Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (33 page)

Within three years, the United States soured on Armas. On July 26, 1957, President Armas was assassinated at around 9:00 p.m., as he and his wife prepared to enter the dining room of the Presidential Palace. Two bullets were fired, one of which severed his aorta and killed him instantly. The assassin, identified as twenty-year-old Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, was said to have committed suicide immediately, using the same rifle he had used to kill Armas. The Guatemalan government identified Romeo Vasquez Sanchez as a disgruntled soldier dismissed from the military in June 1955 because of his “Communist ideology.” Yet, somehow, Romeo Vasquez Sanchez managed to rehabilitate himself sufficiently to have been a member of the Presidential Palace Guard when he committed the assassination.

The Guatemalan Army claimed to have a forty-page handwritten diary
in which the assassin referred to “a diabolical plan to put an end to the existence of the man who holds power.” The diary reportedly read: “I have had the opportunity to study Russian Communism. The great nation that is Russia is fulfilling a most important mission in history … the Soviet Union is the first world power in progress and scientific research.”
⁴⁶⁷
The Guatemalan government claimed to have evidence that linked Romeo Vasquez Sanchez to Moscow. The evidence produced was a card from the Latin American service of Radio Moscow that read: “It is our pleasure, dear listener, to engage in correspondence with you. We are very thankful for your regular listening to our programs.”
⁴⁶⁸
No evidence was ever produced to prove Romeo Vasquez Sanchez was ever a member of the Guatemalan Communist Party.

The parallels between Romeo Vasquez Sanchez and Lee Harvey Oswald are obvious. Both were ex-military who left the service expressing distinct sympathies for Communist Russia. Waldron and Hartmann point out that Oswald was “a seemingly Communist ex-Marine who was able to get a job at a sensitive firm—a Dallas company that helped prepare maps from U-2 spy plane photos—even after he returned from his ‘defection’ to the Soviet Union.” Waldron and Hartman note that in comparison, the Guatemala patsy was described by the Guatemalan government as a Communist fanatic who was expelled from the Guatemalan army only six months before he assassinated Armas, yet somehow Romeo Vasquez Sanchez had still been allowed to join the Presidential Palace Guard. How was that possible? Surely the Presidential Palace Guard would have been a sufficiently elite military unit to require a background check before they were hired. Waldron and Hartman further note that both men were ex-military who killed a president with a rifle. There were both described as Communist nuts who conveniently left behind diaries rambling in Communist propaganda.

There is no photographic evidence proving either Romeo Vasquez Sanchez or Lee Harvey Oswald were the assassins who pulled the trigger. There were no eyewitnesses in either case and both men have gaps and questions in their alibi timelines. For Oswald, what exactly was the route and travel time he used to go between the Texas School Book Depository where he was observed after the shooting and the Texas movie theater where he was apprehended? For Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, exactly how
long did he wait after shooting the president before he killed himself? Why wait? What happened in the time between the assassination and the suicide? Neither made any confession of their crimes. Both died before there could be a criminal investigation or trial.
⁴⁶⁹

Both the Armas assassination and the JFK assassination were considered open and shut cases, where responsible government and law enforcement authorities declared the guilt of Romeo Vasquez Sanchez and Lee Harvey Oswald was obvious, such that doubters could be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.” Both assassins were dead and buried a short time after the assassinations, avoiding a prolonged time for grief or for unanswered questions to surface. In neither case has any written record been released of any government interrogation—not in Oswald’s case of the interrogation by Dallas Police, FBI, and/or Secret Service after his arrest—nor in Romeo Vasquez Sanchez’s case of interrogation records prior to his being released from the military because of suspicions he was a Communist. In both cases, Romeo Vasquez Sanchez and Lee Harvey Oswald made perfect patsies because authorities openly proclaimed their guilt before trial and their deaths made sure neither would have the opportunity of a trial to counter the accusations leveled against them.

