The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (8 page)

When we look at Oswald in isolation as a suspect in JFK’s murder, he can appear unusual. However, as noted earlier and as will be detailed in later chapters, Dallas wasn’t the only city where the godfathers planned to kill JFK—and Oswald wasn’t the only ex-Marine arrested and investigated for trying to kill JFK. In Chicago, Thomas Vallee, a seemingly troubled former Marine, was arrested on November 2, 1963, on the morning of JFK’s planned motorcade through that city. As people started to line the streets in anticipation of seeing JFK, the motorcade was suddenly called off—with two different phony excuses hurriedly given—because the Secret Service had learned that four possible assassins were at large. When arrested, Vallee had “an M-1 rifle, a handgun, and 3,000 rounds of ammunition in his car,” according to the House Select Committee. In interesting parallels with Oswald in Dallas, Vallee had recently taken a job in a warehouse overlooking JFK’s Chicago motorcade route, had moved
into a YMCA in the fall of 1963 around the same time as Oswald, and had contact with a CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban exile group, as had Oswald earlier in 1963.

For the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa on November 18, 1963, there were even more parallels between Oswald and Gilberto Lopez, a young man living there at the time. On the day of JFK’s Tampa motorcade, Lopez was working not far from the motorcade route. Oswald and Lopez were about the same age and had the same general physical description. (The description of a suspect issued in Tampa prior to the attempt to kill JFK in that city fits Oswald—and Lopez—much better than the initial description issued by the police in Dallas after JFK was shot.) In all, government files and sources show there were nineteen parallels between the two men, including having highly unusual ties to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, getting into fistfights over seeming pro-Castro sympathies, making an unusual trip to Mexico City to try to get into Cuba, not owning a car or even being able to drive, and moving to a new city and leaving a wife at the same time, just a few months before JFK’s assassination. After the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa was called off and JFK successfully completed his motorcade, Lopez left Trafficante’s home base and reportedly went to Dallas, which was in Marcello’s territory. Lopez would be secretly investigated for JFK’s murder by both the FBI and the CIA, and their reports on Lopez were provided to Naval Intelligence.

Had JFK been killed on November 2, 1963, in Chicago (home of Rosselli’s mob family) or in Trafficante’s base of Tampa on November 18, 1963, someone remarkably like Oswald was apparently positioned to “take the fall” in either of those cities, just like Oswald in Dallas. The conspirators had only one basic plan: to shoot JFK in an open motorcade, a plan that could be applied in all three cities. Aside
from someone to take the blame, the other personnel were mostly the same, regardless of which city would be the scene of the assassination. (For example, Jack Ruby—part of Marcello’s organization in Dallas—had well-documented ties to his hometown of Chicago, where he received a large payoff shortly before the attempt to kill JFK there, and also to Tampa).

Oswald has been a mystery to many on all sides of the JFK assassination controversy, but when looked at through the lens of Carlos Marcello and his associates—and that of US intelligence—his documented actions as they unfold in this book finally make sense. The only viable explanation for why Oswald worked for strident anti-Castro anti-Communists like Banister and Ferrie and was friends with anti-Communist George DeMohrenschildt is that he was an anti-Communist US intelligence asset. (Many liberals in the early 1960s, including JFK, were anti-Communist, so such a role didn’t require Oswald to be as ultraconservative as Banister and Ferrie.) In that role, he was one of several US intelligence assets sent to the Soviet Union to come back to America with a Russian wife. When the KGB failed to take the bait in the US, Oswald soon began focusing on an upcoming anti-Castro Cuban operation for Naval Intelligence and/or the CIA. Meanwhile, intelligence assets Banister and Ferrie began to manipulate Oswald for nonintelligence reasons. Both were also working for Carlos Marcello, who was planning to kill President Kennedy to end Robert Kennedy’s war against the godfather and his mob allies.

