Authors: Lamar Waldron
would usually have been subjected to similar surveillance—or other-
wise checked out—both in 1965 (when Crowe last saw Sirhan, at college)
and in 1968. But there is no record that happened to Sirhan. Unless the
FBI made an exception in Sirhan’s case, for some reason, then Sirhan had
been checked out or was under surveillance—and, like other informa-
tion about him, those files were suppressed or destroyed after he was
arrested for Bobby’s murder.19
It’s almost as if someone wanted authorities to think Sirhan was a
communist, since that might put him under surveillance, or at least
give the public and authorities some seeming motive for shooting at
Bobby. Melanson points out that “Sirhan’s notebook contained heavy
doses of pro-communist, revolutionary zeal, and anti-Americanism, as
if Sirhan were a member of the Communist Party or . . . interested in
communist ideology. But he wasn’t.” However, that was only the second
most frequent subject Sirhan scribbled about in his notebook. His pri-
mary topic was money and getting money, often very large sums.20
Before Bobby’s murder, Sirhan had been tied to people who could trig-
ger cover-ups by the LAPD or intelligence agencies—but after Bobby’s
death, the Mafia appeared to be a guiding force in Sirhan’s actions.
No more than four days after Bobby died, perhaps even before Bobby
passed away, Sirhan picked Los Angeles attorney Grant Cooper to be his
attorney—at the same time that Cooper was busy as part of the defense
team for Johnny Rosselli’s Friars Club trial. Although Cooper actually
represented one of Rosselli’s codefendants, a former casino owner (tied
to a recent hit attempt by Rosselli), author Lisa Pease noted that Cooper
“was in direct and extensive contact with Rosselli’s lawyer” throughout
much of 1968.21
Because of the way the press reported Sirhan’s selection of Grant
Cooper, the ties of Cooper to the Johnny Rosselli trial were largely over-
looked at the time. But Cooper’s representation of Sirhan would have a
huge impact on Sirhan’s trial, resulting in his receiving a death sentence
and ensuring that future appeals were fruitless. Sirhan himself would
later tell Dan Moldea that
Grant Cooper conned me to say that I killed Robert Kennedy [act-
ing alone and not as part of any conspiracy]. I went along with him
because he had my life in his hands. I was duped into believing he
had my best interests in mind. It was a futile defense. Cooper sold
me out . . . I remember Cooper once told me, “You’re getting the
best, and you’re not paying anything. Just shut up. I’m the lawyer
and you’re the client.”22
Grant Cooper was a respected attorney who had no criminal record
before joining the Friars Club defense team—but that changed when
Cooper became involved with Rosselli and his codefendant. Secret
grand jury transcripts about the case were somehow obtained and
given to Grant Cooper, but authorities were never able to learn who
provided them. Out of the five Friars Club defendants, Rosselli seems
the most likely source because of his long-standing connections to both
Los Angeles and the Mafia. The fact that Grant Cooper was later will-
ing to face charges (and an eventual conviction) for illegal possession
of the transcripts, rather than reveal their source, indicates they came
from someone from whom Cooper feared retribution—and Rosselli
was the only Mafioso among the Friars Club defendants. By giving the
transcripts to Cooper instead of to his own attorney, Rosselli not only
deflected suspicion away from himself, but also gained an important
hold over Cooper.23
664
LEGACY OF SECRECY
According to the
New York Times
, Sirhan picked Grant Cooper’s name
“from a list given him by [the] chief local counsel for the American
Civil Liberties Union.”24 However, Rosselli’s involvement explains why
a pricey attorney like Grant Cooper would readily agree to represent
Sirhan for free. Because Cooper would be busy with the Friars Club
trial for months, he brought in Mafia attorney Russell Parsons to help
on Sirhan’s case. Dan Moldea notes that “Parsons was well known for
serving as counsel to southern California mobster Mickey Cohen and
members of his gang.”25 As he had with Cooper, Sirhan had selected
Parsons’ name from the list of lawyers provided by the ACLU local
counsel—raising the possibility that someone had told Sirhan prior to
Bobby’s murder to select the two mob-connected attorneys. Parsons
immediately agreed to represent Sirhan without being paid (at least,
not by Sirhan).
