The Lacey Confession

by Richard Greener

  “Miss O’Malley. Good to meet you.” He held out his hand. She took it. Her hand was soft and smooth. Rich hands. Her handshake was firm, not too quick, yet she did not let it linger. Without further invitation, she sat on the barstool next to Walter.

  “It’s my pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sherman,” she said. “May I call you Walter? Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “And please call me Abby.”

  “All right, Abby. I’m glad you called.”

  “Thank you for leaving your number with . . .”

  “Sean?”

  “Yes, with Sean. I hope he didn’t give you any trouble. I apologize for that.”

  “I understand,” said Walter. Abby then proceeded to make a little small talk. She asked about the bar, about Ike, and wondered how long Walter had lived on St. John. He thought she might have been just a tad nervous to start with, but she seemed to loosen up just fine after a while. Walter told her about Billy’s, even the story about how it used to be Frogman’s, and he gave her the big picture on Ike, his storied history. He said nothing about his stay on St. John.

  “Tell me,” Walter finally said, “how long have you known?”

  “Known? Known about Lacey?”

  “Yes. About his confession.” He watched for signs of stress in her manner, in her eyes, in the lines around her mouth, a change in her respiration. Nothing.

  “Since 1968,” she said.

  Walter shook his head, nodded to indicate—what? she wondered. Was he surprised? Was he impressed with such a revelation? She couldn’t tell. Almost forty years. He hadn’t expected that. Billy approached. Abby watched the two men as their eyes met. The look on Billy’s face asked if the lady was going to eat. This part of the place, the far end of the bar nearest the kitchen, appeared to be Walter’s private domain.

  “Hungry?” Walter asked. “What do you like to eat?”

  “Fish?” she answered, with a question of her own.

  “Fish,” said Billy. “Fish is the specialty of the house. Red snapper in my own tangy mustard sauce? Seared tuna with capers on a bed of Yukon mashed potatoes? Grilled mahi-mahi served with pineapple rice and coconut shrimp? Or maybe something a little more casual, for the time of day. Grouper fingers—fish and chips?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Fish and chips and a bottle of beer.”

  “Where you from?” Billy asked. It was clear to her he had only a professional’s interest in the information.

  “Boston.”

  “Sam Adams,” said Billy. “Good enough?”

  “Perfect,” she said. Billy looked to Walter. Years of silent signals between them told the bartender to bring his friend another Diet Coke and put the lady’s order on his tab. Abby could not help but notice.

  “That’s a long time,” Walter said after Billy left. “How did you find out?”

  She started with Chicago. She told Walter about graduating from law school there, about her one-year tenure at Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. She came to the notice of the Attorney General, she said. That’s how she got to Washington. She put in a year on the Jimmy Hoffa Squad and then it happened—November 22, 1963. After that, all Robert Kennedy cared about was finding the one, or the ones, responsible for murdering his brother. Abby told Walter everything, unvarnished. It was really quite a treat talking to him. Walter Sherman was one person she could be sure—absolutely sure—would never breathe a word spoken between them. His own identity was so well shrouded, so carefully obscured, his history of discretion so solid. Many people, she thought, have told Walter Sherman things they would never want anyone to know. Famous and powerful people have actually told him the truth and benefited from the telling. She never considered doing otherwise.

  She filled him in on her assignment to the Boston office of the Justice Department and later, when Bobby resigned from Johnson’s cabinet, her job placement as an investment banking attorney. “I had only one client,” she said. “And I never handled any investments. My job was to find out who killed President Kennedy. To help Bobby.” She stopped there. Billy brought out her fish and chips, asked if they wanted any more to drink, smiled and left.

  Walter asked, “What did you discover?”

  “Frederick Lacey,” she said. “A private matter.”

  “Got a little out of hand, wouldn’t you say?” She didn’t. Instead, she was silent. And while she didn’t speak, Walter could see there was a lot she might have said. He saw movement in her eyes, a slight tightening in her temples, a blush in her cheeks. “Harry told me,” Walter assured her. “He told me why. He told me about Audrey Lacey.”