Oswald would have been focused on what he thought was his impending mission to Cuba—and his “big reveal,” when he would finally emerge from years of undercover work to fame and fortune. Yet the very actions that helped him build a pro-Castro, pro-Communist image in public for his intelligence work would also make him look
instantly guilty if he were ever accused of murdering the President. Confessed conspirator John Martino, an associate of Marcello and Trafficante, described the tragic scenario perfectly, telling a trusted associate that Oswald “didn’t know what he was involved in” or “who he was [really] working for—he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together.”

*
A term first applied to Oswald by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

*
Wecht was reportedly the only member of the Panel without personal or professional ties to the original autopsy doctors and was the only one to disagree with the magic bullet theory.

*
George DeMohrenschildt knew both Jackie Kennedy and George H. W. Bush. On the day an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations was trying to interview him, DeMohrenschildt committed suicide. That same day, Chicago hit man Charles Nicoletti—who worked with Johnny Rosselli on the CIA–Mafia plots in 1963 and was alleged to be in Dallas when JFK was assassinated—was murdered, gangland style. He had also been scheduled to talk to investigators for the House Select Committee.

*
While the House Select Committee looked for US intelligence ties to other defectors in the late 1970s, that was before Blakey wrote for PBS in 2003, “I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency cooperated with the Committee.”

CHAPTER 3

A Mafia Godfather Confesses

O
N DECEMBER 15, 1987, godfather Carlos Marcello sat in a gazebo in a prison yard with two close associates, as he railed against John and Robert Kennedy. Aside from those two, no one was in earshot as he hurled curses at the long-dead Kennedy brothers. He had done that before, but this time—since Marcello trusted the two men—he went further than usual in his anti-Kennedy tirade. Normally in careful control of his emotions, Marcello became more and more agitated as he talked about the Kennedys’ crusade against him: First they’d hauled him before Congress, then briefly deported him to Central America, and finally they had him prosecuted in New Orleans, the center of his multistate criminal empire.

Marcello’s anti-Kennedy rant reached a crescendo as he blurted out to his two friends a startling admission about John F. Kennedy: “Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did.” Marcello’s only regret seemed to be that he didn’t get to pull the trigger, since he told his two stunned associates, “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.”

Carlos Marcello had become America’s most powerful godfather by being not just ruthless but also cautious and discreet, and he paused his diatribe after his remarkable confession. Realizing that even though
he trusted his two associates he had crossed a line, Marcello turned away from them and simply walked off.

After Marcello left, his deadly admission hung in the air between the two stunned men who’d heard it. They knew Marcello well enough to know what could happen to them if they ever revealed what they’d just heard. One man told the other, “I don’t know about you, but I did not hear anything.” With that, he walked away as well, leaving fifty-six-year-old Jack Van Laningham alone in the prison yard’s gazebo to ponder the gravity of his situation.

Van Laningham was Marcello’s cellmate at the Texarkana Federal Correction Institute, where both men were incarcerated. The two men had grown close, and Marcello had come to regard Van Laningham almost like a son, as someone he protected and to whom he dispensed fatherly advice.

But Van Laningham was far more than just Marcello’s good friend—he was also an active undercover informant for the FBI.

After the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially concluded in 1979 that Carlos Marcello—along with his closest mob ally, godfather Santo Trafficante—had the “motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy,” it referred the matter to the Justice Department for further investigation. It appeared to the press and public that nothing was done with the Committee’s referral and that Justice officially closed the matter in 1988.

However, we now know that a major, extremely secret undercover investigation of Marcello—code-named CAMTEX (for CArlos Marcello, TEXas)—did go forward from 1985 to 1986. CAMTEX used FBI informant Jack Van Laningham not only to obtain Marcello’s 1985 JFK confession but to glean additional details as well, including some in conversations secretly taped by the FBI. The tapes include
Marcello describing how he committed the crime, including his pre-assassination meetings with Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby. However, apparently, for political reasons, high officials in the Reagan–Bush Administration and Justice Department decided not to reveal CAMTEX and Marcello’s JFK confession to Congress, the press, or the public—either in 1986 when CAMTEX ended or in 1992 when Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act to release all government files about the crime.

