Pena’s bartender at his place, Evaristo Rodriguez, had testified before the Warren Commission that a few days before or after Oswald’s August 9, 1963, confrontation on the street with Carlos Bringuier, whom Rodriguez knew, Oswald came into his bar in the early morning hours with a Latin man (“He could have been a Mexican; he could have been a Cuban”), that Oswald “was drunk” (a very unlikely condition for Oswald), and although Oswald’s companion had ordered a tequila, Oswald asked for a lemonade—a drink, Rodriguez said, they didn’t serve in the bar. Rodriguez asked Pena what to do and Pena said to take a little of the lemon flavoring and squirt in some water.26 Even assuming Rodriguez’s identification of Oswald was accurate (the time, “between 2:30 and 3:00 o’clock in the morning,” and the man being “drunk” do not sound like Oswald, but the man protesting the price of the lemonade, twenty-five cents, as being too high and accusing the owner of the bar, therefore, of being a “capitalist” does), and that he did not make it up, or that he was not one of the great many people after the assassination who were convinced they had seen Oswald somewhere when we know they could not have, the point is that when Orest Pena was called to the stand after Rodriguez and asked if he, Pena, ever saw Oswald at any time other than that alleged night in Pena’s bar when Oswald ordered a lemonade, he answered, “No, I didn’t…I saw him once,” the time at his bar.27 This, of course, flatly contradicts his statement on CBS eleven years later and his HSCA testimony fourteen years later that he had seen Oswald many times with de Brueys.
Indeed, Pena has made contradictory statements as to whether he even saw Oswald that one night at his bar. His bartender, Rodriguez, testified Pena was in the back part of the bar that night and said, “I don’t believe that Orest saw Oswald.”28 Although Pena did tell the FBI in a December 5, 1963, interview that he had seen Oswald at the bar that night, in a June 9, 1964, FBI interview he said he had never told anyone he had seen Oswald in the bar, then proceeded to tell the Warren Commission he didn’t think he had told the FBI this on June 9.29 In view of Pena’s waiting so many years before he came up with his allegation, his “frequently evasive” testimony before committee, and the many conflicts and contradictions in his story, the HSCA concluded the obvious, that Pena “was not a credible witness.”30
One naturally wonders what the origins are for apparent fabrications like Pena’s. But in his case, we may not have to look any further than the peerless Mark Lane. The mere exposure to Lane and his blandishments and suggestions has caused witness after witness in the Kennedy case to experience a remarkable improvement in their memory and suddenly come up with, for the first time, very pro-conspiracy observations. And Mark Lane’s footprints, fingerprints, and palm prints may be all over Pena’s story. It seems that Orest was serving more than booze at his place at 117 Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Rooms at his Habana club were also being used for prostitution, and when he was arrested for it, whom did he seek out? Not a New Orleans attorney, but Mark Lane. Lane, in his book Plausible Denial, doesn’t say when this was, but it clearly was before Pena’s public accusations were aired on CBS in 1975, since Lane suggests to his readers that Pena told him things he did not already know. There is a suggestion that Lane never got paid any fee by Pena for his representation. The quid pro quo? “He [Pena] told me that if I did so [represented him] he would tell me all that he knew about Oswald.” Since everyone already knows the only information—pro-conspiracy—Lane has any interest in, Pena would have known what Lane wanted to hear. Lane writes that “Pena told me that Oswald had worked for the FBI. He showed me the buildings in New Orleans where de Brueys and Oswald had met.” Not only, per Lane, was Pena privy to all this information, but remarkably he even knew that “the CIA was aware of the relationship [between Oswald and de Brueys].”31
One other New Orleans person has come forward with an allegation of a connection between Oswald and the FBI. This one, if true, goes beyond Pena’s story in its conspiratorial implications. Adrian Alba, the part owner and operator of the Crescent City Garage in New Orleans who became acquainted with Oswald when the latter worked next door at the Reily coffee company in May, June, and July of 1963 (see Oswald biography), told the HSCA in a 1978 deposition that one day during the subject period, an FBI agent from out of town entered his garage, showed his credentials, and requested to use one of the Secret Service cars garaged there, a dark green Studebaker. (In an earlier interview, he told HSCA investigators it was a “light green Plymouth.”)32 That same day or the next, Alba, about a quarter of a block away, claims he observed this agent, inside the Studebaker, hand a white envelope to Oswald (who was standing outside the car) in front of the Reily coffee company. There was no exchange of words between Oswald and the agent, and Oswald, having been in a bent-over position to receive the envelope, turned away from the car window and held the envelope close to his chest as he walked back to the Reily building “in a crouched position.” Alba said he believes he saw a similar transaction a day or so later, but he was farther away and did not see what was handed to Oswald. He did not recall when the Secret Service car was returned to his garage or by whom.33*
