Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  To believe the conspiracy theorists who contend that organized crime was behind Kennedy’s murder, we’d have to completely overlook the fact that, as opposed to its counterparts in Sicily,* the mob in America has absolutely no history of going after public officials. The mob not only has religiously avoided doing so, but has taken severe, affirmative steps to prevent it. For example, in 1935, when Bronx racketeer Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer became a target of racket-busting New York State special prosecutor Thomas Dewey in New York City, he went to Lucky Luciano and Albert Anastasia (the head of Murder, Inc., the death enforcement arm of the national crime syndicate) demanding Dewey’s death. When Luciano refused and Schultz decided he was going to do it on his own, Luciano ordered his murder on October 23, 1935, in a Newark, New Jersey, bar and grill. “[Luciano] found almost universal agreement among underworld chieftains,” mob writer Peter Maas notes, “that if Schultz were allowed to murder Dewey, it could trigger exactly the kind of all-out drive against organized crime that they were anxious to avoid. Thus, Schultz himself had to be liquidated.”78

  Likewise, no one in organized crime made a move against Prohibition agent Elliot Ness when he was trying to put Al Capone and his gang out of business in Chicago in the late 1920s. The mob has never gone after law enforcement officers in this country. One would literally have to go all the way back to 1890 to find anyone who even accused the Mafia of killing a member of law enforcement or, for that matter, any public official. In that year, nineteen members of the New Orleans Mafia were indicted for murdering the first superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, one David Hennessy, as he was walking home on the drizzly night of October 15, 1890. His friend Bill O’Connor, a captain of the Boylan Protection League who had been walking with him, had just split off to walk to his own nearby residence when five men ambushed Hennessy with a fusillade of more than fifteen bullets, six of which hit Hennessy, who fired back at the fleeing men. O’Connor, hearing the shots, ran back to Hennessy, and kneeling down beside him, asked, “Who gave it to you, Dave?” “Dagoes [a slur for Italians],” Hennessy whispered back. Hennessy lapsed into unconsciousness and died the following day.79

  But the following year on March 13, 1891, after a highly publicized two-week trial against nine of the defendants (the DA decided to try the remaining ten separately at a later date), the jury acquitted six and couldn’t reach a verdict on three. The jury foreman said that “the state made out a poor case.” Another juror said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t please the whole community, but I had to do what I thought was right.” Thousands in New Orleans were aghast at the verdicts and a local firebrand lawyer, W. S. Parkerson, declared at a huge rally the next day that “when courts fail, the people must act. Our chief of police is assassinated in our very midst by the Mafia society, and its assassins again turned loose on the community. Are you going to let it continue?” “No, no,” the crowd roared back, “Hang the dagoes,” and proceeded to form a lynching mob of over twelve thousand that stormed and broke through the barricaded Parish Prison and ended up riddling with bullets and murdering eleven of the nineteen Mafia members, the largest recorded lynching in U.S. history. Eight of the nineteen had escaped by hiding well within the jail, one in the women’s section. Of the ten defendants who hadn’t yet been tried, five were murdered. All charges were dropped against the remaining five following the March 14 massacre. Although President Benjamin Harrison publicly expressed his regrets and took $25,000 out of a special White House fund to be distributed among the families of the victims, no member of the lynch mob was ever prosecuted, the consensus being that vigilante justice had been called for. Even a New York Times editorial on March 18, 1891, said that although the lynching “is to be deplored, it would be difficult to find any one individual who…deplored it very much.” Indeed, the New Orleans incident ignited strong anti-Italian sentiments throughout the entire country. Were the murdered Italians, in fact, guilty? A subsequent investigation by the “Federal District Attorney” of Louisiana found that the evidence was “not conclusive one way or the other,” and his office was “unable to obtain any direct evidence connecting these persons with the Mafia or any other association of a similar character in the city.”80 A 1999 movie, Vendetta, starring Christopher Walken, was about the Hennessy murder and its aftermath.

  In any event, a precedent dating back to the 1890s when the Mafia was in its infancy, particularly one that was not confirmed by any convictions, hardly supports the proposition that the modern-day American Mafia goes after public figures.

  In their book The Plot to Kill the President, the authors, Robert Blakey and Richard Billings, in addition to relying on the Hennessy case, and trying hard to show that the mob going after law enforcement or public officials was not unprecedented, mention a 1926 murder of the mayor of little Culp, Illinois, but they can only speculate that he was killed “probably because he had been corrupted by a bootlegging syndicate,” the authors not even alleging that the syndicate was the Mafia; the murder of an assistant state attorney in Chicago, also in 1926, “who was believed [the authors give no source for this “belief” of theirs] to have been looking into the activities of Al Capone”; and the murder of an Illinois state legislator in 1936 who was killed “in all likelihood [the authors are again speculating, and offer no source] by the Capone gang.” When the pickin’s are this slim and speculative, the authors would have done themselves a favor by not even mentioning the above killings. To go from what they have dredged out of the past to help support their belief that the Mafia murdered Kennedy (particularly when they do not present one stitch of credible evidence to support this conclusion) is, to be charitable, wholly unjustified. Even the authors are forced to concede that “office holders who were victims of organized crime [the authors offered no evidence that any office holder was murdered by organized crime] violence generally served at a low level of government. They each had been in close contact with the underworld—either as conscientious opponents or as corrupt collaborators.”81

