The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  SOMERSETT: Yeah, that is true. We don’t care, if he wants to go to Birmingham and blow up a church, let him. That is right. Hell, he didn’t say these things in any way to try to get us into trouble, because the only one who could be in trouble would be him, he was confessing on his damn self, he wasn’t confessing on us, because we hadn’t done a damn thing.

  MILTEER: I have a man who is the head of his underground of his own up there in Delaware, and since I worked on the Supreme Court

  SOMERSETT: You worked on the Supreme Court.

  MILTEER: Yeah, three and a half years.

  SOMERSETT: Well, that is why he wanted you to go, then, well, them things have got to be done, but outside the Party, we have got to be mighty careful who the hell we let know anything. Now, here is one thing you have got to realize, transporting dynamite across the state line is a federal offense, well you better let them know that.

  SOMERSETT: I don’t know, I think Kennedy is coming here on the 18th, or something like that to make some kind of speech, I don’t know what it is, but I imagine it will be on the TV, and you can be on the look for that, I think it is the 18th that he is supposed to be here. I don’t know what it is supposed to be about.

  MILTEER: You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans, there are so many of them here.

  SOMERSETT: Yeah, well he will have a thousand bodyguards, don’t worry about that.

  MILTEER: The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.

  SOMERSETT: What?

  MILTEER: The more bodyguards he has the more easier it is to get him.

  SOMERSETT: Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?

  MILTEER: From an office building with a high-powered rifle, how many people [room noise--tape not legible] does he have going around who look just like him? Do you know about that?

  SOMERSETT: No, I never heard that he had anybody.

  MILTEER: He has got them.

  SOMERSETT: He has?

  MILTEER: He has about fifteen. Whenever he goes any place they [not legible] he knows he is a marked man.

  SOMERSETT: You think he knows he is a marked man?

  MILTEER: Sure he does.

  SOMERSETT: They are really going to try to kill him?

  MILTEER: Oh, yeah, it is in the working, Brown himself, Brown is just as likely to get him as anybody. He hasn’t said so, but he tried to get Martin Luther King.

  SOMERSETT: He did ?

  MILTEER: Oh yes, he followed him for miles and miles, and couldn’t get close enough to him.

  SOMERSETT: You know exactly where he is in Atlanta don’t you.

  MILTEER: Martin Luther King, yeah.

  SOMERSETT: Bustus Street [phonetic].

  MILTEER: Yeah 530.

  SOMERSETT: Oh Brown tried to get him huh?

  MILTEER: Yeah.

  SOMERSETT: That is right. They are individual operators, we don’t want that within the party. Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a hard proposition, I tell you, I believe, you may have figured out a way to get him, you may have figured out the office building, and all that. I don’t know how them Secret Service agents cover all them office buildings, or anywhere he is going, do you know whether they do that or not?

  MILTEER: Well, if they have any suspicion they do that of course. But without suspicion chances are that they wouldn’t. You take there in Washington, of course it is the wrong time of the year, but you take pleasant weather, he comes out on the veranda, and somebody could be in a hotel room across the way there, and pick him off just like [fades out].

  SOMERSETT: Is that right?

  MILTEER: Sure, disassemble a gun, you don’t have to take a gun up there, you can take it up in pieces, all those guns come knock down, you can take them apart.

  SOMERSETT: Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we have got to know where we are at. Because you know that will be a real shake, if they do that.

  MILTEER: They wouldn’t leave any stone unturned there no way. They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards, if anything like that would happen just to throw the public off.

  SOMERSETT: Oh, somebody is going to have to go to jail, if he gets killed.

  MILTEER: Just like that Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case you know [Dials telephone].

  On the afternoon after the assassination, Somersett met Milteer again in a train station in Jacksonville, Florida. They then drove together to Columbia, South Carolina, where Milteer had a session planned with some Klan members. During the journey, Somersett later told the Miami police, “he [Milteer] told me that he was connected with an international underground. He said there would be a propaganda campaign too on how to prove to the Christian people of the world that the Jews … had murdered Kennedy. He was very happy over it and said “well, I told you so. It happened like I told you, didn’t it? It happened from a window with a high-powered rifle.”

  On November 27, 1963, the FBI went to see Milteer, who “emphatically denies ever making threats to assassinate President KENNEDY or participating in any such assassination. He stated he has never heard anyone make such threats.”

  One of the “suspicious deaths” cited by Jim Marrs in the Kennedy case was that of Joseph Milteer, director of the Dixie Klan of Georgia. Marrs corroberates that information that Milteer was secretly tape-recorded thirteen days before the assassination telling Miami police informant William Somersett that the murder of Kennedy was “in the working.” Milteer died in 1974 when a heater exploded in his house.

  The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported in 1979 that Milteer’s information on the threat to the President “was furnished [to] the agents making the advance arrangements before the visit of the President” to Miami, but that “the Milteer threat was ignored by Secret Service personnel in planning the trip to Dallas.” Robert Bouck, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Secret Service’s Protective Research Section, “...testified to the committee that threat information was transmitted from one region of the country to another if there was specific evidence it was relevant to the receiving region.”

