A Rose by Many Other Names: Rose Cherami & the JFK Assassination

by Todd C. Elliott

  Cherami was also supposed to pick up her little boy, her son Michael, from her parents, who had been looking after him.

  Cherami told Fruge details of the pending drug transaction in Houston. She said reservations had been made at the Rice Hotel in Houston, but she didn’t say who made them. The trio – which consisted of Rose and the two Italian-looking men – was to meet a seaman who was bringing eight kilos of heroin to Galveston by boat. Cherami had the name of the seaman and the boat he was arriving on. Once the drug deal was complete, the trio would travel to Mexico.

  Fruge was encouraged by his supervisors to follow up on the leads. Cherami was taken into the custody of Lt. Fruge one last time. Along with Louisiana State Trooper Wayne Morein (who would later become the Sheriff of Evangeline Parish in Louisiana), the two became part of the first non-publicized investigation into the murder of President Kennedy.

  On Nov. 28, 1963, Fruge, Morein and Cherami took a plane to Texas, after contacting the chief customs agent in Galveston regarding the boat and the seaman with purported heroin. The chief customs agent in Galveston reportedly verified the docking schedule of the boat and the name of the seaman. The seaman was never captured or detained, as customs allegedly botched the tailing of the seaman, who escaped.

  Soon after, U.S. Customs closed the case, according to Fruge’s deposition.

  Fruge also stated that during the flight to Houston, Cherami laughed out loud at one of the headlines she read in the daily paper. The headlines indicated that Ruby and Oswald had never known one another and had never seen each other before the shooting of Oswald.

  According to Cherami, she had worked for Jack Ruby, or “Pinky,” as she knew him, at his nightclub in Dallas, and Ruby and Oswald “had been shacking up for years”; they were “bedmates.”

  Whether Rose alluded to Ruby and Oswald being homosexual lovers is unknown. It’s possible that Rose meant that they were “in the same bed” as far as plotters might be, in a manner of speaking.

  She mentioned that she once worked as a stripper at a club Ruby owned known as the Pink Door.

  Years later, according to an anonymous Eunice source, this would become well known to certain members of Jim Garrison’s investigative team, who purported that the Silver Slipper in Eunice was owned by none other than Jack Ruby. It was further alleged by Cherami that Carlos Marcello, organized crime boss of New Orleans, fronted Ruby the money to open the Silver Slipper.

  There are no found records, however, to prove any of these allegations.

  But when the plane carrying Rose Cherami touched down in Houston on Monday after the assassination, Fruge contacted the Dallas Police Department. He told Capt. Will Fritz that he had a suspect in custody who was in Houston and could testify as a witness that Ruby and Oswald had known each other. Fruge seemed eager to help in the investigation: to deliver this important Rose Cherami to the Dallas Police’s doorstep.

  According to Fruge’s testimony, Capt. Fritz said he wasn’t interested in Rose. Captain Fritz said that he had dropped his investigation.

  Now, it seemed, so did the Louisiana State Police. Fruge suggested that Cherami speak to federal authorities.

  But after she was denied by the Dallas Police Department, Cherami refused to talk to the FBI and claimed to “not want to get involved in this mess.” Perhaps she was motivated by fear not to speak with the FBI. As the strange events of the assassination unfolded, who wouldn’t be afraid?

  As America and the world struggled to make sense of the shifting events in Dallas, maybe it had just dawned on Rose what the magnitude of the ordeal was and how big it could get. Maybe she realized her life might already be in danger, and that she knew better than to tell anyone at the FBI.

  According to Fruge, all of the information on the narcotics ring operating in and out of Louisiana that was given to him by Cherami was verified as true and good information. Even the Rice Hotel reservation made for her under a fake name checked out. Perhaps Ruby had made the reservations at the Rice Hotel in Houston.

  No matter, for it was in Houston that trooper Morein and Lt. Fruge said their good-byes to Rose Cherami. She was left in Houston, unofficially extradited back to Texas, it seemed, without a paper trail. Rather than being a headache for the Louisiana State Police, Rose would become someone else’s problem in Houston.

