"What I'm saying to you is, this is not something I'd take to court. I'm talking about a
judgment of history. I'm not talking about admissible evidence under a court standard. I'm talking about a jigsaw puzzle and you put little pieces in. Do I have the last piece, certainty, proof beyond a reasonable doubt? No. Could reasonable people disagree with me? Yes."
-G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, whose final report concluded that there was "probably" a conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy
I'm a doubting Thomas.
I consider Roswell to be a hoax and theories about a faked moon patently ridiculous.
Like coroner Thomas Noguchi, I think Marilyn overdosed.
I am not sure I believe that James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan acted alone, but I'm open to the possibility that the official story is true.
Though Bush and Cheney showed gross negligence in not acting on pre-9/11 intelligence reports, I find the idea that they were part of an "inside job" laughable.
JFK's assassination is another matter.
Despite the prodigious efforts of Vincent Bugliosi, I can't buy the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman, and this gut feeling only gets stronger as I learn more.
Though less than one third of Americans believe the lone nut theory of the assassination, establishment media in the U.S. treat the notion of a conspiracy as batshit crazy. In this framing, people who take the Warren Commission's major conclusion at face value are rational and realistic, while those who point up the many inconsistencies in the Oswald-as-lone gunman narrative are overimaginative nutjobs with too much time on their hands.
This position falsely conflates two very distinct ideas. Vincent Bugliosi's 53 pieces of evidence point to Oswald's probable involvement in the assassination, but they don't prove that Oswald acted alone.
The men lurking in and around JFK's assassination were a motley crew of interlocking directorates that worked in the shadows: rogue CIA operatives, government informants, anti-integrationist reactionaries and rabid anti-communists, high-ranking members of the Teamsters and the Mafia, drug dealers and gun runners, right-wing Texas millionaires, and men who had successfully orchestrated the overthrow of democratically-elected third world governments on behalf of U.S. corporate interests.
Who better to keep a secret?
The 52nd anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination is no time for bedtime stories. In the spirit of democratic inquiry, I submit the following 52 questions to lone nut theorists. (Thoughtful, sourced comments are welcome. And encouraged.)
2. Is it pure coincidence that Rose Cherami—a former stripper at Jack Ruby's club who
had been hit by a car while on a cross-country trip, she claimed, to procure heroin for Ruby—told at least two witnesses (Louisiana police lieutenant Francis Fuge and Dr. Victor Weiss) of a plot to kill Kennedy within 48 hours of the assassination? [According to an official report, Cherami died in 1965 after again being hit by a car, on a highway two miles outside of Big Sandy, Texas.]
3. Could a reasonable person find it hard to believe (possible, but not probable) that Lee Harvey Oswald—who'd had mediocre scores on his marksman tests in the Marines—had the grace under pressure to twice hit a moving target, over trees, with a $12 Mannlicher-Carcano mail order, bolt-action rifle? [Reflecting the results of most re-creations, tests of the Carcano done by the Italian army in 2007 concluded that Oswald could not have gotten three shots off in seven seconds, as the Warren Commission theorized.]
4. Texas Governor John Connally, a lifelong hunter, consistently said that he was not hit by the same bullet which tore through John Kennedy's throat. In fact, frame 230 (below) of the
Zapruder film shows Kennedy clutching his throat as Connally calmly stares ahead, holding a ten-gallon hat. A report put out by FBI ballistic experts in December of 1963 backed Connally.
Could a reasonable person doubt the Warren Commission's theory that one magic bullet hit both Connally and Kennedy and produced seven injuries, a hypothesis questioned by Connally, his wife, and three of the seven Warren Commission members (Richard Russell, Hale Boggs, John Sherman Cooper)?
5. If three shots were fired, as the Warren Commission claimed, why did an acoustics expert for the House Select Committee on Assassinations conclude that four shots had been fired, including one from the grassy knoll?
