Authors: Lamar Waldron
the Chevrolet’s front seat plus two passengers in the back. All seven
individuals were white males, and Saidallah didn’t recognize any of
the men, or either of the cars.37
Police would never solve the shooting case, but they advised Saidal-
lah to move from his apartment into his mother’s house, where they
already maintained a twenty-four-hour police guard. Before Saidal-
lah could move to his mother’s, however, he received a threatening
phone call from an unidentified man, about five hours after the freeway
shooting.38
Authorities were appropriately skeptical of Saidallah’s stated reason
for being out at 4:30 AM: to ask a female journalist for the
LA Free Press
,
whom he’d met just once, over a month earlier, if she would write a
story about him. Police confirmed that Saidallah had met the woman,
as he claimed, but he admitted he had no appointment and knew that a
court order prohibited “any story written about his family or himself at
this time.” Saidallah claimed that he went out as late as he did because
“during the day there are too many people on the street . . . and he felt
safer at 4:00 AM.”39
Though Saidallah denied owning any type of gun, a couple of his
associates whom police interviewed thought he owned a .38, but police
couldn’t confirm those assertions or find any such weapon. Saidallah
had asked a female friend about buying .38 bullets for him shortly before
the shooting, so the Pasadena police looked into the possibility that
Saidallah had staged the incident. However, Saidallah offered to take
a polygraph test about the incident and allowed his apartment to be
searched without a warrant. Also, in analyzing the bullet paths, the
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Pasadena police confirmed that the shots could have been fired from
one moving car into another, as Saidallah described. Police noted that if
Saidallah hadn’t ducked after seeing the gun, “the [second bullet] would
probably have passed through his neck.”40
The timing of the incident, just a month after Bobby’s shooting and
two weeks after Sirhan met with mob lawyer Russell Parsons, is suspi-
cious. While Saidallah was clearly not in the area to meet the
Free Press
writer, it’s unlikely, by the same token, that he was mixed up in some-
thing like a drug deal gone bad—otherwise, there would have been no
reason for him to go to the police, especially so quickly after the shoot-
ing. It’s possible that Saidallah was being stalked, or had been lured to
the largely deserted freeway at that particular time, when there would
be no witnesses.
While someone may have wanted to kill Saidallah, it’s also possible
that they wanted only to scare him, to send a message to him—or to
his brother in jail. Because the shooter allowed Saidallah to see the
gun before he fired it—giving Saidallah time to duck—and the shooter
stopped firing after just two shots, their goal was probably to frighten
Saidallah, not to kill him. If so, it would evoke the incident, one year
earlier, when Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante had two gunmen
blast Teamster official Allan Dorfman’s car in a Chicago suburb. Traf-
ficante told his attorney that incident “was just a warning,” because “if
they had wanted to kill him they would have.”41
In a bizarre parallel, noted here for the first time, Sirhan’s mob attor-
ney Russell Parsons had himself been the subject of a similar shooting.
It occurred in 1940, before he became a lawyer for the Mafia, when Par-
sons was working as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles district attorney’s
office. As the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
reported, “Parsons was the
target of two gunmen who fired at him . . . on a street. . . . One bullet broke
a wind wing on the car, and another hit the engine.” At the time of the
hit, Johnny Rosselli was a very prominent member of the Mafia in Los
Angeles. It was after the shooting that Parsons left the district attorney’s
office and started representing members of Mickey Cohen’s mob.42
Saidallah was probably the toughest of Sirhan’s brothers, and later
threatened one of Parsons’ investigators, a former policeman. Parsons
and his investigator went to the police, saying Saidallah’s threat might
relate to a message left at their answering service by a “Mr. C. Sirhan”
that said, “Step out of the case. If my brother is hurt, you will be hurt. I
will kill you.” However, Parsons told police he would handle the mat-
ter himself.43
Ultimately, Parsons wound up frustrating the LAPD by protecting
Saidallah and the other brothers from participating in police lineups.
