Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (34 page)

Giancana claimed that the original plan to eliminate Oswald involved having Officer Tippit and Roscoe White kill Oswald in what would have been portrayed as an attempt to apprehend the escaping assassin. At that time, Tippit was a veteran on the Dallas Police Department, while Roscoe White was listed in Dallas Police Department records as being a police recruit in November 1963.
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Under the guise of self-defense and in the line of duty, Tippit and White were expected to murder the “lone gunman.” According to Giancana the plan went awry when Tippet lost his nerve. Then it fell to Roscoe White to kill Tippit, not just because Tippit failed to carry out his part in the plan, but also because Tippit knew too much about the conspiracy. When the plan to kill Oswald failed, the assignment went to Jack Ruby. Giancana claimed Tippit not killing
Oswald was “the only screwup” in the entire plan to assassinate JFK.
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Interestingly, Lee Harvey Oswald and Roscoe White had crossed paths before. They were both stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro, California, in 1957.
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That same year, they both sailed to Japan on the USS
Bexar
, and they served in Japan at the same time.
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Oswald was sent to the Atsugi Naval Air Station, while White was sent to Tachikowa Air Base and then was flown to Okinawa. Even though Lee Harvey Oswald and Roscoe White crossed paths in the marines, there is no evidence they knew each other at the time.

Roselli, like Giancana, came up in the mob as a hit man for Al Capone in Chicago. When Giancana advanced to head the Capone mob, Roselli became his “eyes and ears” in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Going back to the Eisenhower administration, Roselli had been the primary mob contact in the CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, a plot that continued through the Kennedy administration. As part of this plot, Roselli had involved both Giancana in Chicago and Santo Trafficante in Tampa Bay. The plot to assassinate Castro was directed within the CIA by James Jesus Angleton’s Executive Action program that was headed by William Harvey, and implemented through the Italian Mafia under Chicago mob boss Sam “Mooney” Giancana. Robert Maheu, the second-in-command under Howard Hughes, introduced Roselli to Harvey. Maheu had been second-in-command to Guy Bannister when Bannister was an FBI agent in Chicago.
⁴⁹¹

Roselli was born Fillippo Sacco in Esperia, Italy, on July 4, 1905. When he immigrated to the United States with his mother in 1911, they settled in Somerville, Massachusetts. When he fled to Chicago in 1922, after committing his first mob murder, he changed his last name to Roselli, in honor of the Italian Renaissance sculptor Cosimo Roselli, and to avoid any possible association with the anarchist Ferdinando Sacco who became infamous in the Sacco and Vanzetti robbery and murder case in South Braintree, Massachusetts, that was dominating news headlines in the 1920s. Known as “Handsome Johnny,” Roselli joined the Capone mob, only to be ordered to relocate in Los Angeles in 1925, after skipping bail in a federal narcotics case. Once established in Los Angeles, Roselli spearheaded the mob entrance into the movie industry, welcoming Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, to Hollywood in 1926. In the early 1950s, Roselli helped the eastern mob
to establish a foothold in the emerging gambling industry in Las Vegas. In the 1960s, after Castro closed the casinos in Havana run by mobster Meyer Lansky, Robert Maheu, a CIA operative who had served as a top aide and CEO of the Nevada operations for billionaire Howard Hughes, recruited Roselli to find mob assassins to participate in a planned CIA assassination of Fidel Castro. In carrying out this assignment Roselli was responsible for introducing Maheu to Sam Giancana in Chicago and to Santo Trafficante in Tampa.

Roselli went so far back with the Kennedy family that he had intervened at the request of Joseph P. Kennedy to cover-up a marriage that a youthful John F. Kennedy had entered into unwisely. At the request of JFK’s father and the instructions of Sam Giancana, Roselli had completely wiped all legal documents from the public record that attested to the matrimony. The clean slate placed JFK back on his father’s political agenda, planning for JFK to be elected president.
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This was not the only time JFK was compromised over a sexual matter. In 1975 the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, named after chair Sen. Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, uncovered the fact that JFK, Sam Giancana, and Johnny Roselli all shared an extra-marital affair with the same woman: Judith Campbell, who Frank Sinatra introduced to JFK in Las Vegas on February 7, 1960, at the Sands Hotel. The FBI and Secret Service both tracked and documented JFK’s affair.