  When the HSCA asked Chicago mobster Lenny Patrick if he thought organized crime was behind Kennedy’s assassination, he responded dismissively, “In my opinion, I don’t think they are crazy…It is silly. They know that. They wouldn’t do that.”82

  “Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno articulated the principles of the game,” writes author Anthony Summers. “It was a strict underground rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer.”83 All the more so, of course, the president of the United States.

  With this long history, are we to believe that organized crime decided not only to completely change course, but to start, of all places, at the very top of the hill by murdering the most powerful public official and man on earth? Are we really to believe that the Mafia, which considered it too risky to kill a police officer, found the risk acceptable if the victim was the president of the United States? One whose brother was the chief law enforcement officer in the country? As mafioso Johnny Roselli told Los Angeles mob boss Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratiano, “It’s against the fucking rules [of the mob] to kill a cop, so now we’re going to kill the President?”84 And instead of employing reliable and close-lipped professional killers to do the job, which the mob almost invariably does, getting the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to carry out its mission? It would have been the most insane, unwise, senseless, and self-destructive thing the mob could have ever done. And we know that, despite its criminality, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations put it, “Mafia figures are rational, pragmatic businessmen.”85 As I told the jury at the London trial, when the Mafia came to America from Sicily, “they didn’t leave their brains behind in Palermo.”86

  Out of the literally thousands of mob murders throughout the years, the HSCA could only come up with two examples in mob history where the mob had someone outside its organization commit murder for it, and both of these murders took place after JFK’s assassination: the murder of a Kansas City businessman in 1970 by four young b
lack men, and that of a fellow mafioso, Joseph Colombo, in New York City in 1971 by a young black man with a petty criminal record.87 And with respect to the second murder, of Colombo, this was one mobster being killed on the orders of one or more other mobsters. And the mob and everyone else knows that finding who was behind this type of killing (which the authorities never did) has never had a high priority in law enforcement—the thinking being that one less mobster is one less crime figure law enforcement has to worry about.

  The only other example where the Mafia broke with its almost invariable rule of not going outside the mob to get someone to commit a serious crime for it involved Victor Riesel, a nationally syndicated labor columnist who, in 1956, had been writing unfavorably about six or seven New York City locals of the United Auto Workers, which had close ties to the Thomas Lucchese crime family, one of the Mafia’s five families in New York City. On the evening of April 5, 1956, a drug addict unconnected to the mob approached Riesel on Broadway and threw sulfuric acid in his face, blinding Riesel. A subsequent investigation revealed that the mob had paid the addict five hundred dollars to do the deed.88

  That’s it. Two murders and one aggravated assault in the long history of the mob among literally thousands of killings and assaults.

  The HSCA stated, “A person like Oswald—young, active in controversial political causes, apparently not subject to the internal discipline of a criminal organization—would appear to be the least likely candidate for the role of Mafia hit man, especially in such an important murder. Gunmen used in organized crime killings have traditionally been selected with utmost deliberation and care, the most important considerations being loyalty and a willingness to remain silent if apprehended. These are qualities best guaranteed by past participation in criminal activities.”89 To believe the mob (supposedly “wise guys”) would employ an unknown quantity like Oswald to carry out its most important murder ever turns logic completely on its head. Indeed, the only thing the mob would know about him was that he was terribly strange and unstable, and additionally seemed to love Fidel Castro, someone the mob hated for taking away its multibillion-dollar gambling empire in Havana.

  Quite apart from the extreme improbability that the mob, which already felt enormous governmental heat from RFK’s Justice Department, would do something that could increase that heat—I told the London jury, to a degree akin “to the surface of the sun”—even if the mob were crazy enough to do so, it would never in a million years get the markedly unhinged and unreliable Lee Harvey Oswald and almost childlike Jack Ruby to do its bidding. Oswald and Ruby. Two nuts.

  Interestingly enough, Carlos Marcello, the portly, five-foot six-inch head of the Mafia in New Orleans (believed to be the smallest Mafia “family” in the country at the time, with only about twelve members), who always insisted to the media that he was only a tomato salesman who dabbled in real estate investments, allegedly made a threat to kill Kennedy in September of 1962 and to do it with a “nut,” no less. And when conspiracy theorists get down to their most serious discourse, such as lengthy books alleging the mob’s being behind Kennedy’s murder, it’s not generally the national leadership they accuse, but one of two mob leaders, Marcello or Florida mob leader Santo Trafficante. (As we saw, G. Robert Blakey believes both were likely involved.) And of the two, Marcello has been the principal suspect.*

  The individual to whom Marcello allegedly made the threat was one Edward Becker. Becker, at the time a licensed private investigator in California working for a corporate client on the Billie Sol Estes financial scam, is presently living in retirement in Las Vegas, Nevada. He’s had a multifaceted career, including coauthoring a book about mobster Johnny Roselli, being an investigative reporter for the Oakland Tribune, and producing and writing a local Los Angeles television show.

