Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  On March 12, 1977, Aleman was interviewed by HSCA staff investigator Gaeton Fonzi, and Fonzi’s report of the interview said that “Aleman…got the impression that Trafficante was hinting that Hoffa was going to make the hit, not him, and that Kennedy would never make it to the election because of Hoffa.”51

  When Aleman, wearing an expensive pin-striped suit, testified before the HSCA on September 27, 1978, the heart of his story to the Washington Post remained the same, but the details and interpretation differed. The meetings with Trafficante were in June and July of 1963, not September of 1962, Aleman now said. Also, the reason for the original meeting with Trafficante was entirely different from what he told the Post.

  Aleman: “Mr. George Nobregas came to me and said that J. J. Vila, director of public relations in the city of Miami, wanted to see me because he had a message from President Bosch of the Dominican Republic, and President Bosch was a man that was very grateful to my father and that he wanted to talk to me about bringing to the Dominican Republic a lot of businessmen and whoever wanted to invest there.”

  HSCA counsel Gary Cornwell: “So you understood that it was a request from people with business interests?”

  Aleman: “Yes…At the same time, he said that one of the possible individuals who was interested in going was Santos Trafficante, going to the Dominican Republic.”

  Moreover, although Aleman testified that Trafficante did mention a Teamster loan to him, Trafficante added that “Hoffa could not secure the loan so far.”

  When HSCA counsel asked Aleman what he took the words “he is going to be hit” to mean, the bespectacled, distinguished-looking Aleman, speaking slightly broken English, said that Trafficante may only have meant that Kennedy was “going to be hit with a lot of votes from the Republicans or anything…The way he said that word, I interpreted with a lot of votes from the Republican Party or something like that.” But clearly, Aleman, for reasons of his own, probably his fear of retaliation by organized crime (it didn’t help that he knew Trafficante was in the next room, listening to his testimony),* was not testifying truthfully here. If Trafficante said what Aleman said he did, Aleman could not possibly have construed the words to mean what he told the HSCA. Additionally, HSCA investigator Fonzi, in his 1977 interview of Aleman, clearly got the impression that he was talking about murder, not Republican votes. I mean, since when is “Jimmy Hoffa” a synonym for “Republican votes”? Aleman added in his testimony before the HSCA, “This happened fifteen years ago and to the best of my recollection I think that is the word [“hit”] he put. I am not saying positively that. I mean, the wording he put was something he [Kennedy] is not going to make it…He is not going to be re-elected. In a long conversation like that I didn’t pay too much attention on it.”52

  From this very shaky foundation, North, in Act of Treason, assumes as fact that Trafficante definitely did tell Aleman that Kennedy was going to be hit, and that the hit he was referring to was not by Hoffa but by his close associate, Carlos Marcello, who, North assumes as fact, had told Trafficante of it, and that Marcello and organized crime did in fact thereafter have Kennedy murdered (for which there is no evidence). To tie Hoover into it all, North accepts without question Aleman’s statement to the Post that he did tell his FBI contacts at the time about Trafficante’s threatening words. North then asserts that the agents wrote up a report of the incident, which he says included Trafficante’s threat, and that Hoover eventually saw it. Though he offers no support for this assertion, his assumption is a reasonable one.

  Additionally, North has a compelling point on his side. In the 1976 Washington Post article, the author, George Crile III, says that when he asked Aleman’s two FBI contacts, George Davis and Paul Scranton, “to comment on Aleman’s conversations with Trafficante,” though they acknowledged frequent contacts with Aleman, “both declined to comment,” explaining they “would have to have clearance.” This is common, and hence, not troubling. But then Scranton added, per Crile, “I wouldn’t want to do anything to embarrass the Bureau.” One very strong inference from this is that Aleman had, indeed, told the agents of Trafficante’s alleged threat. However, the FBI could be embarrassed not only if the agents did put the threats in their report and their superiors did nothing about it, but also if they didn’t bother to put the threats in their report—that is, bureau officials would be embarrassed by their own blunders as well as by those of their men in the field, as with the Hosty and Shanklin situation. Assuming Aleman did tell the agents what Trafficante allegedly told him, my guess is that they did not put it in their reports, though I in no way feel serene about this conclusion. I conclude this for several reasons. Crile writes, “Aleman says that he reported this conversation to his FBI contacts, who expressed interest only in Trafficante’s business proposals. Aleman assumed that they dismissed the Kennedy warnings as gangland braggadocio.” However, Aleman told Crile that on the day of the assassination the agents came out to see him and suddenly had a lot of interest in what Trafficante said. “They wanted to know more and more,” Aleman said, adding that they stayed until they had explored every possible angle and then told him to keep the conversation confidential.53

