The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (19 page)

The Northwoods proposals shocked President Kennedy, and he rejected them all. The plan apparently showed JFK that some of the Joint Chiefs—especially its Chairman, General Lemnitzer—were very
much out of touch with JFK’s view of the world. Within months, JFK replaced Lemnitzer with General Maxwell Taylor, who had headed JFK’s Bay of Pigs investigation. General Taylor would remain Chairman of the Joint Chiefs throughout JFK’s Presidency and was so admired by RFK that he named one of his sons after him.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, which most Americans think began in mid-October 1962, has its own complex history, too long to detail here. Still, in many ways it was the culmination of three years of US covert action against Cuba, including the CIA–Mafia plots, massive US military exercises in the Caribbean in the summer of 1962, and small raids into Cuba sponsored by Operation Mongoose. The first US official to sound the alarm about Soviet missiles in Cuba was CIA Director John McCone on August 10, 1962, even though his more experienced subordinates believed he lacked evidence. At first no one knew whether or not the Soviet missiles had nuclear warheads, but by September 19 evidence that they did had started accumulating. On September 27 the US military began preparing contingency invasion plans for Cuba. JFK was briefed on October 16 that “hard photographic evidence” from a U-2 spy plane flight confirmed that Soviet medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles were being installed in Cuba. He made plans to reveal the Crisis to the nation six days later, after having daily consultations with a full range of top military and civilian advisors.

On October 22, 1962, at 7 p.m. (eastern time), President John F. Kennedy went on national television to tell the American people the country was on the brink of nuclear war. Families across America were riveted to their television screens as Kennedy described the missiles and the blockade of Cuba he was instituting to be sure that no more “offensive military equipment” reached the island. Essentially,
JFK drew a blockade line around Cuba, one that several Soviet ships were fast approaching.

As the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded during those tense times, it’s important to remember that this is when recently returned “defector” Lee Oswald was allowed to take the job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas. The firm’s sensitive work would be visible on television throughout the Crisis, which makes it incredible that Oswald would be allowed to work there unless he had US intelligence connections.

William Harvey had his own idea about how to handle the Crisis. Thomas Powers writes that “on October 21 [1962], the day before President Kennedy announced a blockade of Cuba in a televised speech, a CIA team headed by future Watergate burglar Eugenio Martinez landed two agents on the northern coast of Cuba. At least one other team made a similar landing the same night.” Harvey told a subcommittee of the National Security Council that “several agents had already landed [and] there was no way to communicate with them, and thus no way to recall them.” However, the
New York Daily News
later tracked down “intelligence sources” who confirmed that one of Harvey’s teams was actually “an execution squad [sent] to ambush Castro near Santiago de Cuba as he drove to a memorial service . . . snipers hid among trees and bushes lining the road . . . machine guns and rifles sprayed the second jeep [of a five-jeep motorcade] with bullets, killing the driver and his passenger, who turned out to be Castro’s lookalike bodyguard.” Robert Kennedy was furious when he found out and wanted CIA Director McCone to immediately fire Harvey, “but Helms talked” both men out of it. The CIA, in particular Richard Helms, would take similar unauthorized action the following year in a way that inadvertently aided the plans of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli to assassinate President Kennedy.

WHILE THOSE EVENTS were building and unfolding, Marcello and Trafficante were consumed by the Kennedys’ war against them and the rest of the Mafia. Marcello faced an $850,000 tax assessment, as well as “indictment for illegal reentry, [new] McClellan committee hearings, [an] indictment . . . for conspiracy and perjury, and now the deportation order [was] upheld after an unsuccessful appeal,” wrote John Davis. He added, “People close to the Marcellos at this time have remarked that . . . the family’s hatred of Robert Kennedy knew no bounds.”

The IRS busted Santo Trafficante’s Orlando gambling operations and even arrested two of his family members. According to historian Richard Mahoney, “the IRS had launched an audit of Rosselli’s tax records in February 1962,” and an “FBI detail . . . secretly scrutinized all his banking and stock transactions.” He notes that “Rosselli . . . grew openly bitter. He told one associate of Jack Ruby, ‘I’m being run right into the ground—it’s terrible. . . . Here I am helping the government, helping the country, and that little son of a bitch is breaking my balls.’” Rosselli’s boss, Chicago godfather Sam Giancana, was also facing pressure from the FBI, at RFK’s urging.

