A Lie Too Big to Fail
Page 43
Firing blanks would have deceived the mind and the eye. The witnesses who saw Sirhan saw him fire the gun. They saw flame come out. Those witnesses were certain Sirhan had fired bullets. Only the earwitnesses who hadn’t seen him fire thought he was firing blanks, and then only until Kennedy went down. Then all of them assumed what they had thought were blanks were actually bullets. But it appears the earwitnesses were right the first time.
Remember that the panel of ballistics experts appointed by Judge Wenke could not match any of the victim bullets to Sirhan’s gun, and that the victim bullets that matched each other had been switched. If Sirhan fired blanks, that’s why the bullets had to be switched. The simplest and most logical explanation is that none of the bullets could be matched to Sirhan’s gun because Sirhan had not fired any of those bullets.
Where did the extra bullets go?
TWO BULLETS WITH WOOD IN THE GROOVES WERE FOUND BY THE police in Sirhan’s car. Had they been planted there in the hopes of tying him to the crime, before the police realized there were too many bullets?
Clearly, bullets had been removed. Who took them? In a Washington Post article, Dan Moldea recounted how one of the Sheriff’s deputies, Thomas Beringer, saw someone in a tuxedo trying to dig a bullet out of a doorframe “with a knife, a silver knife, for a souvenir.”413 But what if the man wasn’t after a souvenir? What if the man in the tuxedo was simply part of the clean-up team, present at the scene of the crime to clean up what the conspirators understood would be evidence of multiple shooters?
The first people on the scene of the crime were Sheriffs, not LAPD, and they appear to have removed bullets from the holes, and then circled and initialed them—standard procedure when a bullet is removed. Where did those bullets go?
It should be clear that we are not dealing with two lone nuts or a small conspiracy between two men. We’re dealing with a large operation, and not the kind of thing a couple of right-wingers or mobsters could pull off on their own. This plot required compliance not only with the direct participants, but with the LAPD, the Sheriff’s office, the D.A.’s office, state government, the media, and even the FBI. Who had that kind of power in 1968?
The closer you examine the evidence, the more you begin to understand this was a highly sophisticated intelligence operation, with not just shooters but helpers who made sure the shooters could do their jobs and escape undetected.
So who were these team members? And what was Sirhan’s actual level of culpability in all of this? Who was orchestrating the plot? And on whose behalf?
363 Moldea’s interview of Maynard Davis is Exhibit 35 in the 1992 request for a new grand jury, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99873.
364 Letter from Harry L. Hufford, County Administrative Officer, and Robert H. Jackson, Investigator, to Hal Marshall of the FBI, November 2, 1977, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99874#relPageId=252&tab=page accessed October 9, 2016.
365 I secured the rights to this video and posted it at vimeo.com/275690516. Source: UCLA Film & Television Archive
366 Ibid.
367 Turner and Christian, p. 383.
368 Robert Wiedrich, “‘Felt Him Fire Gun,’ Hotel Worker Says,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1968.
369 Moldea, p. 263.
370 Turner and Christian, p. 348.
371 Signed statement by Martin Patruski, witnessed in writing by Vincent Bugliosi in his office in December of 1975, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99873&relPageId=495.
372 Transcript of Dan Moldea’s interview with Charles Collier, December 16, 1989, provided to Sirhan’s defense lawyers, via www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99873&search=collier#relPageId=348&tab=page.
373 Dan Moldea, “RFK’s Murder A Second Gun?” Washington Post, May 13, 1990, via www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/05/13/rfks-murder-a-second-gun/9248e988-9fff-4366-b3e3-2849420b9bf9/, accessed November 13, 2016.
374 Erwin Chemerinksy, “An Independent Analysis of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Board of Inquiry Report on the Rampart Scandal,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, January 1, 2001, pp. 549–550.
375 Edwin J. Delattre, Character and Cops: Ethics in Policing (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2011 ed.), p. 365.
376 Delattre, p. 366.
377 Delattre, p. 365.
378 Erwin Chemerinksy, “An Independent Analysis of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Board of Inquiry Report on the Rampart Scandal,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, January 1, 2001, pp. 549–550.