  The main reason I don’t believe the agents put Trafficante’s alleged threat in their reports is that the HSCA reviewed all FBI reports submitted in 1962 and 1963 by the agents dealing with Aleman, and the reports “did not reveal a record of any such disclosure or comments at the time.”54 North, in his book, makes a fairly good argument, but only at the cost of not telling his readers the absolutely critical fact that the FBI reports from the Miami agents contained no reference to Trafficante’s alleged threat.

  The HSCA also said (again, not mentioned by North in his book) that “the FBI agent who served as Aleman’s contact during that period denied ever being told any such information by Aleman.”55 But the HSCA gives no citation of authority for that assertion so we don’t know, for sure, whether the committee was talking about Davis or Scranton. However, almost for sure, it was Davis. Through a retired FBI agent contact, I wrote to Davis’s last known address in West End, North Carolina, seeking his comments on the Aleman matter, and received a letter back from his widow on July 1, 2000, that he had died the previous August. I had no address for Scranton, but she forwarded my letter to a retired FBI agent, Bill Kelly, who worked with both of them in 1963 in Miami.

  Kelly told me that he and George Davis were assigned to the Internal Security-Cuba section of the Miami field office, and the section was broken down into an anti-Castro squad (working with anti-Castro Cuban exiles), which Davis headed, and a pro-Castro squad (investigating Cuban exiles and Americans who were pro-Castro), of which he, Kelly, was a member. Unofficially, they were called the “Tamale Squads.” Though he did not know Aleman, Kelly said that Davis, not Scranton, would have been Aleman’s FBI contact because his recollection (which he later confirmed with two other retired agents from the Miami field office) was that Scranton did not work Internal Security. His principal job was “police training coordinator,” and he was also assigned to the organized-crime squad. Since even in 1978, in his appearance before the HSCA, Aleman spoke broken English, I assume he spoke much worse English in 1963, and since there may have been a communication problem, I asked Kelly if Davis spoke Spanish. “George didn’t speak a word of Spanish. We used to kid him about it.” Before Castro ascended to power in 1959, Kelly said, no one in the Miami FBI office spoke Spanish. “There wasn’t any need for it. Davis had been working Internal Security since 1956, and he just stayed on even after Castro took over. There was no better or more respected agent in the entire FBI than George Davis. As early as 1956, when no one would listen, he told the State Department that Castro was a Communist.” Kelly said that although Davis didn’t speak Spanish, Scranton did. “My guess is that George took Scranton along when he spoke to Aleman.”56

  I asked Kelly to try to locate Scranton for me so I could interview him. Kelly finally reached Scranton by phone several days later. Scranton,
in his eighties, had just had a massive stroke and was not inclined to speak to me, so I gave Kelly some questions to ask Scranton for me. In a July 31, 2000, telephone conversation with Kelly, Scranton, though speaking slowly, Kelly said, because of his stroke, said very clearly and deliberately, “I have absolutely no recollection of Aleman ever having said that Trafficante told Aleman before the assassination, or any other time, that Kennedy was to be hit. If Aleman had made that statement to us, I guarantee I would have written it up, even if George [Davis] hadn’t, for transmission to [FBI] headquarters.”