6. If all of the shots were fired from the Texas Book Depository, why did 21 police officers, Korean War vet Bill Newman, Abraham Zapruder (who captured the world famous Zapruder film), Orville Nix (who took the second most famous home movie that day), Kennedy apparatchiks Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell, and more than half of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza think that a shot came from the grassy knoll?
7. If all of the shots were fired from the Texas Book Depository, why did Dr. Ronald Jones—a physician who saw Kennedy's body in the hospital—tell Piers Morgan in a 2013 interview that Kennedy had a huge exit wound in the back of his head and why did Charles Crenshaw, a Parkland hospital surgeon, write "Had I been allowed to testify, I would have told (the Warren Commission) that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area" in his book "JFK Has Been Shot?"
8. If, as the Warren Commission claimed, Kennedy was not hit by a shot from the front, why
were motorcycle officers Bobby Hargis and B.J. Martin—who were 15-20 feet behind Kennedy in the motorcade—sprayed with JFK's blood and brain debris?
9. Dr. James Humes, who performed the autopsy, was not a forensic pathologist. Among other errors, he failed to dissect Kennedy's brain, a must in homicide cases. Oddly, his report (which mentioned bullets to Kennedy's brain and neck) contradicted the original FBI autopsy (which placed a bullet five inches below the neck; see photo at left). And according to "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination," a book by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, "Dr. James Humes, the Navy pathologist in charge of the Kennedy autopsy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, burned his original autopsy report in the fireplace in his family room. Humes’ superior officer was so concerned that the pathologist himself might be eliminated by the plotters who killed JFK that he ordered Humes to be escorted home that night."
Could someone with a modicum of skepticism question the validity of such a flawed official autopsy report, particularly when the original is missing?
10. Whatever happened to John F. Kennedy's brain?
 |
| The instant before JFK was shot |
The men lurking in and around JFK's assassination were a motley crew of interlocking directorates that worked in the shadows: rogue CIA operatives, government informants, anti-integrationist reactionaries and rabid anti-communists, high-ranking members of the Teamsters and the Mafia, drug dealers and gun runners, right-wing Texas millionaires, and men who had successfully orchestrated the overthrow of democratically-elected third world governments on behalf of U.S. corporate interests.
Who better to keep a secret?
The 52nd anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination is no time for bedtime stories. In the spirit of democratic inquiry, I submit the following 52 questions to lone nut theorists. (Thoughtful, sourced comments are welcome. And encouraged.)
***
1. Is it at least a little odd that arch-segregationist Joseph Milteer told an FBI informant in Miami (8 days after a pre-empted assassination plot in Chicago, 13 days before the Dallas assassination), that Kennedy would be shot "from an office building with a high-powered rifle," after which "they’ll pick up somebody within hours after…just to throw the public off?" 2. Is it pure coincidence that Rose Cherami—a former stripper at Jack Ruby's club who
3. Could a reasonable person find it hard to believe (possible, but not probable) that Lee Harvey Oswald—who'd had mediocre scores on his marksman tests in the Marines—had the grace under pressure to twice hit a moving target, over trees, with a $12 Mannlicher-Carcano mail order, bolt-action rifle? [Reflecting the results of most re-creations, tests of the Carcano done by the Italian army in 2007 concluded that Oswald could not have gotten three shots off in seven seconds, as the Warren Commission theorized.]
4. Texas Governor John Connally, a lifelong hunter, consistently said that he was not hit by the same bullet which tore through John Kennedy's throat. In fact, frame 230 (below) of the
Could a reasonable person doubt the Warren Commission's theory that one magic bullet hit both Connally and Kennedy and produced seven injuries, a hypothesis questioned by Connally, his wife, and three of the seven Warren Commission members (Richard Russell, Hale Boggs, John Sherman Cooper)?
5. If three shots were fired, as the Warren Commission claimed, why did an acoustics expert for the House Select Committee on Assassinations conclude that four shots had been fired, including one from the grassy knoll?