Not reported at the time was the name of another lawyer Cooper
originally tried to enlist to represent Sirhan, while he finished the Friars
Club case: Washington power attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who
had established his reputation representing Jimmy Hoffa. Williams still
had the Teamsters as a client, though he hadn’t been Hoffa’s attorney
for several years. Edward Bennett Williams had also represented Sam
Giancana in his last bout with federal officials, helping to broker the
May 1966 deal that allowed Giancana to go free in return for leaving
the country and not divulging the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots.
However, by 1968 Williams was trying to develop a more legitimate
image, smoothing over his differences with Bobby Kennedy before his
death and becoming a part owner of the Washington Redskins, so Wil-
liams declined Cooper’s offer.26
That left Sirhan with two attorneys linked to the Mafia, though at the
time the press largely overlooked their mob ties, for several reasons.
First, the
New York Times
reported that Sirhan signed “the retainer for
the two lawyers . . . sometime between Sirhan’s arrest June 5 and June
10.” But that news wasn’t reported until June 20, and even then, only
Parsons’s name was released, not Cooper’s. In the
Times
article that
day, Parsons simply said that he would “be joined by another lawyer,
whom he described as ‘a very able man, a good lawyer who is involved
in something right now in which it would be detrimental if his name
were announced in connection with the Sirhan case.’”27
Parsons’ Mafia ties stemmed mainly from earlier times, since by that
time his primary mob client, Mickey Cohen, had been in prison for sev-
eral years. The
Times
article of June 20, 1968, didn’t mention the Mafia
or Cohen, saying only that Parsons was “best known . . . for his defense
of” a bookmaker, whose case helped to prevent the use “of evidence
secured by placing hidden microphones in private homes without a
search warrant.”28 On the same page, a much smaller article reported
that the United States government had asked the country of Jordan
not to allow “four Jordanian lawyers . . . to fly to Los Angeles to help
the defense of Sirhan.” Jordan complied with the US’s request, leaving
Sirhan’s defense in the hands of two attorneys tied to the mob.
The
Times
article, headlined “Lawyer, 73, Agrees to Defend Sirhan
Without Fee,” could have given readers the impression that Parsons
was simply an elderly attorney taking a case that might give him one
last turn in the limelight, and that he would be the main attorney at
trial, but Grant Cooper was actually calling the shots. It was Cooper
who decided to bring in Russell Parsons on the case, saying that he’d
“worked with Russ before.”29
As Mafia expert David Scheim pointed out, Russell Parsons had not
only “represented many Mob clients [but] had once been investigated
himself by . . . Robert Kennedy.” Parsons had called Bobby “a dirty son
of a bitch,” while praising former Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen.
When Parsons worked for Cohen, Scheim notes that Cohen had ties to
the Ambassador Hotel dating back to “the 1940s,” when Cohen “ran
a major gambling operation there.” In its secret internal reports, the
LAPD did briefly take note of Parsons’ Mafia ties years earlier, though
the department apparently never investigated Cooper’s link to the
Mafia.30
Parsons had an initial, two-hour private meeting with Sirhan on
June 19, 1968, so we can assume that from then on, Parsons and Cooper
exerted a major influence on what Sirhan said and did. In contrast to
Sirhan’s lack of openness with LAPD investigators, Sirhan “would con-
fide in Russell Parsons,” according to defense investigator and journalist
Robert Blair Kaiser.31 Moldea writes that “Kaiser, a respected journalist
and a former correspondent for
Time
, came into the case as an investiga-
tor—so that he could write about Sirhan’s defense ‘from the inside.’”
