Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (35 page)

In 1956 then-Senator Jack Kennedy lost a bid to be the vice presidential candidate on the second run Adlai E. Stevenson was taking to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. In a hotly contested fight in which Stevenson preferred Kennedy to be his vice presidential running mate, the convention chose Senator Estes Kefauver who had come to national prominence as chairman of the Senate Special Committee to
Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, better known as the Kefauver Committee, which held a series of nationally televised hearings investigating organized crime. After being forced to concede to Kefauver in 1956, the Kennedy family realized the importance of the media, especially television, in gaining national political prominence. Wanting to duplicate what Kefauver had accomplished, the Kennedy family seized upon the Lambert-Turner articles as evidence new labor racketeering hearings could be held to investigate the Teamsters.

The Kennedy family quickly realized the importance of the exhaustive wiretapping done by the Elkins family. If these tapes had not existed, the Kennedy family might never have gone forward with the McClellan Committee hearings. Democrats depended on union votes to win elections. The Kennedy family could never afford the wrath of organized labor if the evidence of organized crime penetration of the Teamsters was not certain. After a series of discussions with organized labor figures, including those in the then-five railroad operating unions, the conclusion was reached that the union movement would not oppose the public hearings, provided the Kennedy family limited the investigation to the organized criminals who had taken over the Teamsters Union, being careful to distinguish that the target of the investigation was not the union itself. The consent of the railroad unions at the time was critical, given the extent to which the railroad unions cooperated at the time with the Teamsters. Before the interstate highways truck trailers “piggy backed” on railroad train flat cars for transit across the nation, and then they were picked-up by Teamster Union truck cabs for local delivery.

In the months leading up to the hearings, the Kennedy family realized the mob takeover of the Teamster Union involved a move by the eastern mobs to muscle into the territory of the western mobs. In the 1950s the eastern mobs were largely Catholic and Jewish, controlled back to the 1930s by Al Capone in Chicago, Lucky Luciano in New York, and Meyer Lansky in Florida and Cuba. The western mobs were largely Protestant, as evidenced by the Elkins family. At stake was not only the Elkins family crime empire in the Pacific Northwest, but the future development of what was expected
to be a highly lucrative gambling industry, originally developed in Reno and Las Vegas by the Elkins mob. Joseph Kennedy, a mobster who had controlled the importation of Scotch liquor into the United States going back to the days before Prohibition, had never comfortably been accepted by the eastern mobs even though he was Catholic. Rejected largely because he was of Irish descent, not Italian, Joseph Kennedy encouraged his sons to develop a partnership with the Elkins family to launch the McClellan hearings as a springboard to advance JFK’s presidential ambitions.

The strategy worked. J. B. Elkins began his testimony to the McClellan Committee on the opening day of the hearings, February 26, 1957. The issue of
Life
magazine dated March 11, 1957, carried a full-page color photograph of JFK on the cover with the headline, “Where Democrats Should Go From Here.” The same issue featured a news article on the McClellan hearings entitled “Senators Hear Tales of Scandal.” The article featured a full-page black-and-white photograph of J. B. Elkins. “James Elkins, 56, had been a racketeer in Portland, operating mainly gambling and bootlegging joints,” the article read. “At first he had welcomed the help offered by the Teamsters’ agents when they appeared on his home grounds. Then, outraged by their self-aggrandizing tactics and prodded by the
Oregonian
, he squealed. Before the Senate committee he was by far the most articulate member of the cast of witnesses.”
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In Robert Kennedy’s 1960 bestselling book on the McClellan Committee,
The Enemy Within
, he described racketeer J. B. Elkins as “a slim, rugged-looking man with a rather kindly face and a very attractive and devoted wife.”
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Kennedy said Elkins was “one of the most interesting and controversial witnesses that appeared before the McClellan Committee, noting that Elkins was very guarded in what he said and to whom he said it. Kennedy admitted Elkins was reluctant to talk the first time they met, but in subsequent meetings, Elkins talked freely. “Once he made up his mind that he was going to co-operate, he went the whole way,” Kennedy wrote. What Robert Kennedy did not detail in the book was that getting J. B. Elkins required a series of meetings held near Phoenix, Arizona, between Robert, JFK, J. B. Elkins, and one other trusted member of the Elkins family. In those discussions, J. B. Elkins warned the Kennedys that going after the Teamsters might cost them their lives. Despite the risk, all four committed to working together to
expose the organized criminals who had penetrated the Teamsters Union. Once the agreement had been reached, the Elkins family turned over to the Kennedy family the entire collection of wiretap recordings that incriminated the mobsters posing as Teamsters.

