Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  But who cares about these minor problems? Marita and her fable would live to see another day in the nurturing arms of someone who could give her a run for her money when it comes to a lack of credibility—the inimitable Mark Lane. In an August 1978 article in Spotlight, a small Washington, D.C., weekly published by the ultra-right Liberty Lobby, ex-CIA agent Victor Marchetti wrote that former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt’s assertion in a prior lawsuit that he was in Washington, D.C., not Dallas, on the day of the assassination “was not true,” and that when the HSCA held its open hearings later that month, his former employer, the CIA, would “admit” that Hunt (one of the Watergate burglars) “was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy.” Marchetti’s reasoning for why the CIA would do this made a lot of sense—to a child. The CIA, he said, had “decided to sacrifice him [Hunt] to protect its clandestine services.” Apart from the non sequitur (in what way would sacrificing Hunt “protect its clandestine services”?), the very strong likelihood is that the CIA would only be in a position to “admit” that Hunt was a part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy if the agency itself was involved in it. And if it was, the CIA would really be protecting its involvement in the assassination by sacrificing Hunt, wouldn’t it? Hunt, being a minnow in the conspiratorial pond, would be a ripe candidate for a plea bargain to implicate the higher-ups at the CIA. But Marchetti assured his readers that Hunt “will not dare to speak out—the CIA will see to that.” Right. Sacrifice someone who can implicate you, when he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing so, and then see to it (Marchetti doesn’t say how the CIA would accomplish this) that he doesn’t put the hat on you.

  Marchetti, who wrote that there were “many powerful special interests connected with the conspiracy to kill Kennedy,” most of whom “are already dead” (Marchetti doesn’t say who these special interests and dead conspirators are, nor does he say how he came by this information), also claimed in the article that the CIA “just happened to stumble across” a memo in its old files “dated 1966,” which said in essence “someday we will have to explain Hunt’s presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963.”31 Marchetti doesn’t concern himself with why the CIA would put such a cover-up plot on paper, but he busily goes on in his article to embrace the fairy tale told by Marita Lorenz. One wonders how someone (Marchetti) with this type of fuzzy mind could have been a fourteen-year veteran of the CIA before his resignation in 1969, at one time serving as an assistant to the deputy director. None of Marchetti’s silly predictions in the Spotlight article* came true, of course. One also wonders why Hunt would pay any attention to this drivel in a low-circulation publication. But he did, suing Marchetti and Liberty Lobby for libel.

  Mark Lane, whose politics are as far away from that of Liberty Lobby as night is from day, was the defense attorney for Liberty Lobby and wrote a book about the case, Plausible Denial. The book in substantial part deals with matters totally unrelated to the trial, providing Lane with yet another opportunity to regurgitate all of his conspiracy theories and allegations about the Kennedy assassination. Plausible Denial is poorly written, very superficial (but then again, maybe it’s not, since Lane had nothing to write about), and even lacking in citations (a cardinal sin for any book on the assassination) to give the precise sources of Lane’s allegations. Remarkably, Lane doesn’t even tell his readers whether or not Marchetti was a defendant in the lawsuit (he was in the original complaint, but the case was dismissed against him prior to the trial), waits until page 129 to tell his readers what the Spotlight article says, and never finds the space in his 393 pages to inform his readers what Hunt’s formal complaint, the basis for the defamation lawsuit, trial, and Lane’s book, said. But it is inferable from the book that the main issue at the trial seemed to be the Spotlight article allegation that Hunt was in Dallas, not Washington, D.C., on the day of the assassination. Hunt, being the plaintiff, had the legal burden of proving a negative, that he wasn’t in Dallas on November 22, 1963, some twenty-two years before the trial, which was held in a U.S. district court in Miami in 1985.* He was unable to prove this to the satisfaction of the jury, something that millions of others might be unable to do also, and on February 6, 1985, the federal jury found “for the defendant, Liberty Lobby, and against the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt.”

