Authors: Lamar Waldron
Rosselli still faced prison, but he was also free on appeal—and still had
potential leverage over the CIA to at least protect himself from being
deported on his immigration charge. Jimmy Hoffa was still in prison,
and for some reason had seemed unusually interested in following the
progress of the prosecution of James Earl Ray. Given Ray’s extensive
criminal background and knowledge of what happened to snitches in
prison, in addition to the assassination attempt on Sirhan’s brother, Mar-
cello and the others could be confident that neither convicted assassin
would reveal anything that pointed in their direction.40
With the resolution of the cases against Sirhan, Ray, and Shaw, no
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government agency seemed to be actively investigating any of the three
assassinations that had rocked the country over the past five years. The
same was true for the major news organizations. With the help of orga-
nized crime, illegal campaign contributions from US companies and
foreign governments, and scuttling a pre-election Vietnam peace agree-
ment, Richard Nixon had been elected president in November 1968, and
the Mafia had little to fear from his administration. Nixon had retained
Richard Helms as CIA Director, a decision which would further ensure
that information which might expose the Mafia’s role in the CIA-Mafia
plots and JFK’s assassination would stay hidden. Helms had E. How-
ard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips well positioned to help him in that
regard, while potentially problematic AMWORLD veterans like David
Morales were stationed far away, in Southeast Asia.
While prospects for further government or press investigations into
the murders of JFK, Bobby, or King looked bleak, important questions
lingered. In some ways, Jim Garrison’s best legacy was not his disas-
trous prosecution of Clay Shaw, but the information his investigators
developed pertaining to other matters (never used in court) and the
careers they pursued later. Some of the private citizens who had assisted
Garrison were continuing their own investigations. These included for-
mer FBI agent William Turner, who learned that a Cuban exile named
Harry Williams, who had worked for Bobby Kennedy, might have some
interesting information. Washington attorney Bernard Fensterwald was
organizing a group of people interested in the assassinations, and within
a few years would become James Earl Ray’s attorney. Former Senate
investigator Harold Weisberg had continued his work after leaving Gar-
rison, and would soon be the first journalist to name Joseph Milteer in
relation to JFK’s assassination.
Other private citizens and authors—Mary Ferrell, Sylvia Meagher,
Paul Hoch, Dr. Cyril Wecht, David Lifton, Richard Sprague, Gaeton
Fonzi, Peter Noyes, and several more—were also continuing their
efforts, looking primarily at JFK’s assassination but also aware of some
of the lingering issues surrounding Bobby’s and King’s murders. While
the government’s legacy of secrecy had prevented the American public
from learning the truth by the end of the 1960s, those men and women
were essentially continuing Bobby Kennedy’s quest to uncover his
brother’s killers.
PART FIVE
Chapter Sixty-one
As 1970 began, no one seemed close to exposing the roles that Marcello,
Trafficante, and Rosselli had played in the assassinations of the sixties.
It likewise didn’t appear that anyone would discover Richard Helms’s
unauthorized plots between the CIA and the Mafia to assassinate Fidel
Castro in 1963. No active government investigations were ongoing, leav-
ing only a few independent journalists and private researchers to pursue
leads in the murders of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy.
However, the illegal activities of President Richard Nixon would change
all that: In just a few years, the three Mafia bosses would be grilled by
Congressional committees about the JFK hit, Rosselli would be grue-
somely murdered, Helms would be fired and face prosecution, while
Hunt would be in prison.
For fifty-nine-year-old Carlos Marcello, the start of the seventies saw his
criminal empire continued to expand, even as he diversified into more
legitimate businesses. However, Marcello still ordered contract killings,
even while appealing his conviction and two-year sentence for slugging
an FBI agent.1 The Bureau had offered Marcello a deal to avoid prison, by
providing information in just one other case, but Marcello refused. Mar-
cello had backed Nixon for years, and one of Marcello’s “fixers”—who
treaded the thin line between politics and crime—was close to Nixon’s
own fixer, former mob attorney Murray Chotiner. According to John H.
Davis, Marcello “and his lawyers pulled every string at their command
to get Carlos’s two year sentence reduced . . . to six months and made
arrangements for him to spend that time at the Medical Center for Fed-
eral Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.”2
Marcello entered the Springfield facility on October 14, 1970. Since
it was one of the least secure and most comfortable federal prisons,
allowing more phone calls and visitors than others, Marcello had no
trouble running his empire from prison. When he was released on March
12, 1971—after serving just five months—Marcello emerged much
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
healthier and more fit, ready for what would be his most prosperous
decade.
Even before Marcello entered prison in 1970, reporters whispered
among themselves what they wouldn’t print: that the New Orleans
godfather was tied to JFK’s murder. While covering a Marcello court
appearance in 1970, journalist Peter Noyes heard “a newspaper reporter
[say] ‘There’s been a lot of talk about that guy being involved in the Ken-
nedy assassination.’”3 In fall 1971, Noyes learned from the Los Angeles
chief deputy district attorney that the Senate Judiciary Committee was
holding secret hearings on JFK’s and Bobby’s assassinations, following
California Senator George Murphy’s remarks that “the killers of John
and Robert Kennedy may have acted under orders from someone else.”
