The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (12 page)

Bringing the assassins of Attorney General–elect Patterson to justice was another matter. Two local vice lords had immediately fled to Trafficante’s territory in Florida, while the city’s corrupt “night Police Chief” went to Texas, now part of Marcello’s territory (along with southern Mississippi). The corrupt sitting Attorney General of Alabama, Si Garrett, was targeted by the grand jury investigating the assassination, but he entered “a psychiatric clinic in Galveston, Texas.” After the court indicted Garrett, he stayed either in Texas or Mississippi until 1963, when all charges against him were inexplicably dropped. As with other hits involving Trafficante and Marcello, witness intimidation and murder kept the investigation from ever reaching the level of the two bosses. Of the four men indicted, just one was convicted of murder, eventually serving only seven years, while one was acquitted and a third was allowed to plead nolo contendere to a minor charge.

One might think the Phenix City assassination would have caused the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration to declare war on organized crime, but it didn’t. J. Edgar Hoover continued to turn a blind eye toward the Mafia in general and Marcello in particular.
Time
magazine in 1975 first revealed secret meetings and friendship between Hoover and mob boss Frank Costello, which were confirmed by William Hundley, the Justice Department organized crime chief during the Kennedy Administration. Hoover’s predilection for gambling on horse races is now well known, and it’s also possible Hoover was blackmailed by the Mafia over his closeted homosexuality.

Carlos Marcello’s partners had gotten away with murder, but they had lost the lucrative cash cow that was Phenix City. However, they learned from their mistakes, and the next time Marcello’s associates assassinated a government official, a patsy would be on hand to be quickly blamed and killed to divert suspicion from organized crime.

IN ADDITION TO Trafficante, another important mob figure with whom Carlos Marcello became involved in the 1950s was Johnny Rosselli, the Mafia don who handled the Chicago mob’s interests in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Rosselli was a smooth operator who in the 1940s had hobnobbed with movie studio chiefs until he was caught running a union shakedown operation for the mob. After Rosselli’s release from federal prison, he still had clout in Las Vegas, but the studio heads had to distance themselves from him. Court records show Rosselli was still influential enough to be an executive producer on three low-budget film noirs in the late 1940s, though his name couldn’t be listed in the credits. One of the films,
He Walked by Night
, featured a crazed ex-serviceman who turned killer. The young ex-serviceman kept his long-barreled weapon hidden away, wrapped in a blanket,
but he carried a pistol and used it to shoot a policeman in his patrol car. Rosselli later credibly confessed his role in JFK’s murder, which had a similar scenario involving Lee Oswald and Officer Tippit.

Before leaving the movie business for the greener pastures of Las Vegas and Cuban casinos, Rosselli helped get his friend Frank Sinatra a dramatic role in
From Here to Eternity
, which reignited Sinatra’s career. Rosselli’s biographers say the pressure he applied on Sinatra’s behalf inspired the famous “horse’s head in the bed” scene in the first
Godfather
novel and film.

Johnny Rosselli was very active in Guatemala in the mid-1950s, and his biographers documented from two sources that “Rosselli’s primary concern in Guatemala was to protect and advance the interests of” a New Orleans company with ties to Carlos Marcello. In 1956 Marcello decided that “Guatemala would be the most appropriate country” from which to obtain a fake birth certificate, since it “was easily accessible to New Orleans by air, telephone, and telegraph.” President Castillo Armas ruled the country, having been installed as dictator after the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration used the CIA to overthrow the liberal government of the democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.
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While President Armas reportedly did not take bribes from the Mafia, that was not true of his prime minister. Carlos Marcello paid $100,000 to Guatemala’s prime minister and his former law partner for his fake birth certification and citizenship papers. There was also casino gambling in Guatemala run by Ted Lewin, Johnny Rosselli’s associate from Los Angeles.

President Armas tried to close the casinos, and he jailed Rosselli’s friend Lewin. Four days later, in July 1957, Armas was assassinated, apparently by a lone Communist assassin. The “assassin” was said by accounts to have “immediately committed suicide with the same rifle he had used to kill the President.” One historian notes that even more conveniently, police “produced some leftist propaganda that had supposedly been found in his pockets and a suspicious ‘diary,’ but few if any Guatemalans believed the official explanation.” Rosselli’s biographers said “a more plausible explanation, one that gained currency in Guatemala City at the time of the shooting, was that Castillo Armas had run afoul of . . . the Mafia.”

