin-

cides with the start of the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Highlighting the anti-

Bobby spin of Rosselli’s tale, Connally said that JFK’s “brother ordered

the CIA to send a team into Cuba to assassinate Castro.”4

Continuing to mirror Rosselli’s story, Connally said, “Some of [the

CIA team] were captured and tortured, and Castro and his people—and

I assume Che Guevara—heard the whole story [and] one of Castro’s

lieutenants, as a reprisal measure, sent four teams into the US to assas-

sinate President Kennedy.” Laying the responsibility on one of Castro’s

lieutenants is a slight evolution of the original Rosselli story, probably to

make it more politically palatable. If all the responsibility were placed on

Fidel, LBJ and other high-ranking US officials would be trapped in the

same box they were in just after JFK’s murder, worrying about a public

or Congressional outcry to invade Cuba and eliminate Fidel. However,

putting the onus on a Castro lieutenant, who might have been acting

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on his own, relieved that pressure. Dropping Che Guevara’s name into

the story was a good touch, since by that time he had long since disap-

peared from public view.5

After Connally concluded his urgent story, LBJ told Connally a similar

tale. After warning Connally, “This is confidential, too,” LBJ explained

he’d gotten “that story [from] one of Hoffa’s lawyers [Ed Morgan, who]

went to one of our mutual friends and asked him to come and relay that

to us . . . just about like you have related it. A week or two passed, and

then [Drew] Pearson came to me [and] told me [that Hoffa’s lawyer] had

told him the same thing.”6

LBJ said he was skeptical of the story, and that Attorney General

Ramsey Clark said there was nothing to it. However, LBJ said he had

been “reconstructing the requests that were made of me . . . right after I

became president,” when LBJ was asked to continue the plans for a coup

in Cuba. LBJ told Connally he was going to discuss this new informa-

tion further with Attorney General Clark so that he and J. Edgar Hoover

could “watch [the story] very carefully.”7

LBJ told Connally that “some of these same sources” trying to prevent

“this jail thing” for Hoffa “have [also] been feeding stuff to Garrison as

they did here.” Historian Michael Beschloss says that LBJ was worried

that the story was being spread by “Hoffa’s allies to keep the Teamster

leader out of prison,” by hoping “Johnson might be willing to intervene

at the last minute at the price of tamping down public revelations about

the CIA-Mafia conspiracy against Castro.”8

One of America’s most canny and astute politicians, LBJ worried that

he and the others were being manipulated to keep Hoffa out of jail. LBJ

didn’t seem to realize that another goal was to divert suspicion for JFK’s

murder away from Rosselli and the other mob bosses, or that the story’s

anti-Bobby spin was designed not only to damage Bobby’s reputation,

but also to appeal to LBJ’s hatred of Bobby. LBJ told Connally he didn’t

“know whether there’s any [real] basis for [the story] or not. . . . I don’t

know how much of it is being fed out through their network . . . and

how much of it anybody would know. It’s pretty hard to see how . . . we

would know directly . . . what Castro [actually] did.”9

LBJ confided to Connally that he had talked to Supreme Court Justice

Abe Fortas about the story. Fortas asked, “Who is it that’s seen Castro

and heard from Castro and knows Castro, that could be confirming all

this?” Fortas found it suspicious that “we just hear that this is what he

did, but nobody points to how we hear it.” Fortas was appropriately

skeptical about the story, but would soon become the focus of scandal

himself and would have to resign from the Supreme Court because of

his close relationship with LBJ.10

There is one important difference between the story Rosselli leaked

to Anderson and Pearson, and the ones leaked to WINS and Garrison:

the Mafia. Apparently, word about the Mafia’s role with the CIA had

been given only to Anderson and Pearson, back in mid-January. At that

time, the Mafia angle had been needed to give Rosselli’s story credibility

and as a way to grab the attention of top officials, especially those who

knew something about the CIA-Mafia plots. The Mafia part of Rosselli’s

tale worked most effectively when shared privately among officials like

LBJ and Helms, as something they wanted to keep hidden. Things were

different by late February and early March, when the Garrison inves-