Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald

by Douglas Brode

  At that point, Marguerite temporarily threw up her hands in dismay. Off to a Bethlehem sorely lacking in Jesus. Two years later, God alone knowing where she's been, Marguerite shows up. “Lee? Pack your stuff. We’re moving to Texas,” she announces in her jaunty way. Three weeks later, 4801 Victor Street in Dallas.

  No good! Two months after, Granbury Rd., Fort Worth. Wait! “Texas was a huge mistake.” Back to Louisiana, 311 Vermont Street in Covington. “No!” Back to the Lone Star. 1505 Eighth Ave., Fort Worth; January ’47, 3300 Willing Street; in four months time across town to San Saba Street. The following summer, 7408 Ewing.

  “Lee? Pack up your stuff. We’re moving to New York!”

  Crumbling tenements. Filthy streets. Rats in the corridors. 325 East 92nd Street in August ’52; 1455 Sheridan Ave. in the Bronx by September. Youth House next. Something out of Dickens, who captures the unfairness of society like no other writer.

  An avid reader, Lee had already consumed Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and Bleak House. Despite the dyslexia that made reading difficult, even painful, Lee tore through book after book.

  Hey, at least it can’t get any worse. Right? Wrong.

  “We made a huge mistake,” Marguerite wails. “Gotta get back to our Southern roots!”

  So it's 757 French Street, New Orleans, January ’54. Right town, wrong location. 1454 Saint Mary Street. Maybe we can stay here a while? “I don’t know. There’s a nice apartment opening up over on Exchange Place. Lee? Why are you sobbing?”

  “Drifted and ran,” Johnny Barrows continued. Lee knew that feeling. Oh, how he loved watching Sinatra. Like Lee, Frankie was short. Lee spent hours staring into a mirror, wondering what Sinatra had that he lacked.

  A Voice. That was it. His singing talent had provided a skinny kid from New Jersey with the key to moving up and out. Lee was not blessed with such a genius-level vocal instrument.

  Maybe that’s alright. All I gotta do now is figure out what I’ve got that no one else has. Some hidden gift, an undiscovered skill. Who, after all, is Johnny Barrows? Sinatra without the voice but with a gun. Johnny got his gun? Fine. Lee will, too!

  “Always I felt lost in a great big crowd. All those faces scratching and fighting. Then the mist would clear and I’d see those faces. And those faces would be me ...”

  At that moment Barrows did something Lee had never noticed before in a movie. Sinatra stopped talking to Hayden. Wandering around the room, he stepped up to the camera, speaking into it, as if aware that he was not only Johnny Barrows, a character in some film, but Sinatra, playing Johnny. Addressing his audience.

  Or, maybe, only one person out there in just one theatre. A little man much like him, likewise trembling in the dark.

  Whoah! Now, I get it. Last year, everyone thought they saw the real Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. That lovable, goofy Italian kid you wanted to reach out and hug. They were wrong. That wasn’t him. It was acting. That’s why they gave him an Oscar. Huh!

  I bet all of you sitting in the dampness of this miserable excuse for a theatre think you’re getting to see what a great actor this guy is? No, you idiots. This is him.

  Why, Frankie’s even wearing his signature hat to let us in on that. I know, because I read all about the daily terrors back in Hoboken. His mother, performing abortions on teenage girls with knitting needles, earning money to buy pasta and feed her family. Young Frankie, ridiculed as the son of a mass-murderer. The guy had it as bad as me. Worse, maybe, if that’s possible.

  Which explains why I’ve always been devoted to him perhaps. Someone who comes from no better beginnings than myself, only to rise from those ashes, Phoenix-like, and become a kind of God.

  It can be done. Sinatra achieved it with his God-given gift. Inside me, there must be one as well. Everyone receives something special at birth. The problem for most people is that they never discover it.

  Well, that won't happen here. I don't know what it is yet, but I'll keep searching until ...

  *

  “War changed everything. People began to notice me.”

  They’ll notice me, too. Once I get into a war and kill 27 men. Only I'm a lousy shot. No problem. I'll practice. Once in the marines, they'll teach me to ...

