The Assassination: Did the Mob Kill J.F.K.?

Some portentous voices out of the underworld a quarter-century ago:

“Kennedy’s not going to make it to the ((1964)) election — he’s going to be hit.”

— Santo Trafficante, the top Florida mobster, to an FBI informer in August 1962.

“You know what they say in Sicily: if you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.”

— Carlos Marcello, Mafia boss in New Orleans, to an acquaintance that same month, explaining why President John Kennedy, not Attorney General Robert Kennedy, would be killed.

“There is a price on the President’s head. Somebody will kill Kennedy when he comes down South.”

— Bernard Tregle, a New Orleans restaurant owner allegedly associated with Marcello, within hearing of one of his employees in April 1963.

Out of the mouths of such sinister characters the assassination-conspiracy theorists of the 1980s have fashioned the latest in a long-running series of explanations of what may forever remain unexplainable: why Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, exactly 25 years ago this week. In an anniversary spate of books and TV specials, the trendy theory is that the Mafia arranged the President’s murder and the silencing of Oswald by Dallas strip-joint owner Jack Ruby. This, of course, clashes with the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone for his own twisted reasons and that Ruby impetuously killed the assassin to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a Dallas trial of her husband’s slayer.

As the excerpts from James Reston Jr.’s forthcoming book show, there are new twists on the lone-assassin conclusion as well. His contention that Oswald may have intended to kill Texas Governor John Connally rather than Kennedy was rather perfunctorily dismissed by the Warren Commission. Although Marina Oswald had testified to this belief, the commission’s lawyers found her generally inconsistent and discounted much of what she said. The commission relied on Texas prosecutor Henry Wade for evaluation of the alleged conversation between Oswald and Ruby, overheard at Ruby’s Carousel Club by Dallas lawyer Carroll Jarnagin. Wade found Jarnagin sincere in thinking he had heard Oswald offer to kill Connally so that gangsters could open up the state for their rackets, but he told the commission that the lawyer nonetheless had failed a lie-detector test on the subject.

Other theories persist: that Oswald, an avowed Marxist who had gone from service as a U.S. Marine to spend more than two years in the Soviet Union, returned as a homicidal tool of the KGB; that when he tried to go back to the Soviet Union via Cuba in September 1963, Fidel Castro’s embassy in Mexico City encouraged him to kill Kennedy. The reason: Castro knew that the CIA had plotted with Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Hollywood boss John Roselli to kill him.

Support, of a sort, for the Castro-as-mastermind theory recently came from David W. Belin, a top counsel for the Warren Commission. In his new book, Final Disclosure, Belin says that “it is possible” Oswald was part of a Cuban conspiracy. It may have developed, Belin writes, when Oswald visited Mexico City.

But wait. For the Mafia-did-it advocates, the plot is much thicker. In their view, the man who rode a bus to Mexico City before the assassination, talking to travelers about his plans to meet Fidel Castro and then raising a ruckus at the Cuban embassy, probably was not Oswald. More likely, he was an impostor, dispatched by Mafia schemers so that when the real Oswald killed the President, a Cuban-Soviet connection would be readily assumed. The existence of someone posing as Oswald would, of course, be proof in itself of a conspiracy.

The possibility of an Oswald double is emphasized by the recent pin-it-on- the-Mob authors: John H. Davis (Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy) and David E. Scheim (Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy). Earlier, G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings suggested that underworld and anti-Castro schemers had joined to use Oswald as a handy fall guy (The Plot to Kill the President).

As evidence that someone was making sure that the real Oswald would be pinned to the crime of the century, Davis cites long-familiar sightings of “Oswald” in the Dallas area before the assassination: practice shooting at a rifle range, acting rude while buying ammunition, test-driving a car and claiming he would soon have “a lot of money” to buy it (Marina insists that he did not drive).

Scheim and Davis readily accept this Oswald as an impostor. But both conveniently tend to consider other alleged sightings of Oswald as genuine: sitting in a New Orleans bar with an associate of mobster Marcello’s and taking money under the table; traveling with another Marcello crony three months before the assassination. In this selective reasoning, neither author seems to consider that some or all of the witnesses could be mistaken, their memories swayed by the TV images of the assassin’s face.

Yet, as most of the books explain, the Mob had ample reason to want Kennedy out of the way. As early as 1957, he sat on the Senate Rackets Committee chaired by Arkansas’ John McClellan; Robert Kennedy was its chief counsel. The Kennedys joined in the committee’s stiff grilling of such gangsters as Los Angeles’ Mickey Cohen, Louisiana’s Marcello and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, whose underworld ties presumably led to his murder in 1975.