There are striking parallels between the 1957 Guatemalan patsy, Vasquez Sanchez, and Lee Oswald, the seemingly Communist former Marine who was able to get a job at the sensitive Dallas U-2 map firm at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though he had recently returned from the Soviet Union. In Guatemala, the government described the patsy “as a ‘Communist fanatic’ . . . expelled from the Guatemalan Army six months ago for ‘Communist ideology,’ but [he] had” been allowed to join “the Presidential Palace Guard.” Like Oswald, the Guatemalan patsy was supposedly an ardent Communist, yet “no evidence ever turned up that [he] was a member of the . . . Communist Party.”

The US government and news media, still in the thrall of the McCarthy–Nixon “Red Scare,” which saw hundreds blacklisted or graylisted in Hollywood and elsewhere, quickly accepted that a seemingly lone Communist had murdered President Armas. Eisenhower’s son John declared that the accused killer had been “acting under orders from Moscow.” However, historians point out that a letter supposedly found on the patsy’s body, said by authorities to be the bodyguard’s
correspondence with Moscow about his assassination assignment, was actually only a form-letter postcard from Radio Moscow.

Another US-backed right-wing dictator quickly took Armas’s place, and Marcello kept his fake citizenship papers. At the time of the assassination, Marcello was involved in a business venture with Rosselli in Las Vegas, the godfather’s only direct foray into that city. Rosselli helped Marcello become a partner in the new Las Vegas Tropicana hotel and casino, then the “most luxurious . . . on the strip.” Vegas needed that luxury to compete with the burgeoning Mafia casinos being built in Havana. Rosselli was only a Mafia don, not a mob boss or godfather like Marcello, but he was the consummate deal-maker, and he managed the Tropicana for a time.

However, Rosselli and the Mafia were still learning how to hide mob ownership from the Nevada Gaming Commission. As Marcello later explained to Jack Van Laningham, he “tried to get into gambling in Vegas” using a front man, and “all was going good until the Nevada Gaming Commission learned that Carlos Marcello was involved. They were shut down and lost a great deal of money in the venture [and] he stayed clear of Vegas after that.” Marcello always tried to stay out of the limelight and the newspapers, and he could have all the gambling he wanted in Louisiana without worrying about a state Gaming Commission. Marcello stayed out of Las Vegas after that, even in the 1970s when he had a chance to put up money for the real casino depicted in Martin Scorsese’s film
Casino
. Instead, Marcello simply brokered that deal to the Kansas City mob, getting an enormous onetime (and untraceable) “finder’s fee” in the process, something the FBI learned but never revealed to the public.

Even after the Tropicana problem, Marcello continued to deal with the smooth, articulate Rosselli. In addition to Sinatra, Rosselli
was close to Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, and other celebrities. Furthermore, like Marcello, Rosselli wasn’t an American citizen, having been born Filippo Sacco in Esperia, Italy, on July 4, 1905. But unlike with Marcello, the US government didn’t realize Rosselli wasn’t a citizen, and it wouldn’t learn that until 1966, setting off a chain of events that would help trigger Watergate and lead to Rosselli’s gruesome 1976 murder on Trafficante’s orders, with Marcello’s support. But in 1957 the fifty-two-year-old Rosselli and the forty-seven-year-old Marcello still got along well.

Marcello and Rosselli had something else in common—neither hesitated to kill those who got in his way or who incurred his wrath. By the mid-1950s, Willie Bioff—the key witness whose testimony had sent Rosselli to prison and ended his glamorous Hollywood lifestyle—was living in Phoenix and was good friends with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.