  Consistent with his MO, Lane led his readers to believe that the reason for the verdict against Hunt was that the Miami jury believed the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s murder. But to support this, he only cites one juror, jury forewoman Leslie Armstrong, who said she believed this. But obviously, the issue of whether the CIA was behind the assassination was not for the jury to consider, and they apparently didn’t. The tireless and always industrious conspiracy researcher Harrison Edward Livingstone, in his book Killing the Truth, says that “UPI wrote that juror No. 11 (Cobb) ‘said the jury did not address the allegations brought out by Lane throughout the trial that Hunt was involved in a CIA conspiracy to kill Kennedy.’”32 And Newsweek reported that another juror, Suzanne Reach, told the Miami Herald (in support of what Cobb said) that what Armstrong said “wasn’t the reason for the verdict.”33

  In classic understatement, Lane announces to his readers in the opening pages of his book that “there is no legal precedent for Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby. More than two decades after the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, the case against his killers was finally tried in a civil action suit brought in the federal courthouse in Miami.” And, of course, representing the people of this country in seeking justice was…Mark Lane.

  By Lane’s own admission, his “most important” witness at the trial was none other than Ms. Lorenz, who, Lane writes, “traveled with the assassins from Miami to Dallas just before the murder.” Lorenz’s New York deposition on January 11, 1985, was read to the Miami jury. Since Lorenz’s original story was so much of a lulu, one would have thought that there wasn’t too much room for improvement. But with Lane holding her hand, she managed to do so, big time. After recounting the meeting at Orlando Bosch’s home, the car trip to Dallas (the group no longer had just three or four automatic weapons, but “cases of machine guns, rifles, thirty-eights [and] forty-fives”), and the arrival at the Dallas motel, she testified that not only did Jack Ruby come to the door during her very short overnight stay at the Dallas motel, but the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt, whom she knew as “Eduardo,” also came to the room, and she saw Hunt deliver an envelope of cash to her friend Sturgis, obviously, the payoff for the assassination. (She testified she had seen Eduardo make previous payments to Sturgis.) And Sturgis, who Marita had previously indicated wouldn’t tell her anything, told her Hunt “had made [all] the arrangements” for their mission and “would provide the operating funds, cover, and plans for exit from the area once the assignment was completed.” And though, in her HSCA testimony, she indicated she only assumed that the Sturgis-led group had killed Kennedy, she testified in the defamation trial that Sturgis later told her that by leaving Dallas she had missed “the really big one” in Dallas. “We killed the President that day. You could have been a part of it—you know, part of history. You should have stayed. It was safe. Everything was covered in advance. No arrests…it was all covered. Very professional.” Lane, in his book, adds triumphantly, “It may have been very professional, but after the testimony of Marita Lorenz was read to a jury in a United States courthouse, it was no longer all covered.”34

  In other words, Lane, in 1966, informed the world in his book Rush to Judgment that the Warren Commission had covered up the identity of the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy, and then, in 1991, finally informed the world in his book Plausible Denial just who those conspirators were. The quarter-of-a-century wait was worth it, at least for me. Lane’s undoubtedly innocent and unsuspecting publisher for Plausible Denial, Thunder’s Mouth Press, laments on the book’s dust jacket that the Miami trial was “historic, yet curiously unpublicized.” I can’t imagine why.

  One of the most amusing stories on the assassination was told by C
hicago mobster Sam Giancana’s brother, Chuck, in his 1992 book (written with Sam Giancana’s grandson, Sam Giancana), Double Cross. I could make a few sardonic asides about the story as it progresses, but I’ll respectfully defer to Chuck here. He doesn’t need me to make his story funny.

  It seems that one day after pasta at Chuck’s home three years after the assassination, older brother Sam told Chuck what really went down. Sam started out by saying that he and the CIA “took care of Kennedy…together.” But as he continued his tale, Sam said a great many other people were also involved. Jack Ruby (who needed help crossing the street on a green light—here I go again—that’s the last interruption) was put in charge of overall coordination of the assassination in Dallas because he was Sam’s representative in Dallas. (Ruby and Oswald, Sam added, “were queer for each other.”) Sam said that “Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson knew about the whole damn thing” because he, Sam, told them about it when he met with them in Dallas several times before the assassination. A “half-dozen fanatical right-wing Texans” were also involved in the assassination, per Sam. The nuts-and-bolts planning for the assassination involved some of the top people on the Dallas police force as well as Mayor Earle Cabell.