6. If all of the shots were fired from the Texas Book Depository, why did 21 police officers, Korean War vet Bill Newman, Abraham Zapruder (who captured the world famous Zapruder film), Orville Nix (who took the second most famous home movie that day), Kennedy apparatchiks Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell, and more than half of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza think that a shot came from the grassy knoll?
7. If all of the shots were fired from the Texas Book Depository, why did Dr. Ronald Jones—a physician who saw Kennedy's body in the hospital—tell Piers Morgan in a 2013 interview that Kennedy had a huge exit wound in the back of his head and why did Charles Crenshaw, a Parkland hospital surgeon, write "Had I been allowed to testify, I would have told (the Warren Commission) that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area" in his book "JFK Has Been Shot?"
8. If, as the Warren Commission claimed, Kennedy was not hit by a shot from the front, why
 |
| Kennedy's shirt, showing a bullet hole 5" below the neckline |
9. Dr. James Humes, who performed the autopsy, was not a forensic pathologist. Among other errors, he failed to dissect Kennedy's brain, a must in homicide cases. Oddly, his report (which mentioned bullets to Kennedy's brain and neck) contradicted the original FBI autopsy (which placed a bullet five inches below the neck; see photo at left). And according to "A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination," a book by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, "Dr. James Humes, the Navy pathologist in charge of the Kennedy autopsy at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, burned his original autopsy report in the fireplace in his family room. Humes’ superior officer was so concerned that the pathologist himself might be eliminated by the plotters who killed JFK that he ordered Humes to be escorted home that night."
Could someone with a modicum of skepticism question the validity of such a flawed official autopsy report, particularly when the original is missing?
10. Whatever happened to John F. Kennedy's brain?
A SHORT BACKSTORY AND A DEEPLY FLAWED INVESTIGATION.
Two intertwined areas of Kennedy Administration policy figure most prominently in the
assassination conspiracy theories: Attorney General Robert Kennedy's war on the mob (and the Teamsters
Union, who worked hand-in-glove with the mob) and the CIA-Mafia collusion to assassinate Fidel Castro.
In 1959, during Senate hearings investigating labor union racketeering, Robert Kennedy aggressively cross-examined Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. The next year, in 1960, Kennedy published the findings from the hearing in"The Enemy Within."
In 1961 Robert Kennedy became United States Attorney General and soon began an offensive against the Mafia and the corrupt Teamsters Union which was unprecedented: "In the last year of the Eisenhower administration the Justice Department convicted only 35 low-level mobsters. By the end of 1963 [Robert F. Kennedy] had pushed that number to 288, including high-ranking bosses.
"More alarming for the Outfit, while it was using the Teamsters pension fund to build casinos, RFK targeted Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa with a team of investigators known as the Get Hoffa squad. The squad’s first indictments against the union leader were for accepting payoffs from trucking companies and for subsequent jury tampering in those trials. In the summer of 1963 it brought new charges involving pension funds." By one estimate, "successful prosecutions of the mob increased 700%" on Robert Kennedy's watch.
Hoffa wasn't the only major figure in the mob constellation under attack at the time of John F. Kennedy's assassination. New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello was on trial and Santo Trafficante, the Miami mob boss, was being investigated. Marcello, a non-citizen who'd lived in the U.S. for decades, had earlier been arrested during a routine annual check-in at a New Orleans immigration office and summarily deported by jet to Guatemala (the country of Marcello's birth, according to a fake birth certificate), on Robert Kennedy's orders.
John Kennedy had also disappointed rabid anti-Castro Cubans, members of the Mafia (who had lost a major source of income when Fidel Castro nationalized their casinos in 1959), and their backers in the intelligence community with his Cuba policies.
Kennedy refused to provide Air Force backing to the land-based invasion of Cuba at the
disastrous Bay of Pigs. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, Kennedy ignored the advice of the hawks in his cabinet (who wanted the U.S. to invade Cuba) and cut a deal with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In the fall of 1963, the Kennedy Administration sent ambassador William Atwood to Cuba to discuss normalizing relations, which couldn't have pleased the anti-Castro coalition.
