by Ray Lyman
It is unlikely that anyone will ever know for certain what happened on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, 50 years ago this month when a 46-year-old American president was assassinated in a presidential motorcade on the way from Love Field to the Dallas Trade Mart. Homicides, even the routine ones, are best solved in the first few days and grow increasingly cold with the passage of time; the deaths, natural and otherwise, of key witnesses; and the decay or loss of forensic and physical evidence. Nowhere is this more true than in the Kennedy assassination, a watershed event in U.S. history that has never, at least to the satisfaction of many Americans, been solved or the official version of the event, as published in the Warren Report of 1964, been proved without serious doubts and skeptical questions remaining.
It is with that in mind that I can offer only what are known in the parlance of military intelligence as probabilities, based on my knowledge of that time and evidence that has come to light since November 22, 1963. I am unable to state that this is absolute truth, as such a thing is not possible at this late date, but it is what I believe to be the likely truth. It is the same truth as believed by G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director to the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, and from all accounts by former Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the years before his own assassination in Los Angeles.
Yes, I am reasonably convinced by the available evidence that members of the national organized crime syndicate, known to law enforcement as Cosa Nostra and by the general public as the Mafia, conspired to kill President Kennedy and got away with the crime. None of the other conspiracy theories, and there are many, make any kind of sense or fit the evidence in any rational way, notably those of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and filmmaker Oliver Stone. JFK had no intention of ending the Cold War, as if he even could, ending U.S. support for the government of South Vietnam, or breaking up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Indeed, no American president until Ronald Reagan was a more committed Cold Warrior than JFK, with defense spending a whopping 10 percent of gross domestic product in 1963, while only reaching 7 percent at the high-water mark of the Reagan military build-up in the 1980s and only 6 percent at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. The military chiefs, the defense industries, and the CIA had no reasons to want the president dead in 1963, and to speculate that they did brands all doubters of the Warren Report as loons. The only group that had the motive, the means, the opportunity, and clearly the ruthlessness to kill JFK was the Mob. In particular the evidence points to Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, Santo Trafficante of Tampa, and Sam Giancana in Chicago, all three of whom have been dead for a generation or longer.
Although Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover had denied for decades the existence of a national crime syndicate, the Congressional testimony of Genovese family soldier Joseph Valachi (1903–1971) in October 1963 revealed for the first time the organization, hierarchy, traditions, secret rituals and history of the Mob to law enforcement and the American public. Valachi had been a “made man” since the late 1920s and had been on hand to participate in the 1931 Castellammarese War and the Night of the Sicilian Vespers in which the old Mustache Petes, the first generation of Mafia dons in the United States, were purged in a nationwide series of coordinated hits. He was also a witness to the creation of a national crime syndicate by the ethnic Italian and Jewish graduates of urban slum gangs, including Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Joseph Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Dutch Schultz, Benjamin Siegel, and other Young Turks who had prospered and risen during the Prohibition years.
In 1931 a national commission, virtually a second government within the United States, was established with 26 Mafia dons running rackets in cities across the country, including five in New York. The commission, a brainchild of retired mobster Johnny Torrio, the founder of the Chicago outfit, would, in theory, end the endemic gangland warfare of the Roaring Twenties by adjudicating territorial disputes, sanctioning or prohibiting hits, resolving rivalries within families, and adopting American corporate business models rather than those of gun-happy, bootlegging gangsters epitomized by Al Capone, Jack “Legs” Diamond, and George “Bugs” Moran. For the most part, it worked. When Prohibition ended with the repeal of the 18th Amendment in December 1933, the new executives of organized crime moved gradually from a dependency on the traditional rackets of illegal gambling (bookmaking and numbers), bootlegging, prostitution, protection, and to a small degree, narcotics, to control of legitimate businesses, labor unions, and popular entertainment.
By the 1960s, the American Mob had its hand in the pockets of virtually every citizen. Control of the Longshoreman’s union meant that nothing could come into the United States from abroad without paying a tax to the Mafia. No restaurant in New York, Chicago, or Cleveland could operate without paying an exorbitant price to Mob-controlled laundries, garbage collectors, window washers, and union thugs to leave them alone. Americans paid an added Mob tax for the clothes on their backs, collected by the garment and Teamsters unions. Indeed, very little U.S. commercial activity was conducted and almost nothing moved on the roads from coast to coast without paying a toll to the Mob. The influence of the American Mob extended deep into the corridors of power in Washington like a national tapeworm. After the 1960 election, the Mob fully expected that influence would extend into the White House and the Kennedy administration. After all, they had given the election to the Democrats thanks to their efforts in West Virginia and Chicago, and they were working with the U.S. intelligence community to help overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba.
