Authors: Lamar Waldron
By November 1963, Carlos Marcello was confident that he could get
away with assassinating the President of the United States, because he’d
made sure that JFK’s murder couldn’t be fully or publicly investigated
without exposing the coup plan. As documented earlier, even the bullets
in Oswald’s rifle could have led investigators to the plan with Almeida.
Knowledge of the coup plan enabled Marcello and his associates to com-
promise each of Bobby and Harry’s exile groups in some way. The Mafia
chiefs used money to essentially bribe Artime and Varona, while they
compromised Ray’s and Menoyo’s groups by linking them to Oswald.
As for Harry Williams, Marcello left him to his friend Trafficante. On
one occasion, former death-squad leader Rolando Masferrer confronted
Harry at Bobby Kennedy’s New York apartment. As we noted previ-
ously, a CIA associate of E. Howard Hunt took Harry to an impromptu
meeting with Trafficante, who fruitlessly offered Harry a bribe. Still
56
LEGACY OF SECRECY
later, on a trip to Guatemala to meet with Artime, Harry was attacked
by two gunmen in a restaurant, and he barely escaped after shooting
one of them.
The CIA ties of Guy Banister and David Ferrie, documented in Chapter
6, using new information from the CIA’s Deputy Chief in New Orleans,
also enabled Marcello to take advantage of US intelligence operations
for his own ends. Memos show that the CIA almost recruited Banister
in the summer of 1960, when the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots
with Trafficante and Rosselli began. Guy Banister’s secretary says that
Rosselli visited their office in the summer of 1963, while the CIA-Mafia
plots continued. Banister also had ties to Naval Intelligence through
his close friend Guy Johnson. In addition, Banister had also served in
the FBI on a major case with General Joseph Carroll, JFK’s trusted head
of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which included Naval Intelligence.
Several years before JFK’s assassination, Banister had even been busi-
ness partners with Carmine Bellino, a close advisor to JFK who was part
of Bobby’s Get Hoffa Squad in 1963. In short, Banister had numerous
ways to feed disinformation into various agencies.33
As for David Ferrie, Anthony Summers writes that “the former
Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA [confirmed that]
Ferrie had been a contract agent to the Agency [CIA] in the early sixties
. . . in some of the Cuban activities, [and Richard] Helms stated that
David Ferrie was a CIA agent [in the fall of 1963].”34 In the summer of
1963, Manuel Artime briefly had a training camp near New Orleans,
and Summers writes that Guy Banister’s secretary said that “Ferrie not
only met Oswald but took him on at least one visit to an anti-Castro
guerrilla training camp outside New Orleans.”35 A CIA note card about
Lee Harvey Oswald, declassified in the mid-1990s, said “there had been
no secret, as far as anyone was concerned, in regard to the fact that Ban-
ister, David William Ferrie, and Subj[ect, Oswald] may have known or
been acquainted with one another.”36 Given all those connections, when
Oswald talked to Marcello in the meeting the Informant described, the
young man may have thought he was being brought into the CIA-Mafia
plots by Marcello and his associates.
Marcello faced losing his empire, his freedom, and even the ability
to stay in America—unless he ended Bobby Kennedy’s extraordinary
power by killing JFK. In November 1963, when Marcello was being tried
on federal charges that Bobby had brought against him, even a minor
conviction could have resulted in his deportation. Marcello had already
found a way to evade justice, by bribing a key juror. However, he knew
that a new investigation would begin as soon as that trial was over (and
Bobby did later prosecute him for bribing the juror). Bobby was already
focusing on tax charges against Marcello, the same technique used to
send Al Capone to prison, and the Mafia chief knew he would have no
respite while JFK was alive.
Doing nothing about JFK and Bobby simply was not an option for
Marcello. He knew that the JFK-Almeida coup plan was perhaps the
only thing so sensitive that it could trigger a cover-up by high-ranking
US officials. Just as the Kennedys felt they had to stage their coup with
Almeida soon, Marcello knew he had to act before the coup took place
and removed his only opportunity to force a cover-up by officials like
Bobby Kennedy.
Marcello had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the
JFK-Almeida coup plan to go forward. As long as JFK was President,
Cuba would not be a safe haven for Marcello or any other Mafia boss.