379 David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), pp. 373–374.
380 Talbot, Brothers, p. 374.
381 LAPD interview transcript of Jesus Perez, June 5, 1968.
382 “Doctors Heroes, Says Eyewitness,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 6, 1968. The LAPD did not believe McBroom was in the pantry. But what McBroom said largely matched what other witnesses have said, and he couldn’t have been mimicking them because those statements were kept secret until the LAPD’s files were finally released to the public nearly 20 years later. It seems unlikely that Robert Kennedy would choose a fabricator to be one of his surrogates. It’s not at all unlikely however, that the LAPD went out of their way to discredit him, just as they did every witness whose account suggested a conspiracy. They showed McBroom a picture of himself in the Embassy Room and said it was taken five seconds after the shooting began. But McBroom had already acknowledged being in the Embassy Room just before the shooting began. He didn’t know how many shots had been fired before he realized someone was firing and then he ran into the pantry and saw a gun, a struggle, and evidently felt a possible gunman squeeze past him. McBroom’s “statements” were criticized as being inaccurate, when in fact, the police reporter had not accurately summarized what McBroom had said, as he clarified in later interviews. I recommend interested parties look at all his numerous interviews. For example, to the Sentinel, McBroom said Kennedy was walking along and “joking about Rosey Grier protecting him.” This was mistranslated into an LAPD summary report as McBroom having said that Kennedy was joking to Rosey Grier as he walked through the pantry, and since Rosey Grier hadn’t caught up with Kennedy, that was evidence McBroom was lying. But that wasn’t what McBroom had said. He said Kennedy joked about Rosey Grier, not to Rosey Grier. There are numerous such twists of people’s statements in the LAPD files. That’s why the audio tapes have been very valuable. Sadly, no tape of McBroom’s statements exist. But that one was clearly misstated by the LAPD, and the misstatement used against him, and it was not the only statement of his twisted and then used inaccurately to “discredit” him. Compare especially McBroom’s LAPD interview summary by Collins and Patchett, September 16, 1968, to his earlier FBI interview of July 11, 1968.
383 FBI interview of Boris Yaro, June 7, 1968.
384 LAPD interview transcript of Edward Minasian, June 5, 1968.
385 LAPD interview of Ronald “Roh” Panda, misdated June 8, 1968, as this information is clearly from an interview conducted August 6, 1968. There is a separate document that reflects Panda’s comments when he called the LAPD on June 8, 1968.
386 LAPD interview of Ronald Panda, June 8, 1968.
387 LAPD interview of Ronald Panda, August 29, 1968.
388 LAPD transcripts of taped interviews of Minasian and Uecker, June 5, 1968, and the SUS interview summary of Urso’s interview on June 27, 1968, as well as Urso’s interview by members of the D.A.’s office, the LAPD and County Supervisor Baxter Ward on August 10, 1977 (www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99873&search=urso#relPageId=696&tab=page).
389 FBI Airtel from Los Angeles to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated June 26, 1968.
390 FBI statement from Harold Burba, June 7, 1968.
391 LAPD interview of Ronald Panda, August 29, 1968.
392 Author’s interview of Ronald Panda, May 5, 2012.
393 RFK LAPD Microfilm, Volume 47 (Progress Reports), “Report on Pandemonium and Hysteria in the Kitchen,” August 16, 1968
, p. 11.
394 NBC footage from June 5, 1968, shared with me by Brad Johnson.
395 Kim Zetter, “Tools of Tradecraft: More Spy Gear From the CIA, Others,” Wired, www.wired.com/2011/03/cia-spy-tools/, March 25, 2011.
396 H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace, The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception (New York: Harper, 2010), p. 88.
397 Joseph Zullo, “Tighten Guard in Threats on Khrushchev,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 22, 1960.
398 LAPD interview of Robin Casden, July 1, 1968.
399 LAPD interview of Richard Drew, July 15, 1968.
400 LAPD interview of Evan Freed, June 14, 1968.
401 LAPD interview of Richard Tuck, June 5, 1968.
402 LAPD interview of Virginia Guy, June 5, 1968.
403 LAPD interview of David Jayne, July 29, 1968.
404 LAPD interview of Irwin Stroll, June 14, 1968.
405 FBI interview of Bob Funk, June 21, 1968, dated June 26, 1968.
406 LAPD interview of Booker Griffin, July 25, 1968.
407 KTLA footage from the Ambassador Hotel, June 5, 1968, viewed by the author at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, now the William Paley Center.
