The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  “Who else can you eliminate?”

  “I won’t waste thirty seconds of breath on the ‘military-industrial complex.’ Contrary to popular belief, John Kennedy was no liberal saint, but a dedicated cold warrior. Therefore, defense corporations had no reason to kill him. That theory also violates the large-conspiracy rule. They never could have kept it secret.”

  “And as for the Russians,” Kaiser offers, “by assassinating a sitting president, they would have risked global thermonuclear war. There’s zero chance they did that.”

  “What about the Russians sending Oswald to do it?”

  “Less than zero,” Stone declares, becoming more animated by the give-and-take of discussion. “Oswald had a neon paper trail behind him that led straight to Moscow. Besides, because of his defection to Russia, the KGB knew better than anyone how unstable Lee was.”

  Stone uses Oswald’s first name as easily as a man who knew him all his short life. “And Castro?”

  This time Stone’s answer is slow in coming. “That’s another kettle of fish. Castro knew that the CIA and the Mafia had been trying to kill him, and he had intel reports that those attempts had been sanctioned by the Kennedy brothers. In early ’63, Castro actually said publicly that elected officials who engaged in those types of activities could become targets of such activities themselves. In the very year of Kennedy’s assassination, he’d threatened to retaliate in kind.”

  “Well, did he?”

  “There’s no evidence that he did. Oswald probably hoped that killing JFK would make him a hero in Havana, and thus facilitate his entry to the country. But that’s all.”

  Stone’s eyes and voice betray emotion when he speaks of Oswald and Castro, and I sense that we’re nearing the crux of his theory. “What’s the rest of it, Dwight?”

  “Let’s cross off the Cuban exiles first, the men betrayed at the Bay of Pigs. They were shot to pieces on the beach or imprisoned because Kennedy wouldn’t send air support. A lot of them wanted to punish him for that, and they had the training and weapons needed to pull off Dealey Plaza. However, our considered opinion is that none did. Do I need to go into detail as to why?”

  “No. So, where does that leave us?”

  “La Cosa Nostra,” says Kaiser.

  Stone nods. “From the Mafia, the Select Committee singled out Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Jimmy Hoffa as serious suspects. It recommended that all be investigated further, but I’m sorry to say that no law enforcement agency ever officially fulfilled that charge, including the Bureau.”

  “Except your guys.”

  “With a vengeance, I’m proud to say. In summary, each of those mobsters had a motive to want JFK dead, and each rejoiced at the news that he was dead. But”—Stone leans forward like a professor making a salient point—“just because you want someone dead doesn’t make you a murderer.”

  “If it did, I’d be in jail myself.”

  “Exactly.” Stone drums his fingers on his legal pad. “Of the mobsters, Sam Giancana had particular reason to hate Kennedy. ‘Momo’ had helped get JFK elected president in 1960, by pushing key wards in Chicago and West Virginia Kennedy’s way. Being persecuted by brother Bobby after that election must have pushed him close to violent retaliation. This was aggravated by the fact that Sam and JFK shared a mistress—Judith Exner—but Momo never acted on his hatred.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “We had the Chicago Outfit under electronic surveillance for years before the mob even knew about planted microphones—both before and after the assassination. Sam G. and his crew bitched and ranted endlessly about both Kennedys, but there was never even a hint that they’d moved against them.”

  “Jimmy Hoffa wanted Kennedy dead more than anyone else,” Kaiser says.

  Stone concedes this with a nod. “Hoffa was heard many times to threaten both Kennedys, and he asked Sam G. and Marcello to whack JFK. But in my group’s opinion, that never came to anything either. Hoffa was a hothead, a loose cannon. If Momo or Marcello had moved against Kennedy, they would have done it for their own reasons, not as a favor to Hoffa. All testimony to the contrary by mob lawyer Frank Ragano was fabricated. Ragano made up those stories years later, trying to get a book deal.”

  I have to fight the urge to ask him to skip ahead to my father. “So, that leaves Marcello and Roselli?”