  Kill! Germans, Japanese, Koreans. Vietnamese? It doesn’t matter. So long as I kill somebody. Enemies of America only, though. Like Johnny Barrows, I want more than anything to be a good American. Don’t ask me why, considering the bum deal I got from day one. That’s what I want. To be remembered as a patriot.

  But ... again, now, I’m confused ... how can Johnny assassinate the president and still remain such?

  “At five I will kill the president. At five after five, there’ll be a new president. Nothing changes. Otherwise, I wouldn‘t have taken the job.” Johnny came out of his forlorn reverie. “I‘m no traitor,” he insisted.

  That’s it! That explains everything. How you can kill the president and still remain a patriot.

  When it’s over, Johnny insisted, he’d return to being a face in the crowd. “After I do this this one last job.”

  Me too. I’ve got to get there. Wherever it is. Whatever it takes. Just tell me who to kill! And now, at last, I think maybe I know how to do it ... I’ve found my path in life ...

  *

  At 5:47, the show let out. Moviegoers drifted off, on to other things. Lee staggered away. He recalled an English teacher at Beauregard Jr. High who’d lectured her seventh graders about Greek tragedy. At the end of a play, a truly great play, you’re not merely moved by what you’ve witnessed. Something beyond that. Your life is changed. Catharsis was the word she had used.

  Maybe that’s true about Greek plays. Have would I know? It was the same old lady, best teacher I ever had, told us about fate. How it rules over free will. You do in life what you must, not what you want, and the secret is discovering your destiny. Written in the stars eons ago, whatever it turns out to be.

  I did sense right off that I didn’t happen to wander into this theatre by accident. This is part of some master plan. My job is to figure out my role in that great invisible book.

  "Don’t play God,” the sheriff had begged Sinatra.

  “But that’s the way it is,” Johnny informed him. “When you got a gun, you are a kind of God.” Lee had gulped hard, sitting in the semi-deserted, depressingly sordid auditorium, listening as Sinatra summed it all up: “Without the gun, I’m nobody.”

  Got you! Time to move on. Stop being Johnny Nobody. Become Johnny Barrows. I must get into the service, just like Sinatra up there. What had some director once said that I read in the newspaper? “It’s only a movie ...”

  No, it isn’t. Not in some cases. This, for instance.

  Only a movie? For everyone else, maybe. They can head home, have dinner and a beer, flip on the TV, fade into oblivion until tomorrow, early morning, then get up and do everything all over again. Next week they’ll be another film to see. Color, perhaps.

  Normalcy! Not for L.H.O. This movie defines me. And my future. All at once, everything feels as if it’s set in cement.

  *

  For a while, Lee stepped aimlessly through the early evening mist. Then he found himself standing in front of a Marine recruiting center. Delighted, he hurried in.

  “You’re too young,” a straight-as-a-ramrod lieutenant told him. “Come back in two years. Maybe then—”

  Rejected. Again! Precisely what I most didn’t need today. Two friggin’ years? What’ll I do to fill the hours? Alright, I’ll find menial work. Bide my time. Practice shooting whenever possible. Read a lot. History, politics, bus station books.

  Hours later, before falling asleep, Lee listened to the Sinatra album again. Mellow, morose. Capturing the loneliness, the emptiness, the abiding sense of isolation for life's losers.

  He sings the way I feel.

  Best of all, he whispered into my ear earlier today, via that film. Told me what I must someday do.

  I must, in time, kill some sitting president of the U.
S.

  Thank you, Mr. Sinatra. Frank forever!

  CHAPTER THREE:

  THE MAIN EVENT

  “Rumors that I pal around with known

  criminals are nothing but dirty lies.”

  —Frank Sinatra, 1947

  On February 14, 1947, thirteen years before Frank Sturgis visited Havana to oversee the proposed 'Operation: Lolita' assassination of Fidel Castro, seven years previous to Lee Harvey Oswald’s stepping into a Big Easy grind-house to catch Suddenly, the star of that eventual film majestically positioned himself on a sprawling wood-panel stage before an adoring crowd composed of American Mafiosos, Cuban politicos, and Hollywood celebrities.

  Frank Sinatra beamed at those arrayed before him in the cavernous banquet hall of Havana’s Hotel Nacional. The then-32-year-old singing-sensation had flown into Jose Marti airport four days earlier, learning after arrival from his host, Charles Luciano, the supposed reason for this requested visit would be a full-scale gig by a man now known as The Voice.