But the Warren Commission paid no attention to the CIA-Mafia alliance to get rid of Castro or the mob's potential motives for killing John F. Kennedy, concluding that "the evidence does not establish a significant link between [Jack] Ruby and organized crime."
11. Within hours of the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover leaked stories to the press which claimed that Oswald had acted alone.
As was revealed in a House Select Committee investigation conducted from 1976-1978, two days after the assassination Hoover told Walter Jenkins (a White House aide),"The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney General] Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."
Why was Hoover so invested in this story line and so reluctant to let justice take its course?
12. Is it possible that the inclusion on the Warren Commission of Alan Dulles (the former CIA head who had been fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco) could have contributed to the commission's reluctance to pursue CIA-Mafia anti-Castro collaboration or any other potential intelligence connections to the assassination?
13. Is it possible that Warren Commission member Gerald Ford's clandestine reporting to the FBI (who were charged with gathering evidence for the investigation) undercut the independence and credibility of the commission?
14. As quoted in "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story," an investigative piece published in the Village Voice, "The FBI had the electronic media wired as well. A December 11, 1963, teletype from the FBI office in New York to J. Edgar Hoover indicates that NBC had given the bureau assurances that it would 'televise only those items which are in consonance with bureau report [on the assassination].' The eight-page FBI message details the substance of NBC's research, including the development of leads. 'NBC has movie film taken at some one hundred and fifty feet showing a Dallas Police Dept. officer rushing into book depository building while most of police and Secret Service were rushing up an incline towards railroad trestle [i.e. the grassy knoll; see #5, above].'"
Why did the FBI conceal the instinct of so many law enforcement officers in Dealey Plaza?
Two intertwined areas of Kennedy Administration policy figure most prominently in the
 |
| Carlos Marcello |
In 1959, during Senate hearings investigating labor union racketeering, Robert Kennedy aggressively cross-examined Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. The next year, in 1960, Kennedy published the findings from the hearing in"The Enemy Within."
In 1961 Robert Kennedy became United States Attorney General and soon began an offensive against the Mafia and the corrupt Teamsters Union which was unprecedented: "In the last year of the Eisenhower administration the Justice Department convicted only 35 low-level mobsters. By the end of 1963 [Robert F. Kennedy] had pushed that number to 288, including high-ranking bosses.
"More alarming for the Outfit, while it was using the Teamsters pension fund to build casinos, RFK targeted Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa with a team of investigators known as the Get Hoffa squad. The squad’s first indictments against the union leader were for accepting payoffs from trucking companies and for subsequent jury tampering in those trials. In the summer of 1963 it brought new charges involving pension funds." By one estimate, "successful prosecutions of the mob increased 700%" on Robert Kennedy's watch.
Hoffa wasn't the only major figure in the mob constellation under attack at the time of John F. Kennedy's assassination. New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello was on trial and Santo Trafficante, the Miami mob boss, was being investigated. Marcello, a non-citizen who'd lived in the U.S. for decades, had earlier been arrested during a routine annual check-in at a New Orleans immigration office and summarily deported by jet to Guatemala (the country of Marcello's birth, according to a fake birth certificate), on Robert Kennedy's orders.
John Kennedy had also disappointed rabid anti-Castro Cubans, members of the Mafia (who had lost a major source of income when Fidel Castro nationalized their casinos in 1959), and their backers in the intelligence community with his Cuba policies.
Kennedy refused to provide Air Force backing to the land-based invasion of Cuba at the
 |
| Santo Trafficante, at right |
But the Warren Commission paid no attention to the CIA-Mafia alliance to get rid of Castro or the mob's potential motives for killing John F. Kennedy, concluding that "the evidence does not establish a significant link between [Jack] Ruby and organized crime."
11. Within hours of the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover leaked stories to the press which claimed that Oswald had acted alone.
As was revealed in a House Select Committee investigation conducted from 1976-1978, two days after the assassination Hoover told Walter Jenkins (a White House aide),"The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney General] Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."
