Authors: Lamar Waldron
Ray were well-known within the CIA, so Hunt couldn’t have an official
role with either of those exiles.
Harry told us about one occasion when Hunt sent one of his associates,
a CIA officer, to see him. Harry thinks Hunt sent the associate because
of the friction that existed between Hunt and Harry. Even though the
CIA officer was driving an old car, as Harry said they often did to avoid
attracting attention, the Agency man started telling Harry, “There is a
lot of money to be made.” Harry looked at him and said, “How?” The
CIA officer said, “There is a lot of money in the budget for this thing,
and some people have . . . ”
Harry didn’t realize it at the time, but the total budget for just the
AMWORLD part of the JFK-Almeida coup plan would total at least $7
million, and some agents estimated it was much higher. But Harry felt
the CIA man “was trying to buy me.” So Harry told him, “Look, when I
want to make money I [will] go back to my profession [as a mining engi-
neer]. I am not here to make money. I am not interested.” It’s important
to note that the CIA officer may have simply been testing Harry, to see if
he could be bought. The same Hunt associate later took Harry to a Miami
restaurant, where Trafficante himself tried to bribe Harry.52
By his own admission, Hunt’s assistant in the early 1960s was Ber-
nard Barker, who was also later involved in Watergate. Barker’s offi-
cial CIA position was as a Miami-based agent who frequently passed
along information from Frank Fiorini, a Trafficante bagman. (Fiorini had
changed his name to Frank Sturgis by the time he was apprehended at
the Watergate with Barker, McCord, and others). While Barker has never
acknowledged being officially privy to the JFK-Almeida coup plan, one
of his CIA reports from November 14, 1963, mentions “rumors” of an
“operation including Juan Almeida [to] overthrow” Fidel.53 In a televi-
sion interview, Barker told Bill Moyers, “I would have followed Howard
Hunt to hell and back,” and in another TV program, Barker said that “at
the time [of] the Kennedy assassination . . . President Kennedy’s govern-
ment had reached its ‘peak’ in its efforts to overthrow Castro.”54
tions concluded that mob bosses Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante
had the “motive and means” to kill JFK, but the committee was unable
to figure out how they did it, since crucial evidence was withheld from
them, especially regarding the JFK-Almeida coup plan.1 Based on con-
clusive evidence and testimonies that have come to light in recent years,
it’s now clear that Marcello and Trafficante worked together with Mafia
don Johnny Rosselli to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. All three
confessed their involvement to trusted associates shortly before their
deaths, including stunning admissions in FBI files detailed here for the
first time. It was the JFK-Almeida coup plan that gave the Mafia chiefs
the opportunity they needed: to kill JFK in such a way that any true
investigation would compromise the coup plan, exposing Commander
Almeida and triggering a confrontation with the Soviets and Cuba. The
committee was also denied important evidence about Johnny Rosselli,
one of the small group of US intelligence assets who helped the Mafia
infiltrate the coup plan, and use parts of it to kill JFK.
Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had all faced an unprecedented and
escalating onslaught throughout JFK’s administration. Bobby’s intense
pressure on the Mafia in general, and those three mob bosses in particu-
lar, was at its peak by November 1963. The Mafia had been exposed on
television in millions of homes in September 1963 by sensational Senate
crime hearings in which the star witness, Joe Valachi, became the first
“made” member of the Mafia to publicly reveal its secrets. Carlos Mar-
cello controlled Louisiana and much of Texas, but November 1963 found
him on trial in federal court in New Orleans by Bobby’s own prosecutors
and facing permanent deportation.
In Texas, Marcello and Trafficante’s portion of the French Connec-
tion heroin network had recently faced a major bust for the second time
in a year. All of Santo Trafficante’s operations in Florida, from drugs
to gambling, were under attack, and even his own brothers had been
arrested and indicted. Trafficante himself had been the subject of Con-
gressional hearings in October 1963, exposing him and his operations to
public scrutiny for the first time. Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, the Chicago
Mafia’s dealmaker in Las Vegas and Hollywood, was under attack on
several fronts
.
Bobby was getting ready to run the Mafia out of Las Vegas
and had gotten the FBI to put Rosselli under surveillance, which it was
able to do part of the time. Rosselli’s power flowed from Chicago mob
boss Sam Giancana, and Bobby had finally persuaded the FBI to go all
out after Giancana. Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had no options
for survival as long as JFK was President and Bobby Kennedy was his
crusading Attorney General.
The leading roles of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli in JFK’s mur-
der were first revealed to us in 1992 by a top Kennedy aide, one whose
personal integrity, honesty, and work for the Kennedys are confirmed by
declassified files and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Unlike FBI and
Congressional investigators, this Kennedy aide knew all about the JFK-
Almeida coup plan and the Cuba Contingency Plans to protect it.2 Since
his revelation, more than four million pages of assassination files have
been released, confirming what this aide and two dozen other Kennedy
associates told us about these events. Even though more than a thousand
pages about the coup plan and the Mafia’s infiltration of it have been
declassified, they are just a tiny fraction of the more than one million
CIA records related to JFK’s murder that will remain secret until 2017.
However, information from Kennedy associates, the most important of
the four million pages, and the findings of government investigators and
journalists allow us to show why the three Mafia chiefs killed JFK, how
they did it, and some of the most important people they used.
While all three Mafia bosses worked together to kill JFK, Marcello was
the driving force, since he had the most to lose in the shortest time.