  Abby reminded herself again, Walter Sherman was a free ride. For more than forty years she held it in, held it tight. She told no one, except Bobby. She never talked about her work, not with a single soul, not even her husband. Now, here she was, sitting in a bar in a dumpy little town on a tiny speck of an island in the American Virgin Islands. Here she was with a man who would not only listen but understand. In her life, Abby O’Malley, nee Anna Rothstein, had been nothing if not precise, specific, skilled in detail while also knowing how much was enough. For as long as she could remember, there had been few if any disparate facts she couldn’t make sense of. When she had it all together, especially in the early days with Bobby, her analysis was either conclusive or illuminating in a manner that held promise for the future. With Bobby, she loved the give and take, the teamwork, the endless gaming. Back then, she was sure she worked best working with him. And when she had, when she knew it was Lacey, it had been Bobby who told his mother. Abby couldn’t do it. He realized that and, besides, it was his job. No one else could tell her. She had lost two sons to the man. Only the third could tell a mother such a horror. Only Bobby. And soon, she would lose him too. Had she known that, she would have done anything—anything.

  Then, with the Kennedy legend entrusted to Abby and Rose, both women agreed, Ted Kennedy should not know. When Rose died, the Kennedy flame was left to the care of a Jewish girl from Memphis. She was certain only four people ever learned the truth—she did, Bobby, Rose and Louis Devereaux—and a fifth, of course, if you included the killer himself, Frederick Lacey. When Bobby confronted him in London, Lacey said, quite clearly, that he had told no one. He had written it all down—his confession, his protection—but he never took anybody into his confidence. Neither Robert Kennedy nor Abby O’Malley doubted him.

  And that was it, she told Walter. Since the death of Rose Kennedy, Abby and Devereaux were the only ones who knew the identity of the man who killed Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. It never occurred to Abby that Devereaux would share that information with anyone, with another woman, no matter how close he was to her.

  As soon as the chunky man in the dark suit with his back to the camera shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Abby took the lead in investigating him. Every good investigator knows to start with the most obvious evidence. It’s basic. If something stares you in the face, follow it. When you have a killing, and you have a live suspect, start with him. If, as was the case with the Kennedy assassination, the suspect too is murdered, start then with his murderer. The assignment was hers before anyone heard the name Jack Ruby—before Oswald stopped breathing—almost before he hit the ground. They all saw it. Like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in his Washington, D.C., home, and millions of Americans across the nation, Robert Kennedy’s special Organized Crime investigative team, including Abby O’Malley, watched it happen on television. She leaped from her seat, grabbed her coffee—which was old and cold, she recalled—and shouted, “I’ve got him!”

  It didn’t take much to connect Ruby with the mob, she told Walter. He was tied in half a dozen ways. The biggest, of course, was his business. The nightclub in Dallas owed a lot of money to the Chicago family headed by Johnny Rosselli. Jack was behind in his payments. Not a good thing, for him. He was in over his head and to make matters worse, he had cancer. Anthony Rocco, a capo in the Chicago gang, kn
own to his associates as T Rock, approached Jack Ruby. The deal he offered would wipe out Ruby’s debt and net him fifty thousand dollars on top of it. Abby reminded Walter that fifty thousand dollars in 1963 was like a half million today, maybe more. Jack Ruby had a short time to live and this was a way he could take care of his own. When he was told what was expected of him, he never hesitated. Everyone concerned figured Ruby to be a dead man over this. After all, he was supposed to kill someone in police custody. He would be going into Police Headquarters in Dallas, guns blazing. The necessary arrangements would be made to give Ruby access to his target—more than a few Dallas cops got paid for that one—but no one could protect him afterward. The cops would shoot back, wouldn’t they? Part of the deal even? He didn’t mind. The cancer was taking him out anyway. As soon as Oswald was captured, Jack Ruby got a call telling him where to be and when to be there. He was on time. He shot Oswald as planned and, fortunately or not, he was not killed in a hail of bullets from the Dallas Police. He was captured and he kept his end of the bargain until the end. Tracking Ruby’s movements were easy, Abby said, and the key was the timing. “You see,” she told Walter, “T Rock met with Ruby the day before the assassination.”