The most corrupt city in the United States has always been Chicago. More so than even New York, the Windy City has been run by a Democratic political machine with a spoils system that rewards ward heelers who bring out the vote on election day. The political bosses in 1960, and perhaps even today, were not overly concerned whether some of those ballots were cast by the deceased or a multiplicity of them cast by a single voter. Chicago did not invent the stuffing of ballot boxes, but it did perfect the art. The Outfit, as the Mob is known in Chicago, used this culture of corruption to elect the kind of candidates who would be amenable to Outfit influence. From Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson during Prohibition to Mayor Richard Daley in the 1960s to slumlord and Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko, the power brokers of Chicago have had a live-and-let-live relationship with the Outfit and the corrupt system. Under Chicago Mob boss Tony Accardo and his flashy psychotic protege Sam Giancana, Outfit influence extended across the country to the casinos in Las Vegas and near Lake Tahoe along the California-Nevada state line. The profits from the skimming of the take at all of the major casinos made Giancana and Accardo, along with their partners, the wealthiest gangsters in history and the most politically influential in the history of the United States. And where did the money come from to build the lucrative casinos and hotels? The pension fund of the Mob-influenced Teamsters Union and its corrupt president, James Riddle Hoffa.
The 45-year-old Hoffa had replaced indicted Teamster President Dave Beck as head of the union in 1958. Hoffa’s Brotherhood of Teamsters had been intimately associated with organized crime since the 1920s. Indeed, some of the Teamster locals included among their top officials members of Cosa Nostra families, notably Genovese family underboss Anthony Provenzano, who served as vice president of a Teamster local in New Jersey. It would be a scheduled meeting with Provenzano at a Michigan diner in 1975 when Hoffa would mysteriously disappear. Tony “the Pro” Provenzano insisted there never was such a scheduled meeting with Jimmy and had an airtight alibi for that day. Hoffa had many Mob associates and regarded any attempts by the government to investigate his union as an attack against the American labor movement. As I can personally attest, the union rank and file loved Jimmy Hoffa and hated the people who were trying to put him in prison, in particular an ambitious and idealistic young lawyer named Robert Kennedy. Hoffa knew how to play the class warfare game and did so shamelessly.
During the U.S. Senate hearings to investigate improper practices in labor and management, chaired by Arkansas Democratic senator John L. McClellan, between 1957 and 1959, the acerbic Bobby Kennedy served as chief legal counsel and investigator for the committee, posing sharp questions to Jimmy Hoffa, Dave Beck, Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, Anthony Provenzano, and Vito Genovese, among dozens of others. Most of the gangland figures pleaded the Fifth and refused to engage with the chief counsel, but Hoffa fought back in a give-and-take that frequently turned into a shouting match and on at least one occasion a near fistfight over Bobby Kennedy’s mention of Hoffa’s wife as the figurehead owner of a phony truck-leasing company called Test Fleet. From 1957 until Bobby Kennedy’s murder in 1968, these two very alpha males waged a highly publicized feud in which the stakes were Mob control of the largest labor union in the United States. The very last person Jimmy Hoffa wanted to see as attorney general of the United States was Robert Kennedy, but in the face of charges of nepotism and on the advice of his father, President Kennedy picked his younger brother for that cabinet post, deflecting criticism by telling the press corps that his 35-year-old brother needed a little legal experience before opening a law practice.
To the intense disapproval of FBI Director Hoover, the focus of the Kennedy Justice Department would be on organized crime and Jimmy Hoffa. No administration had ever attempted to make war against the Mob; most had chosen to ignore its existence. There were a bare handful of organized crime prosecutions during the Eisenhower years, most of them by the Bureau of Narcotics under its long-time commissioner Harry J. Anslinger. Hoover continued to insist, against all evidence, that organized crime, except for a few interstate car-theft rings, did not exist.Bobby Kennedy changed that policy overnight, and during his years as attorney general organized crime convictions increased by 800 percent, putting pressure on the nation’s leading racketeers that they had not experienced before or since. Much of that pressure was directed against four men — Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa — and all four made repeated verbal comments to business associates, threatening the lives of both the attorney general and the president.
As Marcello so plainly explained to Las Vegas private investigator Ed Becker, “A dog will continue to bite you if you cut off its tail, but if you cut off its head, it won’t cause you any more trouble.” Becker took this to mean that Marcello was intending to have President Kennedy assassinated. Marcello kept a sign on the door to his office that read, “Three can keep a secret if two are dead.” It was a rule by which he lived to a ripe old age and died in bed at the age of 83.