One of the big problems with Alba’s story is that he waited so many years (fifteen) to tell it. In two interviews with the FBI in New Orleans, one on November 23, 1963, the very day after the assassination, and one two days later, Alba made no reference to the suspicious incident he recalled so vividly fifteen years later.34 In his lengthy testimony before the Warren Commission on April 16, 1964, he again never mentioned the incident. And it must be noted that by April 1964, conspiracy theories that Oswald may have been, among many other charges, a paid agent of the CIA or FBI were already rampant and publicized in America. Indeed, though Alba did not address himself directly to this fact in his testimony, he did say, “Things I have seen on television, of course, and read in the newspapers, and so forth, has laid out some suggestive pattern that Lee Oswald was a subversive, et cetera, toward the country, and maybe even the President, or something; but prior to that assassination he gave me no indication at any time he was burdened with such a charge, or that he was concerned or involved with anything of that nature.” And at the end of his testimony, when Warren Commission counsel asked him, “If you can’t think of anything else, anything else you would like to add at this point, I have no further questions,” Alba said, “I would feel free if there was, but I don’t think there’s anything further that I would like to add that can be of any help to you.”35
What perhaps destroys Alba’s credibility about the incident even more than the fifteen-year delay in telling the authorities is the reason he has given for the delay. Although he told Summers that in 1963 he was fearful of telling his story36 (even though when Alba was interviewed by the FBI back then, Penn Jones and his ridiculous “mysterious deaths” allegation hadn’t yet surfaced, that silliness not starting until 1966), he told the HSCA that the very first time he even remembered these two incidents was in 1970, seven years later, when his memory was triggered by a television commercial of the Rosenberg furniture store in New Orleans, which urged people to shop at the store by cab. The commercial showed, Alba said, a “Jewish merchant, in a bent-with-age posture running out to the cab” to pay the fare for the customer.37
The HSCA investigated Alba’s story. Among other things, the committee found that in 1963, “several Secret Service Agents had signed out two Studebakers, a Ford and a Chevrolet [from Alba’s garage] at various times, but the records do not indicate that any FBI agents had signed out any of these cars.”* The HSCA rejected Alba’s story as being of “doubtful reliability.”38 Further indication of Alba’s lack of reliability is that he told Case Closed author Gerald Posner that “it was a fact” that Robert Kennedy had personally selected Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Castro, and when Oswald instead killed his brother, RFK went around crying out, at the Justice Department, “Oh God, I killed my brother, I killed my brother.”39
The HSCA thoroughly investigated every alleged association between Oswald
and the FBI and found nothing at all. Since the committee concluded that Oswald killed Kennedy, it also logically concluded that “absent a relationship between Oswald and the FBI, grounds for suspicions of FBI complicity in the assassination become remote.”40
When the conspiracy theorists accuse the FBI of being behind the Kennedy assassination, the object of their scrutiny is always J. Edgar Hoover. But they virtually never bother to present a motive other than that Hoover “hated” Kennedy.41 Actually, though no one disputes that Hoover intensely disliked RFK, his nominal superior at the Department of Justice who did not treat him with the respect he required of others, the evidence is at best ambiguous as to whether he harbored the same animosity for JFK, though no one says affirmatively that he liked JFK. Former assistant FBI director William Sullivan, whom Hoover forced to retire in 1971 after Sullivan had asked him to resign (telling Hoover he ruled the bureau by fear and he did not intend to be intimidated), is one of the few who has publicly said that Hoover did not like JFK. But he does not offer anything substantive in his book to support this, limiting himself to assertions such as “the director never disguised his true feelings for Jack Kennedy…when he was among his close aides,” without favoring us with even one quote or paraphrase of just what Hoover said.42 What we do know is that in addition to the Kennedy glamour being inimical to his starched-collar notion of public office, the sanctimonious Hoover was apparently offended by Kennedy’s sexual hijinks, particularly with married women.