  In a series of five lengthy telephone conversations† between August 13 and September 26, 1999, Becker (eighty-two at the time) told me he was “friendly” with the mob “to this very day.” On the September 1962 day in question, Becker said he was at Marcello’s Churchill Farms, his 6,500-acre estate in Jefferson Parish outside New Orleans, through the auspices of Carl Roppolo, a close family friend of Marcello’s whom Marcello affectionately referred to as his “nephew.” (And Roppolo referred to Marcello as his “uncle.”) In addition to Roppolo, Jack Liberto (Marcello’s barber and a close friend) was at Churchill Farms. Earlier in the day, Roppolo and Becker had pitched a legitimate business deal (ultimately, never agreed on) to Marcello at his office in the Town and Country Motel in the city, and after the meeting Marcello drove the group in his black Cadillac to his sprawling farmhouse to relax.

  Becker, by most accounts a colorful character whom people opened up to, had worked as the director of public relations for the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas from 1955 to 1958 when it was controlled by the Chicago mob, finally leaving after his boss, Gus Greenbaum, and Greenbaum’s wife, Bess, were the victims of an underworld killing in Phoenix. Because Marcello knew of Becker’s background in Las Vegas (“Greenbaum was dead and I was still alive, so I must have been okay”), and also knew that Becker had been friendly with Johnny Roselli, as well as Becker’s having had entree to him through his “nephew,” Becker believes that Marcello felt “comfortable” with him. As was second nature to him as a private eye, and because he says he has always been “fascinated” by the mob and its culture (as are millions of Americans), Becker said he didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to hear the legendary mobster emote. The way he puts it, it “was fun” to him, saying he found big-time mobsters “interesting people. It’s not easy to crack that world, and when you do, you take advantage of the situation.” With Roppolo and Marcello’s barber not in the room at the time, having “decided to wander around the farmhouse and grounds,” Becker says he “intentionally provoked” Marcello (known to friend and foe in Louisiana as the “Little Man” because of his height) into talking about what was going on in his life by saying, “These SOB’s [the Kennedys], they’re really going after everybody,” and “Bobby Kennedy is really giving you a rough time,”* whereupon Marcello, per Becker, exploded in anger that he intended to kill not only Robert Kennedy but also JFK, explaining that “the dog [JFK] will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail [RFK],” but if the dog’s head were cut off, it would die. Marcello also uttered what Becker (whose mother is half Italian and who grew up in an Italian neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut, but spoke few words of Italian) construed from Marcello’s voice and demeanor to be a “Sicilian curse,” the essence of which Becker remembered phonetically: “Livarsi na petra di la scarpa” (“Take the stone out of my shoe,” a translation he said he got not long after the incident from an Italian friend of his in Las Vegas).

  When Becker told Marcello that if Marcello did this he would immediately become a suspect (because of the well-publicized effort the Kennedy administration was making to re-deport him), Marcello responded, “You [referring to himself] get a nut to do it.”

  Assuming for the sake of argument that this conversation took place, this sequence, of course, is very important. If Marcello had, without prompting, brought up the “nut” reference, it could possibly mean he had already given some thought to the matter. But Becker was very, very clear with me that Marcello’s “nut” remark was a spontaneous response to Becker’s warning to him.†

  But, of course, if Marcello had given the matter some prior thought, and if he or any other mob leader did actually intend to kill the president, not more than a few moments’ reflection would be necessary to yield the obvious course of action he’d have to take.‡ The inevitable question that presents itself is this: If any person or group of people had the resources (which organized-crime figures surely do) to employ a third party to kill the president of the United States, what would that person or group then do? Would they hire someone who is an expert gunman with a track record of successful murders, a reliable, professional hit man with a proven history of being closed-mouthed, thereby greatly reducing the like
lihood that any finger of suspicion would ever be pointed back at them? Or would they get a nut to do it, increasing the likelihood immeasurably that something would go wrong and the trail would lead back to them, or the nut would simply point the finger at them, and their only defense would be that they could say to the authorities, “Why would I get a nut to do something like this?” When the choice is between no finger of suspicion against you at all, and a finger of suspicion against you whose only limited benefit allows you to say, “Why would I hire a nut like this?” the choice can only be the former. And this isn’t just abstract, esoteric logic. This is the very, very simplest of common sense. Show me any precedent at all for the mob taking the opposite option.