Why was Hoover so invested in this story line and so reluctant to let justice take its course?
12. Is it possible that the inclusion on the Warren Commission of Alan Dulles (the former CIA head who had been fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco) could have contributed to the commission's reluctance to pursue CIA-Mafia anti-Castro collaboration or any other potential intelligence connections to the assassination?
13. Is it possible that Warren Commission member Gerald Ford's clandestine reporting to the FBI (who were charged with gathering evidence for the investigation) undercut the independence and credibility of the commission?
14. As quoted in "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story," an investigative piece published in the Village Voice, "The FBI had the electronic media wired as well. A December 11, 1963, teletype from the FBI office in New York to J. Edgar Hoover indicates that NBC had given the bureau assurances that it would 'televise only those items which are in consonance with bureau report [on the assassination].' The eight-page FBI message details the substance of NBC's research, including the development of leads. 'NBC has movie film taken at some one hundred and fifty feet showing a Dallas Police Dept. officer rushing into book depository building while most of police and Secret Service were rushing up an incline towards railroad trestle [i.e. the grassy knoll; see #5, above].'"
Why did the FBI conceal the instinct of so many law enforcement officers in Dealey Plaza?
15. Why did the FBI try to block Mark Lane (who published "Rush to Judgment," the first big book to criticize the Warren Commission) from having a town hall meeting about the assassination in Manhattan in February 1964?
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| J. Edgar Hoover |
16. According to "The Man and his Secrets" by Curt Gentry, Hoover refused to comply with the Kefauver [Senate] Committee (which investigated organized crime in 1950-1951) and the FBI never wiretapped Miami mob bosses Santo Trafficante or Carlos Marcello, despite their deep involvement in criminal enterprises.
Morever, when the Warren Commission convened, Hoover kept his organized crime task force out of the investigation.
Could Hoover's hands-off attitude toward organized crime have influenced the commission's claims that Oswald and Jack Ruby had no significant links to organized crime?
[According to "Coincidence of Conspiracy,"by Bud Fensterwald Jr. and Michael Ewing, an aide to Warren Commission member Hale Boggs claimed that Boggs told him, "Hoover lied his eyes out to the commission—on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets the guns, you name it." Boggs died in 1971 when a plane he was on disappeared without a trace over Alaska.]
OSWALD.
17. Dallas district attorney Henry Wade and Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr told the Warren Commission that they'd found the number of James Hosty (an FBI agent) in Oswald's address book and a federal government voucher for $200 when he was arrested.
Is there any truth to the allegation that Oswald was a government informant, and if this is true, what would the implications be?
18. Dallas Sheriff's Deputy Buddy Walthers told the Warren Commission that he found "Freedom for Cuba" [emphasis mine] literature among Oswald's belongings in family friend Ruth Paine's garage, which would seem at odds with the image of Oswald as a left-wing radical.
On May 13, 1975, William Gaudet (a long-time CIA informant) told attorney Bernard Fensterwald that the street scuffle Oswald got into in the summer of 1963 (with anti-Castro men who purportedly objected to the Fair Play for Cuba literature Oswald was handing out) was part of a "PR operation" and that "The Fair Play for Cuba deal....[was] nothing but a front and was one of the dreams of—I think Guy Banister?" Gaudet repeated this claim to emeritus Berkeley professor and assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott when interviewed for a Canadian television program in 1977.
If Gaudet told Fensterwald and Scott the truth, is it fair to think that Oswald wasn't the left-wing radical he claimed to be, but a willing participant in a hidden right-wing agenda?
19. Is it a coincidence that Oswald was bailed out after the scuffle by Emile Bruneau, an associate of two of Carlos Marcello's top aides?