Jimmy Hoffa, who had a number of criminal activities with Marcello and Trafficante, was under such intense pressure from the Kennedys that he decided to kill Robert Kennedy. In September 1962 Edward Partin, the Justice Department informant who had witnessed Marcello’s $500,000 bribe to Hoffa for Nixon, approached officials about becoming an informant after he heard Jimmy Hoffa discuss plans to assassinate Attorney General Kennedy. Partin had passed “a meticulous FBI polygraph examination” and had provided to RFK’s Justice Department a stream of information about Hoffa’s crimes.

Hoffa trusted Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official, and told him about two different plans he was considering to end RFK’s war against
him and the Mafia. One plan “involved firebombing Hickory Hill, Robert Kennedy’s Virginia estate,” hoping that RFK would either be killed by the blast or “would be incinerated, since ‘the place will burn after it blows up.’” Jimmy Hoffa’s other plan to murder Robert Kennedy was to have him “shot to death from a distance away” by a “gunman . . . without any traceable connection to Hoffa and the Teamsters [and using] a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.” Hoffa thought the best place to do it would be “somewhere in the South [while] Kennedy” was in a “convertible.” Jimmy Hoffa declared to Partin that “somebody needs to bump that son of a bitch [RFK] off.” Partin said that Hoffa also badly “hated [President] Kennedy . . . he’d fly off [when JFK’s] name was even mentioned.”

However, by the late fall of 1962, Hoffa was no longer telling Partin about his plans to assassinate RFK. Godfathers Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante had apparently persuaded him that the problem of Robert Kennedy required a different solution, one that didn’t involve murdering the Attorney General, despite Marcello’s visceral hatred of RFK and JFK. Instead, assassinating JFK was the way to end RFK’s war against the mob bosses.

BY THE FALL of 1962, Carlos Marcello had been safely back at home in Louisiana for more than a year, following his humiliating ordeal in the jungles of Central America. His organization had quickly recovered from his absence and was more profitable than ever. However, John and Robert Kennedy had only increased their pressure on Marcello and his Mafia allies and were now mounting the largest assault on organized crime America had ever seen. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had finally persuaded FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to begin fighting the mob. Not content to depend on the aging and
imperious Hoover, RFK had hired ten times more Justice Department Mafia prosecutors than were employed during the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration. The Kennedys’ pressure on Marcello, and on his close partners Santo Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa, was unrelenting. Something had to be done.

In October 1962, Marcello briefly and unexpectedly explained his solution to the Kennedys’ war on the Mafia. The godfather was with two of his most trusted associates in the place he felt safest, the middle of his secluded sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms property outside New Orleans. With Marcello were his trusted longtime driver, Jack Liberto, and his favorite nephew, Carlo Roppolo. Joining the three was Ed Becker, a former public relations man for two Las Vegas casinos. Marcello felt comfortable talking to Becker not only because he’d worked for mob-run casinos but because Becker was now in business with Roppolo, who vouched for him. According to Becker, Marcello “pulled out a bottle and poured a generous round of scotch. The conversation wandered until Becker made an off-hand remark about Robert Kennedy and Marcello’s deportation. The reference struck a nerve, and Carlos jumped to his feet, exclaiming the Sicilian oath, ‘Livarsi na pietra di la scarpa!’ (Take the stone out of my shoe!).” Marcello didn’t speak Sicilian but was repeating an old saying he had heard many times from those who did.
*

As Becker later wrote, “Reverting to English, Marcello shouted, ‘Don’t worry about that Bobby son-of-a-bitch. He’s going to be taken care of.’”

Becker told the godfather that killing RFK would get Marcello “into a hell of a lot of trouble.” In answer, “Marcello invoked an old Italian proverb: ‘If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.’” Becker says the implication was that “Bobby was the tail” and “if the President were killed then Bobby would lose his bite. Marcello added that he had a plan, to use ‘a nut’ to take the fall for the murder . . . then Marcello abruptly changed the subject, and the Kennedys were not mentioned again.”

