Reclaiming History (270 page)

Now mind you, by Ragano’s own admission, he says he couldn’t believe what Hoffa had told him, but the very next day at the Royal Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, he dutifully says he passed on the message to the two mobsters. “Marteduzzo [Little Hammer, Hoffa’s Sicilian nickname] wants you to do a little favor for him. You won’t believe this, but he wants you to kill John Kennedy. He wants you to get rid of the President right away.” Ragano says he thought that Hoffa’s wish would be met with laughter from the two mobsters, but, he tells his readers, there was “silence. Santo and Carlos exchanged glances. Their facial expressions were icy. Their reticence was a signal that this was an uncomfortable subject, one they were unwilling to discuss.”
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(In a
Frontline
documentary, Ragano said that when he told Marcello and Trafficante that Hoffa wanted them to kill Kennedy, “they looked at one another and I got the distinct impression that it was as if, well, that’s what we were going to do anyhow.”
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This is what Ragano also told
New York Post
reporter Jack Newfield in an earlier 1992 interview.
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)

Two weeks after the assassination, Ragano says in his 1994 book, he was in the passenger seat of a car in New Orleans driven by Marcello’s brother, Joe. Carlos and Trafficante were in the backseat. When a news item on the car radio questioned whether Oswald acted alone in the assassination, Ragano reports that Trafficante said, “Carlos, you mark my words. Before this thing is over with, they’re going to blame you and me for the killing.”
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But twenty-seven years earlier, in an interview with the FBI in Tampa, Florida, on April 10, 1967, Ragano said the above incident (this later version had Carlos Marcello driving, Trafficante in the front seat, and Ragano in the backseat alone) took place not two weeks after the assassination but
four years later,
in 1967, and what prompted Trafficante’s remark was the car radio’s news about New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s investigation of the assassination. Ragano told the FBI that the allegations about Trafficante being involved in Kennedy’s death “were ridiculous,” and illustrated Trafficante’s attitude about the assassination by telling the agents about Trafficante’s alleged remarks in the car and his belief that he would be “framed” by law enforcement to put him behind bars.
¹²⁸
So, according to Ragano, up until 1967, Trafficante was innocent.

But in the aforementioned 1992
Frontline
documentary, Ragano said that before dying, Trafficante confided to Ragano that he and Marcello had Kennedy murdered. In his book, he elaborated on the incident. According to Ragano, on March 13, 1987, in Tampa, Florida, just four days before Trafficante’s death, Trafficante called him. In an extremely enfeebled voice (“between gasps I could hear him wheezing”) Trafficante said, “Frank, please come and see me today…I want to talk to you. It’s very important.” Trafficante was figuratively on his deathbed, per Ragano. During a drive in Ragano’s car, the Mafia leader, per Ragano, told him in Italian, “
Carlos é futtutu. Non duvevamu ammazzari a Giovanni. Duvevamu ammazzari a Bobby
” (“We shouldn’t have killed Giovanni [John in Italian]. We should have killed Bobby”).
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Ragano doesn’t say in his book why Trafficante, who, like the HSCA said, was always “discreet,”
¹³⁰
would confess to the biggest murder ever.

Conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers, who
smells
a rat almost everywhere in the assassination of President Kennedy, but unlike most of his brethren in the conspiracy community is rational, responsible, and intelligent enough to never say he thinks he actually
found
the rat (i.e., “The mob killed JFK,” etc.), checked this last story out. He learned that on March 13, 1987, Trafficante was no longer living in Tampa, having taken up permanent residence at his home in North Miami Beach, and hadn’t been to Tampa since the previous Christmas holidays. Trafficante’s widow (who Ragano says he saw in the Tampa home when he picked up her husband for the ride), his two daughters, and several friends and neighbors told Summers the meeting between Ragano and Trafficante not only didn’t take place but couldn’t have, since he was in North Miami Beach the entire day. Summers also learned from hospital records that Trafficante was treated in the dialysis unit of Miami’s Mercy Hospital the previous evening, March 12, until 7:15 p.m., and was back in the unit by the afternoon of March 14, leaving a one-day window for him to fly to his father confessor, Ragano, for his mea culpa. But there is no evidence, other than Ragano’s word, that Trafficante, near death, did so. Oh yes. Ragano told Summers he had three witnesses who could corroborate his story, but he declined to tell Summers who they were.
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But quite apart from Summers’s good investigative work exposing Ragano’s story, the story from start to finish does not make one iota of sense. Ragano writes in his book, after revealing Trafficante’s alleged confession, that “Carlos [and] Santo…undoubtedly had roles in Kennedy’s death,”
¹³²
but had he forgotten that earlier in his book he wrote that Trafficante and Marcello were “two ultra-cautious men…two prudent godfathers,” and the thought that they would “dare to get involved in a plot against the President…was too absurd for credibility…It was absurd to contemplate that these Mafia dons or any Mafia boss had the audacity to pull off the biggest hit the world—the murder of the President of the United States”?
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Of course, that’s what I have said more than once in this book—that the thought that Trafficante, Marcello, or any of the mob leaders would plot to murder the president is too ridiculous to even mention. If that’s an absurd thought, multiply by one thousand the unlikelihood that Trafficante and Marcello would murder the president of the United States
simply as a favor for Jimmy Hoffa
, a union leader, and someone whom Trafficante, Ragano says,
had never even met
.
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No sensible person would believe a story like that.

There’s perhaps an even bigger reason why we know that Ragano’s entire story is a giant fabrication. Were it true, he’d never in a million years talk about it since he’d automatically be exposing himself to the high probability of being killed twice over. First, if he had conveyed the message from Hoffa to Trafficante that he believes resulted in Kennedy’s murder, as a criminal lawyer for several years Ragano would have to know that he’d also be guilty of the assassination under the law of aiding and abetting. Indeed, he writes, after the alleged confession from Trafficante, about his “possible complicity in the assassination.”
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Since there’s no statute of limitations for murder, he could be prosecuted for the president’s murder and sentenced to death. Second, no one knows better than he that, as the flap on the dust jacket of his own book says, “A bullet in the head is the customary penalty for violation of
omerta
, the Mafia’s code of silence.” But you see, Ragano never had any of these fears, since he knew he hadn’t aided and abetted any crime, nor squealed on those who he said did, so knowing neither the authorities nor the Mafia would pay any attention to his blather, he felt perfectly safe to say what he did.

Why did Ragano make up his tale? Some have suggested that Ragano may have been seeking revenge for the fact that Trafficante refused to loan him money at an earlier time when he needed it. After Ragano was disbarred from the practice of law in 1976 following his conviction for income tax evasion, he was near bankruptcy, and when he asked Trafficante for a loan he was devastated by the response: “Ask me for anything—except money.”
¹³⁶
But although bitter for a long time about the rejection, Ragano, whose license to practice law had been reinstated, defended Trafficante in a subsequent 1986 federal racketeering case in Tampa (which ended in a mistrial when the judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence for the case to proceed), and attended his funeral the next year. In any event, I find it hard to believe that Ragano would try to implicate not only Trafficante in Kennedy’s murder, but also himself (even if he knew the mob and authorities would know his story was a fraud) just to get revenge against someone he couldn’t even hurt (since Trafficante was already dead), all because his request for a loan was turned down fifteen years earlier. I would think the likelier reasons for Ragano’s fable were more self-aggrandizing in nature. At the time he first told it in 1992, he was in the process of writing his book, and the allegation, per the dust jacket and promotional material, was the most sensational and explosive part of the book. So the hope of stimulating book sales probably was at the heart of the story. Also, as a concomitant thereof, the opportunity to be a media celebrity and tell his story, as he did on several national TV shows, may have held its appeal to him. Another possibility is that when he first came forward with his story in 1992, he was fighting to stay out of prison for a second conviction in 1990 for income tax evasion (he was unsuccessful), and by some manner of thinking he may have thought the story, and the prospect of telling more, would give him some leverage with the authorities. Fighting to stay out of prison and promoting his book may have been the combination that caused Ragano, close to thirty years after the assassination, to come up with his whopper.