408 LAPD interview transcript of Rafer Johnson, June 5, 1968.
409 Grand Jury testimony of Karl Uecker, June 7, 1968.
410 LAPD interview transcript of Richard Aubry, June 5, 1968.
411 LAPD interview transcript of Dick Tuck, June 5, 1968.
412 FBI interview report of Richard Lubic dated June 27, 1968.
413 Dan Moldea, “RFK’s Murder A Second Gun?” Washington Post, May 13, 1990, via www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/05/13/rfks-murder-a-second-gun/9248e988-9fff-4366-b3e3-2849420b9bf9/, accessed November 13, 2016.
SUSPICIOUS OTHERS
“[The person reporting (P/R)] noticed four men and one girl standing between the Venetian Room and the lobby fountain. P/R states one of these men resembled Sirhan B. Sirhan. … P/R is sure that all these persons were together. … P/R tackled the suspect and a security officer of the hotel helped subdue the suspect. The officer handcuffed the suspect and took him away. P/R recognized this man as one of the four suspects he observed earlier in the lobby.”
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK: HOW DID THE CONSPIRATORS KNOW KENNEDY would be coming through the pantry? The answer they expect to hear is that a member of Kennedy’s staff was in on the plot, setting him up from the inside. But the evidence doesn’t appear to support that belief.
While the original plan was to take Kennedy downstairs to the overflow crowd in the Ambassador Room below the Embassy Room to say a few words, at every one of his press stops, Kennedy had always talked to the print media. It was understood, then, that at some point, Kennedy would go to the Colonial Room to talk to the print press. And there were only two ways into that room. One was through the lobby area, which would be filled with people, and the other was through the pantry, which opened to a small hallway and then to the Colonial Room. Any other route would have left him more exposed and less protected. The only “change” was that Kennedy’s team decided he should talk to the press right after the speech rather than heading downstairs to talk to the overflow crowd first. But this made perfect sense. Fred Dutton described the decision process to Captain Hugh Brown of the LAPD in a phone interview:
It was a last-minute decision, I would say made within five minutes before the shooting occurred. What had happened was that we’d come down from the Senator’s suite through that back way to the Colonial Ballroom for his statement, and while he was speaking, Bill Barry and I went off on the side and discussed sort of what should be—where we were going next.
Unruh and the local people had suggested—not directly, I got this indirectly—that the Senator should go one flight down where there was an overflow crowd in another ballroom.
I made the decision that the crowd was too rowdy and congested and so forth; it was too late an hour; that he should speak at one place where he already was and then we could go hold the press conference, which was in that press room off of the end of the hallway through the kitchen [the Colonial Room].
That pretty much was the pattern that we had in the other election nights in the primary sites in Nebraska and Indiana and so forth.414
So any plotter of intelligence could have deduced that Kennedy would eventually return through the pantry to the Colonial Room, as that was Kennedy’s pattern. All the conspirators had to do was wait. And to guarantee they wouldn’t be kicked out, they needed press passes. That’s why it’s important that both Michael Wayne and the girl in the polka dot dress so persistently sought press passes from various people that night. Press passes were like all-access passes and would have been invaluable to conspirators.
Another common fallacy is to assume the conspiracy was necessarily a small one, because otherwise, “someone would have talked.” But as you’ll see, there were those who tried to talk before and maybe even after the shooting. No less than four people seemed to have inside knowledge of a plot on the last day of Kennedy’s life, as you’ll soon see.
The operation might never have succeeded if only two people had been involved. No one knew for sure until the last minute which way Kennedy would go. Although his usual move was to talk to the print press after campaign rallies, would he follow that process this time? What if this time Kennedy had decided to forego talking to the printed press and had gone downstairs and never passed through the pantry?