A Murphy aide confirmed the secret hearings to Noyes, who began writ-
ing a book about the assassinations,
Legacy of Doubt
. Most of the media
ignored Noyes’s book when it was published in 1973, even though it
featured new information tying Marcello to JFK’s slaying and raised
troubling questions about Bobby’s murder.4
William Sartor was also preparing a book in 1971, writing about Mar-
cello’s ties to Martin Luther King’s murder. Sartor went to Waco, Texas,
to interview Sam Termine, a nightclub owner and Marcello lieutenant
who had once been Marcello’s bodyguard and driver while serving as
a decorated member of the Louisiana State Police. Sartor was killed
the night before his interview with Termine, leaving his manuscript
unfinished—but it wasn’t until 1992 that the local district attorney ruled
Sartor’s death a “homicide.”5
Unlike Marcello, Santo Trafficante didn’t have legal issues to worry
about, which allowed his operations to grow throughout the 1970s and
into the early 1980s. Even though Jimmy Hoffa was still in prison, new
Teamster president Frank Fitzsimmons made sure that associates of
Trafficante and Marcello received generous multimillion-dollar loans
from the Teamster Pension fund. The fifty-five-year-old Trafficante also
greatly expanded his heroin network not just in America but interna-
tionally. Intelligence journalist Joseph Trento documented that after the
Mafia chief made a 1968 trip to South Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singa-
pore, Trafficante6
decided to have his Hong Kong-based deputy . . . take control of
every big Saigon nightspot catering to US servicemen. By 1970,
[Trafficante’s] Saigon-produced heroin was being sold directly to
American GI’s at bargain prices at each of these nightspots.7
Though largely forgotten today, the “Service Club Scandal” was major
news at the time, because Trento points out that “by 1970, Congress
estimated that a full fifteen percent of the US troops in Vietnam were
hooked on heroin.” Still, none of the mainstream press coverage linked
Trafficante’s name to the growing heroin problem or the service club
scandal, allowing him to once again prosper by staying in the shadows.
Trento finds it significant that AMWORLD veterans David Morales, for-
mer Artime aide “Chi Chi” Quintero, and CIA Station Chief Ted Shack-
ley were stationed in Saigon as the heroin problem exploded.8
Trafficante’s heroin network was undergoing a major shift by 1970,
with Cuban exiles playing an increasing role, as France finally began to
arrest some of their most notorious traffickers. Nixon’s official reaction
was to order the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) to
crack down on US heroin trafficking.9 Unofficially, Nixon would soon
build his own small antidrug squad, one that included Trafficante associ-
ates like Frank Fiorini and Manuel Artime.10
As documented by many journalists in the 1970s, and more recently
by Anthony Summers, Richard Nixon had numerous criminal ties, some
dating back to the 1940s. By the time Nixon became president, several
of his criminal business partners and contributors had links to Santo
Trafficante. That may explain why Trento found that “the BNDD could
not get the Nixon administration to go after Trafficante directly.”11
Trafficante had casino interests in the Bahamas, as did several Nixon
associates. Nixon’s best friend, Bebe Rebozo, a Miami Cuban exile
heavily involved in Nixon’s business affairs, also had links to organized
crime, though they were rarely reported in the press. Nixon’s personal
and business—and soon White House—affairs became so compromised
by criminal associates that the corruption made a mockery of Nixon’s
public “law and order” stance so often extolled by Vice President Spiro
Agnew.12
When US pressure finally resulted in the arrest of Michel Victor Mertz
on November 24, 1969, for the 1965 Fort Benning bust, Mertz was too
wealthy and powerful to suffer consequences for very long.13 Mertz’s
long-standing ties to French Intelligence (SDECE) gave him far more
leverage over the SDECE than Johnny Rosselli had over the CIA. Mertz
was released from his initial jailing after just seven months but was then
tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years for heroin trafficking in July
1971. However,
Newsday
reported he had to serve only eight months,
even though Mertz’s operation had shipped two tons of heroin, with a
street value of $400 million, into the US in the past eight years.14
Because of the heroin epidemic in the US,
Newsday
publisher William
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Attwood had devoted the resources of his newspaper to an unprec-
edented, globe-trotting narcotics exposé. Attwood had worked for JFK
and Bobby on Cuban matters, and though the prizewinning
Newsday
series didn’t mention any links between JFK’s murder and Mertz, it was
the first American press exposure of Mertz’s heroin trafficking—and his
soft treatment by the French government.15
Mertz’s brief prison stints had little impact on Trafficante, since his
Cuban exiles filled the void left by the French arrests to such an extent
that
Newsday
reported the BNDD had discovered that 8 percent of the
1,500 Bay of Pigs veterans had “been investigated or arrested for drug
dealing.” That total likely didn’t include prominent exiles like Manuel
Artime, who would never be arrested for his drug trafficking activities,
and whose reach soon extended into the White House.16
At sixty-five, Johnny Rosselli was not doing nearly as well as Traff-
icante and Marcello. Rosselli not only faced five years in prison for his
Friars Club scheme and immigration violations but INS was again try-
ing to deport him. Even worse, Rosselli’s former partner in the Friars
Club scam, the casino owner, had turned states evidence and was giv-
ing information to the government. Prosecutors in Los Angeles used a
grand jury in an attempt to pressure Rosselli, but the Mafia don gave
only vague answers that didn’t incriminate himself or anyone else.17
Rosselli’s new attorney, Tom Wadden, once again pressed the CIA
to intervene for their former asset, at least enough to prevent Rosselli’s
deportation. Toward that end, Rosselli had meetings with William
Harvey, CIA official Jim O’Connell, and Robert Maheu, recently fired by
Howard Hughes when the reclusive billionaire left the country.18 One
CIA memo says that “on November 18, 1970 . . . Mr. Helms flatly refused
to intercede with INS on Rosselli’s behalf.” However, the CIA admits
“meeting with INS regarding the status of the deportation proceedings
[in] March 1971,” and the INS deportation efforts were halted at that
time, after Rosselli entered prison on February 25, 1971. What happened