The fact that Armas was assassinated just four days after trying to close a casino owned by an associate of US mob figure Johnny Roselli, at a time when Roselli and Carlos Marcello, the “godfather” from New Orleans, were expanding their presence in Guatemala, received little coverage by the international press. With a view toward the mob’s role in the JFK assassination, Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartman commented that both Marcello and Roselli would remember from the 1957 assassination of a president in Guatemala the importance of having a patsy to quickly take the blame and divert investigators.
⁴⁷⁰

In 1984, when serving a prison sentence at the maximum-security federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, mob boss Carlos Marcello from New Orleans was the subject of an undercover FBI sting operation code-named CAMTEX, for “Carlos Marcello, Texas.” The sting involved a then-fifty-six-year-old prisoner named Jack Van Laningham. He was from Tampa
and was serving an eight-year sentence in Texarkana for bank robbery. In March 1985, Van Laningham managed to befriend Marcello, and after being moved to share a cell with Marcello, Van Laningham agreed to work cooperatively in an FBI undercover operation directed by FBI agent Thomas Kimmel with the goal of recording Marcello to find out how he controlled his criminal organization from prison. CAMTEX evolved beyond taping the Texarkana phones to placing a bug in a transistor radio for Van Laningham to place in the private prison cell he shared with Marcello. In the course of their conversations, Marcello confessed to Van Laningham the role he played in the JFK assassination.
⁴⁷¹

Marcello explained to Van Laningham that his hatred of the Kennedy family traced back to the early 1960s, when then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy had Marcello deported to Guatemala where Marcello was dropped and left to his own devices to survive. Marcello, born in Tunisia, North Africa, had obtained false documentation claiming he had been born in Guatemala. In an arduous journey, aided by pilot David Ferrie, Marcello managed to make his way back to the United States through Florida. Ferrie, a shady character in his own right, traced back to Oswald because the two were photographed together at the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol in 1955, where Ferrie was a leader and Oswald a teenager. One of the first revelations Marcello made to Van Laningham was that David Ferrie had introduced him to Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans. Oswald and Marcello met at various locations in several subsequent meetings before Oswald left New Orleans for Dallas. Marcello also claimed to have set Jack Ruby up in the bar business in Dallas. Van Laningham told the FBI that Marcello knew Jack Ruby was a homosexual and understood Ruby was paying off the corrupt police in Dallas. Marcello claimed Ruby came to visit him in New Orleans regularly in order to report on what was happening in Dallas.
⁴⁷²

In the course of their discussions, Marcello confessed to his involvement in the JFK assassination: “Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch killed, and I would do it again,” Marcello said, referring to JFK. “He was a thorn in my side. I wish I could have done it myself.”
⁴⁷³
Waldron and Hart-mann noted that two former FBI agents who worked on the CAMTEX operation, including the supervisor of the operation, Thomas A. Kimmel, confirmed Van Laningham’s credibility to them. A federal judge found
Van Laningham’s reliability sufficiently credible to authorize extraordinary surveillance of Marcello while he was in prison, including putting an FBI bug in a transistor radio Van Laningham bought in prison to share with Marcello.
⁴⁷⁴
Regarding Marcello’s comment that Jack Ruby was gay, Waldron and Hartmann note that information saying Ruby was homosexual or bisexual appears more than forty times in Warren Commission documents and Ruby’s roommate at the time of the JFK assassination described Ruby as “my boyfriend.”
⁴⁷⁵

John H. Davis documented ties Ruby and Oswald both had to Marcello prior to the JFK assassination, in his 1989 book,
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
. In the summer of 1963, Oswald worked in Marcello’s downtown bookmaking network as a runner, while his cousin Dutz Murret worked as a longtime bookie, working out of the Felix Oyster House, a mob-owned restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
⁴⁷⁶
Davis also reported that the New Orleans attorney who performed occasional legal services for both Marcello and Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 was certain Marcello was paying Oswald to hand out pro-Castro literature for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee on the streets of New Orleans. Davis questioned whether three months before the JFK assassination if Oswald was being unwittingly manipulated by the Marcello organization to play the role of the patsy in the plot to assassinate the president.
⁴⁷⁷