On March 22, 1962, in a private lunch at the White House, J. Edgar Hoover made clear to the President that the FBI was aware of the affair he was having with Campbell, stressing the FBI had also documented Kennedy was sharing his mistress with Sam Giancana. Journalist David Talbot, in his 2007 book,
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
, revealed that Robert Kennedy was also aware of the affair after one of his investigators tracking racketeers’ phone calls came across the relationship. Talbot speculated that sending Hoover over to the White House may have been Robert Kennedy’s way “of drilling into his sexually daring brother the urgency of stopping his liaison before it became a presidency-threatening scandal.”
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In a less generous manner, investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh in his 1997 book,
The Dark Side of Camelot,
noted JFK’s relationship with Judith Campbell “exposed the president to blackmail
by the mob and friends of the mob.”
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On June 19, 1975, five days before he was scheduled to testify to the Church Committee, Sam Giancana was murdered in his home in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Around midnight, he was shot once in the back of his head, once in the mouth, and five times under his chin, in a mob-style killing that suggested he was about to break the mob code of
omert
á, requiring silence on all mob related matters.

Since Roselli let Joseph P. Kennedy into the club by ushering Kennedy into Hollywood in the 1920s, it was Roselli who would have to take care of the problem, once the mob decided JFK had to go. When Joseph P. Kennedy experienced a disabling stroke on December 19, 1961, at the age of seventy-three, John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert lost a major protector. After years of professing his innocence, Roselli finally confessed to his lawyer his involvement in the JFK assassination. Roselli claimed he knew a gunman shooting from the grassy knoll fired the first shot that hit JFK. This first shot supposedly went through the windshield of JFK’s limousine and hit him in the throat. Roselli claimed the second and third shots came from gunman Charles Nicoletti, a Giancana hit man, who was shooting from the third floor of the Dal-Tex building behind JFK. Roselli claimed the second shot hit JFK in the back and the third shot hit Connally. Finally, according to Roselli, the fourth shot fired and the second shot from the grassy knoll was the fatal headshot that killed JFK.

On July 9, 1976, Johnny Roselli’s legless body was found stuffed in a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida. Roselli had completed two rounds of testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. His murder prevented him from being called a third time to testify about the JFK assassination.

On March 29, 1977, Charles Nicoletti was murdered gangland style, with three .38 slugs pumped into the back of his head while he was sitting in his Oldsmobile in the parking lot of the Golden Horns Restaurant in Northlake, Illinois, another suburb of Chicago.

On the same day Nicoletti was murdered, George de Mohrenschildt supposedly committed suicide. At the time of their deaths, de Mohrenschildt, Roselli, and Nicoletti were all scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, while Giancana was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee when he was killed. The murders
of Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Charles Nicoletti remain even today unsolved open cases.