In an assassination plot, you need more than shooters. You need a support team who can help maneuver the shooters into position. Someone had to signal when Kennedy was coming down. What if a shooter or designated patsy is caught moments before the crime? Of course you would put multiple shooters in the room. There even appears to have been a team waiting downstairs as well, had Kennedy gone the other way first.
Members of the team had even been spotted at earlier Kennedy events. Maybe they had been observing for future reference. Maybe they had tried to kill Kennedy before and failed. This was clearly the conspirators’ last best chance to kill Kennedy before the Democratic Convention, where there would be much greater security. And if he got the nomination, as most observers expected he would, the security net would have been tighter still. Kennedy could not be allowed to leave the hotel alive. That’s why the plot was large, sophisticated, and efficient.
Six different suspects
IN THE FIRST THREE HOURS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION, THE LAPD’S radio communications referenced at least six different male suspects. I say “at least” because only a tiny portion of the radio traffic has been transcribed.
The first suspect aired on police radio was not the tall, sandy-haired man that Sharaga broadcast, according to the multi-track transcription made by Philip Van Praag. At 12:28 A.M., call sign 8K1 reported over the police radio: “apparently, the suspect is a male Mexican waiter that supposedly works at the Ambassador.”415 An entry in the LAPD’s Emergency Control Center (ECC) journal, entered four minutes later indicated that “possible suspect Jesse Greer” was on his way to the Rampart Station and that the info had come from Jess Unruh.416 Curiously, one of Fernando Faura’s friends in the LAPD tipped him off on the morning of June 5 that a call had come in identifying the shooter as a fry cook at a drive-in at Wilshire and Westwood named “Jesse.”417 Was this the same person? Was the fry cook’s full name Jesse Greer? Remember that when Sgt. Jordan was questioning Sirhan after the shooting, before anyone knew Sirhan’s identity, Jordan walked in at one point and called him “Jesse.” According to Van Praag’s transcription, at 12:28 A.M., the person with call sign 3Y65 reported, “according to a radio report, they have two suspects in custody,” so it seems possible that someone named Jesse Greer and Sirhan had both been apprehended, but that Jesse was quietly released.
It would not have been unprecedented for an arrested suspect in an assassination to have been quietly released. When Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965, witnesses reported three attackers. Reporter Jimmy Bres
lin, who had just happened to be in the audience when Malcolm X was shot (and in the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy was shot) wrote a front-page article that had a subheading that read, “Police Rescue Two Suspects.” Within a few hours, however, the story was reissued in an updated edition with the same story but with a different subheading, “Police Rescue One Suspect.” The suspect who got away was ignored, and the second suspect, apprehended but released by the police, was simply written out of that history.
When author Toby Rogers asked Breslin about this years later, Breslin perhaps revealed more than he intended: “Well I was supposed to receive a journalism award in Syracuse that evening, but I got a tip (from the NYPD) that I should go up to Harlem to see Malcolm X speak. I sat way in the back smoking a Pall Mall cigarette.” Did someone in the NYPD know Malcolm would be killed that night?
Breslin’s reaction to Rogers’ next question, about the heading that changed from two suspects to one, suggests Breslin did have some sort of guilty knowledge, if only after the fact. His over-the-top reaction when asked was bizarre, to say the least: “I don’t fucking know what is what. I don’t know if there was two editions or one. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to read it. Fuck it. Who cares! It’s 2005!”418
Less than 20 seconds after the description of the first suspect, Sgt. Sharaga broadcast his description of a second suspect. Sharaga described him as six-foot to six-foot-two, with sandy-colored curly hair, “very thin” in a “light tan shirt.”419
In the same minute, between 12:28 A.M. and 12:29 A.M., LAPD officers Fedrizzi and De Losh broadcast a suspect description told to them by Andrea Busch and her brother Richard Busch and their friend Richard Ritner about the male and female that seemed to be escaping, where Richard Busch had thrown open the door and the woman hurried past and stopped a few feet away. Fedrizzi and De Losh broadcast a description of this third male suspect and a female companion: “No. 1, male Latin, 30 to 35, 5-9½, stocky, wearing a wool hunter’s hat with a small brim. No. 2, described as a female Caucasian. No further description.”420