The Review Board created by the JFK Act was set to expire in September 1998, and the FBI waited until near the end to dump almost a hundred pages of CAMTEX files on the Board staff. It’s doubtful that any Review Board members saw Marcello’s confession files or that any of the Board’s staff—overwhelmed by even larger last-minute document dumping by the CIA—got more than a cursory glance at a few pages of CAMTEX files before their office closed for good.

Over the next seven years, researchers found less than a handful of scattered pages at the National Archives, some with more than 90 percent of the page blacked out, making them impossible to understand. Finally, in 2006, after months of intense effort and with the help of National Archives staff, I located the main trove of CAMTEX files given to the Review Board, and they were almost completely uncensored. The public first heard about Marcello’s JFK confession files in TV news and newspaper coverage accompanying the 2008 publication of the hardcover of my book
Legacy of Secrecy
, which also contained interviews with key CAMTEX FBI personnel. In 2009 I partnered with a division of NBC News for a Discovery Channel special (
Did the Mob Kill JFK?
), which also involved locating Jack Van Laningham, who had maintained a very low profile since his release from prison.

This book contains startling new revelations about Marcello’s confession and CAMTEX from declassified FBI files, from former Bureau informant Jack Van Laningham, and from key FBI personnel involved in the undercover operation. Since 2009 I have conducted numerous exclusive in-person and phone interviews with Van Laningham, adding to and clarifying important parts of the story told by the FBI files and by the FBI agents involved. It’s remarkable how much of that information confirms many of the most crucial discoveries of the House Select Committee and of historians such as Marcello’s biographer, John H. Davis (whose 1989 book
Mafia Kingfish
remains the only definitive biography of the godfather). In turn, the Committee’s findings, other government investigators, and noted historians and journalists buttress almost all the key points of the new CAMTEX revelations.

Credibility is always important in evaluating information about JFK’s assassination, and the CAMTEX revelations about Marcello are extremely reliable. As noted, all the CAMTEX files referenced in this book came from FBI files at the National Archives, and all had been officially declassified. CAMTEX involved several FBI agents and supervisors, as well as court-authorized wiretaps on Marcello. The dangerous undercover operation was fully authorized by the FBI and Justice Department. CAMTEX lasted from 1985 to early 1987 and targeted not only Carlos Marcello but also members of his family, including his brother Joe. The operation succeeded in persuading a Marcello family member to pay two bribes to an undercover FBI agent who posed as a crooked friend of Van Laningham.

As for Jack Van Laningham, more than twenty-five years later, he retains an excellent memory of those events, which can be verified by comparing his comments now with his extensive remarks contained in FBI files from the 1980s. When first interviewed by NBC and me,
Van Laningham hadn’t seen his own notes—now in the FBI files—in over two decades. In fact, I extensively interviewed Van Laningham on many occasions before giving him copies of those notes, yet his unaided recollection was very much in sync with what he had typed up all those years before.

In addition, after his release from prison in early 1989, Van Laningham took and passed an FBI polygraph test regarding Marcello’s JFK confession. Moreover, Van Laningham was not a career criminal. In fact, until shortly before meeting Marcello in prison, Van Laningham was a successful family man with no criminal record at all.

In 1985 Jack Van Laningham was fifty-six years old and had spent much of his adult life as a civilian air traffic controller for the US Air Force. In the 1970s, he’d switched to selling cars in California and was successful at that as well, supporting his English-born wife and three children. However, Jack’s wife was a troubled alcoholic who left him in the early 1980s. That sent Jack on a downward spiral. By the time he hit bottom, he was regularly drinking heavily and living in a small motel in Tampa, Florida. When his money ran out, he committed his first—and only—crime during a drinking spree, robbing a small bank branch using a bag of dirty laundry and a TV remote control, which he told the tellers were a bomb and a detonator.

Van Laningham got away scot-free but was soon so overcome with guilt that he called the authorities to turn himself in. When he was taken into custody, a Tampa FBI agent admitted that they would have never found Jack on their own. Nonetheless, Van Laningham was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for armed robbery and wound up at the federal prison in Texarkana to serve his sentence.