  The specificity of the Milteer information speaks for itself. For a broader perspective on the relationship between Southern Segregationists and right-wing paramilitary groups such as the Minutemen, one can refer to the book Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited (2005) by Susan Klopfer. This book is the definitive work on the history of Mississippi civil rights battles in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

  According to the portrayals set forth by Klopfer, the White Citizen’s Councils were organized rather quickly in direct response to the school integration movement. They included middle class white citizens. In contrast the Ku Klux Klan was made up of poorer whites and was thus more violent than the Citizen’s Councils.

  During the insurrection which occurred at the University of Mississippi in 1962 when James Meredith tried to enroll, the Ole Miss students combined with outside militants and the KKK to carry out a true armed insurrection on American soil. In addition, General Edwin Walker was present there as more or less a cheerleader to the riots and nothing more. However, this insurrection was spontaneous and involved outsiders with no real connection to local Mississippi segregationists.

  Aside from the riots at Ole Miss, the local segregationists, (at least in Mississippi where the worst racial terror occured) were not regularly involved with outsiders or paramilitary groups.

  Against this background, Milteer was apparently connected to the Minuteman-type paramilitary extremists who were bombing churches and involved in similar acts which we would now label as terrorist. There was apparently no real plan for these activities outside of the depraved personalities of those involved. There is no indication that the actual Minutemen, led by Robert DePugh, were even close to being well organized enough to plan and carry out the Kennedy assassination. They couldn’t even be counted on to keep up the security needed to conceal such a plot. The reckless talk of Milteer is a prime example of this problem. />
  The prior knowledge of Milteer has to be attributed to very specific rumors arising from the bragging of disorganized elements around the South. Or he could have found out from Secret Service sources. This was not anywhere near to being considered proof of Milteer’s direct involvement in the assassination plot as a perpetrator. It could be said that the “lunatic fringe” as they were called in the 1960’s were virtual vacuum cleaners in scrounging around in the underworld that existed in the South which included the KKK, the Cuban exiles, the oil billionaires, FBI and CIA informants and even the Russian Tsarists and Neo-Nazis.

  We know that Jack Ruby, after the assassination, was in mortal fear of anti-semitic groups. It is very likely that part of the attraction of the plotters to Ruby, and the involvement of Ruby was in part to blame Jewry in the assassination. After all, there were billboards in Dallas which were prominently signed by a local right-wing Jew. It was these billboards that put Ruby on the defense on this issue.

  It’s also well known that the New Orleans FBI office, just days before the assassination, received a warning from the Director [Hoover] that stated that a right-wing extremist group was possibly planning an assassination in Dallas. This somewhat sounds like the Minutemen or a similar violent group.

  Dr. Jeffrey Caulfield in General Walker reports that Milteer claimed to be part of the “international underground.” International. Who would think of the Southern Segregationist movement as international? Also, Milteer stated that there was a lot of “Catholic money” involved in the assassination. Caulfield interprets this as Catholic money from Catholic New Orleans. This could have been the case. But then there were the prominent Catholic activists such as Konrad Adenauer and Heinrich von Bentano of Germany. And also, we must include Senator Thomas J. Dodd, House Speaker John W. McCormack, former Congressman Charles Kersten and Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago. There were many possible Catholic individuals and groups involved in the assassination.

  But from examining the above information, it does not seem that the information proves that Joseph Milteer was in any way a participant in the JFK assassination, nor that any right-wing paramilitary group were involved or were the perpetrators. Milteer could merely have heard a rather detailed rumor and was trying to look like a big shot to his friend or friends. However, the information which Milteer had definitely qualifies him having prior knowledge of the assassination.

  The Prior Knowledge of Santos

  Trafficante

  By far the weakest and most insignificant case for prior knowledge of the Kennedy assassination is the apparent statement of the mob boss of Tampa, Santos Trafficante, in September, 1962. He mentioned to an informant that Kennedy would be “hit” before the next election.

  The most significant fact regarding this information is that it qualifies as the earliest mention on record by anyone regarding a possible assassination.

  The fact that it is alleged to have happened in September, 1962, lines up very well with many early rumors about Soviet missiles in Cuba and JFK’s response or late response to the Cuban Missile Crisis which reached a climax in October, 1962.

  Santos Trafficante, Jr. is described on page 37 of TMWKTM as a Tampa-based Mob boss, involved in CIA plots against Fidel Castro. The most important facts relating to Trafficante as the information has played out in very recent years, is that Trafficante had interests, probably drug running, in Cuba under Batista.

  When Castro took over, Trafficante was jailed by Castro in Cuba. His quarters in jail were apparently fairly luxurious. According to reports, Trafficante shared a cell there with the paramilitary soldier-of-fortune Loren Hall and he was visited in jail by, among others, Jack Ruby while he was in custody. Trafficante was supposedly ransomed (by persons unknown) and returned to Florida.

  Trafficante was involved in some way with CIA plots to assassinate Castro, but these plots never came to anything. The plots were apparently supervised by Robert Kennedy and they went by the code-name Operation Mongoose.

