The Kennedy Half-Century (40 page)

In 1978 Castro himself told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that killing Kennedy would have been an “insane” thing for him to do. “That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years.”
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Rather, Castro pointed an accusing finger at his own enemies in the United States, CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuba’s Department of State Security, says that the exiles “had planned to kill Kennedy twice in November 1963, because they felt the U.S. president had
done too little to topple the [Castro] government on the Caribbean island.” According to Escalante, the exiles hoped that Kennedy’s death would trigger a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
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Edward Martino’s peculiar story about his father, John, lends some credibility to Escalante’s claim. John Martino, who had Mafia connections, spent three years in one of Castro’s prisons, and he emerged from that ordeal fiercely anticommunist. Martino traveled to Dallas twice in the autumn of 1963 and, on the day of the assassination, ordered his son to stay home from school and monitor the news. At lunchtime, when his son alerted him that Kennedy had been shot, the elder Martino appeared tense but unsurprised and spent many hours on the telephone, doing his part to blame Fidel Castro. In later years, John Martino claimed that he was a low-level operative in a plot to kill Kennedy that had been masterminded by anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia, possibly with some CIA involvement. Martino told friends that Oswald had been manipulated by the anti-Castro group to assassinate Kennedy in order to trigger a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
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For their part, the Soviets had unfettered access to Lee Oswald for years and could have recruited him or created a brainwashed “Manchurian candidate” assassin.
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However, common sense and the existing evidence lead to a conclusion similar to the Cubans. A few months before he died, JFK signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, abolishing aboveground nuclear weapons tests. The treaty represented a breakthrough in arms control between the superpowers and opened the door to further agreements that could have lessened Cold War tensions and saved both nations billions in defense expenditures. Since Khrushchev was putting his country on a path toward detente, and saw that Kennedy was doing the same, why would he risk war by authorizing the murder of his negotiating partner? He had come to understand what the consequences of nuclear war would be. In July 1963 Khrushchev told his fellow Communists that “only madmen” believed that the USSR could triumph in a nuclear war. “A million workers would be destroyed for each capitalist,” said the Soviet premier. “There are people who see things differently. Let them. History will teach them.”

In the months following the assassination, Khrushchev became convinced that a conspiracy of some sort, possibly organized by U.S. “reactionaries” had brought about Kennedy’s murder. The Soviet chairman did not believe that Oswald acted alone and expressed doubt to one prominent journalist, Drew Pearson, that “the American security services were this inept.” “What really happened?” he asked, and his suspicions were echoed by his wife, Nina, in May 1964.
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Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the Soviet premier, who now lives and teaches in the United States, remembers: “First of all, my father had no idea how [the assassination] happened and what happened. He tried to figure
it out from [the] KGB, and of course [the] KGB said they were never involved with this. He knew it was not Soviets and he thought it was not Cubans, but he didn’t have control over Soviets completely.” A rogue group of Soviet hardliners or a secret KGB cabal similar to the one alleged by some to have existed within the CIA could have planned the president’s murder, but theories without a shred of hard evidence must eventually be set aside.
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During a 1999 summit in Cologne, Germany, Russian president Boris Yeltsin presented President Bill Clinton with a surprise gift, “a report on declassified Russian information relating to the assassination of President John Kennedy.” Although the account contained some intriguing materials, such as a handwritten note from Oswald to the Supreme Soviet asking for asylum and citizenship, it “did not alter Washington’s conclusion regarding KGB recruitment of Oswald” or “even shed much new light on what was already known about Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union.”
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So if Oswald was not a Soviet agent, could he have been a hit man for the mob?
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Certainly, the American public has been conditioned by the media and Hollywood to believe that the Mafia is a well-oiled killing machine that can take down anyone. In the movie
The Godfather, Part II
(1974), mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has this famous exchange with his half-brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) about plans to kill another top mobster:

HAGEN: It would be like trying to kill the president. There’s no way we can get to him.

CORLEONE: Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill
anybody
.
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The first two
Godfather
movies were released in the 1970s, just as the public, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were reconsidering the Warren Commission’s findings.
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Many Mafia kingpins loathed the Kennedys, mainly because RFK went after organized crime with a vengeance once he became attorney general.
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He raised the number of mob convictions from 35 in 1960 to 288 in 1963. Did Bobby’s aggressive tactics represent a betrayal of a deal between Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and the mob? The father’s ties to organized crime allegedly dated back to his days as a bootlegger during Prohibition.
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Shortly before the 1960 election, Joseph Kennedy was said to have promised Chicago mafioso Sam Giancana access to the White House in return for intervening with another mobster, Frank Costello, who had threatened to kill him over a property
dispute. The elder Kennedy was said to have told Giancana, “You help me now, Sam, and I’ll see to it … that you … can sit in the goddamned Oval Office if you want. That you’ll have the president’s ear.”
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According to some published sources, Giancana agreed to the deal and convinced Costello to take the ambassador off his hit list. Even before this incident, Giancana had apparently helped JFK by distributing the Kennedy patriarch’s cash to buy endorsements and votes during the critical West Virginia Democratic primary election in May 1960. And when JFK began having an affair with a black-haired beauty named Judith Campbell while he was still a U.S. senator, Giancana slept with her as well, reportedly so that he would eventually have a direct link to the White House.

