Authors: Lamar Waldron
angle, and Sirhan” didn’t deny it, and instead “answered with another
question. ‘If I got the money, where is it?’”34 The answer to Sirhan’s
question was literally staring him in the face, since, as we noted earlier,
Cooper had told Sirhan, “You’re getting the best [defense lawyers] and
you’re not paying anything.”35 In addition, it would have made little
sense for anyone to have paid an amateur like Sirhan a substantial sum
before the hit. As we pointed out earlier, Sirhan initially said he expected
only a short sentence if he were caught and convicted, leaving plenty
of time for him to be paid later. As it turned out, free defense from
high-profile attorneys, and protection for his family from more shoot-
ings (and, for Sirhan, from attacks in prison), were apparently the only
rewards Sirhan received.
Sirhan’s trial began amidst much national publicity on January 7,
1969, but Grant Cooper was caught up in conflicts of interest from the
start. The previous week, Cooper had been called before a new grand
jury to testify about the illegal transcripts of the Friars Club grand jury
that he had obtained mysteriously the previous year. According to a
January 10, 1969, newspaper report, “Cooper did admit to the [grand]
jury that he had lied to the Friars trial judge . . . to protect his client,”
Rosselli’s codefendant.36 However, Rosselli’s name was not mentioned in
press accounts of Cooper’s Friars Club problems or in regard to Sirhan’s
trial, press coverage of which quickly drove Cooper’s own legal troubles
from the news.
The possibility of jail time for Cooper wasn’t resolved until almost
four months after Sirhan’s trial was over, when Cooper pleaded guilty
and was fined only $1,000, even though he never revealed the source of
the transcripts.37 Cooper’s distinguished legal career was still in jeop-
ardy, and professional sanctions against him by the California Supreme
Court remained hanging over his head for two more years.38 Because of
those circumstances, Johnny Rosselli and the Mafia had ample leverage
over Cooper for the three crucial years after Bobby’s murder.
As for Sirhan’s own trial, many authors have pointed out that Cooper
essentially capitulated to all of the prosecution’s major points. As Lisa
Pease pointed out, the result was that Sirhan’s trial was “solely for the
purpose of determining his sentence, not whether or not he really was
guilty of the crime.” Cooper simply ignored important prosecution
problems, such as the autopsy’s conclusion that Bobby had been shot
from about an inch away, when no witness placed Sirhan that close. The
defense apparently wasn’t even given a copy of Bobby’s final autopsy
report until after the trial began. When an LAPD ballistics expert testi-
fied that only Sirhan’s pistol and “no other gun in the world fired the
evidence bullets,” the defense didn’t notice that the LAPD’s test bullets
were labeled as having been fired from a different pistol.39
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Later official investigations found the ballistics evidence problematic:
A 1977 report by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office said that “the
apparent lack of reports, both written and photographic, either made
. . . and destroyed, or never in existence, raised serious doubts as to
the substance and reliability of the ballistics evidence presented in the
original Sirhan trial.” A 1975 court-authorized panel of ballistics experts
concluded that the bullets from Bobby and the other victims could not
be matched to Sirhan’s pistol, and did not preclude the possibility that
two guns had been fired.40 Yet Cooper noted none of those problems, nor
others, during Sirhan’s trial, even though Cooper admitted three years
later that he’d been “warned prior to the trial” by an experienced crimi-
nologist that the LAPD’s ballistics expert “could not be relied upon,”
due to irregularities in an earlier case.41
Meanwhile, Cooper was still working on the Friars Club case. Four
weeks after Sirhan’s trial began, Rosselli and his codefendants were
finally sentenced, on February 4, 1969, for the cheating scandal. The
former Las Vegas casino owner who was Cooper’s client received
the longest sentence—six years and a $100,000 fine—while Rosselli
received a five-year sentence and was fined $50,000. Rosselli got an addi-
tional six months for his earlier immigration conviction, to be served
concurrently.42
On February 10, six days after Rosselli and the others were sentenced,
Cooper tried to make a deal with Sirhan’s prosecutor to end the murder
trial. The prosecutor agreed to accept a guilty plea in return for sparing
Sirhan the death penalty, because Sirhan’s shooting had been so out of
character for the young man that the prosecution’s own psychiatrist
could conclude only that Sirhan was psychotic—an assessment that fit
perfectly with Sirhan’s “diminished capacity” defense. But in a private
conference with the District Attorney and Cooper, Sirhan’s judge raised
“the Oswald matter,” in which people wondered what was “going on,
because the fellow wasn’t tried.” The judge worried that if the prosecu-
tor accepted the deal, the public “would say that it was all fixed; it was
greased. So we will just go through the trial.”43
That meant that Sirhan was on trial for his life, but even after Cooper
began presenting the defense case, on February 28, 1969, Sirhan was
opposed to portraying himself as insane or psychotic. Mental-health
facilities could still be relatively primitive in those days, and apparently
Sirhan feared spending the rest of his life locked away in an institution
for the criminally insane more than he feared the death penalty (which
Sirhan actually asked for during his February 25 outburst, mentioned
earlier).44
Sirhan’s case went to the jury on April 14, 1969, and he was convicted
on April 17. The jury voted to give Sirhan the death penalty on April 23,
and pronounced the death sentence on May 21, 1969.45
Without waiting for action to be taken on Sirhan’s appeal, the Los
Angeles Police Department was soon destroying critical evidence in
the case. On June 27, 1969, the LAPD destroyed the ceiling panels and
the door frames that had been photographed showing extra bullet holes,
too many to have been made by Sirhan’s bullets alone. The excuse the
LAPD gave later was that the door frames were “too large to fit into a
card file.”46
Some 2,400 photos from the case were burned on August 21, 1969.