Elkins assisted Robert Kennedy in running a complete background check, disclosing to the Kennedy family details that had not before been shared with anyone outside the family. “I learned that [Elkins] had manufactured illicit whiskey during prohibition, been given a twenty-to-thirty-year sentence for assault with intent to kill, a one-year sentence for possession of narcotics, and had been arrested several times on gambling charges,” Robert Kennedy wrote. To get out of prison, the Elkins family paid a substantial fifty-thousand-dollar bribe to Arizona’s first governor, George W. P. Hunt. Robert Kennedy also documented that Elkins had worked with military intelligence during World War II, although the nature of that work was never fully disclosed. In
The Enemy Within
, Robert Kennedy gave Elkins one of the most positive endorsements he ever gave regarding testimony before the McClellan Committee:

Nevertheless, Jim Elkins was one of the three or four best witnesses the Committee ever had. Because his background was so unsavory, we checked his story up and down, backward and forward, inside and out. We found he didn’t lie, and that he didn’t exaggerate.

Occasionally, at the beginning, he would not answer a question. He would ask me to go on to something else. Later, as we came to know each other better, he would answer the question but tell me not to use the information. And sometimes when I pressed him for an answer, he would say, “You don’t want to know the answer to that.”

He was bright. He had a native intelligence. He was highly suspicious—and a fund of information. He never once misled me. He never once tried.
⁵⁰⁵

Robert Kennedy further disclosed that he spent more time with J. B. Elkins than he did with any other witness, both because of the tremendous amount of information he had and because of the difficulty he feared the Committee would have in understanding him. Kennedy wrote that he “needed to know the story almost as well as [Elkins] did, so that I could clarify some of his complicated answers.
⁵⁰⁶

What Robert Kennedy did not disclose was that the relationship had
been so close that Elkins and the family associate that accompanied him to Washington stayed in Robert Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia. This was confirmed by a note found in 1986 in the correspondence collection of the JFK Library at Columbia Point in Boston. On December 17, 1957, Elkins posted a Christmas card to Robert Kennedy and his family, addressed to the Kennedy offices in the Senate Office Building. A personal handwritten note written by Colleen Elkins, J. B.’s wife, addressed to Robert and Ethel Kennedy and family, commented that Colleen and J. B. had watched the Edward R. Morrow television show
Person to Person
. “We watched Edward R. Murrow’s program the night he was at your home,” Coleen wrote. “We certainly enjoyed it. Jim said it reminded him of ‘Old Home Week.’ The children were just as cute as could be and the baby had grown so we hardly knew her.”
⁵⁰⁷

The importance of Elkins to the McClellan Committee cannot be overemphasized. “It was Elkins’ passion for detail that made him the star witness before Sen. John L. McClellan’s Select Committee investigating labor racketeering,”
Newsweek
commented, crediting Elkins with a phenomenal memory. “The mother lode of evidence Elkins turned up made it possible for committee counsel Bobby Kennedy to crack the Teamster case wide open. Without Elkins, there might have been no indictment of Teamster vice president Jimmy Hoffa. Without Elkins, the Teamsters’ powerful president Dave Beck would not be defending himself on the witness stand this week.”
⁵⁰⁸