Despite Bioff’s friendship with, and political support of, Senator Goldwater, Rosselli and the Mafia got their revenge: Bioff was killed when his truck exploded in his driveway at his Phoenix home on November 4, 1955, destroyed by “a dynamite bomb.” No one was arrested for the murder. Three years later Rosselli approved the murder of another good friend of Goldwater’s, Gus Greenbaum, owner of the Riviera casino and “mayor” of the Las Vegas strip.
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After becoming addicted to heroin, Greenbaum refused mob orders to sell his interest in the Riviera. So on December 3, 1958, Greenbaum was almost completely “decapitated” while his wife, Bess, had “her throat slashed with a butcher knife” according to crime writer Ovid Demaris. Senator Goldwater attended Greenbaum’s funeral, but there was no
arrest. Several years later DeMaris documented the arrival of two hit men from Miami shortly before the murder. Afterward they left in a private plane. Rosselli may well have used his mutual associate with Marcello—Santo Trafficante—to provide the hit men. Employing out-of-town hit men was a technique both Trafficante and Marcello increasingly used since it was difficult to tie them to a crime and locale. Five years later all three men would employ a variation of that approach against JFK.

CARLOS MARCELLO’S EMPIRE continued to grow and would soon be bringing in “$2 billion annually from criminal operations in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas,” according to his biographer. While much of that went to payoffs and support for a wide range of local, county, state, and federal officials, Marcello had plenty of cash to invest in land and in legitimate businesses (to which, he later boasted to Van Laningham, he gave a criminal competitive advantage). Not that Marcello necessarily bought those legitimate businesses—as Marcello later explained to Jack Van Laningham, he took what he wanted:

by force. Anyone that got in the way of what he wanted was eliminated one way or another. He told me about the bars and liquor business in New Orleans. He never bought bars, he took them. Marcello would send men to see the owner that he wanted to do business with. The owner was told that from now on, you will be selling our liquor. If the bar owner made trouble or refused, fights were staged, furniture broken up, and the guests harassed. Whores were sent in to cause trouble. The owner of the bar either went out of business or
went into partnership with Marcello. Marcello had his own still in New Orleans and also shipped liquor in from Texas, in five-gallon cans. Since all of the police were on the payroll, it did no good to call them, he had them all in his pocket, along with the judges.

That pattern was repeated dozens, probably hundreds, of times, and not just in the bar and restaurant business but also in the companies that supplied them. Marcello also explained to Van Laningham that “the way to make and keep money was to buy ground”—in other words, land. Marcello told Van Laningham that “he owned hundreds of acres of ground that he had bought for peanuts, and now it was worth millions.”

Marcello’s real estate holdings in Louisiana and cities such as Dallas were extensive and growing. They included his secluded and massive sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms estate. Once mostly swamp, part of the land had been drained, and Marcello used the remote farmhouse in the middle of it for some of his most sensitive meetings—including several concerning plans for JFK’s assassination.

By 1957 Marcello had set up his daily office at the nondescript Town and Country Motel, a location he would use for routine business for the next two and a half decades. Located on the equally nondescript Airline Highway connecting the city to Moisant Airport, it was an appropriate venue for the publicity-shy godfather; the road was described by his biographer as an “ugly . . . endless procession of gas stations, parking lots, billboards, striptease joints, sleazy bars, cheap motels, and neon signs”—the kind of area that could be found in most larger cities throughout America at that time.

The Town and Country Motel was the center of a multistate prostitution ring as well as the center of Marcello’s gambling empire, which included his “national racing wire network.” Every Sunday Marcello held court in the motel restaurant. Marcello’s private office behind the motel was the site of most of his weekday meetings when he wasn’t traveling through his extensive empire, where he also maintained smaller offices and mistresses. Marcello’s main office had one other notable feature, “a sign on the door leading out” that according to his biographer gave visitors a chilling reminder of whom they “were dealing with”:

THREE CAN KEEP

A SECRET

IF TWO ARE DEAD

When frustrated New Orleans citizens tried to bring in experienced law enforcement help from the outside, even there they were thwarted. The former FBI agent in charge of Chicago, Guy Banister, was brought in to be New Orleans’s Assistant Police Superintendent, focusing on the ties between organized crime and the department. However, the extremely conservative and racist Banister seemed more interested in going after left-wingers and alleged Communists. He quit the force after pulling his gun on a waiter in a bar. The alcoholic Banister then formed a local private detective agency; by the early 1960s his clients included Carlos Marcello—who would use Banister’s law-enforcement connections, his interest in white supremacy, and his undercover anti-Communist activities in the plot to kill JFK.