After Robert Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961, the Justice Department waged a war against organized crime. Despite the foot dragging of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had long claimed there was no Mafia, the Justice Department indicted 116 members of the Mob. Bobby also undertook a personal vendetta against Hoffa, who was convicted of jury tampering and pension-fund fraud in separate trials in 1964.

Robert Kennedy’s crusade against the lesser-known Marcello, whose Mob territory embraced Texas, was almost as intense. Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents who moved to the U.S. in 1910, Marcello later used a phony Guatemalan birth registration to avoid deportation to Italy. Fully aware that Marcello was not a Guatemalan, Kennedy in 1961 nevertheless had Immigration agents hustle him aboard a 78-seat jet as its lone passenger and deposit him in Guatemala City. Marcello and his American lawyer were later flown to El Salvador, where soldiers dumped the two expensively dressed men in the mountains. Marcello claimed he fainted three times and broke several ribs before finding his way to a small airport. Slipping secretly back into New Orleans, he vowed revenge against the Kennedys.

But if the Mafia had a strong motive to kill the President, where are the connections to Oswald, the executioner, and Ruby, the silencer? They are almost too numerous to count, if you accept the claims of Scheim, a manager of computerized information at the National Institutes of Health. He seems to have amassed every reference ever printed about the J.F.K. assassination figures and mobsters, then woven these threads to fit a Mafia-hit theory.

Some of the connections are provocative. Take Oswald. His father Robert died of a heart attack in August 1939. Lee, born two months later, spent much of his first three years with Lillian and Charles Murret, his aunt and uncle, in New Orleans. In April 1963, while looking for a job in New Orleans, he stayed with the Murrets. Charles Murret was a bookmaker in a gambling operation run by Marcello, and for a few months Oswald allegedly collected bets for his uncle. Marcello and other New Orleans gangsters thus may have been aware that the much publicized former Marine defector was in their midst.

That summer, when Oswald passed out leaflets for his one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his literature listed 544 Camp Street as the chapter office. That building housed the offices of Guy Banister, a private investigator and former FBI agent. Banister had been hired by Marcello to help him fight court battles. Working for Banister was David Ferrie, a former airline pilot who had publicly berated Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. In 1955 Ferrie headed a New Orleans squadron of the Civil Air Patrol. One of his cadets was Oswald. Some witnesses thought they saw the two together in Clinton, La., in September 1963.

On the two weekends before the Kennedy assassination, Ferrie huddled with Marcello at a farmhouse on the mobster’s delta property. Ferrie later told the FBI that he was helping Marcello map strategy for a perjury and conspiracy trial then under way. (Marcello was acquitted on the day of the assassination.) On the night of the assassination Ferrie drove 350 miles through a rainstorm to Houston, arriving at about 4 a.m. He later insisted that this was a hunting trip, but he spent hours making calls from public phones at a skating rink.

To the conspiracy writers, all this meant that Marcello had been using Ferrie to help plot the killing of Kennedy. Ferrie’s hasty trip, they imply, was to make sure, from telephones beyond Marcello’s haunts, that Ruby killed Oswald.

As for Ruby, his gangster role is magnified by the recent books that go beyond the Warren Commission’s portrayal of a strip-show proprietor and police buff. Some authors see him as a small-time hood in Chicago who worked his way up in what had been Al Capone’s outfit. He was sent to Dallas in 1947, they say, with other Chicago gangsters to take over that city’s rackets. Other reports had Ruby being exiled to Dallas by the Chicago Mob. Yet Marcello retained control of Dallas operations, working mainly through local boss Joseph Civello. The new books claim that Ruby was close to him and other Dallas gangsters active in prostitution, narcotics and slot machines.

Telephone records show that as the assassination date approached, Ruby made numerous calls to relatively high Mob figures in Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles, as well as to two associates of Jimmy Hoffa’s. He later told the FBI that the calls were made to get union help in stopping other Dallas clubs from using amateur strippers. Yet the gangsters he called would not seem likely to trouble themselves with such petty problems.

However, if Oswald were merely a “patsy,” as he claimed, it is difficult to understand why, after leaving the Texas School Book Depository building and picking up a revolver at his rooming house, he gunned down officer J.D. Tippit, who was about to question him. Six witnesses identified Oswald as Tippit’s killer. Three watched him discard empty cartridges. The cartridges matched the gun he was carrying when police seized him in a theater.