  That would easily be accepted by the authorities in both countries, as well as the media. The true motivation provided a more pressing excuse for this hastily arranged trip. A small suitcase which Sinatra had carried on board and clutched tight during the ninety-seven minute flight didn’t transport his fresh underwear and socks but a special delivery for The Mob.

  Now, this impromptu show for friends and family (in every sense of that term) drew down the curtain on Frank’s whirlwind visit. All present oooohed! and aaaahed! as he casually crooned about the joys of “drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola.” Performed to what would soon become known in the States as the lilting Mamba beat, that song encoded the about-to-be-realized dream of a financial union between Havana’s longstanding if dormant raw materials and the heightened business acumen of an unsavory corner of America's financial communities.

  This splendid concert served as a cover in case anyone should venture to ask why Sinatra slipped away from radio and recording gigs in the City of Angels, where he also danced and sang his way through gaudy musicals for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  However happy Frank might appear now, in the limelight, basking in adulation and accolades, that was but a facade for the less than pleasant actuality of his life. Nor had it ever been easy for this fugitive from a rough section of New Jersey’s poorest Italian enclave. The star's popular image, all smiles and sweetness, allowed him to mask deep, smoldering insecurities that tortured this famous, gifted, complex man all his life.

  “Thank you,” he beamed, standing center-stage. “Thank you!” Loud applause. A wide grin in return.

  This happened to be a particularly troubling time. During the postwar years, a new form of country-western, pioneered by one Hank Williams, added steel guitars and a pounding rhythm to traditional rural music. One entertainment-observer referred to this emergent musical style as The Big Beat. Surprisingly, the warbly hard-edged sound spread to the Midwest, then up to the industrial north thanks to recently created superstations, able to beam programming a quarter of the way across our nation. Now this New Music, as others called it, had coalesced with soulful black jazz from the ethnic south and blue-collar angst pouring out of crowded New York factories and Pennsylvania mine shafts to form an emergent, and important, musical idiom.

  Several years hence it would be dubbed rock ‘n’ roll. Already, this blend of contemporary hillbilly and old-time folk, underscored by electric guitars, had knocked pop standards, Sinatra’s specialty, off the charts. He could only hope, trust, and pray that this phenomenon would prove to be a passing fad.

  As if that weren’t enough, MGM's big-wigs, always keeping a close collective eye on box-office returns, had come to the conclusion that Frankie’s reign as idol to the bobby-soxer set was over. As a result, and according to their ownership of his services via a long-term contract, MGM now featured him in less prestigious pictures. Sinatra ran scared, and for good reason. Though a huge star, Frank knew he could lose all that he, with mentor Charley, had achieved. He vowed not to let that happen.

  Perhaps he’d need to ask Charley to speak directly to the Hollywood suits. It had been Charley who, a decade earlier, “persuaded” Tommy Dorsey to let Frank out of his long-term contract so that the youngster could emerge as a solo artist. Nobody's fool, Frankie knew the way things worked. You wanted a favor, you performed one for Charley first. Which explains, when Sinatra got the word as to this delivery, he didn’t hesitate.

  Nor did he ask any questions about the suitcase’s contents when it arrived at his home with the word that he should deliver it to Charley. When the call came, Frank Sinatra answered.

  *

  Though the message had come to him from Meyer Lansky in Chicago, Frank’s introduction to the Pearl of the Antilles had been arranged by Salvatore Luciana. Now Charles Luciano, older than Sinatra by 19 years, he had been born in Lecara Friddi, the same simple Sicilian village which those humble people Francis Albert claimed descent from had early in the century abandoned, hoping to find fame, fortune and their fates in America. The former two would be a long time in coming. As to Cuba, Charley, as his friends called him (the nickname ’Lucky’ was created by enemies who had failed to eliminate him) first arrived on the lush island shortly after World War II wound down. 'Lucky' had again proven that his nickname fit like the proverbial glove.