Conspiracy theorists who make an extra effort to come up with a motive claim that Hoover had Kennedy killed to keep his job. You see, Hoover was coming up for mandatory retirement under federal law on January 1, 1965, when he would be seventy years old, and unless there was a presidential waiver,† which was much more likely under President Johnson (whom he was very friendly with, being neighbors in Washington for nineteen years, and with whom he shared a dislike for Ivy League patricians in Washington) than under Kennedy, he’d be out of a job in a little over a year.43 Apart from the preposterous notion that Hoover would be behind Kennedy’s murder to keep his job or for any other reason, conspiracy theorists, when they excitedly posit their theory, never stop to realize that even if a particular person or group had some motive to kill Kennedy, that person or group would have an even more compelling motive not to do it—if they did it and got caught, they could be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to death. It should be added that Hoover was a man who was so concerned about his image and reputation that the head of the Dallas FBI field office ordered that Oswald’s note to FBI agent James P. Hosty be destroyed because he knew that if Hoover found out about it, he would go orbital with anger over exposing him and his agency to the charge of negligence in not alerting the Secret Service to Oswald. And this same fellow, Hoover, apparently had no fear of his possibly being exposed to the charge of murder? Former attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, nominally Hoover’s boss at the Department of Justice when Katzenbach was attorney general, told the HSCA that “Mr. Hoover resented criticism to a degree greater than any other person that I have ever known.”44
One of the few conspiracy theorists who has added a touch of substance to the heretofore very simplistic thinking about Hoover’s alleged connection with the assassination does not conclude that Hoover was behind the assassination or that he was a co-conspirator. Instead, he stitches a series of facts and assumptions (presented as facts to his readers) together to support the scenario that the mob killed Kennedy, and that Hoover learned of its plans through the report of two Miami FBI agents and elsewhere and, wanting to keep his job, never did anything to prevent the murder from happening. In Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy, author Mark North builds his case around Florida Mafia chieftain Santo (referred to by some as Santos) Trafficante allegedly telling Cuban exile José Aleman in September of 1962 that President Kennedy was “going to be hit.” North’s book is perhaps the only one in the entire library of conspiracy books that postulates a theory that, though almost assuredly not true, has some commonsense inferences on its side (other than that some group had a motive to kill Kennedy, so therefore it must have), which, if true, though not establishing a crime, would forever mark Hoover as one of history’s greatest villains. It is therefore surprising that his book and theory have received all the attention of a new fly in the forest from his peers in the conspiracy community.
A note about Trafficante: Though Trafficante has frequently been referred to, as here, as the head of the Florida Mafia, and though he was certainly the most powerful Mafia figure in Florida (attending the infamous November 14, 1957, meeting of the mob’s leadership in Apalachin, New York), the Trafficante family’s principal sphere of influence, according to the McClellan Committee, was in Tampa and central Florida, not Miami and Florida’s east coast. Trafficante’s father, Santo Trafficante Sr., a Sicilian immigrant, was one of the pioneers and overseers, along with Meyer Lansky (the mob’s moneyman, who first opened up Havana to the mob—with the blessing of his new friend, military strongman Colonel Fulgencio Batista—way back in 1933), of mob gaming interests in wide-open Havana. Grooming his son, one of six, to be a mobster, Santo Sr. sent Santo Jr., while in his twenties, to New York to serve his apprenticeship under Mafia boss Carlos Gambino. Unlike nearly all other Mafia leaders, Santo Jr. became well read and gave the appearance of being moderately cultured and sophisticated.* His lawyer, Frank Ragano, described him as wise and very clever. Santo Jr., who lived in Havana for several years, took over the Havana operations from his father in the early 1950s (and the Tampa operations in 1954 when his father died). But in Havana, Santo Jr. was always just under Lansky, who himself took up residence in Havana during periods in the 1950s as well as earlier, between 1937 and 1940, when he was operating the gambling casino at the Hotel Nacional and the local racetrack, which he had leased from the National City Bank of New York. Havana was Lansky’s empire, and at the time it was a virtual playground for wealthy Americans with sybaritic appetites.