20. Is it a coincidence that Oswald's uncle and surrogate father Charles "Dutz" Murrett had been a bookie for the New Orleans mob, headed by Carlos Marcello?
 |
| David Ferrie |
Banister, an associate of G. Wray Gill, one of Marcello's lawyers, was a friend of David Ferrie. Ferrie, whom Oswald had known since his teen years, was an investigator on the deportation proceedings against Carlos Marcello and was in court with Marcello on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
Is it possible that Oswald's numerous connections to Carlos Marcello may be of significance?
22. Is it also a coincidence that Oswald—whom many have claimed may have been a government spy—was stationed at a military base in Atsugi, Japan (which had a CIA training center that housed U2 spy planes) in 1959 and 1960?
23. Why was the CIA closely tracking Oswald from 1959-1963 and how could their officers have concluded on October 10, 1963 that he had "matured" (was not a threat) in a cable to Win Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico?
24. According to researcher and author Peter Dale Scott, when Win Scott (who believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy) died, CIA counterespionage spy James Angleton flew to Mexico and rifled the Scott family safe to remove key CIA documents, a
 |
| Left circle: Ferrie; right circle: Oswald (eight years before the assassination) |
Could Angleton have been covering up intelligence information about Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged trip to Mexico City, and if so, would that information have shed any light on the whys and wherefores of the Kennedy assassination?
25. If the CIA (or members of the CIA) had no connection to the assassination, why did they suppress evidence from the Warren Commission in 1964, during the congressional investigations of the '70s, and why do they continue to fight the release of 50,000 pages of documents related to Kennedy's assassination to this day?
26. How was Oswald—who lone nut theorists claim was a left-wing revolutionary—able to
27. The wife and daughter of George de Mohrenschildt, a wealthy Dallas resident with long-standing connections to oil men and the CIA, told author Anthony Summers that
If Lee Harvey Oswald was a loner, a fringe character with no ties to U.S. intelligence, what motivation would the wealthy, powerful George de Mohrenschildt have had to befriend him?
[In 1977, de Mohrenschildt told Edward Epstein of Reader's Digest that he had befriended Oswald as a favor for the CIA. The same day, de Mohrenschildt committed suicide, after receiving a card from Gaeton Fonzi—see #44—an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.]
RUBY.
28. How are we to believe that a jaded strip club owner with nine arrests (which included disturbing the peace, carrying a concealed weapon, and assault), who sometimes beat and
29. Is it a coincidence that Jack Ruby made multiple trips to Havana—the location of lucrative mob-controlled casinos—in 1959? [The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Ruby was most likely a courier for gambling interests.]
30. Some of the women who danced in Jack Ruby's club came from a New Orleans club owned by Carlos Marcello's brother. Would it be logical to conclude that Ruby knew Marcello?
31. If Ruby had no significant links to organized crime, as the Warren Commission claimed,
32. How could the Warren Commission conclude that Ruby had no significant links to organized crime despite his time as a runner for Al Capone and an organizer for the mob-controlled Waste Material Handlers Union local, his membership in "the Dave Miller gang," and relationships with a long list of mobsters (or Teamsters who worked with the mob) such as Jake Arvey, Paul Dorfman, Harry Hall, Lenny Patrick (see #48), Dave Yaras, and Dallas mob boss Joseph Civello?
33. Ruby's phone records showed seven conversations with organized crime figures who had been prosecuted by Robert Kennedy in the months leading up to the assassination. There was also a marked increase in long-distance calls to organized crime-linked individuals during this time, according to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
If Jack Ruby had no significant link to organized crime—or if those links had faded away by the time of the assassination, as some claim—why did he call all of these men not long before the assassination?
34. If Jack Ruby had no significant link to organized crime, why was he in contact with Alexander Gruber, an associate of Mickey Cohen, both before and after the assassination?
35. If Jack Ruby had no significant link to organized crime, why was he visited in prison, six days after the murder of Oswald, by Joseph Campisi, the number two mob guy in Dallas?
36. If Jack Ruby had no significant link to organized crime, why was he considering going into business with Harold Tannenbaum, a mob figure in New Orleans, shortly before the assassination?