Carlos Marcello was arguably the most powerful and feared Mob figure in the history of American crime. Members of other Mafia families never dared to enter his territory without asking permission, even to attend Mardi Gras or a wedding. Even then they were frequently refused or restricted to just 24 hours. Rising to prominence in the New Orleans underworld in the 1940s, the godfather of New Orleans controlled gambling and vice all along the Gulf Coast, the deep South and throughout Texas, a regional empire of legal and illegal businesses. Aside from book making parlors, strip clubs, narcotics, prostitution, and union corruption, Marcello had a quite respectable reputation as a real estate magnate in New Orleans, active in civic affairs and the chamber of commerce. He had just one vulnerability that the Kennedy Justice Department used for all it was worth. Born in Tunisia to Sicilian parents, Marcello was not an American citizen and held a phony Guatemalan birth certificate, though he had never set foot in Guatemala. The government might not be able to send Marcello to prison, but it had the power to deport him, and it was much easier to deport a noncitizen in 1961 than it is today. On April 4, 1961, that was exactly what the government did.
Federal agents snatched Marcello off the streets and manhandled him in handcuffs to the airport, where he was flown to Guatemala City and dumped, without papers and with just the cash in his pockets. Although Marcello was back in the United States within a few weeks fighting deportation, the humiliation of having federal agents under Bobby Kennedy’s orders put their hands on him and publicly disrespect him ate at his gut. It was an insult that no Sicilian could let rest without being avenged. For the next two and a half years, the Justice Department kept the heat on in the courts, trying to deport Marcello to Guatemala or Italy. In fact, Marcello was in a New Orleans federal court fighting that deportation on November 22, 1963. The legal woes over his immigration status soon eased considerably, and Marcello’s lack of citizenship became a moot issue from that time on.
Sam “Momo” Giancana in Chicago also had a serious grievance against both the Kennedy brothers. In the summer of 1960 Mom’s man in Las Vegas and on the West Coast, John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, had been approached by Howard Hughes frontman and former FBI agent Robert Maheu to arrange an introduction to Giancana and Santo Trafficante, which resulted in a clandestine meeting that October in which Maheu asked for advice from the Mob kingpins on how to eliminate Castro without mentioning his CIA connections. In March 1961, Maheu, an OSS man during World War II and an occasional CIA contract employee, set up a conference for Trafficante, Giancana, and Roselli with a CIA black ops agent in a room at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. There a contract on Fidel Castro was given to Johnny Roselli, a contract that was bungled along with all the other attempts to assassinate “the Beard” in Havana. This was the beginning of Operation Mongoose, a CIA program to eliminate Fidel Castro and overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba. The Mob was anxious to get back into Cuba, where vast amounts of cash for lavish hotels and casinos were invested in 1950s under Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. Although no promises of any kind were made, they also anticipated that helping to kill Castro would ingratiate them with the U.S. government. When Giancana and Trafficante realized they could expect no such quid pro quo, they felt betrayed and played for suckers by the Kennedys.
In the 1960 presidential campaign, Giancana had been approached during the primaries by his good friend Frank Sinatra. Family patriarch Joseph Kennedy had asked Sinatra to seek Momo’s help in the crucial West Virginia primary, where Hubert Humphrey was ahead in all the polls in that very Protestant state. Giancana’s influence with local sheriffs in the state changed the outcome and, in an upset, won West Virginia for the Catholic JFK and the Democratic nomination as well. During the general election, Giancana ensured that both the living and the dead in Cook County overwhelmingly cast their votes for JFK rather than Nixon. Cook County’s landslide won the state of Illinois for Kennedy, and Illinois decided the contest in the electoral college with a razor-thin popular vote majority for Kennedy. It was the first stolen presidential election since Rutherford Hayes swindled Samuel Tilden out of his popular-vote victory in 1876. Giancana figured that the Kennedy brothers and Frank Sinatra owed him big time and when the Kennedys felt otherwise and Sinatra could not deliver on his promises, Giancana and Roselli were ready to hit both JFK and the Rat Pack, threatening in a wiretapped conversation to shoot out the other eye of singer Sammy Davis, Jr. Momo eventually reconciled with Sinatra, but Kennedy was another matter. The playboy president had even shared the same mistress, Judith Campbell, with Giancana until Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover warned him to stop seeing her.