Trafficante’s primary base was Havana’s Sans Souci Hotel and Casino. From 1952 through 1958, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s last of two reigns (the first being from 1940 to 1944, though the general was the most powerful man in Cuba for years before then), the San Souci (along with eleven other casinos or hotels the mob either owned or controlled, including the Deauville, which Trafficante also ran, and Lansky’s two main hotels, the Hotel Nacional and the spectacular Havana Riviera) shared its proceeds with Batista. The mob, and reportedly U.S. intelligence, had helped return Batista to power in an almost bloodless military coup on March 10, 1952. He remained in power for six years until he was overthrown by Castro’s revolution, fleeing from the island by plane on January 1, 1959.45 When Castro assumed power in 1959, he ordered all the casinos closed. For all practical purposes, this had already been done. Mobs of Cubans, angry at the rule of Batista, had taken over the city. They had stormed the casinos, overturned card tables and roulette wheels, and thrown slot machines into the street. Lansky fled back to the states, but Castro detained Trafficante in a small jail for several months, though he eventually agreed to release him.46†
Like his New Orleans intimate, Carlos Marcello, in 1963 Trafficante was not a member of the “national commission,” the nine-member group that made decisions of national importance to the Mafia.47
José Aleman’s story first appeared in a long article about Trafficante in the May 16, 1976, edition of the Washington Post. Aleman was a young, rich revolutionary in Batista’s Cuba whose father, José Aleman Sr., had been the minister of education under Ramón Grau San Martin, a previous president. Aleman Jr. was involved in a March 13, 1957, failed attack on the presidential palace to overthrow Batista. At the time, Aleman was the leader of Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, a group of militant Cuban students who were supportive of Castro. “Our main trouble is Batista,” Aleman was quoted as saying around that time. “Kill him or get him out of the country and Cuba could
return to a democracy.”48 But Castro turned out to be worse, in Aleman’s eyes, than Batista, and Aleman was forced into exile as a counterrevolutionary. His wealthy father had left Cuba for Florida before the revolution, becoming very big in Miami real estate with his ownership of beachfront hotels, Miami Stadium, and other interests worth around $20 million.49
When Aleman’s father died in 1950, the inheritance taxes were so high that Aleman’s family had to sell Miami Stadium to pay them. Coupled with other business reverses and poor management, by 1962 Aleman was almost in debt, only owning the run-down Scott Bryan Hotel in Miami Beach. In the late 1950s Aleman had become friendly with agents in the FBI office in Miami when he convinced them, early on, that Castro was actually a Communist (not advertised by the “Bearded One” initially), and particularly when they found him to be “reliable” and a valuable source of information by alerting them to exiles he suspected as being agents of Castro. He told the Washington Post’s George Crile III that in September of 1962 a revolutionary colleague of his (George Nobregas) told him that Trafficante, whom he had never met and only knew by reputation as a casino operator in Havana, wanted to meet him. Trafficante, his colleague said, felt indebted to Aleman’s cousin, Garcia Bango, an attorney who represented Trafficante in Cuba and had succeeded in getting him out of a Cuban detention center and returned to the United States. Trafficante wanted to express his gratitude by helping Aleman out of his current financial difficulties. Aleman said that when they met at the Scott Bryan, the Tampa-based mob chief told him that a $1.5 million Teamster loan to replace his ramshackle hotel with a twelve-story condominium, and a penthouse apartment for Aleman, had already been cleared by Jimmy Hoffa. During an evening of talk that followed, Trafficante, Aleman said, started speaking out against Kennedy’s treatment of Hoffa, who he felt was a friend of blue-collar people. “Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him,” Aleman quoted Trafficante as saying. When Aleman responded that he felt Kennedy would be reelected, he said Trafficante responded, “No, José, he is going to be hit.” Though he had several meetings with Trafficante thereafter, the loan never came through. Aleman told the Post that he informed his FBI contacts of Trafficante’s statement that Kennedy was going to be hit.50
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