Yet William Turner reports that whenever “Kaiser had tried to open the
minds of the defense lawyers to the indications of a conspiracy, [he]
had run up against a stone wall, [and Kaiser said that] ‘Parsons simply
would not talk about [conspiracy,] let alone pursue it.’”32
The unusual actions, and lack of action, by Parsons and Cooper in the
time leading up to Sirhan’s trial have been documented by many writers,
but not at the time, only since the mid-1970s. William Turner points out
666
LEGACY OF SECRECY
their odd defense strategy of “not contesting the state’s contention that
Sirhan had acted alone.”33 Thus, all the evidence that authors and jour-
nalists later found to be so controversial—or missing—would never be
tested at Sirhan’s trial. Philip Melanson said this evidence included the
many “eyewitness accounts that challenged whether it was physically
possible for Sirhan to have inflicted Kennedy’s wounds,” and several
witnesses who saw a second gunman. After a pretrial hearing on Octo-
ber 18, 1968, Russell Parsons would announce to the press that “‘We
have seen no evidence of a conspiracy.’ An
LA Herald
headline the fol-
lowing day declared, ‘Both Sides Agree Sirhan Acted Alone.’”34
To give the press and public a logical reason for Sirhan to have shot
Bobby, Lisa Pease points out that “it was Cooper who supplied Sirhan the
motive he lacked, claiming that Sirhan was angry that RFK was willing
to provide jets to Israel.” Melanson found it troubling that even though
“Chief defense attorney Grant Cooper and . . . Russell Parsons decided
on a diminished capacity plea,” supposedly “in order to avoid the death
penalty,” they didn’t try very hard “to obtain crucial audio tapes of
Sirhan’s interrogation sessions with police during the early morning
hours following his arrest” that were central to such a defense.35
Decades later, Sirhan would finally admit to journalist Dan Moldea
that “Cooper sold me out”—but even if Sirhan saw signs, in the summer
and fall of 1968, that their defense wasn’t going to be effective, Sirhan
had no real choice but to go along with the two mob-linked attorneys.
Because of Sirhan’s experiences in the world of racetrack gambling,
plus the criminal background and associates of some of his brothers,
Sirhan would have known what happened to those who crossed the
mob. Only two weeks after Sirhan first met with Russell Parsons, some-
one apparently attempted to murder one of his brothers, possibly to
make sure that Sirhan realized what could happen to his family if he
didn’t cooperate.
In a well-documented but rarely noted incident, on July 3, 1968, Saidal-
lah Sirhan was the victim of an unusual shooting. According to Pasa-
dena police reports, at approximately 4:30 AM, while driving the Sirhan
family’s 1955 DeSoto on the Pasadena freeway, Saidallah noticed two
cars signal each other with car horns. Saidallah sensed “he was possibly
being followed” by the two vehicles. Soon, one of them—a late-model
Volkswagen Beetle—pulled up along the right side of his car, while a
1959 Chevrolet came up beside his car on the left. The police report says
that Saidallah was worried “that the two vehicles were attempting to
box him in, in an attempt to slow his car.” Then Saidallah “saw a hand
gun being pointed out the [Volkswagen’s] driver’s window.”36
Seeing the pistol, Saidallah “immediately let go of the steering wheel
of his car and leaned over to the right, lying down on the front seat of
his car,” to get out of the way. Two shots were fired into Saidallah’s car,
both “through the right wind wing.” Saidallah stayed down in the seat
for about ten seconds as his car slowed, since he had also taken “his foot
off the gas.” When Saidallah looked up, he saw the Chevrolet turn left,
while the Volkswagen turned right. Saidallah went straight ahead, to
the Pasadena Police Department, to report the shooting, where at 4:45
AM it was written up as an attempted murder. Police recovered two
bullets, which appeared to be from a .38-caliber pistol, from Saidallah’s
car. Saidallah told the Pasadena police that he had seen two men in the
Volkswagen’s front seat and two in the back, as well as the driver in