  It has more recently been suggested that after Batista fell and Castro took over, Trafficante may well have continued running drugs, this time working with Castro himself. That would make Trafficante, in effect, a double agent.

  If the above were true and he was a double agent, that could explain how he found out so early about the impending assassination of Kennedy. Castro had an excellent intelligence service, best described in the book Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros and the Politics of Murder, by Guss Russo.

  The following paragraph is excerpted from the Anthony Summers website:

  “Mark my word,” Trafficante is reported to have said to a close associate in September 1962, “this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.… He’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.”

  There is very little credibility, in the opinion of your author, to the theory that the Mafia killed Kennedy. It is a theory that seems to be useful to those who want a “cover” because they hesitate, for whatever reason, to postulate more realistic possibilities. As we know, as of this writing, the official position of the media and most of the government, despite the findings of the HSCA, is that Oswald was the lone gunman and that only Oswald bears responsibility.

  Notes:

  LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination Paperback (2013) by Phillip F. Nelson.

  Websites which provide information on Dinkin include: www.educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7078.

  The original military documents can be found at (www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/cia/russholmes//104-10438/104-10438-10154/html/104-10438-10154_0001a.htm). [The above information as extracted from the government files was contributed by Lee Forman in the Education Forum 12/2/05].

  You can find material which supports the following information about Rose Cheramie in: Jim DiEugenios, The Assassinations, Phillip Nelson, LBJ: Mastermind, and Dick Russell, TMWKTM.

  The facts relating to Rose’s role as a stripper are: (Reported in a memo of Frank Meloche to Louis Ivon as part of the Jim Garrison investigation, 5/22/67) (3/13/67) In fact, Fruge later confirmed the fact that she had worked as a stripper for Ruby. (Louisiana State Police report of 4/4/67) .

  Regarding what Rose told Dr. Weiss, see: (Memo of Frank Meloche to Jim Garrison, 2/23/67) as part of the Garrison conspiracy investigation to take place in New Orleans.

  About Fruge’s phone call to the Jackson State Hospital, see: Fruge’s HSCA deposition, p. 12.

  Regarding Fruge’s conversation with Rose about the relationship between LHO and Ruby, see: (Fruge’s HSCA deposition p. 19).

  The Mary Ferrell website mentioned in the text can be found with the following link: [(https://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Rose_Cherami).

  As cited in the text, see: Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination (2016) by Richard Belzer and David Wayne.

  Regarding the location of Rose’s fatal pedestrian accident, Hit List authors cite: (footnote # 186--Walt Brown, Ph.d., 26 Oct 2012, email to author).

  The transcript of the Milteer can be found at: [http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Transcript_of_Milteer_Somersett_Tape] Note: The “transcript” mentioned in the text is specifically a transcript of a tape recorded on 9 Nov 1963 by Miami Police informant William Somersett, recording a conversion with right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer. The transcript is taken from Harold Weisberg’s essay The Milteer Documents in the book The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in this version, INFORMANT has been replaced with SOMERSETT, and SUBJECT with MILTEER). Portions referring to Kennedy are in bold.

  Regarding the matter mention as stated by Jim Marrs, see: from[en.wikepedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_conspiracy_theories].

  Where Rebels Roost …Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited 2nd Edition by Susan Klopfer, MBA, Fred Klopfer, PhD and Barry Klopfer, Esq.

  The following is one of the best JFK assassination references: Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys,
the Castros, and the Politics of Murder (2008) by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton.

  The following paragraph is excerpted from the Anthony Summers website as mentioned in the text: [http://anthonysummersandrobbynswan.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/the-claims-that-mafia-bosses-trafficante-and-marcello-admitted-involvement-in-assassinating-president-kennedy/].

  Chapter 1

  Introduction to the Three Barons and the

  JFK Organizational Chart

  Thanks to the Internet and the passage of time, it is now possible to put together the plot of the JFK assassination. It is also now possible to know a great deal about the perpetrators and why they did it.

  My research efforts began on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. There was week-long coverage on C-Span. Since that time, I have read 145 books on the events surrounding the assassination.

  It is hard to know where to begin. So we will start with just a sample of the newest (and previously unknown) evidence surrounding the JFK assassination.

  In reading and analyzing the 145 books, I have been able to gain an understanding of the plot down to small details. Along the way, I have assembled a database of 1500 names. These were names that were most frequently cited in the 30 best books I could find on the assassination. These are books which I believe are objective. They represent evidence which I feel presents a new diverse viewpoints and theories. Near the end of this book, I will present the results of my application of statistical factor analysis applied to this database. This factor analysis in itself has produced some startling information.

  But we will start with evidence which is new in the world of JFK assassination research. Let’s look at our first example:

  Senator Thomas J Dodd was brought up on ethics charges in the Senate in 1966. In the hearings before the Senate Ethics Committee former Congressman Charles Kersten of Wisconsin was questioned about three mysterious letters. These letters were sent to the three Kennedy brothers on November 7, 1963. This was just two weeks before the assassination:1 Quoting from the transcript of the hearings: