The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (40 page)

Author Vince Palamara wrote that “Abraham Bolden was adamant that [Chicago Secret Service Chief] Martineau knew about” the four-man plot to kill JFK. In 1993 Martineau himself confirmed the existence of the plot to Palamara and said “he assumed everyone knew about it.” Martineau also added that he believed JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy and that there was “more than one assassin.”

The investigation of the Chicago assassination threat went along two paths that began more than forty-eight hours before JFK was set to arrive. One investigative path, sparked in part by a tip the FBI passed along to the Chicago Secret Service, was about a four-man assassin team in the city. Several Chicago Secret Service agents kept watch on two of the four-man assassin team. But, as Agent Bolden later told Congressional investigators, “through a series of blunders, the surveillance” of the two assassins “was ‘blown.’”

According to investigative journalist Edwin Black, the agents had been able to pick up the trail of only two of the four men and had been watching the rooming house where they were staying. When the two men left, one Secret Service agent followed them in an unmarked car. However, the car with the two men suddenly reversed direction on a narrow street and began doubling back, so the two men wound up going past the Secret Service agent’s car. They overheard the agent’s radio and realized they were under surveillance. With its surreptitious
surveillance blown, the Secret Service felt it had no choice but to go ahead and detain the men, so “the two subjects were apprehended and brought to the Chicago Secret Service office,” Bolden told investigators. Black writes that “the two men were taken into custody (but not actually arrested or booked) in the very early Friday hours and brought to the Secret Service headquarters. There are no records that any weapons were found in their possession or back at the rooming house.”

The lack of any weapons—and the premature ending of the surveillance before the two men had committed any crime—presented a problem for the Chicago agents. Threatening the President was not a federal crime at the time. The only information about the two men being a threat came from the FBI, which was loath to share informants with other federal agencies. Without knowing the source or circumstances of the original information about the four-man threat, the Chicago Secret Service faced two problems: how to find out where the other two men were, and how long they could justify detaining the two men they did have in custody. Once the two men were detained by the Secret Service, no doubt various checks on them—or at least on the aliases they were using—were run in an attempt to find an outstanding warrant or other reason to hold them.

Richard Cain—Chief Investigator for the Chicago/Cook County Sheriff’s Department—was in a perfect position to monitor or even influence law enforcement’s reaction to the Chicago plot. A “made” member of the Mafia, Cain had also worked on the CIA–Mafia plots for Rosselli, Trafficante, and Marcello. Cain would have known about the two suspects detained and lookouts for the two still at large, showing that the secrecy of the assassination plot had been blown. The plan was no doubt called off by Cain’s mob superiors. Cain’s position also would have allowed him to follow a second important part of the Chicago plot.

The second path of the Chicago investigation focused on ex-Marine Thomas Vallee. The report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations confirms that “on October 30, 1963, the Secret Service learned that an individual named Thomas Arthur Vallee, a Chicago resident who was outspokenly opposed to President Kennedy’s foreign policy, was in possession of several weapons.” That same day, according to an FBI report, two Secret Service agents conducted a “pretext interview of Vallee . . . and noted that he had two M-1 rifles in his possession, along with [a] .22 caliber revolver and an estimated 1,000 rounds” of ammunition. Unlike the other ex-Marine fall guy, Oswald, Vallee was serious about guns. The Secret Service agents returned to the office and reported their concerns to Martineau.

On or about Thursday, October 31, 1963—one day after the Chicago agents’ pretext interview of Vallee—“Vallee’s landlady called the [Secret] Service office and said that Vallee was not going to work on Saturday,” according to the testimony of Agent Edward Tucker to Congressional investigators. The agent testified that because Saturday was “the day of JFK’s visit to Chicago,” this information “resulted in the [Secret] Service having the Chicago Police Department surveil Vallee.” A later FBI report says that as a result of the Secret Service request to the Chicago police, “a 24-hour surveillance was placed on Vallee and his activities by the Chicago Police Department.”