Communication between the Elkins family and the Kennedy family continued as long as John and Bobby were alive. The Elkins family continued to advise Attorney General Robert Kennedy in his war on organized crime, a war the Elkins family interpreted as having been ordered by the Kennedy family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, to even the score and get revenge for perceived slights the Kennedy family had suffered at the hands of the eastern mob going back decades. The Kennedy war on organized crime particularly rankled the eastern mob, given the effort the Giancana family and Chicago mayor Richard Daley went to in order to deliver, both legally and illegally, the critical votes in Cook County that JFK needed to win the 1960 presidential campaign. The eastern mob felt betrayed that the Kennedy family did not have more respect and appreciation for the mob efforts taken to make sure JFK became president. The Elkins family
joined the Kennedy family in the grudge match between Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa. Truthfully, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa hated each other in part because they were both so very much alike—small men with an irrepressible determination to prove how tough they were. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Clark Mollenhoff reported that at the arraignment of Jimmy Hoffa for having McClellan Committee papers in his possession, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa got into a friendly debate, arguing with each other who could do the most push-ups, although neither actually did any.
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In 1963 the Elkins family warned the Kennedy brothers that a mob hit had been called on JFK. Elkins explained to JFK the details of the hit, that it was planned to be done from a tall building by a shooter armed with a high-powered rifle with a scope with the intent to shoot JFK in a motorcade. The top Elkins family consigliere flew to Portland, Oregon, in 1968 to warn Robert Kennedy an assassination attempt had been planned on him in Los Angeles during the California presidential primary. RFK was warned that when the shooting started a small-caliber handgun discharged from the rear would be used to kill him. RFK was advised the assassin being a person who was supposedly there to protect Robert Kennedy. The Elkins family consigliere urged Robert Kennedy to postpone his planned return to Los Angeles, under the assumption that even a few hours change in schedule might derail the plan. If Robert Kennedy resolved to go ahead as planned and return to Los Angeles to be there for the primary results, the Elkins family warned him to fire his bodyguards and hire new ones.

On Friday, October 17, 1968, J. B. Elkins died under suspicious circumstances. The car he was driving was pushed off the road by another driver who was never apprehended or identified. He veered off the road and crashed into a utility pole. Elkins reportedly died of massive chest injuries suffered when he collided with the steering wheel of his car. Representatives of the Portland Police Department were sent to Arizona to view Elkins’ body to validate the Portland crime czar was actually deceased. At the time of his death, Elkins was free on a twenty-thousand-dollar bond. He was facing indictments in Portland, Oregon, for possession of a firearm, conspiracy to commit a felony, possession of dangerous drugs, and several counts of receiving and concealing stolen property.
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“[E. Howard] Hunt and [CIA psychological specialist] David Phillips were both veterans of the CIA’s 1954 Guatemala campaign. The Cuba Project [Bay of Pigs invasion] was to be a carbon copy. In Guatemala the CIA trained a ‘patriotic’ opposition army, gave it logistical support and orchestrated an ‘invasion’.”
⁵¹¹

—Warren Hinckle and William Turner,
The Fish Is Red: The Secret War Against Castro
, 1981

T
HE CIA-ENGINEERED COUP D’ÉTAT
in Guatemala going back to 1954, set the stage both for the Bay of Pigs and for the JFK assassination. Although the Bay of Pigs typically is considered a Kennedy administration initiative, the historical record demonstrates the CIA undertook the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion during the last year of the Eisenhower administration. The original plan was to provide Vice President Richard Nixon with an “October Surprise” that Nixon could use to defeat John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election.

The idea was that the American public would rally around Vice
President Nixon taking the lead in an Eisenhower administration effort to support a popular uprising of Cuban patriots invading Cuba from the United States in order to rescue their homeland from Castro and Communism. The plan was to allow the American public to see Richard Nixon directing the American military in support of the Bay of Pigs invasion from within the White House. Nixon would score a knockout blow over Kennedy as the American public saw Nixon using his superior foreign policy expertise to depose Castro via a popular uprising in Cuba stirred by the invasion.

Nixon’s plan to win the 1960 election was disrupted when insider sources tipped-off the Kennedy campaign that the Bay of Pigs invasion was planned for the last weeks of the 1960 presidential campaign.