  He had been released from Great Meadow prison. Charley was sent there (after stints in Sing Sing and Clinton State) after his conviction on charges relating to prostitution. An ambitious Republican, Thomas Dewey, he an aspiring presidential candidate, put Charley away to forge a reputation as the next Eliot Ness. From behind bars, Charley continued to run things in the Mob. Initially, he passed orders on to his second-in-command, the Sotto-capo Vito Genovese, later to Vito's eventual replacement, Charley’s old pal Frank Costello. Both tried to coordinate their activities with those of Lansky and the Jewish mob, these two organizations having merged into The Combination. Neither could manage a working relationship as casual and efficient as the one between Luciano and Lansky, based on a childhood friendship.

  However unpleasant a prison cell may be, Charley never lost a sense of himself as a true American patriot. When the U.S. military determined that the invasion of Italy must begin with an upward strike on southern Sicily, Charley offered his full services. The only way in which such an attack could succeed would be if the local Mafiosi cooperated. That would not happen unless members of that Sicilian organization first received some sign from one of their American counterparts. So Luciano, by means known only to him, communicated a green light.

  For a price, of course. Always, there is a price.

  After victory was achieved, the U.S. had to find some way to say ‘thank you’. Simply letting Lucky walk free? Out of the question. Instead, the unanimous decision was to deport him back to Italy, where Charley could live as a free man. Even Dewey, the G-man who sent Charley up the river, agreed that some sort of compensation had to be extended. The catch was, Luciano had to exit the U.S. at once. There was no schedule, however, as to when he must arrive back home. Charley took the brief flight down to Havana and for the next year ran Mob operations on America’s mainland from there. Luciano communicated daily via phone with Lansky and their man in Miami, Santo Trafficante, Jr.

  In Havana, Charley noticed strong business opportunities itching for proper exploitation. These included two casinos located in an area referred to as Oriental Park, a racetrack currently in disrepair, once magnets for wealthy U.S. fun-seekers during the Roaring 1920s. During what had been tagged The Jazz Age, American horse-owners and jockeys cruised on down to compete. Along with them arrived rich tourists eager to squander stock market earnings in exotic destinations. While Prohibition remained the law of the land back home, here they could enjoy alcohol, gambling, music, food, and raw, open sex.

  With an emphasis on the latter. Dark sex. Forbidden sex. The kind of sex that smart-suited business types in respectable places like St. Louis, Kansas City, even Dubuque IA sec
retly hungered for and could afford. Leaving their straight-laced public images at home, such people traveled to Cuba in droves.

  All that came to a swift end with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. After Black Tuesday, ever fewer people were in a position to pony up the dough. As a result of America's crisis, things quickly turned desperate in Havana. The casinos, at best half full during the early-to mid-1930s, lost their luster. By The Great Depression’s end, the track opened each day mostly for locals, these not from the respectable social strata.

  This might have continued until the dissipating buildings were eventually torn down for firewood had Charley not one fine day taken a mid-morning drive out to play the horses. After a close consideration of his surroundings, Luciano sensed that, as in time strength gradually returned to the U.S. economy, here was a perfect place to re-develop for those who would shortly enjoy affluence, able to as in the good old days spend and play.

  *

  “I told ya so,” his pal Meyer laughed when Charley soon mentioned his discovery during a phone conversation. Lansky came to a similar conclusion way back in 1938, when he visited Cuba. Meyer fell in love at first sight with this rich green island, caressed by tropical breezes and gentle trade-winds. At least, that is, when some hurricane didn’t coming roaring by.

  As to the people, Lansky recalled enjoying them immensely. Most Cubans displayed a fundamentally gentle, open nature, their joyous celebration of life apparent in every graceful movement. They would stroll, almost dancing, along narrow boulevards. The women in particular caused him to marvel: Their bold femininity struck Meyer as provocative in a natural way, allowing these coffee-colored girls with big, bold eyes to appear innocent even when they rolled over at a moment‘s notice for American dollars.

  So many were beautiful, their hue an appealing combination of Caribbean natives who had called this place home long before recorded history, and the Spanish, arriving in large numbers after Columbus claimed the nearly 2,000 mile main-island and its nearby archipelagos for that country in 1492. Spain ruled for the next four hundred years. That era came to a close when a controversial war with America caused Cuba to briefly fall under U.S. domination, in time emerging as an independent nation in the evolving modern world.