Ragano had no credibility left to squander, but if anyone thought he did, his testimony before the ARRB should disabuse them of this notion. Let’s let the ARRB tell it: “Ragano…stated in his book that he possessed original,
contemporaneous
notes of meetings with organized crime figures. To determine whether Ragano’s notes were relevant to the assassination, the Review Board subpoenaed the notes and deposed Ragano. He produced several handwritten notes regarding the assassination, but he could not definitely state whether he took them during the meetings [with mob figures] in the 1960’s or later when he was working on his book in the 1990’s.”
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Really believable, isn’t it?

Before going on, I should note that although the Hoffa plan to kill President Kennedy is clearly a fabrication of Frank Ragano’s, it is pretty well accepted that Hoffa, though never ordering, at least discussed the possibility of murdering his chief nemesis, the president’s brother, RFK. The main confirmation for this came from one of Hoffa’s close confidants, Edward Partin, a Baton Rouge teamsters official with a criminal record who informed the authorities in September of 1962 that he had participated in such a discussion with Hoffa. In October of 1962, the FBI gave Partin a polygraph test and he passed. In an interview with the HSCA in 1978, Partin reaffirmed the account of Hoffa’s discussion with him about having RFK killed, Hoffa suggesting a lone gunman with a rifle equipped with a telescopic sight shooting RFK as he rode in a convertible. While there are the similarities to the president’s death, the HSCA observed that they “were not so unusual as to point ineluctably in a particular direction.” Hoffa also discussed the alternative possibility of killing RFK with plastic explosives, but Partin said Hoffa never pursued the matter of killing RFK.
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The HSCA also confirmed that in early 1967, Frank Chavez, another Teamsters official, spoke to Hoffa about murdering Robert Kennedy, even suggesting ways to get the job done, but Hoffa “sharply rebuked his aide, telling him that such a course of action was dangerous and should not be considered.”
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The HSCA noted that, unlike the various organized-crime figures with whom he associated, “Hoffa was not a confirmed murderer,”
*
his association with them having derived from the nature of his union activities. Further, the only credible evidence pertained to Hoffa’s discussion about killing RFK, not President Kennedy, and even with RFK it never went beyond mere talking with Partin, and Hoffa sternly rejected the proposal set forth by Chavez. The committee also said it was doubtful Hoffa would have risked something as extremely dangerous as a plot to murder President Kennedy at the very time he was under active investigation by RFK’s Justice Department. Accordingly, the HSCA concluded it was “improbable that Hoffa had anything to do with the death of the President.”
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The HSCA could have added the most important point of all—that there was
no evidence
of any kind that Hoffa was involved in the president’s death.

O
ther than a virtual madman (as Oswald was), no person or group in America would ever seriously consider murdering the president of the United States. For well over a century this has been so, and will continue to be so indefinitely if our culture and democratic form of government remain in existence. The president is simply someone you don’t mess with. That is why, as I have said, the very thought of groups like organized crime, the CIA, military-industrial complex, and so on, sitting around and actually planning to murder the president of the United States is inherently crazy on its face, and except for the necessities of this book, I reject the proposition out of hand.

But if, for instance, the mob did intend to “mess with” the president because it wanted to get his brother, Robert Kennedy, off its back, what it would do is something like this (and I maintain the mob wouldn’t even try to do this against the president): It is well known, and too well chronicled to require documentation, that President Kennedy was a hound dog when it came to women, continuing his indiscriminate liaisons with many women through his one thousand days in office. As
Time
magazine observed in 1975, “Even after he entered the White House, the handsome and fun-loving Kennedy never stopped pursuing attractive women—nor they him…Once, he startled two proper Britons, Prime Minister Harold MacMillan and Foreign Minister R.A.B. Butler, during a 1962 conference in Nassau by casually confiding that if he went too long without a woman, he suffered severe headaches.”
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The story was just a rumor, but because of the continuing revelations through the years of Kennedy’s girlfriends,
Time
magazine’s Hugh Sidey wrote in 2003, “This story has been largely discounted, but now it has new currency.”
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