  Scranton also confirmed that he did not work Internal Security, but Kelly, feeling he already knew the answer (that Scranton could speak Spanish), did not ask Scranton why he went along with Davis on the Aleman interview. Kelly also did not ask Scranton why he told the Post’s Crile, “I wouldn’t want to do anything to embarrass the Bureau,” and when I asked Kelly, who was very helpful, to call Scranton back on this point a few days later, Scranton was in the hospital with another stroke. When Kelly called Scranton back on August 9, after Scranton had been released from the hospital, and asked him if he had made the subject remark to the Post’s Crile, he told Kelly he did not recall telling Crile this, but that it was a quarter of a century ago and in any event his memory had been affected by his recent strokes.

  As circumstantial evidence as to what happened in this case, I asked Kelly how many people in the FBI chain of command would have seen a memo from Davis or Scranton quoting Trafficante as saying Kennedy was going to be hit. “I may leave out someone along the way,” Kelly said, “but at a minimum, Davis’s memo would go to Howard Albaugh, the supervisor of the Internal Security section of the [Miami FBI field] office, then to Wesley Grapp, the agent in charge of the [Miami field] office, then, because of its extreme importance, it would be teletyped [not airtelled, he said, which was priority mail] to the Internal Security-Cuba section at headquarters in [Washington, D.C.], and, because of Trafficante, to the organized-crime division, then it would go to either the assistant director of internal security or domestic intelligence, or both, as well as to the assistant director back then who had responsibility for organized crime, then to Clyde Tolson, the assistant director, then to the old man [Hoover].” Kelly added that even if, for some strange reason, the memo had been sent by Airtel, before it was placed in an envelope the same people in Miami would have seen it, and when it arrived at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., it would have been opened by a clerk at the bureau and the same people at headquarters would have seen it. When I told Kelly about the charge in North’s book, he said, “That’s just ridiculous. Hoover would never suppress something like this. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t because he’d know too many other people had already seen the report.” Conceding that Hoover was a “dictator,” Kelly said Hoover was “a good man, a benevolent dictator.”57

  Now let’s look at what Mark North gives his readers as support for his assertion that there was an FBI report of the Trafficante-Aleman incident and it did reach Hoover’s desk. “Pursuant to standard FBI procedure, the two agents [George Davis and Paul Scranton] report the assassination plan to their superior, Miami SAC Wesley Grapp.”* North then writes that “the information is then sent by [FBI] AIRTEL to Hoover.” North gives no source or citation of authority at all for this assertion, which goes to the heart of his book. He simply states an assumption on his part as fact. What does Hoover do with this information he now has (courtesy of Mark North), that the mob is going to murder Kennedy? North speculates that “Hoover shifts his efforts from attempting to gain political leverage over the President to ensuring the success of the contract [to kill Kennedy]. Word of the plot is withheld from the Secret Service.”58

  It should be pointed out that in addition to Scranton’s denial and the absence of an FBI report confirming that Aleman told the agents what he said he did, Aleman’s testimony before the HSCA itself isn’t perfectly clear on this matter. Indeed, although at one place in his testimony he said he did tell the agents this, at another point he implies he may not have. He said, “If, in any way, I would have thought the context at that time was that something was going to happen in that respect, I would have immediately advised the proper authorities about it.” Whereupon HSCA counsel asked Aleman this leading question: “And didn’t you do so?” And Aleman said he did, although not as expressly as HSCA counsel clearly wanted. Aleman said, “I talked in some way to members of the FBI about what was going on in the conversation [with Trafficante], and I told them that something wrong was in some way.” When HSCA counsel pressed and said to Aleman, “I believe you previously told me…that you did specifically tell the FBI about the comments of Trafficante on this occasion,” instead of simply saying yes, Aleman only responded, “We talked in some way,” suggesting the difficulty of “trying to recollect things that happened 15 years ago.”59

  As to the more seminal question of whether Trafficante ever made the remark to Aleman in the first place, in testimony before the HSCA on September 28, 1978,* Trafficante said, “I want to tell you something now, Mr. Stokes [chairman of the HSCA]. I am sure as I am sitting here that [in] all the discussion I had with Mr. Aleman, that I never made the statement that Kennedy was going to get hit.” Trafficante’s vehement denial, of course, by itself means nothing. But he did add something noteworthy concerning Aleman’s implication in his testimony that Trafficante made his threat in English.60 “I spoke to [Aleman] in Spanish. No reason for me to talk to him in English because I can speak Spanish fluently and he speaks Spanish. That is his language. There was no reason for me to tell him in English that Kennedy is going to get hit.”61