Many people knew that Robert Kennedy and Vice President Johnson hated each other, and one of them was the politically savvy Marcello, who “owned” US Senators, members of Congress, governors, and judges. If Marcello killed President Kennedy, then RFK’s status as the second-most-powerful man in America—with far more power than a typical Attorney General—would end, and with it so would RFK’s extraordinary war on Marcello and the Mafia.

According to all accounts of the incident, “Becker related his encounter with Marcello to the FBI soon after the meeting, and well before the Kennedy assassination, but no action was taken by the Bureau.” In addition, “former FBI agent Julian Blodgett, who was familiar with Becker at the time, corroborates Becker’s account.” The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated Becker’s story, took his sworn testimony, and found him and his account credible.

IN THE FALL of 1962, around the same time Marcello told Ed Becker about his plan to assassinate JFK, godfather Santo Trafficante made a similar comment to an associate named Jose Aleman. Trafficante confirmed to Congressional investigators that he knew Aleman and acknowledged having met with him on business approximately three times, although some accounts put the number much higher. Aleman’s
family had long-standing Mafia ties; former FBI agent William Turner notes that Jose Aleman’s grandfather “had been Lucky Luciano’s lawyer in Havana.” Aleman’s family had recently helped Jimmy Hoffa gain control of a Miami bank that Hoffa could use to launder money from his criminal activities. Also, Aleman knew Rolando Cubela, the disgruntled mid-level Cuban official and CIA asset, who had his own ties to Trafficante associates.

According to the
Washington Post
, Jose “Aleman had been a rich young revolutionary in Havana” whose “considerable wealth” involved “Miami real estate, including the Miami Stadium.” But after losing “his land holdings in Cuba to the revolution” and the death of his father, Aleman “was forced to sell the Miami Stadium” and other Miami real estate, except for “the three-story . . . motel” where Aleman would meet with Trafficante in 1962. By the fall of that year, Aleman “was in debt,” though his contacts and reputation could still be of use to someone like Trafficante, who was always looking for seemingly legitimate fronts for money laundering and other scams.

The
Post
notes that “Aleman . . . became involved with Trafficante in 1962 through his cousin, [a] resourceful lawyer” for Trafficante. Aleman testified under oath to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that in 1962 an associate of Trafficante “came to me and he said Santo wants to meet you.” Aleman said he was initially reluctant, since he “had to testify against Santo’s people in 1960” in a complex case involving Trafficante associates. Aleman had been a reluctant witness, and his testimony had not been especially damaging. Aleman said that despite his initial reluctance, he did “ultimately go to . . . meetings with Trafficante.”

“Aleman said that Trafficante” made the threat against JFK as “part of a long conversation that lasted from sometime during the
day until late at night.” Aleman said the conversation with Trafficante “came about because” his cousin had helped get “someone out of a Cuban jail,” and Trafficante “wanted to help Aleman get out of his financial difficulties in return.”

To the Congressional investigators, “Aleman attempted to explain why” Trafficante “would have contact with him, much less offer him assistance, in view of the fact that Aleman had testified for the State.” Aleman said he explicitly told Trafficante about his testimony, but Trafficante “laughed out loud and said not to worry about it, that it didn’t matter at all.” According to the
Washington Post
, Aleman had been subpoenaed by the FBI to testify, and Aleman “tried to avoid testifying, but the FBI reminded him that, if he did not cooperate, he might be subject to prosecution for illegal gunrunning.”

The
Post
said that “Trafficante had offered to arrange a million-dollar loan for Aleman . . . from the Teamsters Union,” which “had ‘already been cleared by Jimmy Hoffa himself.’ It was natural that the conversation turned to Hoffa when Trafficante met Aleman at the Cott-Bryant Hotel in Miami in September 1962.” Aleman told Congressional investigators that Trafficante complained about JFK: “[H]ave you seen how his brother is hitting Hoffa . . . mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble and he will get what is coming to him.’ When Aleman disagreed with Trafficante and said he thought . . . Kennedy would be re-elected,” Trafficante said, “You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.” Aleman told the government investigators “that Trafficante ‘made it clear . . . he was not guessing about the killing, rather he was giving the impression that he knew Kennedy was going to be killed.’”