  Chuck writes that his brother solicited from several quarters professional killers who were required to be top-notch marksmen. The killers? Two of New Orleans mafioso Carlos Marcello’s men, Charles Harrelson and Jack Lawrence, as well as two of Tampa mafioso Santo Trafficante’s Cuban exile friends. Sam told Chuck that he sent three of his killers down too: Richard Cain, Chuckie Nicoletti, and a fellow named Milwaukee Phil (Felix Anthony Alderisio). So seven assassins in all were sent to Dallas to kill Kennedy, but the actual killers, Sam told Chuck, were Cain and Nicoletti, both firing from the Book Depository Building. Chuck writes that “during the operation, Moonie [Sam’s nickname] said the CIA upper echelon sequestered themselves in a hotel, surrounded by electronic equipment. With the aid of walkie-talkies, the [killers] were able to secure their firing positions.” The CIA, Sam said, had arranged for Dallas police officers J. D. Tippit and Roscoe White to murder Oswald after the assassination, but when Tippit wavered, White was forced to murder Tippit. Oswald’s survival, Sam told Chuck, was “probably the only real screw-up in the whole goddamned deal,” but it was a big one. Since Ruby was assigned to make sure everything went right and it didn’t, he knew that to avoid dying at the hands of “one of Moonie’s vengeful enforcers for a screwed-up job,” he himself would have to silence Oswald, which he did. Sam told Chuck that after the assassination, “for once, we didn’t have to worry about J. Edgar Hoover.” Hoover, Sam said, covered up anything and everything his “boy scouts” found because “he hated the Kennedys as much as anybody and he wasn’t about to have Bobby find his brother’s killers.”

  Oh, by the way, Chuck, who often speaks fondly of his late brother, Sam, informs the reader in his book that Sam had Marilyn Monroe murdered with a lethal dosage of sedatives, and had also been behind the murder of Robert Kennedy in California in 1968.35 I’d hate to read what type of book Chuck Giancana would write about his deceased brother if he hadn’t been so fond of him.

  Not only are brothers fingering their supposedly beloved brothers as being behind the assassination, but sons, still loving their dead fathers, are fingering their fathers. Ricky White, a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed salesman, called a press conference on August 6, 1990, at the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas (a haven for conspiracy theorists and literature that is no longer in existence but at the time was run by Larry N. Howard, J. Gary Shaw, and Larry Ray Harris) and said his father, Roscoe White, a Dallas police officer at the time of the assassination,* was one of three CIA operatives who fired on the president that day.† For good measure, he said his father also killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald, he said, was also part of the conspiracy but fired no shots. Jack Ruby was a co-conspirator, but his role was not specified.

  Where did Ricky White learn about his father’s role in the assassination? His father’s diary, he said, which he found in 1982 in a footlocker inside a shed behind his grandfather’s home in Paris, Texas. But White was unable to produce the diary, the entire basis for his charge, for the throng of reporters at the press conference, claiming it was stolen by an FBI agent who came to his home in Midland, Texas, to interview him in 1988. Though he didn’t have the diary, he recalled for the reporters the diary’s entry for November 22, 1963. His father, a covert U.S. intelligence operative code-named “Mandarin” in the diary, fired the two shots that killed Kennedy from behind the picket fence using his7.65-millimeter Mauser. “Lebanon” was the man in the Book Depository Building that fired two more shots, and “Saul” (the name most likely picked up from Hugh McDonald’s 1978 book, Appointment in Dallas) fired two shots at the president from the Dallas County Records Building. The reason for the assassination, per his father’s diary, was “to eliminate a National Security threat to world-wide peace,” and it was a part of Roscoe White’s “assignment” to join the Dallas Police Department before the assassination.

  White wasn’t content to merely tell a ridiculous story. He insisted on bringing a collective smile to his audience by saying that although he wasn’t quite three years old at the time of the assassination, he recalled seeing his father and four other men practice for the assassination by firing into an automobile on a remote ranch near Van Horn, Texas. Although his father died in 1971 from third-degree burns on 99 percent of his body sustained in an industrial fire and explosion at a site where he worked as a welder, White claimed his father was probably murdered because he wanted to leave his CIA unit.