Tampa-based Mafiosi Santo Trafficante Jr. was another mobster involved in Operation Mongoose and the anti-Castro exile community in south Florida. The Trafficante family, father and son, ran illegal gambling and vice in Florida for most of the 20th century, the son taking over the business after the death of his father in 1954. Along with Meyer Lansky, Santo Jr. operated the casino hotels in Batista’s Cuba during the 1950s, but ,unlike Lansky, who knew the gig was up when Castro rode his jeep into Havana, Trafficante did not get out of Cuba before the Castro crackdown on the gangland casino owners. In the summer of 1959, the gambling kingpin found himself in one of Castro’s crowded jails. Before he could buy his way out later that year, Trafficante received frequent visitors from the United State who brought cash to purchase comforts and carried messages to pass along to his business associates in the States. One of those curious visitors, oddly, was recognized as a Chicago small-time hoodlum and nightclub owner named Jack Rubenstein, known to people in the Mob as Jack Ruby. It is one of the many connections that tie both Ruby and Oswald to organized crime.
Upon his release from jail in Cuba, Trafficante resumed his role as the Mob kingpin of south Florida and became a primary target for Bobby Kennedy and his Justice Department organized crime task force. Santo never made any secret of his Sicilian hatred for the Kennedy brothers and his anger over their relentless persecution of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, a close personal friend of Trafficante. In his book Mob Lawyer, Frank Ragano — whose clients included Trafficante, Marcello, and Hoffa, recounts how in early 1963 Hoffa told him to tell Trafficante and Marcello that he could no longer handle the legal pressure coming from the Justice Department and wanted JFK dead. After the JFK assassination, according to Ragano, Hoffa told him that he would never forget what his friends Marcello and Trafficante had done for him. Marcello agreed that Hoffa now owed him big time and told Ragano to pass the message along to him. On the evening of November 22, 1963, Santo Trafficante and Ragano, along with their wives, went out to a celebratory dinner, where Santo shocked Mrs. Ragano by offering a champagne toast to the death of the president. In 1987, on his deathbed, again according the Frank Ragano, Santo confessed to Ragano that it had all been a mistake. “Carlos screwed up. . . . We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have killed Bobby.”
Everything comes back to the enigmatic, quintessential misfit Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine converted to Marxism who defected to the Soviet Union and returned home with a Russian wife in a troubled marriage, gained some local notoriety by passing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans, and moved to Dallas, where he was befriended by prominent members of the anti-Communist Russian exile community and attempted to kill right-wing retired U.S. Army general Edwin Walker in April 1961. Nothing about Oswald seems to make much sense, except for his anger at the world and resentment about his place in it. He would seem to be the last man anyone would pick to join a conspiracy to murder the most powerful political figure on the planet. Yet that is also what makes him the perfect man. The Mob conspirators would know that you cannot kill a president without there being someone on whom to pin the crime. It had to be a person who fit the profile of a loner political assassin in the mold of others in American history, such as Charles Guiteau (assassination of President James Garfield), Leon Czolgosz (assassination of President William McKinley), Giuseppe Zangara (attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt), and Richard Paul Pavlick, the retired postal worker who attempted to kill JFK with dynamite in December 1960.
And then there is Thomas Arthur Vallee, an ex-Marine Korean War veteran and political extremist arrested in Chicago for planning to assassinate Kennedy, who was scheduled to visit Chicago on November 2, 1963, for the Army-Air Force football game at Soldier Field. Just three weeks before an identical scenario in Dallas, Vallee intended to fire his M1 rifle from a warehouse window along the presidential motorcade route. Vallee’s remarkable similarities to Oswald seem beyond coincidence, almost as if the Mob were hedging its bets. He even bore a physical resemblance to Oswald. Two anti-Castro Cuban nationals, armed with rifles fitted with telescopic sights, allegedly part of a four-man hit team, were also arrested in Chicago that day but soon released for lack of evidence, as was Vallee. The President never arrived in Chicago that Saturday, not because of any assassination plot against him, but because of the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother in South Vietnam that same day.
Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, the first African-American to serve on the White House protection detail, attempted to bring the Chicago plot to the attention of the Warren Commission but was reprimanded for his efforts and told to keep his mouth shut. A few months later, Bolden was charged with soliciting a bribe while working on a counterfeiting case in Chicago. His accusers were both connected to Sam Giancana and the main witness, Joseph Spagnoli, later recanted his testimony, but Bolden still spent six years behind bars. There is an effort today to win Abraham Bolden a pardon from President Obama, but so far that effort has been fruitless.