Supposedly all were duplicates, yet crucial photos from the case are
still missing, even today. We mentioned earlier the photos taken in the
pantry during the shooting by fifteen-year-old Scott Enyart, who was
standing on a table to get a good view of Bobby Kennedy. Larry Hancock
writes that “Enyart eventually got back 18 prints, no negatives, and none
of the photos taken in the pantry. After years of legal struggle, he was
awarded the photos [from the pantry by the court]—which were then
‘stolen out of the back seat of a courier’s car’ when the courier stopped
to inspect a problem with a tire on the way to deliver them.”47 With-
out those photos—in the LAPD’s possession, though what the pictures
depicted was not mentioned in the LAPD’s reports—we cannot know
for certain if Sirhan did somehow manage to get close enough to Bobby
to have fired the fatal shot, as Dan Moldea suggested.
Among the other evidence that was destroyed or is still missing,
Philip Melanson lists “X-rays and test results on ceiling tiles and door
frames, spectrographic test results [for bullets], the left sleeve of Senator
Kennedy’s coat and shirt, the test gun used as a substitute for Sirhan’s
gun during ballistics tests, and results from the 1968 test firing of Sirhan’s
gun.” He also points to numerous missing tapes containing interviews
of important witnesses, including those of eyewitness Paul Schrade;
“twelve witnesses with information relating directly to whether Sirhan
was accompanied by a female accomplice”; “five witnesses at a pistol
range where Sirhan was target practicing the day of the shooting”; and
“three associates of Sirhan’s whose background . . . required probing
for possible conspiratorial involvement.” In some cases, reports refer to
tapes that no longer exist, and in other instances, tapes do not appear
to exist for witnesses who supposedly recanted their stories of having
seen Sirhan with possible accomplices.48
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
In destroying or suppressing so much evidence soon after Sirhan’s ver-
dict, some in the LAPD were simply continuing what had begun less
than an hour after the shooting: the depiction of Sirhan as a lone assas-
sin with no accomplices. While much evidence seems to support that
conclusion, its hasty adoption precluded a serious investigation of any
backing Sirhan might have had.
Once LAPD officials had made their conclusions clear internally and
to the press—that Sirhan had acted alone with no confederates—the
essential nature of large institutions caused others on the force to sup-
port the conclusion—not just before and after Sirhan’s trial, but even
years later. This situation is similar to what happened in the JFK case
with Hoover and the FBI, when field agents quickly realized that pur-
suing conspiracy leads was at odds with what headquarters wanted,
and for thirty years the FBI’s public stance continued to support that
view. LAPD officers who backed the department’s Sirhan-as-a-lone-nut
conclusion in 1968 couldn’t afford to admit later that they might have
been wrong, if they wanted to see their careers—or those of their LAPD
mentors—flourish. Decades later, the LAPD as an institution, including
its members with no connection to the original investigation, would still
take action to support its “lone nut” conclusions, not as part of a mas-
sively orchestrated cover-up, but to avoid embarrassment and scandal
for the department.
Chapter Sixty
During the summer and fall of 1968 and into 1969, the investigation
and pre-trial proceedings of James Earl Ray for Martin Luther King’s
assassination were going on at the same time as those for Sirhan Sirhan
in Bobby’s murder. News about Ray and Sirhan usually overshadowed
reports about Jim Garrison’s ongoing investigation of JFK’s assassina-
tion in New Orleans, which was now hopelessly compromised and off-
course, focusing almost exclusively on Clay Shaw.
At no time during the news coverage of any of those matters did
the names of Carlos Marcello, Johnny Rosselli, or Joseph Milteer ever
surface. The press and most investigators similarly ignored Santo Traf-
ficante and Jimmy Hoffa. No mainstream reporter pointed out any
possible connections between the three assassinations. Aside from a
few public figures like comedian Mort Sahl, most commentators and
newspeople in the US avoided even general comments on the apparent
similarities between certain aspects of the assassinations of JFK, Bobby,
and Dr. King.
After his capture on June 8, 1968, James Earl Ray spent the rest of June
and much of July in London, awaiting extradition to the US for the
murder of Dr. King. But even before his return to the US, Ray’s legal
defense started to become compromised by financial considerations and
conflicts of interest. Over the next nine months, Ray would go through
three attorneys, each with problematic connections to associates of
Carlos Marcello or Joseph Milteer, who would help to ensure the roles
of Marcello and Milteer weren’t exposed.
While still in a British jail, Ray told an officer that he expected to profit
from being involved in King’s assassination. According to the officer’s
later testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Ray
expected to be charged only with “conspiracy.” Since the trial would be
held in Memphis (or at least, if there were a change of venue, somewhere
in the South), Ray might not be convicted at all—and even if he were,
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Ray told the British officer, he expected to receive a sentence of only “ten
to twelve years.” Parole could reduce that time significantly, theoreti-
cally allowing Ray to emerge from prison a wealthy man.1
The British court appointed a solicitor for Ray, who asked the solici-
tor to contact two US attorneys whom Ray wanted to represent him.
One was Arthur Hanes Sr., the former mayor of Birmingham, Alabama,
known for winning acquittals for the four Klansmen accused of killing
civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. The other attorney was flamboyant
Melvin Belli, the drug-linked attorney who had represented Jack Ruby.
Despite their high profiles and fees, Ray told his British solicitor, “I’m not
worried about their fees . . . even if it takes a hundred thousand dollars,
I can raise it. They’ll be taken care of.”2
Melvin Belli passed on the chance to represent Ray, but Arthur Hanes