Mob lawyer Frank Ragano, years after the deaths of two of his clients—Jimmy Hoffa and Santo Trafficante—wrote a book,
Mob Lawyer,
in which he disclosed some remarkable information about the JFK assassination. At a lunch on July 23, 1963, Hoffa told Ragano, “something has to be done.… The time has come to kill John F. Kennedy.” Hoffa knew Ragano was flying that day to New Orleans to meet Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, and he wanted Ragano to deliver the message. At breakfast the next morning, Ragano explained to Marcello and Trafficante that Hoffa had a favor he wanted the two mob bosses to do. “You won’t believe this, but [Hoffa] wants you to kill John Kennedy.” Ragano reported their initial reaction was so icy he felt he had intruded into a minefield he had no right to enter.
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On the Monday following the assassination, Ragano was in Jimmy Hoffa’s office in Washington, D.C. As the meeting broke up, Hoffa pulled Ragano to one side. “I told you they would do it,” he said, referring to Marcello and Trafficante killing JFK. “I’ll never forget what Carlos and Santo did for me.”
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In 1987 when Trafficante, then seventy-three years old, was on his death bed, he decided to confess to Ragano that he and Marcello had been involved in the JFK assassination. “We shouldn’t have killed Giovanni [i.e. John Kennedy],” Trafficante explained. “We should have killed Bobby.”
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Ragano wrote that with this confession, the facts that had been suppressed for more than two decades could no longer be ignored. “Carlos [Marcello], Santo [Trafficante], and Jimmy [Hoffa] undoubtedly had roles in Kennedy’s death,” Ragano concluded. “They had planned to murder him and they used me as an unwitting accomplice in their scheme.”
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Ragano reasoned that Trafficante confessed to him because of “his perverse pride.” Trafficante wanted the world to know “that he and his mob partners had eliminated a president, outwitted the government’s top law-enforcement agencies, and escaped punishment.”
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Ragano concluded Marcello and Trafficante were uniquely capable of arranging the murder of a president. “Their minds performed unscrupulous and daring gymnastics that could
befuddle and outmaneuver the best police and intelligence agents in the country,” he wrote.
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The House Select Committee on Assassinations was critical of the Warren Commission for not investigating more thoroughly the role of organized crime in the JFK assassination. While the House Select Committee did not find evidence of a broad-based conspiracy, it did find “that the quality and scope of the investigation into the possibility of an organized crime conspiracy in the President’s assassination by the Warren Commission and the FBI was not sufficient to uncover one had it existed.” The committee’s extensive investigation led it to conclude that “based on an analysis of motive, means and opportunity, that an individual organized crime leader, or a small combination of leaders, might have participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.” Specifically, the committee found “the most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in such a unilateral assassination plan were Carlos Marcelo and Santo Trafficante.”
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They had the motive, means, and opportunity to have JFK assassinated, though it was impossible to develop conclusive evidence that would prove their guilt. The House Select Committee also discussed various threats that Hoffa had made regarding both John and Robert Kennedy and that JFK had been made aware of the threats. In direct contrast with the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee concluded Lee Harvey Oswald, much like Jack Ruby, had contact with organized crime, specifically with Marcello and Trafficante.

G. Robert Blakey, the Notre Dame law professor who served as the chief counsel and staff director for the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded “that organized crime had a hand in the assassination of President Kennedy,” Blakey wrote in his 1981 book,
The Plot to Kill the President: Organized Crime Assassinated J.F.K.—The Definitive Story
.
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With this conclusion, the House Select Committee repudiated the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin, had killed the president.

The bad blood between the mob and the Kennedy family that led to the JFK assassination traces back to the 1957 McClellan Committee hearings,
named after the chairman, Arkansas Democratic Sen. John L. McClellan. The committee was officially constituted as the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The initial focus of the committee was to investigate organized crime’s penetration into the labor union movement, specifically the mob penetration of the Teamsters Union. While the target of the hearings at the start involved corrupt Teamster boss Dave Beck who lived and worked out of Seattle, the hearings are best known for the conflict that developed between Jimmy Hoffa, the infamous Teamster Boss from Detroit who took over the Teamsters after Beck resigned in disgrace, and the committee’s chief counsel Robert Kennedy. On the committee was the freshman senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy.

Almost totally neglected by historians, the primary moving force behind the McClellan hearings was the committee’s first star witness, crime boss James Butler Elkins from Portland, Oregon, better known as J. B. Elkins, or simply, “Big Jim.” In 1957 two reporters for the Portland paper the
Oregonian
—William Lambert and Wallace Turner—won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles exposing the infiltration of organized crime into the Teamster Union operating in Washington State and Oregon. The source of the Lambert-Turner articles involved hundreds of hours of wiretaps the Elkins family had taken of various gangsters and public officials in Portland and Seattle as they bribed and extorted their way into control of the Teamster’s Union in the northwest. The rub came after organized crime gained control of the Teamster’s Union in Portland and the gangsters involved moved to take over the Elkins family’s lucrative crime empire involving bootlegged liquor and gambling. The Elkins family, rather than concede a portion of their profits and control of the crime syndicate to the eastern mobsters, had decided to fight back, even if fighting back meant exposing themselves to criminal prosecution and the likely loss of their syndicate operations.