On the morning of November 2, before JFK’s motorcade was canceled, Thomas Vallee was heading into the city. According to Congressional investigators, he had put one of his M-1 rifles and his pistol in the trunk of his car, where he also had three thousand rounds of ammunition. Vallee wore a shirt with an open collar and a jacket—similar to what at least one member of the four-man assassin team was wearing.

According to Edwin Black, police records show that Vallee was arrested around 9 a.m., about two hours before JFK’s scheduled touchdown at O’Hare. The two police officers following Vallee pulled him over for “left turn without a proper signal” and found a “hunting knife in [his] front seat.” That was all the pretext the Chicago police needed to search his car, where they found the M-1 rifle and three thousand rounds of ammunition. An FBI file says a subsequent “search of Vallee’s home” by Chicago police “discovered an M-1 rifle, a carbine rifle and about 2,500 rounds of ammunition.” A different FBI file says that Chicago police “charged him with an ‘assault with a deadly weapon’ charge.”

By Saturday night, November 2, 1963, all the suspects who were in custody—Vallee and the two who were part of the four-man team—had been released. As Abraham Bolden told Congressional investigators, “The two suspects in Chicago were turned over to the Chicago police who took them away in a patrol wagon.” According to Edwin Black, who had several Chicago police sources, when no evidence had been found to justify holding the men, they were released. As for the heavily armed Vallee, the HSCA report says that he was “released from [Chicago Police] custody on the evening of November 2.” Vallee was apparently never even brought to the Secret Service office for an interview, then or in the coming weeks. The Secret Service didn’t even talk to ex-Marine Vallee in the days and weeks after the Dallas assassination was blamed on fellow ex-Marine Oswald, even though Secret Service records—some of which are still classified—show that the agency maintained an interest in Vallee for at least the next seven years. Clearly there was more to Vallee and the Chicago attempt than the records released so far reveal.

AFTER THE CANCELLATION of the Chicago portion of the plot, Marcello’s two shooters from Europe headed south. As Marcello explained to his cellmate Jack Van Laningham, in a conversation secretly recorded on FBI undercover audiotape, the two hit men left Michigan and came to his huge, sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms estate. The estate had its own airfield, so they could have been flown directly there, perhaps by pilot David Ferrie. It’s long been documented that Marcello and Ferrie spent the weekend of November 9 and 10 working on strategy at the secluded farmhouse in the middle of the vast Churchill Farms property. Marcello’s federal trial continued in New Orleans, so the two later claimed to government investigators that they were working on trial strategy. However, Marcello had top attorneys to handle that, and Marcello’s main strategy involved bribing a key juror to ensure his acquittal, or at the very least a hung jury, and Ferrie was not involved with that. Their meetings at Churchill Farms were also unusual because Ferrie usually met with Marcello in the godfather’s office at the Town and Country Motel, as he had done several times in October.

Marcello admitted to Van Laningham that two rifles were obtained from a New Orleans gunsmith so the two European hit men could conduct target practice, safe from the view of law enforcement. Because of the ongoing trial, the government had to be careful not to intrude on Marcello’s privacy or talks with his attorneys or their representatives. (Ferrie officially worked for one of Marcello’s attorneys.) That created the perfect situation for Marcello and Ferrie to help prepare the two hit men for the upcoming hit against JFK, ironically at the same secluded house where one year earlier Marcello had revealed his intention to kill JFK to FBI informant Ed Becker.

Investigators for the New Orleans District Attorney later found “notations in the margins of one of [Ferrie’s] books, a reference manual on high-powered rifles,” showing “that Ferrie had measured exactly how many feet an empty cartridge flew when ejected from that rifle and at what angle.” Also, shortly before his weekend planning session with Marcello, David Ferrie admitted that he’d purchased a .38 pistol and that he’d deposited the $7,000 mentioned earlier into his bank account.

On November 7 and 8, 1963, Jack Ruby talked to two of Hoffa’s associates in lengthy telephone conversations. Earlier, on November 1, Ruby had called Chicago, and on November 9 Ruby’s recent visitor from Chicago—Lawrence Meyers—was in New Orleans; Ferrie had called Meyers just over a month earlier. It seems unlikely that Meyers was anything more than a low-level message courier who knew nothing about the overall operation.