The intermediary for the Kennedy-Giancana joint ventures was Frank Sinatra, an avid Kennedy supporter until their falling-out during JFK’s presidency.
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Sinatra introduced Senator Kennedy to Judy Campbell in Las Vegas. Moreover, as Sinatra’s daughter Tina informed CBS’s
60 Minutes
, her father called Giancana and acted as the go-between for the West Virginia primary shenanigans. When the Kennedys turned on Giancana once they were in the White House, Sinatra had to work hard to deflect the mobster’s wrath at Sinatra on account of the Kennedys’ unfaithfulness. In atonement, the singer played at Giancana’s club, the Villa Venice, with his “Rat Pack” of fellow entertainers, for eight nights in a row.
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Sinatra worked his way back into Giancana’s good graces, but the Kennedys never did.
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If Giancana followed through, he might have worked with fellow Mafia don Carlos Marcello, who had been deported by RFK and was, if anything, even angrier than Giancana with the Kennedys. In 1979 the New Orleans–based Marcello told an undercover FBI agent that he had known Dutz Murret (Oswald’s uncle) and that Oswald had worked as a runner for Murret’s book-making operation. Marcello supposedly knew David Ferrie as well. Ferrie had been hired as a researcher by Marcello’s attorney, G. Wray Gill. When Ferrie wasn’t researching cases for Gill, he did part-time investigative work for Guy Banister, another Marcello employee. Oswald’s Marxist political views might have made him a suitable triggerman. Once the hit went down, federal law enforcement agencies and the public would blame Communists, not mobsters. Perhaps Marcello approached Oswald indirectly, through an intermediary posing as a Castro supporter. Some assassination buffs contend that the man who appeared at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and was misidentified as Oswald was an impostor dispatched by the mob so that the real Oswald would be contemporaneously linked with Cuban and Soviet Communists.
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The HSCA’s Robert Blakey believes that Marcello and Santo Trafficante, the mob don of southern Florida, were the brains behind the Kennedy murder. As proof, Blakey points to the confessions that Marcello and Trafficante made
shortly before they passed away. In 1985, an FBI prison snitch named Jack Van Laningham heard Marcello say, “Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch [JFK] killed, and I would do it again; he was a thorn in my side. I wish I could have done it myself.” Marcello also told Van Laningham that he had been introduced to Lee Oswald by a man named “Ferris” (possibly David Ferrie) and that he, Marcello, had personally helped Jack Ruby get “set … up in the bar business.” From his deathbed, Santo Trafficante told his lawyer, Frank Ragano, that he and Marcello had masterminded the assassination. Ragano published this story in his autobiography,
Mob Lawyer
. But Ragano apparently added this explosive revelation to his autobiography while he was trying to sell the manuscript—and just three weeks after the release of
JFK
, convenient timing so that he could capitalize on the movie sensation.
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Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt president of the Teamsters Union, must also be included on a list of crime figures with strong motives to kill John F. Kennedy. Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy had a hatred for one another that would melt steel, stemming from the McClellan Committee hearings in 1957, when RFK served as counsel and grilled Hoffa in an unrelenting manner. Still enraged by Hoffa’s smug answers to his inquiries, Bobby as attorney general set up a special “Get Hoffa” unit within the Justice Department. He was determined to destroy Hoffa no matter the cost. The usual union ties with Democrats did not come into play, since the Teamsters often supported Republican candidates. Hoffa grew deeply frustrated with the increased pressure from Washington and began making threats against the attorney general. According to a government informant, Hoffa discussed two “separate murder plans aimed at Robert Kennedy.” The first involved blowing up RFK’s estate in Virginia, Hickory Hill. The second is eerily familiar: Hoffa thought RFK could be “shot to death from a distance away; a single gunman could be enlisted to carry it out—someone without any traceable connection to Hoffa and the Teamsters; a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight would be the assassination weapon.” Hoffa also thought that the South would be the ideal location for the hit since the authorities would likely blame it on segregationists.

Did Hoffa implement this plan, but change the target to JFK instead of RFK?
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Or maybe the mob and a rogue group of CIA agents worked together to kill Kennedy. There was no hesitation by the CIA in reaching out to mobsters when they could be helpful, as they had done in planning assassination attempts against Castro. During the winter and spring of 1961, Robert Maheu, an FBI agent acting on behalf of the CIA, held meetings in Miami with crime kingpins Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Santo Trafficante. Maheu told them that if the mob wanted to murder Castro in order to reclaim their assets in Havana, the U.S. government would be glad to lend a hand. This foul relationship continued for years, even after senior administration officials
thought it had ended, and the CIA continued to work with the Mafia to find ways to eliminate Castro. For example, CIA agent William Harvey delivered poison pills to Johnny Roselli, meant for Castro, even after CIA headquarters had told Attorney General Kennedy that the agency had severed its ties with gangsters.
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The counterargument to the Mafia theory is that even for the mob, a presidential assassination is potentially pulling the pin on a nuclear grenade. Presidents and attorneys general come and go, just like police crackdowns at the local level. Far better to wait the Kennedys out than to risk the wrath of a provoked public that would have demanded full retribution for the death of its president. Emotion and fury might have gotten the better of the godfathers’ judgment, yet most organized crime experts do not believe that any of the bosses would have been willing to take such a risk. Ralph Salerno, who served as a consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Department of Justice, tried hard to find evidence of mob involvement in JFK’s death. He told an ABC reporter, “I felt it would have raised the hackles of the entire nation against organized crime so I would have loved to have found something. But I didn’t find that.” Salerno has expressed great respect for his former HSCA colleague Robert Blakey, but he disagrees with Blakey’s conclusion about Mafia involvement. Perhaps reflecting that lack of consensus, the House committee’s final report uses a bit of ambiguous language. While acknowledging that “the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy,” it says that “the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.”
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