37. If Jack Ruby had no significant link to organized crime, how was the House Select
38. Based on Ruby's demonstrable links to organized crime, might a reasonable person conclude that he killed Oswald not out of patriotism, or grief, but to pay off his debt to the mob by covering up the crime of the century?
DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES.
One common feature of prolonged Mafia-related trials is the murder or disappearance of key witnesses. The Kennedy assassination follows a similar pattern. Two years ago, comedian and author Richard Belzer published "Hit List" about "50 mysterious deaths of witnesses to the JFK assassination,” including "...CIA agents, FBI agents, reporters, people who had foreknowledge or people who spoke too much afterward." [Here is a helpful chart which contains much of the same information in abbreviated form.]
Even if we presume, as the Warren Commission did, that Ruby had no significant ties to organized crime, the mass of corpses that coincided with eye-opening, post-Watergate
 |
| Sam Giancana |
39. If the mob had no connection to JFK's assassination, why was Sam Giancana, a Mafia kingpin who'd survived the violent world of the Outfit for decades, gunned down in his own home the night before he was to testify before the Church Committee about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro?
40. If the mob had no connection to JFK's assassination, why was Charles Nicoletti (a mob figure involved in the Mafia-CIA attempts on Castro's life who Chauncey Holt, a Mafia-CIA man, told Newsweek he had driven to Dallas the day of the assassination) murdered in 1977, just one day after he was contacted by a House Select Committee investigator?
 |
| Johnny Roselli |
42. Is it at least a little fishy that William Sullivan, who had been chief of FBI espionage operations in Mexico and Latin America (with connections to Win Scott, see #23), died of an alleged hunting accident a few days before he was to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations?
[Sullivan was one of six former FBI men that were set to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations who died over a six-month span in 1977.]
IF THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY, WHY HAS NO ONE TALKED?
One of the lone nut theorists' favorite claims is that no "smoking gun" has emerged which proves a conspiracy.
It appears more likely that these people have got their man (Oswald) and decided to ignore the many testimonials of people in proximity to the assassination.
For example:
43. FBI informant Jose Aleman testified in secret session to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Santo Trafficante had said of John Kennedy, in 1962, "He is not going to be re-elected, you don't understand me, he is going to be hit." Perhaps fearing for his safety, Aleman danced around the meaning of "going to be hit" in a public hearing.
Was Aleman lying in secret session?
44. Then there was David Morales, a right-wing CIA black ops figure who'd helped in the overthrow of Guatemala's democratic government in 1954 and had deep involvement in the Mafia-CIA efforts to upend Castro.
According to the Mary Ferrell Foundation, one of the most respected JFK assassination sites, "House Select Committee] investigator Gaeton Fonzi [see #27] traced Morales to Wilcox,
 |
| one of the few public photos of David Morales |
Was Fonzi making this up, or were Walton and Carbajal lying to Fonzi?
[Reknowned author-activist Bill Simpich fingers Morales—along with William Harvey, a CIA man fired by Bobby Kennedy who had led the Task Force W anti-Castro operation—as near the center of the assassination in his book, "State Secret," about Oswald's alleged trip to Mexico City (see #23). Morales' involvement in the assassination was also alleged by ex-CIA man E. Howard Hunt in conversations he had with his son in 2003. Moreover, Morales was very likely in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.]
45. According to a Discovery Channel documentary and "Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination" by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, Carlos Marcello told a cellmate (FBI informant Jack Van Laningham, who was wearing a wire) in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, "I had the little bastard [JFK] killed."
Was Marcello just boasting?
46. As he was nearing death, John Martino (who had been in the anti-Castro, Mafia-CIA nexus) told two witnesses—investigative journalist John Cummings and Fred Claassen, described as a "former business partner"—that he'd been involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy.
Martino also reportedly told Claassen, "The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for—he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater [the movie house where
 |
| John Martino |
Martino's wife Florence later told JFK assassination author-researcher Anthony Summers "that her husband had advance knowledge of JFK’s assassination.