This act left the LAPD unable to resolve whether Saidallah, or other
brothers, were with Sirhan when he bought his bullets and asked about
the armor-piercing shells, or if they were involved in sightings of a man
with the girl in the polka-dot dress. The other matter in which Par-
sons deliberately stymied police was their investigation of possible ties
between Sirhan and Jerry Owen, the preacher friend of Los Angeles
Mayor Sam Yorty.44
At the time of Sirhan’s trial, it didn’t appear to the press that Cooper
and Parsons were obviously throwing the case, which would have
raised suspicion and provided grounds for Sirhan’s future appeals. But
years later, one of Sirhan’s attorneys would claim that Cooper did pre-
cisely that.45 Cooper was subject to pressure because of his indictment
for the stolen grand jury transcripts in the Friars Club case. Parsons
had a much longer history with the Mafia, but the fact that Saidallah’s
shooting incident was similar to the one involving Parsons meant that
it could have served as a reminder to keep the seventy-three-year-old
attorney in line.
Was the attack on Saidallah a message meant for Sirhan, to cooper-
ate with his mob lawyers or see his family (or himself) killed? If so,
Sirhan got the message. Moldea recounts that Sirhan launched into an
“outburst on the opening day of his defense—which forced the judge to
send the jury out of the courtroom [as Sirhan pleaded,] ‘I, at this time,
sir, withdraw my original plea of not guilty and submit the plea of guilty
as charged on all counts.’” Sirhan stunned the court by saying, “I will
ask to be executed . . . I killed Robert Kennedy willfully, premeditatedly,
with twenty years of malice aforethought.” Sirhan also asked that his
two mob lawyers, Cooper and Parsons, “disassociate themselves from
this case completely.” Sirhan soon calmed down, but his outburst sug-
gests someone who had resigned himself to take the fall to protect his
family from harm.46
Grant Cooper was following orders from someone, but it clearly
wasn’t Sirhan. In hindsight, the most obvious person in a position to
influence Cooper was Johnny Rosselli. But that fact wasn’t obvious at
the time, because while Sirhan’s case was major news nationally and
in Los Angeles, the Friars Club case involving Rosselli and Cooper
was primarily a small, local story. In 1968 and 1969, the two cases were
almost never connected in the national media, and even locally, the few
times they were mentioned in the same article, it was mainly to note
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
scheduling issues. If Rosselli were influencing Grant Cooper’s defense of
Sirhan, his sway could explain why two of Johnny Rosselli’s associates
would later apparently confess to being involved in Bobby Kennedy’s
assassination.
Chapter Fifty-nine
A decade after Bobby’s murder, Carlos Marcello’s brother Joseph would
be discussing the Kennedys with FBI BRILAB informant Joe Hauser, a
highly trusted business partner of Carlos Marcello. When the subject of
John and Bobby Kennedy came up, Joseph Marcello declared to Hauser,
“We took care of ’em, didn’t we?”—implying that Carlos Marcello had a
hand in eliminating Bobby, as well as JFK. On October 25, 1979, Hauser
would record for the BRILAB operation a talk between Marcello and two
trusted associates, including the number-two man in the Los Angeles
mob. When one raised the subject of Edward Kennedy’s running for
president, Carlos Marcello shouted that “he better fuckin’ not. He better
stay the fuck out of it. . . . ”1
The Los Angeles mobster replied, “What a fuckin’ shithead dat
brother of his, Bobby, was . . . bastard thought he was gonna put us all
outa business, the motherfucker.”