  It was the last time Fruge would see her alive.

  As elements of a plot that seemed to originate from New Orleans began to come to light years later, Fruge was part of a team of investigators probing the JFK assassination with Jim Garrison – the New Orleans District Attorney and the only person to ever bring a trial in the murder of President Kennedy.

  In 1967 Fruge – who was working as a Garrison aide investigating the Rose Cherami lead – visited the Silver Slipper in Eunice. He allegedly showed the owner, Mac Manual, some photographs of men suspected to be traveling with Rose on that fateful day in 1963.

  Fruge testified to having shown two mug shots of men that were identified by the owner as the two mystery men who traveled with Rose. The owner claimed that the two men had been to the Silver Slipper before, allegedly transporting prostitutes from Florida to Eunice, but he did not know them by name. Fruge claimed that the man had identified Sergio Arcacha-Smith, an anti-Castro Cuban expatriate with ties to the CIA, and another Cuban man known only to Fruge as “Osanto.”

  A conversation about Rose was documented on July 18, 1967, when the Eunice News’ Matt Vernon (writer of the Comment Cava column) reported perhaps the first news of “Melba Christine Marcades” (aka Rose Cherami) who was “a one-time performer in Jack Ruby’s nightclub” in a brief interview of Lt. Francis Fruge.

  According to the article, Cherami “told Francis that Oswald and Ruby were close friends for years. She was found dead on the side of a Texas highway September 4, 1965 … she would have been an important witness except that she was, like 23 or more other potential witnesses, dead. Despite her unsavory reputation and record, everything she told Francis … checked out.” Francis Fruge said he thought Cherami could have had direct knowledge of the assassination plot.

  While other research and writings asserted that Fruge and Morein embarked upon the first, non-publicized murder investigation in the assassination of JFK, Morein would not confirm this. In both 2010 and 2012, Morein declined to comment on the matter. Morein only confirmed that he did once work with Fruge.

  Chapter Six

  Good Doctor, Bad Doctor

  One doctor – whose name continues to circulate within the saga of Rose Cherami – was mentioned in the HSCA report as the source of the report of Rose’s foreknowledge, as it was allegedly told to staff members of the East Louisiana State Hospital.

  His statements shoot holes in the validity of the published HSCA findings. Dr. Donn E. Bowers, now of Mississippi, said that the sworn testimony of Dr. Seymour Weiss is inaccurate.

  Bowers said that he took issue with page 200 and 201 of Appendix 10 to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which stated:

  “The commission [sic] interviewed one of the doctors on staff at the East Louisiana State Hospital who had seen Cheramie during her stay there at the time of the Kennedy assassination. The doctor corroborated aspects of [the Cheramie (sic) allegations]. Dr. Victor Weiss verified that he was employed as a resident physician at the hospital in 1963. He recalled that on Monday, November 25, 1963, he was asked by another physician, Dr. Bowers, to see a patient who had been committed November 20 or 21. Dr. Bowers allegedly told Weiss that the patient, Rose Cheramie, [sic] had stated before the assassination that President Kennedy was going to be killed.”

  Bowers said that he was not even at the Jackson Hospital when Rose was committed. While he did work at the Jackson hospital on weekends to earn extra money, Bowers said that at the time when Rose was admitted, he was in New Orleans working at the Southern Baptist Hospital.

  Bowers also said that he was never called to testify in the 1970s during the HSCA investigations as a possible key witness, th
e source of the story of Rose Cherami and her foreknowledge among the staff at the East Louisiana State Hospital in Jackson.

  While he never saw Rose Cherami in the East Louisiana State Hospital, he is one of the only people to review and look at her medical files from her second stint at Jackson, a luxury afforded to him being a physician that had worked at the hospital.

  Nothing about any foreknowledge of JFK’s impending murder was in the file, according to a 2013 interview.

  Bowers contends that Dr. Weiss was the one who told him the strange tale of Rose Cherami during a dove hunting excursion on the Sunday following the President’s murder on Friday. When he read the published report of the HSCA in 1979, Bowers was prompted to make a phone call.

