The Bone Tree (34 page)

THE NOISE KAISER
and I heard from the hotel bathroom was Dwight falling off the toilet. When we reached him, he was bruised and angry but basically no worse than before. After Kaiser and I lifted him back onto the toilet, I cleaned him up and wheeled him to the bed while Kaiser wiped up the vomit he’d left on the floor. Without the headboard to support him, I don’t think Stone could hold himself up, yet the unquenchable light still shines from his sunken eyes and yellow face.

Despite my internal distress, I sit in the desk chair and wait for Kaiser to take his seat on the sofa beneath the picture window. After he does, Stone begins speaking with slightly diminished volume. “Penn, I know why you’re still sitting here. You want to know what I know about your father. I’m going to tell you that. But you have to trust me about something. Without context, the information would be almost useless to you. To understand Tom’s involvement, you’ve got to understand and accept what happened in Dallas, and why.”

“You mean that Carlos Marcello killed Kennedy? What if I tell you I do accept that?”

A faint smile touches Stone’s lips. “You don’t really believe it. Think like the prosecutor you once were for a moment. Glenn Morehouse and Henry Sexton have given us a unique opportunity here. John Kennedy was shot forty-two years ago. Some members of my group have been working that case almost all that time. We’ve made real progress, but two years ago we hit a wall. Some of us have died in the interval since. I’ve been afraid
I
would die without knowing the truth, or worse, that it would never be known. But now we have a chance. Not only to discover the truth, but to
prove
it.”

“I understand, Dwight.”

“Do you? Because this opportunity is very fragile. If Tom is killed running from the police, the truth could die with him. If you push the
Double Eagles too soon, or too hard, Forrest Knox could move to bury whatever evidence remains. That might mean killing some of his own family, and I don’t think he’d hesitate. We have to move quickly, but with the utmost care.”

Again the pressure to back off from the Double Eagles.
“Just tell me what you need to, Dwight. I came here because of you, and I’m ready to listen.”

“It’s not easy to condense twenty years of investigation into an hour, but I’ll try, for both our sakes. First, I want to dispense with the existing conspiracy theories. To do that, you must stop thinking of the word ‘conspiracy’ as meaning a large number of people. Large conspiracies usually fail, and when they do succeed, they never stay secret for long.”

“Agreed.”

“Second, I want to explain a principle that a colleague of mine calls ‘Stone’s Razor.’ It’s a way we deal with coincidence.”

“All right.”

“Nearly every JFK conspiracy theory depends upon one critical and unacceptable coincidence: President Kennedy’s motorcade passing beneath the building where Lee Harvey Oswald worked. Oswald got that job randomly, through the friend of a friend of his wife, and only thirty-seven days before the assassination. Kennedy’s motorcade route was chosen by the Secret Service only
seven
days before the assassination.”

“And it wasn’t made public until three days prior,” Kaiser clarifies, “after being printed in the
Dallas Times Herald
on Tuesday, November nineteenth.”

“The point,” Stone continues, “is that Oswald getting the Book Depository job and the choice of motorcade route were
causally unrelated
. That’s been proved as conclusively as any fact in history. No one could have placed Oswald in that job in that building with the intent to kill JFK, because no one knew at the time he got the job what the motorcade route would be. Consequently, any conspiracy involving Lee Harvey Oswald that depends upon inspiration or planning prior to November fifteenth is
de facto
impossible.”

“Which is all of them, right?”

“Except Oliver Stone’s. Since he claimed that everyone from the CIA to the military-industrial complex was in it together—right up to LBJ—Oliver was claiming that they could have controlled the motorcade route and put Kennedy in Oswald’s sights.”

“Yeah, well . . . let’s come back to planet Earth.”

“How about halfway back?” Dwight says with a smile. “If I asked you to list the main conspiracy suspects in the assassination, you’d probably give the same ones most Americans would.”

The usual suspects,
I think, recalling Kaiser’s list from last night outside City Hall. “The CIA, Cuban exiles, Castro, the Russians, the Mafia, and the military-industrial complex?”

“Right. And while the House Select Committee cleared the CIA, the Cubans—both pro- and anti-Castro—and the Mafia as
organized groups
in 1979, it did not rule out the possibility that individual members of those entities had carried out the hit in Dallas.”

“And your Working Group?”