"'Flo, they’re going to kill him,' she recalls [Martino] saying in November 1963. 'They’re going to kill him when he gets to Texas.'”
Were Claassen and Cummings and Florence Martino all lying too?
47. In a PBS "Frontline" special on the mob's role in the Kennedy assassination, private investigator Ed Becker told Jack Newfield (an investigative reporter for the Village Voice) that Carlos Marcello had said "that’s going to be taken care of, or words to that effect” when Becker brought up the subject of Robert Kennedy's deportment of Marcello a year before the assassination.
“I says 'you mean Bobby Kennedy?'” asked Becker.
“[Marcello] said 'no, you don’t do that'…what it was coming down to was he was saying ‘you cut off the head [John Kennedy] and the tail [Bobby Kennedy] dies."’
Was Ed Becker lying too?
48. According to "How the Outfit Killed JFK,"one day when [mobster and Jack Ruby confidant Lenny] Patrick showed up at the safe house [FBI agent Jim] Wagner was waiting for him with a lie detector.
“[Wagner] told Lenny an examiner was on his way to strap him into the polygraph so [he]
 |
| Lenny Patrick |
"Patrick had always downplayed their relationship, but he admitted to Wagner that he had been 'Rubenstein’s' mentor in the Outfit, having plucked him out of a boxing club. Patrick said he taught him how to be a bookie, and when Ruby’s best friend was killed for taking bets without paying his street tax, Patrick was the one who banished Ruby to Dallas. Patrick admitted he was one of the last to speak with Ruby before he killed Oswald.
“He said, ‘We did it.’
“‘But who did it?’
“‘You know. Momo [Sam Giancana, see #39] had the main guys there.’"
Was Patrick lying too?
49. The same article mentioned Frank Ragano, perhaps the biggest source so far in the Oswald-didn't-act alone camp. According to the story, "The mob bosses’ go-between with the Teamsters was [Santo] Trafficante’s trusted trial lawyer Frank Ragano, who was also defending [Jimmy] Hoffa against the government’s charges. According to Ragano, in August 1963, when the mob bosses had the lawyer approach Hoffa yet again about the loan [from
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| From left: Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Frank Ragano |
"At breakfast the next morning in a corner of Marcello’s restaurant, Ragano passed along Hoffa’s request. He expected the mob bosses to laugh it off, but they responded instead with stony silence. Looking back on the incident in his 1994 memoir, Ragano wondered whether the assassination conspiracy was already under way."
Ragano repeated this story in an episode of "Frontline" (see #47) in which he added another relevant anecdote. In 1987, Santo Trafficante, looking back on his life, told Ragano, "Carlos fucked up. We shouldn't have killed Giovanni [John Kennedy]. We should have killed Bobby." Trafficante died four days later.
Was Ragano lying too?
50. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and the curator of JFKfacts.org,
Is Ruby's former girlfriend lying too?
51. In 1964, Robert Kennedy resigned his post as Attorney General. Justice Department tracking in the years after Kennedy's departure showed dramatic reductions in the number of organized crime convictions, the number of attorneys employed to fight organized crime, as well as the days in court, days in the field, and days in grand jury.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, a far-from-radical mainstream institution with strict standards of scrutiny, concluded that there was a "high probability" of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, that Marcello and Trafficante possessed "the motive, means, and opportunity" to murder the president," and that the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby had "all the earmarks of an organized crime hit, an action to silence the assassin, so he could not reveal the conspiracy."
52. Considering Robert Kennedy's war on the mob and JFK's actions vis-à-vis Cuba, Oswald's connections to the mob (and possibly right-wing intelligence elements and/or anti-Castro Cubans), Ruby's 1,044 pages worth of connections to the mob, the shoddy work of the Warren Commission and their suppression of key information, the conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the murders of numerous high-level mobsters who testified or were called to testify before the committee, and the detailed claims of a conspiracy by numerous people in and around the assassination, might a rational person hold reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?