After serving several years in prison in the early 1930s, Marcello had
risen through the ranks to become the Louisiana Mafia’s unchallenged
ruler by the 1950s. Marcello was sometimes referred to as “the little
man,” though never to his face. His height was reportedly 5’ 2”, upped
to 5’ 4” by elevator shoes. But what he lacked in size, he made up for in
ruthlessness and raw power. Traditional Mafia terminology can’t convey
the true measure of Marcello’s power by 1963.
Two of Bobby’s Mafia prosecutors used the term “godfather” to
describe Marcello. John Diuguid, who prosecuted Marcello in New
Orleans during much of November 1963, later read the transcript of
44
LEGACY OF SECRECY
the only instance in which Marcello’s conversation was ever bugged
during the 1960s. Since the FBI in New Orleans left Marcello alone, this
single instance involved one visit to Marcello’s headquarters by a very
scared wired informant for the Bureau of Narcotics. Diuguid described
the scene to fellow Mafia prosecutor, Ronald Goldfarb, who wrote that
“the overheard conversation between Marcello and other supplicants
who came to see him and seek his favors sounded like a scene from
The Godfather.”
Diuguid confirmed that to us, describing Marcello as a
“godfather” who was “holding court.”
However, Marcello was more powerful than any traditional god-
father, or even a fictional one such as Don Vito Corleone, the character
in
The Godfather
. Even he had to share New York City with the heads of
other Mafia families, and the real Mafia families of New York sometimes
feuded as they vied for power. In contrast, Marcello reigned supreme in
Louisiana and large portions of the surrounding states, including Texas,
where he controlled rackets in cities like Dallas and Houston. Instead
of feuding with Mafia bosses in adjacent territories, Marcello became
business partners with them, as he did with Florida’s Trafficante.
There was another very important difference between Marcello and
almost every other Mafia chief in America: As the head of America’s
oldest Mafia family, Marcello didn’t need permission from the informal
National Mafia Commission to stage major hits. This made Marcello
more powerful in 1963 than far more famous mob bosses who had held
sway over only a particular city, such as his friend Mickey Cohen (of Los
Angeles) and New York’s Vito Genovese, both of whom had still been
subject to the commission. Unlike most other Mafia families in America,
the Louisiana Mafia had a long tradition of murdering government offi-
cials, beginning with the assassination of a New Orleans Police Chief
in 1890. Marcello himself had attempted to have New Orleans Sheriff
Frank Clancy assassinated in 1955, and was linked to two successful hits
on much higher-ranking government officials.
The Mafia assassinations of an attorney general in 1954 and a presi-
dent in 1957 had a major impact on how Marcello, Trafficante, and
Rosselli assassinated JFK. Marcello had learned in the 1950s that by
working with other Mafia bosses like Trafficante and Rosselli, he could
extend his considerable power even further. While Trafficante had pri-
mary control of corrupt Phenix City, Alabama, in the 1950s, Marcello
also had vice interests in the town. Across the river from sprawling
Fort Benning, Georgia, Phenix City was so lawless that even General
George S. Patton had been unable to tame it. However, in 1954, an anti-
corruption attorney general for the state of Alabama, Albert Patterson,
was elected from the town, after he pledged to run the mobsters out of
Phenix City once and for all. The mobsters faced a huge loss of revenue,
so the state’s new attorney general–elect was assassinated in Phenix
City on June 18, 1954.
However, the vice lords had been so used to the lax attitudes toward
organized crime by the state of Alabama, J. Edgar Hoover, and the
Eisenhower-Nixon administration that they didn’t bother to use a patsy
to quickly take the heat and divert attention from the real culprits. This
was a serious mistake, and suspicion quickly focused on Trafficante’s
lieutenants and a corrupt official, one of whom fled to Marcello’s terri-
tory to hide, while two others went to Trafficante’s Florida. The brazen
assassination became a national scandal, causing a barrage of media
coverage. After nationwide calls for action, President Eisenhower finally
declared Martial Rule and sent in National Guard troops to clean up the
city once and for all. Though their names stayed out of the investiga-
tion, Trafficante and Marcello had suffered a rare setback and would not
repeat the same mistake.
The error was corrected when the president of Guatemala, Castillo
Armas, was assassinated in 1957, at a time when Johnny Rosselli was
very active in the country and Marcello was developing his extensive
ties to Guatemala and to Rosselli. Guatemala’s president was assas-
sinated just four days after trying to close a casino owned by one of
Rosselli’s criminal associates. A seemingly lone, apparently communist
patsy was quickly blamed and soon killed. Like Oswald, the patsy was
ex-military, and supposedly an ardent communist who had never both-
ered to join the Communist Party. The investigation essentially ended
with the death of the patsy, who was accepted as the sole assassin by the
world press and much of the public.3 Both Marcello and Rosselli would
remember the importance of having a patsy to quickly take the blame
and divert investigators.
Marcello’s fellow mobsters continued to target government officials
into 1963. Chicago Alderman Benjamin F. Lewis was assassinated on
February 28, 1963, “the back of his head . . . shot off by three bullets,”
according to Hoffa expert Dan Moldea. He wrote that the hit man was “a
close friend of [Jack] Ruby,” in addition to being an associate of Johnny
Rosselli.4 The 1961 Mafia assassination of UAW-AFL President John
Kilpatrick in Chicago was an important turning point, even though he
wasn’t a government official: It was the first Mafia murder solved in
the city since 1934, and the first Chicago mob hit the FBI investigated,
46
LEGACY OF SECRECY
all because of new Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Guy Banister, the
FBI’s Chicago chief before his drinking and erratic behavior sent him
on a downward spiral that eventually found him working for Marcello,
once noted in a speech that more than one thousand gangland slay-
ings in Chicago remained unsolved. Banister was exaggerating only