“We picked up where the Select Committee left off. Let’s dispense with the CIA first. Most top-level agency people were relieved or even happy to hear JFK was dead, but they had no reason to kill him. Kennedy had never made good on his threat to splinter the agency in a million pieces, beyond firing Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles. Nor did the agency need to cover its attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, as is often proposed. Both Kennedy brothers had been partners with the CIA in that effort since taking office. Robert Kennedy had personally signed off on Operation Mongoose, so the Kennedys stood to lose even more than the agency did by exposure. That whole theory is nonsensical.”

“Who else can you eliminate?”

“I won’t waste thirty seconds of breath on the ‘military-industrial complex.’ Contrary to popular belief, John Kennedy was no liberal saint, but a dedicated cold warrior. Therefore, defense corporations had no reason to kill him. That theory also violates the large-conspiracy rule. They never could have kept it secret.”

“And as for the Russians,” Kaiser offers, “by assassinating a sitting president, they would have risked global thermonuclear war. There’s zero chance they did that.”

“What about the Russians sending Oswald to do it?”

“
Less
than zero,” Stone declares, becoming more animated by the give-and-take of discussion. “Oswald had a neon paper trail behind him that led straight to Moscow. Besides, because of his defection to Russia, the KGB knew better than anyone how unstable Lee was.”

Stone uses Oswald’s first name as easily as a man who knew him all his short life. “And Castro?”

This time Stone’s answer is slow in coming. “That’s another kettle of fish. Castro knew that the CIA and the Mafia had been trying to kill him, and he had intel reports that those attempts had been sanctioned by the Kennedy brothers. In early ’63, Castro actually said publicly that elected officials who engaged in those types of activities could become targets of such activities themselves. In the very year of Kennedy’s assassination, he’d threatened to retaliate in kind.”

“Well, did he?”

“There’s no evidence that he did. Oswald probably hoped that killing JFK would make him a hero in Havana, and thus facilitate his entry to the country. But that’s all.”

Stone’s eyes and voice betray emotion when he speaks of Oswald and Castro, and I sense that we’re nearing the crux of his theory. “What’s the rest of it, Dwight?”

“Let’s cross off the Cuban exiles first, the men betrayed at the Bay of Pigs. They were shot to pieces on the beach or imprisoned because Kennedy wouldn’t send air support. A lot of them wanted to punish him for that, and they had the training and weapons needed to pull off Dealey Plaza. However, our considered opinion is that none did. Do I need to go into detail as to why?”

“No. So, where does that leave us?”

“La Cosa Nostra,” says Kaiser.

Stone nods. “From the Mafia, the Select Committee singled out Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Jimmy Hoffa as serious suspects. It recommended that all be investigated further, but I’m sorry to say that no law enforcement agency ever officially fulfilled that charge, including the Bureau.”

“Except your guys.”

“With a vengeance, I’m proud to say. In summary, each of those mobsters had a motive to want JFK dead, and each rejoiced at the news that he
was
dead.
But
”—Stone leans forward like a professor making a salient point—“just because you want someone dead doesn’t make you a murderer.”

“If it did, I’d be in jail myself.”

“Exactly.” Stone drums his fingers on his legal pad. “Of the
mobsters, Sam Giancana had particular reason to hate Kennedy. ‘Momo’ had helped get JFK elected president in 1960, by pushing key wards in Chicago and West Virginia Kennedy’s way. Being persecuted by brother Bobby after that election must have pushed him close to violent retaliation. This was aggravated by the fact that Sam and JFK shared a mistress—Judith Exner—but Momo never acted on his hatred.”

“You sound pretty sure.”

“We had the Chicago Outfit under electronic surveillance for years before the mob even knew about planted microphones—both before and after the assassination. Sam G. and his crew bitched and ranted endlessly about both Kennedys, but there was never even a hint that they’d moved against them.”

“Jimmy Hoffa wanted Kennedy dead more than anyone else,” Kaiser says.

Stone concedes this with a nod. “Hoffa was heard many times to threaten both Kennedys, and he asked Sam G. and Marcello to whack JFK. But in my group’s opinion, that never came to anything either. Hoffa was a hothead, a loose cannon. If Momo or Marcello had moved against Kennedy, they would have done it for their own reasons, not as a favor to Hoffa. All testimony to the contrary by mob lawyer Frank Ragano was fabricated. Ragano made up those stories years later, trying to get a book deal.”