Marcello’s associate said, “Yeah, so we put HIM outa business!” as
all the mobsters laughed.2
Unlike in JFK’s assassination, there is not a clear, unequivocal con-
fession by Carlos Marcello to his being involved in Bobby Kennedy’s
assassination. Then again, unlike the mostly released BRILAB audio-
tapes, the hundreds of hours of CAMTEX audiotapes of Marcello that
were secretly recorded in prison in 1985 have never been released—and
crucial evidence about Bobby’s assassination has disappeared or been
destroyed by Los Angeles police. Still, by using only the evidence that
was available twenty years ago, John H. Davis and David E. Scheim
were able to make compelling cases that Marcello and the Mafia were
involved in Bobby’s murder. Aside from his close relationship to Mickey
Cohen, Marcello said that he considered other leaders of the Los Angeles
Mafia to be “personal friends of mine . . . good people. They part of the
family.”
Carlos Marcello had maintained his close ties to Jimmy Hoffa and the
Mafia’s $2 million “Spring Hoffa” fund. Hoffa shared Marcello’s hatred
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
of Bobby Kennedy, and on July 23, 1968, the FBI finally interviewed
Hoffa about his earlier reported threats to have Bobby assassinated. In
addition to the May 1967 and May 1968 threats we’ve mentioned, Dan
Moldea wrote about another incident in June 1968, “eight days after
Robert Kennedy’s murder, [when] the FBI received information from a
confidential informant that James R. Hoffa . . . had said [before the assas-
sination], ‘If Hoffa isn’t out, Kennedy will never get in.’”3
When the FBI talked to Hoffa at Lewisburg Federal Prison, Hoffa did
not directly deny making the threats to have Bobby killed, probably
because he knew that lying to a federal officer was a crime. Hoffa also
refused to “sign the waiver” saying that he had been informed of his
rights. According to FBI reports, Hoffa was asked if “he had made the
statement that he had a contract out on Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and
if he, Kennedy, ever got in the primaries or ever got elected, the con-
tract would be fulfilled within six months.” In response, “Hoffa stated
he would not answer such a ‘stupid’ allegation. He stated, ‘You know
as well as I do how many nuts there are in this place who would say
anything.’ Hoffa said, ‘You have my statement,’ and refused to com-
ment further regarding this allegation or the assassination of Senator
Kennedy.”4
Hoffa’s threats to assassinate Bobby Kennedy were not reported in
the press at the time, and didn’t start to become public knowledge until
after Hoffa’s disappearance, seven years later, and some are quoted in
this book for the first time. If Hoffa’s contract on Bobby were put into
action, as a federal prisoner, Hoffa couldn’t have played any significant
role in implementing it—he would have needed others to do that.
In Chapter 54, we noted briefly police and FBI reports of a Las Vegas
Mafia contract on Bobby. Around May 1, 1968, a wealthy rancher and
farmer in Delano, California, named Roy Donald Murray was overheard
by the Chief of Police and another officer saying that “he had pledged
$2,000 . . . to pay off a contract to kill Senator Kennedy,” and that the
Mafia “was behind the letting of the contract.” Quoted for the first time
here, the Delano police confirmed that Murray had “supposed connec-
tions in Las Vegas” and was “a known gambler [who] frequently loses
several thousands of dollars at a time when he visits Las Vegas, but this
does not appear to bother him,” indicating that the “prosperous cotton
rancher” had money to burn.5
The two Delano police sources had heard Roy Donald Murray while
he was drinking heavily at the local Elks Club. Murray said that “he
received a telephone call from his ‘Mafia,’ friends in Las Vegas, request-
ing a contribution to help pay a $500,000 to $750,000 contract to assas-
sinate Robert Kennedy. Murray stated that the assassination was to
take place if it appeared Kennedy was to earn the Democratic presi-
dential nomination.” Murray said that according to the Mafia, “Cali-
fornia was considered as the conclusive proof point of that probable
nomination.”6
Like many wealthy farmers in the area, Murray was upset about Bob-
by’s support for migrant labor leader César Chávez, based in Delano.
Local law enforcement supported the farmers, so Murray felt comfort-
able telling the policemen about his “friends [who] were members of
the ‘Mafia.’”7 The two police officials who heard Murray’s comments