  “When all of this started coming out, I finally called (Dr. Weiss),” Bowers said. “He was in practice in San Antonio then, in the practice of psychiatry. Once he finished at East Louisiana State Hospital, he took up his practice in San Antonio. And I called him and said, ‘Vic, you told me that story about Rose, but I was not there on the admission. And I never was.’”

  Bowers said that Weiss “seemed like he was embarrassed” and said, “Well, I was confused, I guess. I didn’t really remember the facts right.”

  Bowers said that Weiss “mumbled a lot” into the phone. “And that was the end of the conversation,” Bowers said. “He was embarrassed that he had said that. You know, psychiatrists don’t like to be wrong in their thoughts.”

  Bowers said that he had no idea if Weiss was lying about not remembering the facts correctly.

  “I never understood why he thought that,” Bowers said. “In fact, when I challenged him. I could only take it to mean that he was embarrassed that he had made an incorrect assumption that I was present at the admission of Rose Cherami. So, I didn’t follow up anymore. And he died not too long after that. I think he had prostate cancer and died of that. I never did talk to him again because he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  Judyth Vary Baker, author of Me & Lee – an account of her relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald during the spring and summer of 1963 – said that the Jackson hospital was the site of a “cancer soup” weapon test on live human subjects, prisoners of Louisiana State Penitentiary, a prison farm in Angola, Louisiana.

  Baker contended that Oswald (in concert with David Ferrie) was part of a project at Jackson and covered his plausible appearance at the hospital by requesting, or filling out, an application for employment at the Hospital on the day he observed a subject’s exposure to the cancer weapon – which was being tested for a future assassination attempt on Fidel Castro in Cuba.

  Baker also said that Oswald was affiliated with Carlos Marcello through Oswald’s uncle, Dutz Murret – who allegedly worked for Marcello in a bookkeeper role.

  In regards to Rose’s files at East Louisiana State Hospital, Dr. Bowers stated that he looked over at least one of Rose’s files at the hospital and found nothing unusual about it except for the fact that Rose was admitted into the hospital then released back into the custody of Lt. Frances Fruge and the Louisiana State Police.

  “You’d think that that was not the right place for her to, for them to take her back,” Bowers said. “Because I don’t know what they did with her.”

  When told that Rose – who was an admitted hospital patient in a state mental facility – was seemingly “extradited” back to Texas, as she was left in Houston never to return to a doctor’s care, Bowers said that “struck him as odd.”

  Bowers said that he recalled where he was the day and the moment JFK was shot in Dealey Plaza. He was in the cafeteria at Southern Baptist Hospital in New Orleans having a lunch of red beans and rice.

  When asked if he thought that Carlos Marcello had something to do with JFK’s assassination, Bowers answered, “Well, I’ll tell you this, Carlos Marcello was a very, very powerful Mafioso, there’s no question about that,” he said. “And the way they ran things [in New Orleans], he could have and would have done anything.”

  Chapter Seven

  Little Big Mamou

  Rose was considered a low-ranking member of the Carlos Marcello heroin network – which worked in unison with another crime boss, Santos “Sam” Trafficante, who controlled the Florida market, according to Lamar Waldron, author of Legacy of Secrecy: “It’s ironic that a woman who was one of the lowest members of Marcello’s crime empire came close to saving JFK’s life, and on at least three occasions would risk her own life to help law enforcement.”

  Alluding to organized crime figures in the Eunice area in 1963 is one thing. Proof to place them in the area is another thing entirely.

  When theories and hypotheses won’t do, a visit must be paid to the Holiday Lounge in Mamou, Louisiana.

  There’s a shot of proof in that 55-year-old lounge that looked as if it had remained intact, unhindered by time, since 1963, with the evident decor and vintage, worn furniture. At one time, it was the happening spot, with half of the building serving food out of the Holiday restaurant.

  The place in 2013 belonged to Eugene Manuel and his mother, Linda – who, like Rose, was born in Houston and lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida at one time. However, Linda would have been younger than Rose, and she claimed that she did not know her or recognize her photographs.