  But far more importantly, for those who believe that Trafficante was behind Kennedy’s murder, and cite his alleged statement to Aleman as support, why in the world would Trafficante confide such a monstrous murder plot to Aleman, who not only wasn’t a fellow mafioso, but also was someone he had never met before? It makes no sense at all. The HSCA said it “found it difficult to comprehend why Trafficante, if he was planning or had personal knowledge of an assassination plot, would have revealed or hinted at such a sensitive matter to Aleman,”* particularly, it said, when Trafficante had a reputation for being cautious and discreet. (FBI agent Jim Kenney, who investigated Trafficante for fifteen years, said in a November 17, 1992, Frontline documentary on the mob that “our investigation of Santo Trafficante throughout the years proved to be frustrating in that he maintained a low profile and he was very, very circumspect about whom he would talk with and meet with.”)62 The HSCA ended up rejecting Aleman’s story, concluding that “there were substantial factors that called into question the validity of Aleman’s account.”63

  On the one hand, if Trafficante were actually behind the assassination, his confiding such a murder plot to Aleman is, as indicated, nonsensical and not worthy of belief. But this doesn’t mean he didn’t say what Aleman said he did. By George Davis’s own admission to George Crile in the Washington Post, “José’s a real nice fellow. He’s a reliable individual.” Even the HSCA, which did not accept Aleman’s story, said he was a “reputable person who did not seek to publicize his allegations.” Moreover, what would Aleman possibly have to gain by making up such a story? It seems like he could only hurt himself. And FBI agent Paul Scranton’s telling the Post’s George Crile III that he did not want to comment on Aleman’s allegation without clearance because “I wouldn’t want to do anything to embarrass the Bureau” certainly sounds, as least to a layman unfamiliar with the practice of FBI agents, as if Aleman did tell them what he claims Trafficante told him, and they either didn’t put it in their report, or they did and no action was taken. However, Kelly, a thirty-year veteran of the bureau, told me, “Don’t read too much into those words of Scranton’s. It’s a standard response by agents, even when there’s nothing that could embarrass the bureau. I’ve used almost those exact words myself many times in my career. Don’t forget that FBI policy back then, and I believe even today, is that only three people i
n a field office are authorized to say anything of substance to the media: the agent in charge of the field office [special agent-in-charge], the assistant agent-in-charge, and the press liaison guy.”64

  The situation seems irreconcilable unless, taking into account the problems of communication between Aleman and Trafficante (if, in fact, Trafficante spoke to Aleman, as Aleman suggests, in English) as well as between Aleman and the two agents, one of whom spoke no Spanish, one concludes that, as the HSCA said, “it is possible that Trafficante may have been expressing a personal opinion, ‘The President ought to be hit.’”65

  There are several parenthetical observations to be made about the Trafficante-Aleman incident. One is that even if Trafficante said precisely what Aleman said he did, as discussed elsewhere in this book, there is absolutely no credible evidence that Trafficante was connected in any way with the assassination, so his utterance to Aleman wouldn’t have any relevance to this case. Furthermore, although FBI electronic surveillance of Trafficante was limited, its on-site surveillance of him was very extensive. In a letter to J. Edgar Hoover in 1967, Frank Ragano, Trafficante’s lawyer, complained of the absolutely suffocating surveillance of “Mr. Trafficante and members of his family [that] has been going on since 1961,” and beseeched Hoover to order a stop to it. Ragano wasn’t just talking. Not only did he give Hoover physical descriptions of the agents, but he also provided the license plate numbers of four of their cars.66 To believe that someone under this type of “surveillance,” as Ragano put it, would nonetheless decide to order the murder of the president of the United States is simply ridiculous.