  “And Santo Trafficante. Johnny Roselli was the main link between the CIA and the Mafia during their attempts to kill Castro. He was close to both Giancana and Trafficante, but nothing ties him or them to Dallas and Dealey Plaza. Frank Ragano told a story about Trafficante ordering him to tell Marcello they’d screwed up by killing JFK—that they should have killed Bobby instead—but that was more bullshit. As a coda to that line of inquiry, Giancana was murdered in 1975, shortly before he was to testify before a Senate Select Committee investigating mob-CIA collusion in the JFK assassination. It sounds suspicious, I know, but Giancana was actually killed over a dispute about Iranian casino revenues. One year later, Roselli did testify before that committee, about the CIA-mob efforts to murder Castro. Days later he was found floating in an oil drum off Miami. Roselli knew a lot about his bosses, but nothing about the JFK assassination.”

  “I guess we’re down to Marcello, then?”

  “‘Uncle Carlos,’” Stone intones. “The king of New Orleans, and the most powerful don in the United States.”

  His timbre sounds weirdly like affection, and reminds me of my mother’s use of that nickname. I think of my father and his time in New Orleans. If Marcello really was that powerful, and Dad was in a position to do him favors at the parish prison, how could a lowly medical extern have resisted?

  “If the story I’m about to tell you sounds like it was written by Mario Puzo,” says Stone, “that’s because there’s a lot of Carlos Marcello in The Godfather.”

  The old FBI man begins to speak in a soft but spellbinding baritone that reminds me of the agent I knew in another life. “In 1910, Carlos Marcello was born Calogero Minacori in Tunis. His parents were Sicilian, but Carlos himself never went to Sicily. He once famously said to another mobster who tried Sicilian on him: ‘I don’t talk dat shit, only English.’”

  Kaiser chuckles from the sofa. “That sounds just like Carlos. I’ve heard the BRILAB tapes.”

  Stone presses on like a man who knows he has only so much stamina remaining. “When Calogero was an infant, his parents emigrated to a plantation near Metairie, Louisiana. The boy changed his name while very young to better assimilate with the children in his new country. As a boy he hauled vegetables in the swamp parishes south of New Orleans, but he soon figured out that crime paid better. As a teenager, he ran an armed robbery gang that preyed on the surrounding towns. Carlos carried a sawed-off shotgun on a sling, and he killed anyone who got in his way or questioned his leadership. The bodies usually went into the nearby swamps, into the bellies of alligators.”

  Kaiser gives me a pointed look. “Sound familiar?”

  “At eighteen,” Stone continues, “Carlos was sentenced to nine years in Angola Prison for robbery and assault. The state let him out after five, and he went right back to his old ways. This is the period during which Brody Royal and his father came to know Carlos. At twenty-seven, Marcello was arrested with twenty-three pounds of marijuana in his possession. He got another stiff prison sentence and a seventy-five-thousand-dollar fine, but this time he was released after only ten months. Why? Because somehow, he had attracted the notice of Frank Costello, head of the Genovese crime family in New York.

  “That connection was the making of him. After cutting a gambling deal with Huey Long, Costello chose Carlos to move illegal slot machines into New Orleans. Using his six brothers, local muscle, and the influence of the Long political machine, Carlos eventually forced one-armed bandits into every redneck honky-tonk, black juke joint, Cajun dive bar, and whorehouse from Grand Isle to Raceland—five thousand in all. Within ten years, he’d seized contr
ol of all gambling rackets in Louisiana.”

  “He also developed an association with Meyer Lansky,” says Kaiser. “Through the Lansky connection—as reward for services we’re still not sure of—Marcello was awarded a percentage of the skim from the Outfit’s Vegas casino operations. And they don’t hand that out for nothing.”

  Stone nods. “Carlos was also awarded an interest in the mob’s Havana casinos under Batista. He got that cut by providing muscle to Santo Trafficante on Florida real estate deals, a job that the Double Eagles would take on years later. Anyway . . . by 1947, Carlos had become not just a made man, but a bona fide member of the national Commissione, and one of the richest of all the bosses.”

  I suddenly recall several images I once saw of Marcello, way back when I was investigating Ray Presley. The mobster known as “the Little Man” was short, but as thick and tough as a cypress stump. His face looked quick to anger, and several photographers had captured his chilling glare during the 1960s and ’70s.