Jack Ruby’s volume of long-distance phone calls continued to explode in November. His usual number of calls per month was fewer than 10, but that number had risen to almost 30 in September, and in November there would be at least 110 phone calls. Ruby’s cover story—at the time and later accepted by the Warren Commission—was that the calls were simply about a union problem involving his performers. However, many of his calls were to an incredible number of Mafia and Hoffa associates. They served as intermediaries and cutouts, as no doubt coded phrases were passed from Ruby to eventually reach others involved in the plot, with those in the middle knowing nothing of the assassination plans. Ruby could be helpful to Marcello not just if the President was killed in Dallas but also if the hit was in Tampa. Ruby had been stationed in Tampa during World War II and in recent years had reportedly made trips there to recruit strippers for his club.

ON NOVEMBER 9, 1963, undercover Miami Police tapes recorded white supremacist Joseph Milteer talking about JFK’s murder less than two weeks before the assassination in Dallas. Milteer told Miami Police informant William Somersett about a plan “to assassinate the President with a high-powered rifle from a tall building.” On the police tape, Milteer accurately states that authorities “will pick up somebody within hours afterwards . . . just to throw the public off.” Milteer said the assassination had been arranged in such a way as to “drop the responsibility right into the laps of the Communists . . . or Castro.”

Somersett also told authorities that Milteer had indicated “this conspiracy originated in New Orleans, and probably some in Miami.” Milteer said “there was a lot of money” involved in the plot, not only from far-right extremists “but from men who could afford to contribute,” though the only one he mentioned by name was a Louisiana political boss who was tied to both Carlos Marcello and Guy Banister. The Miami Police told the Secret Service and FBI about the tapes and plot. The FBI assigned Atlanta agent Don Adams to the case on November 13, and he went to the southern Georgia town of Quitman, where Milteer lived, to quietly investigate him. However, Adams told me that his FBI superiors never told him about the Miami police tapes of Milteer; he later learned they withheld other relevant information from him as well. Milteer was not arrested before JFK’s Tampa motorcade, before Dallas, or even after JFK’s murder.

While parts of the Milteer story and the audiotapes have been known to investigators for decades, it was only in 2006 that Michael L. Kurtz published accounts of reliable witnesses who could tie Milteer directly to Guy Banister and other associates of Carlos Marcello. He wrote that on one occasion a noted architect saw Banister and “Milteer conversing with some of Marcello’s people in the French
Quarter.” Aside from sharing racist views and hatred of the Kennedys, Banister, Milteer, and Marcello also shared a connection to the illegal arms trade, since in 1963 the major buyers of illegal weapons from organized crime included Cuban exile groups and white supremacists. Milteer traveled extensively and was in touch with the most violent racist groups active in 1963, as well as those trafficking in arms. Kurtz also noted that “Milteer had close connections to Santos Trafficante,” since Milteer was also involved in “illegal arms and narcotics trafficking.” Milteer would continue to make accurate remarks to Somersett about JFK’s murder in the coming days, showing he was aware of—and possibly involved in—the plot. Milteer had inherited $200,000 from his father (over a million in today’s dollars), and his determination to kill JFK appears to have been motivated by his racist ideology more than money.

John and Robert Kennedy were told about Milteer’s threat before JFK made his trip to Florida. However, by mid-November 1963, JFK and RFK were dealing with pressing Cuban issues on several important fronts, in addition to an array of foreign crises and domestic problems. A November 8, 1963,
Los Angeles Times
article—headlined “Kennedy Ducking Cuba Problem, GOP Says” and picked up by other newspapers—slammed JFK for doing nothing about Cuba. The article reported “Republican Party [claims] that the Kennedy administration had ‘swept Cuban affairs under the rug’ since the Missile Crisis of October, 1962.” A review of articles in the
New York Times
from May to November 1963 shows a constant stream of charges that JFK was soft on Cuba from Republican Presidential hopefuls Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and Barry Goldwater. Senator Barry Goldwater (the eventual Republican nominee) was especially vocal, accusing JFK—his former colleague on the Senate Crime
Committee—of “doing everything in his power” to keep the flag of Cuban exiles “from ever flying over Cuba again.”