Nor, despite the decades of sarcasm by earlier critics, has the basic evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy been shaken. Fragments of the bullets that hit Kennedy were matched with the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository. Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle barrel. Fibers from the clothes he wore when arrested were caught on the rifle butt. That morning he had brought a long, thin package to work from the house in Irving where he spent weekends with Marina. He explained to the co-worker who gave him a ride that it contained curtain rods for his Dallas apartment, even though his flat had a full set.

One other problem for a conspiracy: Oswald got his job at the Depository on Oct. 15; the Secret Service did not decide on the motorcade route past this building until Nov. 14. It was not in Dallas newspapers until Nov. 19.

Most of the conspiracy writers contend that there was another gunman in Dealey Plaza, firing from a grassy knoll in front of the presidential motorcade. Numerous witnesses, including some officers, thought they heard shots from that direction. Still, as the House Assassinations Committee neared the completion of an exhaustive two-year reinvestigation of the Kennedy murder in December 1978, it approved a tentative conclusion that there had been no conspiracy.

But then Blakey, its chief counsel, found an acoustics expert who examined a police Dictabelt recording made of one of the two radio channels used during the motorcade. After tests in Dealey Plaza, the scientist concluded that sounds on the belt came from an escorting motorcycle with its microphone stuck open, that four shots could be detected on the belt and that there was a fifty-fifty probability that one of them came from the knoll. Blakey called in two other experts, who raised the estimate to 95%. The committee then concluded that a conspiracy was “probable.”

In 1982, however, the National Academy of Sciences examined the same recording. Its experts detected cross talk from the other police channel on the belt, chatter that it identified as occurring one minute after the shooting. “The acoustic analyses,” the Academy experts reported, “do not demonstrate that there was a grassy-knoll shot.” Moreover, three panels of independent experts examined the materials from Kennedy’s autopsy. All concluded that he had been hit only by shots fired from behind him.

One conspiracy writer, David Lifton, offered a way out of these inconvenient findings: in his 1981 book, Best Evidence, he contended that conspirators had altered the President’s body to conceal evidence of an entry wound from the front. Others note that Kennedy’s brain has not been examined by anyone, except superficially by the autopsy doctors. Robert Kennedy did not turn it over to the National Archives with other autopsy evidence in 1966. He presumably did not want it preserved as a grisly artifact.

The timing of Ruby’s assault on Oswald also fails to fit any tidy conspiracy. If he had been stalking Oswald, why was he in a Western Union office wiring $25 to one of his strippers, Karen Carlin, at 11:17 a.m. that Sunday? Not even the Dallas police knew when their interrogation of Oswald would end and when he would be transferred to custody of the county sheriff. In fact, a U.S. postal inspector had unexpectedly dropped in on the questioning and joined the quizzing. That held up the transfer by at least half an hour; without the delay, Ruby would have been too late. His televised shooting of Oswald occurred at 11:21 a.m.

The resourceful Warren Commission critics have a solution to that dilemma too. They note credible reports that Ruby visited police headquarters, where Oswald was being held, twice on the night of the assassination, even attending a press conference at which Oswald was exposed to photographers. Ruby sat at the back of the room, allegedly carrying his handgun. He was spotted in a crowd outside the building about 3 p.m. on Saturday, when the transfer originally had been scheduled. On Sunday morning, three TV technicians reported seeing him near their van overlooking the transfer ramp well before 11 a.m.

This pattern, these writers say, fits a stalking of Oswald. But why did Ruby go off to Western Union at a crucial moment? It was a prearranged plan to make the killing look spontaneous, they reply. Someone signaled Ruby when Oswald’s move began. They imply that a cop did this; they do not say how.

Warren Commission critics point out that its members had never been told about the CIA’s scheming with mobsters to assassinate Castro, even though Castro had warned publicly on Sept. 7, 1963, that “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” Allen Dulles, a member of the commission who had been the CIA director when the plots were hatched, did not disclose this secret to the investigators. The CIA had told Robert Kennedy, but he too kept this information from the commission. Bobby’s apparent acquiescence in the attempts to kill Castro may have added twinges of guilt to his deep grief over his brother’s death.

Clearly, those plots were something the commission had every right to know about. If alerted to the CIA-Mafia entanglement, it might have worked even harder to close some of the investigatory gaps through which, 25 years later, the conspiracy advocates still rush with a welter of accusations, speculation and, so far, a dearth of conclusive evidence.