  “When Fidel Castro liberated Cuba in 1959,” Stone continues, “Carlos lost untold millions, just like Trafficante, Giancana, Lansky, and the other bosses. Hoping to take those casinos back, they helped fund training camps for the Cuban exiles prepping to retake the country in the Bay of Pigs invasion. That’s probably where Carlos first came into contact with Frank and Snake Knox, who worked as combat instructors at Carlos’s training camp near Morgan City.”

  “Ping,” Kaiser says softly, imitating a submarine’s sonar.

  “Despite the failed invasion,” Stone goes on, “Carlos was nearing the height of his power. By the midsixties his cash inflow would reach two billion dollars per annum. That’s more than twelve billion in today’s money.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Carlos owned trucking lines, shrimp fleets, untold amounts of real estate—much of it held by third parties who served as blind trustees for him. Interestingly, a lot of those were poor black families who felt complete loyalty to the old tomato salesman from Jefferson Parish.”

  “He was a folk hero to those people,” says Kaiser. “Like Pablo Escobar to the Colombian poor. A benevolent dictator.”

  I nod. “They do like their dictators in Louisiana.”

  Stone raises a forefinger and points at me. “That’s something a lot of people miss. After Louis the Fourteenth and Napoleon, Louisiana never really assimilated into America, not fully. The law here is still based on the Napoleonic Code. They seceded from the Union in 1861, and in the 1930s they got Huey Long. After Huey was assassinated, they got Carlos Marcello. Carlos had learned the patronage system under the Kingfish, and he perpetuated it with cash in one hand and a gun in the other. He spread the wealth to every official in the state, from the governor and senators down to the lowest justice of the peace, and nobody—but nobody—bucked him.”

  “And yet,” Kaiser interjects, “despite all that power, in 1963 Carlos found himself under mortal threat from the attorney general of the United States.”

  Stone nods grimly. “As attorney general, Robert Kennedy initiated the most aggressive battle against organized crime in U.S. history. He attacked several mob bosses, but none with more personal animus than Marcello.”

  Kaiser takes the baton from his mentor. “In 1959, Carlos was called before the McClellan Committee. Senator John Kennedy was a committee member, but Bobby was its chief counsel. You should see the film. Bobby barks and growls like a pit bull, and Carlos treats him with utter contempt. Carlos pled the Fifth a hundred and fifty-two times and smirked throughout the hearing. He claimed he was nothing but a tomato salesman, and on paper he was—through his Pelican Fruit Company.” Kaiser laughs dryly. “Salary, fifteen hundred bucks per month.”

  “Carlos lived to regret that performance,” says Stone. “As soon as JFK made Bobby attorney general, Bobby set out to destroy Marcello. He attacked the don on two legal fronts. The first was an IRS case for back taxes. If fraud could be proved, that would land Carlos in federal prison. But the more dangerous prosecution involved Carlos’s immigration status. Unlike his brothers, Carlos had never bothered to become a citizen, which kept him out of the army and making millions during World War Two. But in the end that cost him dearly. To gain some legal status, he’d bribed the government of Guatemala—the source of his fruit and marijuana imports—to issue an official birth certificate. But that lie also made Carlos vulnerable.”

  “I know about Bobby Kennedy illegally deporting Carlos to Central America in ’61,” I tell them. “As a prosecutor, I read quite a bit about his anti-Mafia tactics.”

  Stone looks grateful that he can skip the details. “As soon as Carlos got back from that little excursion, Bobby indicted him for falsifying his birth certificate, and United States versus Carlos Marcello was set in motion. Between 1961 and 1963, Carlos did all he could to put off the day of reckoning, while Bobby and the INS steadily ratcheted up the pressure. Marcello’s Washington lawyer was Jack Wasserman, former chief counsel of the INS. He was the best immigration lawyer in the country, but there was only so much he could do. Carlos had bribed the Guatemalans, and Bobby’s team could prove it.”

