The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (39 page)

JACK RUBY HAD ties to all three cities in the JFK plot—Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas—and probably had the same role in Chicago that he had in Dallas: making sure the fall guy was quickly rubbed out. Ruby had grown up in Chicago, had moved back for a time in the early 1950s, and had close relatives and many friends in the city. Journalist Seth Kantor says that just two months before the Chicago attempt, Ruby had “met in Dallas with two Chicago detectives to provide them information,” thus beginning an informant relationship with Chicago law enforcement that could prove useful.

Ruby had other contacts with people connected to Chicago in the weeks and months prior to the Chicago assassination attempt. On October 7, 1963—just three weeks before the Chicago attempt—Ruby had met in Dallas with Chicago businessman Lawrence Meyers, whom David Ferrie had called on September 24. Meyers would be in Dallas meeting with Ruby the night before JFK’s assassination, at the restaurant of Joe Campisi, Marcello’s Dallas lieutenant.

In preparation for the attempt to kill JFK in Chicago, Ruby received an envelope with approximately $7,000 from an associate of Jimmy Hoffa in October 1963. The payoff occurred in Chicago just weeks after Ruby met with Johnny Rosselli in Miami. I interviewed Jim Allison, who witnessed the payoff, along with his wife.

Jim Allison was a respected businessman who in 1963 was in the public relations field. Allison was friends with Pierre Salinger,
JFK’s Press Secretary, but his work also brought him into contact with “lots of colorful characters, including mob types.” One of those was A. Gordon Hardy, who introduced Allison to Jimmy Hoffa in Chicago, in Hoffa’s large suite at the Bismarck Hotel. Allison came to realize that Hardy also had Mafia ties, but Hardy came to view Allison as someone he could trust.

Jim Allison was in Chicago on business on the weekend of October 27, 1963, and Hardy told Allison he could get him tickets to see the Chicago Bears play the Philadelphia Eagles. He told Allison to meet him on Sunday morning at the coffee shop at the Bismarck Hotel. Allison was having a late breakfast at the coffee shop when Hardy showed up with the football tickets. While Allison was talking with Hardy, “a little guy came in” to the coffee shop and caught Hardy’s eye. Hardy asked Allison to excuse him, saying he had to give the guy money to pay for his breakfast. Hardy smiled as he pulled out a number-10 business envelope and—feeling Allison was a friend he could trust—gave Allison a look at the inch-thick stack of $100 bills inside. Hardy then went over to the “little guy” and gave him the envelope. Allison soon left the coffee shop, went to the football game, and didn’t think anything more about the payoff in the coffee shop until three weeks later.

On November 24, 1963, Allison watched the transfer of Oswald from the police station to the county jail on NBC. When he saw Ruby shoot Oswald live on TV and the ensuing coverage, Allison realized “it was the man at the coffee shop” he had seen receiving the envelope stuffed with money from the Hoffa associate. However, Allison was reluctant to tell the authorities, because he’d just seen someone murdered on live TV in a police station—by someone his friend Hardy apparently knew. “Two or three months after JFK’s assassination”
Allison went to see Hardy in Chicago for the first time since the coffee shop incident, but Hardy’s secretary told him that her boss—though only in his late thirties and in good health—had died of a sudden heart attack.

It is unlikely that Hardy had any idea what the money he had given Ruby was for or that Ruby would soon become so notorious; otherwise, he wouldn’t have met Ruby in front of witnesses. Hardy had probably simply been asked by Hoffa or one of Hoffa’s men to give this man Ruby from Dallas an envelope stuffed with money. From the mob standpoint, that was all Hardy needed to know.

Neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations could find any record of Ruby’s being in Dallas on October 27, 1963, one of the few days in the months before JFK’s assassination they could not account for. Ruby had called a number in Chicago the previous day, after he had called Los Angeles—Johnny Rosselli’s home base. The Chicago number belonged to an associate of Allen Dorfman, a corrupt Teamster official and mobster. Ruby kept late hours, and it would have been easy for him to take a commercial flight under an assumed name to Chicago early in the morning after his club had closed. Or he could have been flown by a private pilot like David Ferrie. The FBI and Justice Department would get reports about a rumored payoff to Jack Ruby prior to JFK’s death, and those reports linked Teamster official Allen Dorfman to the money.