  None of the allegations Ricky White made at the 1990 press conference had been made in early 1988 when he first indicated to the authorities in Midland, Texas, that he might have some information relating to the assassination. In meetings with representatives of the Midland County DA’s office and FBI agents out of the El Paso office in January of 1988, he said nothing about his father being a CIA agent who was one of three people who shot Kennedy, or that his father had killed Officer J. D. Tippit. Nor did he say anything about his father being murdered because he wanted to leave the CIA. He did say he believed that his father and his father’s mistress, who worked at the Book Depository Building, arranged for Lee Harvey Oswald to get the job he got at the building, and that it was his opinion that his father, Officer J. D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald had conspired to kill Kennedy because all three were U.S. marines who were upset with JFK “for leaving Marines on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.”

  He also had a box of materials he showed the FBI agents. What they found, among the miscellaneous items, was a “hodge-podge of late 1950’s vintage letters” from his father to his mother, miscellaneous receipts and insurance policies of his father, a key, a letter, his father’s military service papers, an address book, correspondence from the HSCA to his mother, Geneva, and two receipts from the HSCA to his mother for photographs she had sent them of Lee Harvey Oswald, one of which, it turned out, was a companion to the backyard photos of Oswald holding the Carcano rifle taken by Marina.36

  How did Roscoe White’s widow, who told the FBI agents she was a distant relative of JFK’s, come into possession of such photos, particularly the backyard one? She told the FBI El Paso agents that her husband was a police photographer for the Dallas Homicide and Robbery Bureau, that he had access to the photographs and simply took some. She said he “put the pictures in a nice album and thought they would be valuable someday.” Dallas assistant DA Jim Owens told the Midland DA that many police officers of that era acquired various sets of photographs and other memorabilia concerning the JFK assassination.

  What about the diary White claimed, at his later press conference, that he found but was then stolen by an FBI agent who came to his home in Midland in 1988? The FBI never went to White’s home in Midland. White went to the Midland office of the FBI, but he told the FBI that in 1976 or 1977 “they” (he did not identify who “they” were,
but he presumably meant HSCA investigators who picked up mostly photographs from his mother on December 31, 1976) took the diary and he never got it back, but his mother had a copy. However, neither White nor his mother were ever able to furnish this alleged copy of the alleged diary to the FBI.

  The El Paso office of the FBI concluded that because of the photos of Oswald that his father had and because his mother told him his father was a friend of Officer J. D. Tippit’s on the Dallas Police Force, Ricky White was “trying to cash in” on the situation with his allegation of a conspiracy involving his father, Tippit, and Oswald. Finding there wasn’t “any basis in fact” in anything Ricky White had to say, the El Paso office of the FBI closed its file on the matter on January 26, 1988, unaware that two years later Ricky White would reemerge, full bore, with new and more sensational charges.37

  Ricky White’s story, of course, was pure moonshine, and didn’t need any more assaults on its veracity, but assassination researchers Gary Mack and David Perry further exposed Ricky White’s claim as a complete hoax. Perry located Dr. Daniel Pearson, who, White claimed, had given electroshock treatments to his mother (since deceased) to force her to erase her memory of the conspiracy. Dr. Pearson told Perry that electroshock treatments can “affect” memory but “don’t erase memory,” and that although he did administer the treatments to Mrs. White in 1966, they were for her severe depression, not to erase or affect memory. This didn’t surprise Perry since he knew Roscoe White had gotten a hardship discharge from the army based on his wife’s depression.

  And Perry and Mack located a man White had said was a hit man in the conspiracy, but he turned out to be a blueberry farmer.38

  When Mack told White three weeks after White’s press conference that he and Perry “have good news for you. We’re convinced your father didn’t kill the president,” Mack said that White obviously “should have been overjoyed and relieved.” Instead, Mack said, White was shocked and speechless. “I waited for him to ask me ‘What do you have that convinces you of my father’s innocence?’ but he never asked. That’s when I knew the story was a hoax.”39