  “If Marcello played that immigration case by the rules,” Kaiser says, “he was guaranteed to lose. And the result wouldn’t be simple deportation. If he was forced out of the country, he would lose his empire. That’s why he had another lawyer on his payroll—a New Orleans lawyer. One who played by New Orleans rules, by which I mean no rules at all.”

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” says Stone, holding up a hand. “What matters is that Bobby had Carlos dead to rights. Carlos knew that if he was deported, the remaining Marcello brothers could never hold his empire together. So long as Bobby Kennedy headed the Justice Department, it was only a matter of time before Carlos’s stranglehold on the South was broken and his multibillion-dollar kingdom was carved up by his fellow dons. For Carlos Marcello, deportation was the equivalent of death.”

  “I get it. So that’s the basis of your theory? Marcello had the president killed to sabotage RFK’s prosecution?”

  “Yes,” Stone says simply.

  “Tell him the dog story,” says Kaiser. “It always makes me think of Brando playing Vito Corleone.”

  Stone waves his hand almost angrily. “It can’t be verified. I don’t want Penn thinking about Hollywood bullshit. This is history.”

  Kaiser looks suitably chastised, and this brings me some satisfaction.

  “Try to imagine the rage Carlos must have felt at this state of affairs,” Stone says. “Unlike mainstream America, he’d never bought into the myth of Camelot. He knew this country was corrupt to the marrow. He’d bought and sold politicians in Washington, put senators at the head of major committees. He knew that Joe Kennedy had made his fortune as a bootlegger. To Carlos, JFK was a bootlegger’s son, no more, and Bobby was a self-righteous hypocrite.”

  Stone gives me a piercing stare. “Many scholars dismiss the idea of mob assassination because in some crime families it was forbidden to murder any state official, even a prosecutor. They figure that since mobsters balked at killing judges or even cops, killing a president was totally beyond the pale.”

  “The exception to that rule,” says Kaiser, “was betrayal in a criminal enterprise. And that’s what this conversation is really about. The actual relationship between Carlos Marcello and John Kennedy.”

  “Did they have a relationship?”

  “Of course they did,” Stone replies. “It was carried on at a distance, but it was as valid as any other, and it had very clear rules—though John Kennedy doesn’t seem to have understood that. The crux of it was Cuba. As I said, the Kennedys had used the CIA and the Mafia to try to murder Fidel Castro, and Carlos was part of that.”

  “And Castro was a head of state,” says Kaiser.

  Stone nods. “That Kennedy-CIA effort legitimized the assassination of a head of state as a tactic in Carlos’s eyes. It lowered his threshold of action to almost zero.”

  “But John Kennedy
was a president,” I remind them. “Not a gangster.”

  “Carlos saw himself as a head of state,” Stone says. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. In his own mind, he was the equal of John Kennedy.”

  “I think that’s a stretch, Dwight.”

  “Do you remember Joe Valachi?”

  “Sure. The first ‘made man’ to testify about the workings of the Mafia.”

  “One month before the Kennedy assassination, Valachi was asked on the stand about Carlos Marcello. He said only that he’d once planned to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and as a formality he’d mentioned his plans to Vito Genovese. Genovese told Valachi not to go. The Mafia boss of New York told a made man that nobody was allowed to travel in Marcello’s territory without Carlos’s express permission—not even Genovese himself. ‘It was an absolute rule,’ Valachi said.” Stone holds up a shaking finger. “Carlos Marcello was the only don in America who could make men without approval from the national Commission. He was sui generis, Penn. And nobody crossed him.”

  “Except Bobby Kennedy,” I say softly.

  Stone nods. “JFK’s ingratitude after Giancana’s election help was serious, but that’s politics. His failure of nerve at the Bay of Pigs lost the mob a lot of money, but that was business. But Robert Kennedy’s single-minded quest to permanently deport Carlos was a matter of survival. By pushing that trial to its limit, Bobby Kennedy signed his brother’s death warrant.”

  For the first time since entering this room, I feel a chill racing over my shoulders.

  “Christ, what I’d give for a shot of scotch,” Stone says. “Of course it would kill me, but that might not be a bad way to go.” The old FBI agent looks like he’s about to laugh, but instead he clenches his jaw in pain.