When Ruby returned to Dallas, he bought a safe for his office, perhaps to keep the money, because he didn’t put it in his bank account. A simple test of putting an inch-thick stack of bills into a number-10 business envelope shows it would have held about $7,000 in $100 bills. According to Seth Kantor, on the afternoon of JFK’s assassination, Ruby was seen by “the loan officer at” his Dallas bank. The loan
officer “vividly remembers Ruby standing in line” at the bank “on the afternoon of November 22, after President Kennedy was slain.” According to the loan officer, “Jack was standing there crying and he had about $7,000 in cash on him the day of the assassination. . . . I warned him that he’d be knocked in the head one day, carrying all that cash on him.” Ruby didn’t put the money in the bank, however; bank records show that Ruby’s only bank transaction that day was a withdrawal for $31.87.

CARLOS MARCELLO’S FEDERAL trial in New Orleans could result in his deportation again, a nightmare that Marcello would do almost anything to avoid. Marcello was clearly guilty of the charges Robert Kennedy had brought against him, so, according to biographer John Davis, “Marcello’s principal strategy was to terrorize and possibly eliminate” the key witness against him and to “bribe as many jurors as” possible. But Marcello knew that even if he was successful in using that strategy for the trial, Robert would keep bringing new charges against him as long as JFK remained president.

By Friday, November 1, David Ferrie and Carlos Marcello were no doubt ready to see JFK killed the following day, cutting off the major source of Bobby Kennedy’s power. Marcello’s biographer writes that “on the morning of November 1, 1963, in a federal courtroom in New Orleans, the final showdown began in Carlos Marcello’s ten-year battle to avoid deportation.” Bobby had sent his own Justice Department lawyers to prosecute Marcello, who was charged with “‘conspiracy to defraud the United States government by obtaining a false Guatemalan birth certificate’ and ‘conspiracy to obstruct the United States government in the exercise of its right to deport Carlos Marcello.’”

Carlos Marcello was joined in the courtroom by David Ferrie, who had just returned from Guatemala. Marcello had been plotting JFK’s death for just over a year at that point, and now his goal was just one day away. For John F. Kennedy to die the day after Marcello’s trial started would no doubt be sweet revenge for all the prosecutions—which he viewed as persecutions—and the harrowing ordeal of his humiliating deportation.

*
The complete list of all eighteen parallels between Oswald and Lopez will be posted on thehidden
historyofjfksassassination.com
.

CHAPTER 13

Targeting JFK in Chicago and Tampa in November 1963

E
VEN AS CHICAGO residents started to line President Kennedy’s planned motorcade route on November 2, 1963, JFK abruptly canceled his entire trip. The Secret Service had learned of an assassination threat in the city; his visit to Chicago was cancelled on such short notice that agents were already at the airport to meet the President. According to Chicago Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, whose account was confirmed by other law-enforcement sources uncovered by journalist Edwin Black, the plot involved four men, two of whom were briefly detained and released and two who were never apprehended.

Because two of the men had never been caught, there was still an active threat involving potential Presidential assassins on the loose. Two of the suspects had Hispanic names—“Rodriguez” and “Gonzales”—indicating a possible Cuban connection. Combined with Immigration and Naturalization Service and CIA reports of a Cuban agent in the Chicago area, the situation looked like the worst-case scenario of the Cuba Contingency Plans: possible Castro retaliation for the coup plan by the “assassination of an American official”—but on American soil, something the officials had considered “unlikely.”

Five years later, former Senate investigator Bud Fensterwald found several newsmen at the
Chicago Daily News
who knew about the four-man threat in Chicago, even though they did not write about it at the time. One of the newsmen said, “At the time of JFK’s scheduled visit to Chicago [on November 2, 1963] there were four men in town who planned an assassination attempt from one of the overpasses from O’Hare into town. They were seized but apparently not arrested.” The assistant city editor also recalled “a disassembled rifle in the story.” However, as Fensterwald’s memo of the interview with the newsmen puts it, “For some reason” the story about the assassination attempt “did not get in the paper.”