Whether Oswald fired all three shots in under eight seconds from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street or another gunman fired a shot from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll is something we will never know for certain as the JFK autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital was a rushed affair conducted by naval doctors in a very crowded room and inconsistent with some of the testimony from doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. A big-city medical examiner, experienced with homicides, would have cleared up much of the mystery surrounding the location and entry-exit points of Kennedy’s wounds. Clearly, as it has been demonstrated on at least several occasions by marksmen re-creating the assassination, Oswald could have fired all three shots accurately in the allotted time, assuming that his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, an inferior piece of junk weaponry, did not misfire, as they are prone to do. In the end, we are left with the images of him at the Dallas city jail whining to reporters from around the world that he was just a patsy and police hanger-on Jack Ruby standing in the background with the press, stalking the man he would shoot in the garage basement of Dallas Police headquarters only 48 hours after the assassination.
The Warren Commission, established by President Johnson only a week after the assassination, appeared to conduct an investigation knowing what their ultimate findings would be at the outset. While the integrity and patriotism of the prominent men on the Warren Commission cannot be doubted, this is, obviously, not how you conduct an inquiry into a murder with world-changing historical significance. None of this was done as an intentional cover-up to hoodwink the American people, but it did result in witnesses being ignored and discredited whose testimony contradicted the official version of events. For example, when Chief Justice Earl Warren and Congressman Gerald Ford interviewed Jack Ruby at the Dallas County jail, they could not understand Ruby’s insistence that he be brought back to Washington to testify and his refusal to reveal his true motivations in a Dallas jail. They turned down his request, and the most important figure in determining evidence of a conspiracy was not given a chance to testify in a safe location under the protection of U.S. Marshals. If what we know today had been known then, the path of the investigation would likely have taken a different course and might actually have resolved some of the central issues surrounding the tragedy.
If there was a rush to judgment by the Warren Commission, the reasons for it may be understandable, if not excusable. This was at the height of Cold War tensions and only little more than a year since the Soviet Union and the United States had come to the edge of nuclear war over the Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba. No one in the government wanted to go through that nightmare again. President Johnson feared that Oswald would somehow be connected to the Castro regime, especially since Oswald had paid a visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City only seven weeks before the assassination, ostensibly seeking a visa to immigrate. Castro had also made wild threats in speeches that he was capable of retaliating in kind for the attempts against his life. If the America people learned that Castro had somehow been involved in the murder of their president, they might insist on an invasion of Cuba, and that Johnson knew would lead to a global confrontation with the Soviet Union. To the end of his life in 1973, Lyndon Johnson believed that Castro had been behind the events in Dallas. In a 1969 interview with Walter Cronkite, Johnson told the legendary newsman that he believed that there were international connections to the assassination but asked that the segment be omitted from the broadcast for reasons of national security, which it was.
Most of the key suspects in the JFK conspiracy, assuming it was an organized crime conspiracy, died violent deaths before the end of the 1970s. On June 19, 1975, shortly before being summoned to testify before a Senate select committee investigating Mob ties to the CIA, Sam Giancana, then semi-retired at age 67, was silenced with a bullet in the back of his head while frying sausages and peppers in the basement kitchen of his Chicago home. The gunman then fired six shots into his face to make the point that no one violates omerta, the Mafia honor code forbidding members to talk to the authorities. Johnny Roselli suffered a similar fate before he was to testify before the Church Committee on Intelligence, named for Idaho Senator Frank Church. After he disappeared from sight in the spring of 1976, his dismembered body was found stuffed in a 55-gallon oil drum off the coast of Miami on August 9 of that year. Pardoned by President Nixon after serving five years of a 13-year sentence for bribery and jury tampering, Jimmy Hoffa vanished on July 30, 1975, and his body has never been recovered. All these men had many enemies within organized crime, and many others had a vested interest in seeing that they remained silent forever.
Scores of other material witnesses and people who seemed to know too much, including Jack Ruby, died in accidents or from natural causes, and occasionally murder, in the next decade, far more than would be normal based on actuarial tables. Ruby died from lung and liver cancer in January 1967, shortly after being granted a new trial. He believed that he had been poisoned. Among the people who seemed to know too much was national columnist, What’s My Line contestant, and outspoken Warren Report critic Dorothy Kilgallen, who had conducted a private interview with Jack Ruby in which no Dallas police or sheriff’s office official was present to listen in. Kilgallen was apparently claiming to colleagues that she was about to blow the lid off Kennedy assassination when she died of an overdose of barbituates and alcohol in her New York brownstone at the age of 52 in November 1965. The death was ruled an accident by the medical examiner, and it may well have been. Only Marcello and Trafficante survived to die of natural causes in 1993 and 1987 after ensuring that all the people who could ever harm them were long dead.
Fifty years later, the mystery of who was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy lives on.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.