  Walter listened. He asked no questions, but his interest was evident, his attention riveted. Abby continued. She knew the mob had not ordered the hit on the President because they would never use a patsy like Oswald or a cutout like Jack Ruby to clean up at the end. That’s not the way they worked and Abby knew it. Had it been them, they would have left no loose ends, no errant strings to pull, and no civilians in their wake. Someone else had killed JFK, and somehow managed to get the Chicago organized crime family to eliminate the fall guy. Abby traced Anthony Rocco to a meeting, a full week before November 22, with a man named Angelo Francese. The aged Francese was well known to be capo de capo, answering only to the Don whose family ruled in Naples, Italy. The meeting in New York had been arranged, as a gesture, by the Costello family. Once she had the meeting confirmed, Abby told Robert Kennedy. Why, she wanted to know, would T Rock from the Chicago mafia meet with someone from Italy, someone from the old country, someone so high up? And why would they meet in New York?

  Bobby leaned on his father’s contacts on the East coast, Abby told Walter. A face-to-face was arranged for RFK. He went to a beach house on Long Island where he met with one of the Costello lieutenants. It was just the two of them. “This meeting never happened,” the young Costello soldier told the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer. That’s what Abby told Walter Bobby had told her. Costello’s man, who insisted he be called only Dante, explained that an important family in the old country asked New York for a special favor. They wanted to contract with the Chicago people for a hit. Dante said they were never told who the target was or where or when this would occur. “We couldn’t refuse,” he told Kennedy. Their service was only that of an intermediary, an act of respect and kindness. “Never, never in a million years did we think this thing would involve your brother, the President.” That’s what Dante told Kennedy.

  “He was telling the truth,” Abby said to Walter. “When I realized that Costello had misunderstood everything, that he thought the Rosselli crowd had killed the President, I knew Costello really knew nothing. And I knew the mob was in the clear. They did Jack Ruby all right, but they had no clue why, not when they agreed to do it. Of course, by the time Ruby shot Oswald, they had to know it had something to do with President Kennedy. Costello, and his capos, felt betrayed, used. These people are very patriotic, in their own way. Killing the President was out of bounds, like killing your mother. Killing Oswald, on the other hand, was just business. And, by then it was a matter of honor.”

  With the mob no longer a suspect, out of the picture, for five years Abby chased other leads. She told Walter she couldn’t remember how many people she went after. “Everything,” she said. “We rejected nothing out of hand.” Who knew who, or what, or why? Who knew someone else who knew something—something that seemed important? Every theory was checked and then checked again. Assassination conspiracies ran amok in the press, in the media, in books and periodicals, not only here, but worldwide. The CIA killed Kennedy because he was about to abandon Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs did it. No, it was J. Edgar Hoover. Or the Cubans. Maybe the Russians. Abby covered every one. She looked at homegrown racist crackpots in the South, white supremacists out West. Abby went after everyone ever mentioned as having even the slimmest motive. She chased FBI agents, CIA case officers, even a few Dallas cops themselves. Every lead was treated as a good one. At one point she spent three months digging into a tiny cult of radical Catholics in Rhode Island. This bunch thought a Catholic in the White House would bring the Pope to power in the United States. They were beside themselves when it didn’t turn out that way and they despised Jack Kennedy for it. She investigated them all, even Lyndon Johnson and his motley crew of Texas associates. “God, Bobby hated that man,” Abby told Walter. Each time she found a string, she pulled it. And every time that string led to another, she pulled it too. Sooner or later, every string came to an end. None revealed the killer.

  On a winter afternoon in early 1968, Abby O’Malley and Robert Kennedy sat in a small den in a house in Hyannisport. A fire from four big logs warmed them against the New England snowstorm raging outside. They were alone. A few months earlier, before the leaves changed and the temperatures plummeted, she asked him for a list of individuals, private citizens with no government or political affiliations, a list she told Bobby might contain the name that eluded them, the name of the assassin. Where else could they look?

  “We’ve gone through everyone else,” she said to him. “We should look at it as if it might have been a private matter. It might have been.” The list was a short one.