A fifth man, ex-Marine Thomas Vallee, whose job overlooked JFK’s motorcade route, was arrested at 9 a.m., two hours before JFK was scheduled to arrive in the city. In his car he had an M-1 rifle and three thousand rounds of ammunition. Knowing of at least two potential assassins still at large, JFK and Bobby apparently decided to cancel JFK’s entire trip. They also decided to keep any mention of the assassination threat out of the press—and the press complied, even though several newsmen had heard about the four-man threat.

If the threat was made public, and the four men turned out to be Cuban agents retaliating for the JFK–Almeida coup plan, then the plan—and Almeida—could be exposed. That could have resulted in a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Remarkably, there is no evidence that those making the Cuba Contingency Plans, like my State Department source John Crimmins, were told about the Chicago threat. Information about the Chicago (and Tampa) threat appears to have been limited to higher officials, especially those in the Secret Service and FBI—two agencies not directly involved in the Cuban Contingency planning.

As JFK’S Press Secretary Pierre Salinger explained to me, just after he assured the press that JFK would NOT cancel the motorcade because of a crisis in Vietnam, he had to quickly issue two different phony excuses for the cancellation. The initial reason given for JFK’s sudden cancellation was a cold, although that was quickly changed to the need for JFK to stay in Washington to deal with the aftermath of the assassination of Vietnamese President Diem. While Diem’s death probably was a factor in JFK’s decision, news services had already run a story from Salinger saying that special equipment had been installed in Chicago so that JFK could monitor the tragic events in Vietnam during his visit.

The Kennedys had done this kind of news management on a smaller scale in the past, involving incidents as diverse as leaks about the Bay of Pigs and reports of JFK’s sexual indiscretions. The CIA had suppressed news stories related to Cuban operations, such as a Florida incident in September 1963, when the Agency made sure “two local newspapers suppressed” and turned over photos of several covert Cuban exile operatives after their boat had problems.

Suppressing a news story on the scale of the Chicago threat against JFK took a new level of coordination among Robert Kennedy and several agencies, but the Cuban aspects of the threat seemed to justify it. Not until years later would the public learn that Vallee had recent ties to a Cuban exile group training to assassinate Fidel Castro. Vallee also had ties to the John Birch Society, widely known at the time for its extreme stance against civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr., and JFK, especially his seemingly soft stance on Cuba.

As mentioned earlier, the CIA and INS had also received reports of a possible Cuban agent named Miguel Casas Saez in Chicago, but they were unable to track him down. In addition, two of the men sought in
the Chicago incident had Hispanic names, and a later CIA memo says the plot allegedly involved “Cuban dissidents,” which meant exiles. (The suspects also had a possible family connection to Tampa fall guy Gilberto Lopez.) Those Cuban connections are why Bobby and JFK kept any mention of the four-man Chicago plot, and the real reason for JFK’s sudden cancellation, out of the press.

Former Chicago Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden confirmed the four-man Chicago threat and told Congressional investigators and Fensterwald that it was handled differently from any other threat against the President. Bolden said that when Chicago Secret Service chief Maurice Martineau first learned of the threat shortly before JFK’s scheduled visit, he told Bolden and the other agents, “There were to be no written reports; any information was to be given to him orally.” The chief would “report only by phone to” the head of the Secret Service, “[James] Rowley, personally.” Bolden testified that instead of the usual file number, any written information was put into a COS file; COS stood for “Central Office” and “Secret.” COS “files were kept separate from all others” and the Secret Service “could say they had nothing in their files on a subject when in fact a ‘COS’ file existed.” After the last-minute cancellation of JFK’s trip to Chicago due to the threat, said Bolden, “the memos were then taken to O’Hare airport and given to a crew member of a commercial flight to Washington.” He believes a Secret Service “employee met the flight and delivered the material to [Secret Service] headquarters.”

But that wasn’t the end of the secrecy about the four-man threat. Bolden said that “shortly after the [JFK] assassination,” the Chicago Secret Service Chief “called all agents into his office and showed them a memo from Washington to the effect that the Secret Service was to discuss no aspect of the assassination and investigation with anyone from
any other federal agency now or any time in the future. Every agent . . . was made to initial this memo.” Bolden thought this memo was directed at the FBI, who “wanted to get the role of Presidential protection away from” the Secret Service. Decades later, former Chicago FBI agent Thomas B. Coll recalled, “Some people were picked up. And I’m telling you it wasn’t ours. That was strictly a Secret Service affair . . . you’ll get no more out of me.”