I have to fight the urge to ask him to skip ahead to my father. “So, that leaves Marcello and Roselli?”

“And Santo Trafficante. Johnny Roselli was the main link between the CIA and the Mafia during their attempts to kill Castro. He was close to both Giancana and Trafficante, but nothing ties him or them to Dallas and Dealey Plaza. Frank Ragano told a story about Trafficante ordering him to tell Marcello they’d screwed up by killing JFK—that they should have killed Bobby instead—but that was more bullshit. As a coda to that line of inquiry, Giancana was murdered in 1975, shortly before he was to testify before a Senate Select Committee investigating mob-CIA collusion in the JFK assassination. It sounds suspicious, I know, but Giancana was actually killed over a dispute about Iranian casino revenues. One year later, Roselli
did
testify before that committee, about the CIA-mob efforts to murder Castro. Days later he was found floating in an oil drum off Miami. Roselli knew a lot about his bosses, but nothing about the JFK assassination.”

“I guess we’re down to Marcello, then?”

“‘Uncle Carlos,’” Stone intones. “The king of New Orleans, and the most powerful don in the United States.”

His timbre sounds weirdly like affection, and reminds me of my mother’s use of that nickname. I think of my father and his time in New Orleans. If Marcello really was that powerful, and Dad was in a position to do him favors at the parish prison, how could a lowly medical extern have resisted?

“If the story I’m about to tell you sounds like it was written by Mario Puzo,” says Stone, “that’s because there’s a lot of Carlos Marcello in
The Godfather
.”

The old FBI man begins to speak in a soft but spellbinding baritone that reminds me of the agent I knew in another life. “In 1910, Carlos Marcello was born Calogero Minacori in Tunis. His parents were Sicilian, but Carlos himself never went to Sicily. He once famously said to another mobster who tried Sicilian on him: ‘I don’t talk dat shit, only English.’”

Kaiser chuckles from the sofa. “That sounds just like Carlos. I’ve heard the BRILAB tapes.”

Stone presses on like a man who knows he has only so much stamina remaining. “When Calogero was an infant, his parents emigrated to a plantation near Metairie, Louisiana. The boy changed his name while very young to better assimilate with the children in his new country. As a boy he hauled vegetables in the swamp parishes south of New Orleans, but he soon figured out that crime paid better. As a teenager, he ran an armed robbery gang that preyed on the surrounding towns. Carlos carried a sawed-off shotgun on a sling, and he killed anyone who got in his way or questioned his leadership. The bodies usually went into the nearby swamps, into the bellies of alligators.”

Kaiser gives me a pointed look. “Sound familiar?”

“At eighteen,” Stone continues, “Carlos was sentenced to nine years in Angola Prison for robbery and assault. The state let him out after five, and he went right back to his old ways. This is the period during which Brody Royal and his father came to know Carlos. At twenty-seven, Marcello was arrested with twenty-three pounds of marijuana in his possession. He got another stiff prison sentence and a seventy-five-thousand-dollar fine, but this time he was released after only ten
months. Why? Because somehow, he had attracted the notice of Frank Costello, head of the Genovese crime family in New York.

“That connection was the making of him. After cutting a gambling deal with Huey Long, Costello chose Carlos to move illegal slot machines into New Orleans. Using his six brothers, local muscle, and the influence of the Long political machine, Carlos eventually forced one-armed bandits into every redneck honky-tonk, black juke joint, Cajun dive bar, and whorehouse from Grand Isle to Raceland—five thousand in all. Within ten years, he’d seized control of all gambling rackets in Louisiana.”

“He also developed an association with Meyer Lansky,” says Kaiser. “Through the Lansky connection—as reward for services we’re still not sure of—Marcello was awarded a percentage of the skim from the Outfit’s Vegas casino operations. And they don’t hand that out for nothing.”

Stone nods. “Carlos was also awarded an interest in the mob’s Havana casinos under Batista. He got that cut by providing muscle to Santo Trafficante on Florida real estate deals, a job that the Double Eagles would take on years later. Anyway . . . by 1947, Carlos had become not just a made man, but a bona fide member of the national
Commissione,
and one of the richest of all the bosses.”