Davis tied Jack Ruby to Joe Civello, one of the fifty-nine Mafia leaders arrested at the famous Appalachian meeting where he was representing Marcello. Davis reported Ruby was a frequent visitor of Civello and his partner Frank LaMonte at their Italian import business in Dallas—a business whose real purpose Davis suspected was importing narcotics.
⁴⁷⁸
These ties were confirmed in the final report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. “The committee also established associations between Jack Ruby and several individuals affiliated with the underworld activities of Carlos Marcello,” the House Select Committee concluded. “Ruby was a personal acquaintance of Joseph Civello, the Marcello associate who allegedly headed organized crime activities in Dallas.”
⁴⁷⁹
Davis further reported the FBI deliberately suppressed evidence of the relationship between Ruby and Civello from the Warren Commission.
⁴⁸⁰

In the 1992 book,
Double Cross: The Story of the Man Who Controlled America
, Chicago gangster Sam “Mooney” Giancana confessed to his younger brother, Chuck Giancana, the deepest secrets of how he had gained mob power.
⁴⁸¹
As part of the confession, Sam Giancana revealed his role in the JFK assassination. “The hit in Dallas was just like any other operation we’d worked on in the past,” Sam Giancana explained to his younger brother, “we’d overthrown other governments in other countries plenty of times before. This time, we just did it in our own background.” Giancana went on to make sure the parallel between Guatemala and Dallas was clear. “On November 22, 1963, the United States had a coup. The government of this country was overthrown by a handful of guys who did their job so damned well … not one American even knew it happened.”
⁴⁸²

Giancana claimed Jack Ruby was a mobster with roots back to Chicago where Ruby was born Jack Rubenstein. He further claimed Ruby had demonstrated extreme loyalty and his ability to work with the CIA during the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Giancana also insisted Lee Harvey Oswald was associated with the Marcello mob in New Orleans from the time he was born, given that Oswald’s uncle was a Marcello lieutenant who worked as a bookie and “exerted a powerful influence over the fatherless boy.”
⁴⁸³
Giancana claimed Oswald’s alliance with the US intelligence community began when he was “an impressionable young man during a stint in the Civil Air Patrol with homosexual CIA operative and Outfit (i.e., mob) smuggling pilot David Ferrie—a bizarre, hairless eccentric”
⁴⁸⁴
who Marcello used to fly guns and drugs in and out of Central America. Giancana asserted Oswald had been a spy for the US government in the Soviet Union, and that he had been trained to speak fluent Russian. Giancana scoffed at the idea that Oswald was a Communist sympathizer, characterizing as misinformation the Warren Commission’s argument Lee Harvey Oswald was a Fidel Castro supporter. “Lee Harvey Oswald was a right-wing supporter of the ‘Kill Castro, Bay of Pigs Camp’ … CIA all the way,” Giancana said without hesitation.

He explained the mob ordered Ruby to silence Oswald. Ruby did the job, knowing it was better to be executed in the electric chair for having committed murder than suffering a death being tortured by the mob for
failing to carry out an order. Giancana explained that when his superiors had ordered Oswald to Dallas, Oswald linked up with Giancana’s representative in Dallas, Jack Ruby, at Ruby’s Carousel Club, where Oswald also reestablished contact with David Ferrie. Giancana claimed that Russian exile George de Mohrenschildt was a CIA operative who helped him make a lot of money by introducing him to Texas oilmen, including Syd Richardson, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Mike Davis. He claimed money raised for the JFK assassination came “from wealthy right-wing Texas oilmen.”
⁴⁸⁵
He also claimed he sent his mob associate Johnny Roselli to New Orleans to check out Lee Harvey Oswald as a prospect to play the patsy in the JFK murder.

In New Orleans, Roselli met with Guy Bannister, a former Chicago FBI agent with intelligence community ties, at 544 Camp Street—the address of Bannister’s office that was also found stamped on pro-Castro leaflets Oswald handed out on the streets of Dallas. Roselli also traveled to Dallas on Giancana’s orders, coordinating with Ruby in preparation for the assassination. Giancana claimed it was early spring 1963 when he and his CIA associates made the decision to finalize plans for the elimination of the president. Oswald was the natural choice to play the role of fall guy, Giancana claimed: “They’d already laid the groundwork to make him look like a Commie nut, by goin’ to Russia and with all that pro-Castro shit. He was perfect … he acted like a Commie … he smelled like a Commie … so they figured it would be no problem to convince people he was a Commie.”
⁴⁸⁶