  Jack Kennedy was a man. Like most men, he had made enemies along the way. But, also like most men, none of his personal enemies seemed to be people who would actually try to kill him. Besides, who could kill the President of the United States? Who could manage it? With two exceptions, the men on what Abby came to call the Private List were all contemporaries of JFK. One of the two who were not was an old man, a long-ago business partner of Kennedy’s father. Bobby said this man indeed hated Jack, hated him since his brother was a young man—since he was at Harvard. Remembering it, Robert Kennedy laughed, as did Abby as she told the story to Walter Sherman. Apparently Bobby’s older brother Jack had been sleeping with this man’s wife. They were never caught in the act, in flagrante delicto so to speak, but one day in the midst of a bitter argument with her husband, the wife threw it in his face. Jack was still in college, said Bobby. The angry woman then went and told a few of her friends. Her husband was a laughing stock. He threatened Jack Kennedy’s life a number of times, in front of quite a few witnesses. Surely, all assumed, the man was all bluster. JFK himself knew nothing of these revelations, or the animosity and hostility they provoked, or the threats. His father shielded him. Bobby only learned of it when his brother became President. As Attorney General, he ordered a complete review of all the President’s perceived enemies. He made a list then, too, he told Abby.

  “He gave me a copy of that list,” Abby told Walter. “I remember, it was dated February 1960. It must have been the first thing Bobby did when Jack took office.”

  By 1963, this vengeful husband was divorced, eighty-one years old, and in the care of a nurse twenty-four hours a day. He had difficulty urinating. He could hardly remember the names of his children. It was doubtful he even knew who the President of the United States was. Abby scratched his name off. What surprised her about Bobby’s second list, the 1968 list, was another name, a name that had not appeared on the list he made in 1960. Frederick Lacey—Lord Frederick Lacey.

  “Who is Frederick Lacey?” she asked JFK’s brother.

  Finally, he told her.

  By the spring of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was disheartened. Abby O’Malley told Walter she was worried about him. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. aff
ected him deeply. It seemed he was no closer to finding his brother’s killer than he was five years before. He viewed the list of private individuals he gave to Abby as a desperate move, an indication all hope was lost. While his run for the Democratic nomination did raise Kennedy’s enthusiasm noticeably, Abby could see the despair roiling his gut.

  It was on a campaign bus in Indiana, rolling through the foothills in the southern part of the state, with a steady rain more dripping than falling, that Abby first told him it was Frederick Lacey who killed President Kennedy. “He looked at me in disbelief,” she told Walter. “I gave it to him—the whole thing, as I saw it, from start to finish—and he never said a word.” As Abby detailed a sequence of events leading to the assassination, Walter marveled at her concentration, her focus, her ability to relate apparently unrelated facts. Of course, he knew just how accurate her analysis was. He knew what Lacey had written. Abby did not. She knew nothing more than that Lacey had left something in writing, an admission, a confession.

  Once she presented her conclusion to Bobby Kennedy, she asked him how he could have left Lacey’s name off the original list of the President’s enemies, the list he prepared immediately following the inauguration. His explanation was weak and tentative. It was almost as if he was making it up as he spoke. That was not like him, Abby said. Without Walter asking, she revealed that the real reason for Bobby’s oversight in 1960 was embarrassment. Robert Kennedy did not want his dead brother’s affair with Audrey Lacey coming to light then, just as he entered the White House, or later, after his death in 1963. In 1968, Abby could see his continuing determination that it never would. Bobby did not see the connections between Lacey’s masterminding of the murder and the evidence trails that, over five years, led them into the FBI and the CIA and others. Abby explained it by showing him that Lacey had contacts within all the suspect groups, all the different organizations. Sure the CIA was involved. And the FBI. Lacey was able to get information from each vital to the success of his plan. His reach extended even into the supposedly unreachable Secret Service. The strings she had been pulling, for five years, had been attached only to the coverup. The assassination itself remained a mystery. Like the mob, which was only hired for Ruby’s cleanup work on Oswald, the intelligence agencies also did not know what Lacey intended to do before he did it. Once the act had been accomplished, it was too late for all of them. In their rush to cover up their unwitting roles, they made many mistakes. There were dozens of sleuths chasing down the facts: newspaper reporters, magazine journalists and freelance writers, Kennedy conspiracy enthusiasts—nuts, if you will—of all sorts. Plus, everyone at CIA and FBI knew Bobby had a crack team working around the clock. Abby’s problem was simple, her delay perfectly understandable. She never heard of Frederick Lacey until 1968.