  Growing up in the bar, or being involved in his family’s business from an early age, Eugene said that in the late 1970s or early 1980s, he took a phone call one day at the Holiday Lounge. It was for his father, Edison Manuel, or “Tee-Ed” as he was known, and still is today in Mamou. The man on the phone stated that he was Carlos Marcello.

  A disbelieving teenager, Eugene laughed it off as a prank call and went to get his father to tell him that there was a man on the phone who said that he was Carlos Marcello. Eugene recalled that his father gave him a serious, stern look.

  “He looked mad,” Eugene said. “By his face, I knew something was wrong. He said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t talk to him like that. Give me the phone.’”

  “Well, daddy … you think … ” Eugene said, still not believing that he had just been on the phone with Marcello.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” his father said.

  Eugene said that his father explained to him after he got off the telephone. “He said to me, ‘the next time that man calls, you don’t ask questions, you don’t pick at him. He’s not an ugly man, he’s a nice man’,” Eugene said.

  Then Eugene said that his father asked him, “What if he got mad at you?”

  It was at that moment that Eugene said that he became enlightened about the closeness of the shadowy underworld in his small town of Mamou.

  A worried look ran across his father’s face that seemed to say, “What the hell did you say to him?” Eugene said in a 2013 interview that his father “had a friendship” with Marcello, but that his old man never had any business dealings with Carlos.

  However, back in the 1963, he said, the Holiday Lounge was filled with slot machines and a jukebox purchased from “a middle man” that Eugene believed had some affiliation with the Pelican Novelty Company, out of New Orleans, owned by Marcello.

  However, the Pelican Novelty Company was one of three companies started by the big daddy of the underworld, the “Prime Minister,” Frank Costello. Costello was of the infamous “five families” of Italian, organized crime which originated in New York.

  Research has shown that shortly after meeting with Governor Huey P. Long in the early 1930s, Costello began shipping slot machines to Louisiana in droves. Legend has it that, as per Long’s deal with Costello, Louisiana would get a 10-percent cut of “the take.” Long would ironically meet with a public assassination, much like JFK, in which the alleged assassin was also silenced shortly after, again as in JFK’s murder.

  There were so many slot machines in Louisiana at the time, Eugene said, that behind the the Holiday Lounge and Restaurant, his father built some single-rooms for some of the traveling slot machine and jukebox technicians, possibly affiliated with Marce
llo. Everyone in Eunice and Mamou seem to have common knowledge that these motel rooms were considered “cathouses.”

  Eugene denied this as gossip and rumor.

  “I’m not saying that nobody never got a piece of ass in those rooms,” he said. “I just use it as storage today.” The rooms still stand, overgrown with weeds, vines and spider webs.

  His mother, Linda, said that she had met with Carlos Marcello, even having dinner with him in New Orleans. She described him as a “nice, regular guy.” The men in Marcello’s circle of friends talked amongst themselves, she said, the wives knew very little as to what was discussed or where and how money might flow.

  Eugene offered more about the town often dubbed “Big Mamou.”

  Mamou is a sleepy, prairie Cajun village within Evangeline Parish, just about 9 miles north of Eunice up La. Hwy 13. Mamou is known for its traditional rooster- or chicken-chasing Mardi Gras, and boasts a population of about 3,500 people.

  The four cotton gins that were once the life blood of Mamou are long gone. It seems an unlikely place for a major, organized crime boss to go to a hospital. However, Eugene said that Marcello would regularly drive to the Mamou Hospital for treatment by a world-class surgeon, Dr. Frank Savoy, Jr.

  Savoy and his father built the hospital in the country, after graduating from LSU Health Medical School in New Orleans. In 1950 they opened Savoy Hospital with eight beds and later expanded to 185 beds, becoming the Savoy Medical Center.

  New Orleans is where Dr. Savoy first met Marcello as a patient, according to Eugene Manuel. The doctor apparently had a reputation for being one of the best. Marcello, like any crime boss, would want nothing but the best.

  Eugene said that he remembers seeing a long, black limousine at the hospital one day, complete with a Negro chauffeur waiting in the car. Eugene said that he was told by one of Dr. Savoy’s sons that the limo belonged to Carlos Marcello.