Hence, Marcello had to kill JFK before December 1, 1963, the scheduled
date for the coup. That’s why Marcello organized three attempts to kill
JFK during November 1963, in Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas.
Marcello relied on his trusted associates to help him: the Chicago
mob’s Rosselli, and Trafficante in Tampa. The men sometimes met at a
secluded resort outside Tampa, the Safety Harbor Spa, whose exclusive
clientele and distinctive staff freed the mob bosses from any possibility
of law enforcement surveillance.37 Trafficante also met with Marcello in
New Orleans once or twice a year, and we noted earlier Rosselli’s trip to
New Orleans in 1963. In the JFK hit, these Mafia chiefs were only doing
on a larger scale what they had done successfully in the past, and using
only associates they knew they could trust.
Chapter Four
Though Carlos Marcello was the driving force behind JFK’s assassina-
tion, he was joined at the highest level by Tampa crime boss Santo Traf-
ficante and the Chicago Mafia’s Johnny Rosselli. As Chapter 5 explains,
in November 1963 they first attempted to kill JFK in Chicago and then
in Tampa, before finally succeeding in Dallas. Their careful year of plan-
ning meant that even their backup plan (Tampa) had a backup (Dallas),
and each city’s Mafia family shared the risk. As with Marcello, both
Trafficante and Rosselli also confessed their roles in JFK’s murder to
trusted associates shortly before their deaths. The same was true of some
of the operatives they had used in the JFK hit, some of whose roles are
described in this chapter.
Santo Trafficante’s exclusive territory was not as large as Marcello’s,
but because of the groundwork laid by his crime-boss father, Santos
Trafficante Sr., the Tampa crime godfather’s reach stretched far beyond
Florida and US borders. In the 1920s, the senior Trafficante began import-
ing heroin from France into Cuba, and then into Florida. By the 1940s,
the Trafficante network had worked out partnerships with other Mafia
families that allowed them to bring in heroin through New York City.
The elder Trafficante started his son in the Havana casino business in
1946. After his father died in 1954, Santo Trafficante became boss of
the Tampa Mafia and prospered during the golden age of Cuban mob
casinos in the mid- to late 1950s.1
Trafficante’s Havana casino empire slowly crumbled after Castro
ascended to power. Castro initially closed all the casinos, but then
allowed them to reopen for more than two years before finally closing
the last one in 1961, several months after the Bay of Pigs. However, Traf-
ficante was still able to prosper by expanding his gambling and other
criminal activities, which included smuggling contraband through Cuba
while bringing in black-market goods barred by the American embargo.
Trafficante controlled the rackets in most of Florida, and though Miami
was considered an “open city” like Las Vegas, Trafficante’s heavy pres-
ence there made him first among equals. While Trafficante lived in
Tampa, he maintained a base in Miami, where he shared an office with
a Hoffa Teamster local.
Trafficante also greatly expanded the French Connection heroin
network, in partnership with Marcello and other associates, including
Jimmy Hoffa.2 By 1963, this heroin-importation network stretched from
France to entry points like New York City, Montreal, Mexico City, New
Orleans, Houston, and Miami. One of Trafficante’s most common tech-
niques for smuggling heroin was to hide it in special compartments in
cars, bringing them into the United States at border crossings in Texas
or from Canada, or on ocean liners, as depicted in the
French Connec-
tion
movie. Investigations by the Bureau of Narcotics and a Pulitzer
Prize–winning team from
Newsday
show that the French criminal who
perfected the car technique, Michel Victor Mertz, was an important part
of Trafficante’s network.3
Trafficante’s heroin network was his most secure and ruthless opera-
tion because of the tremendous amounts of money it involved. It was a
high-stakes, deadly enterprise in which one mistake could mean death.
Although importing heroin was one of the most profitable operations
that Trafficante and Marcello shared, it was under increasing attack by
the Kennedys. This helps to explain why the mob bosses used trusted
members of this network in the JFK hit, from Mertz to Ruby—and why
one of the lowliest members of the network was almost able to prevent
JFK’s assassination.
Santo Trafficante talked about his decision to kill JFK in the fall of
1962, around the same time Carlos Marcello told Ed Becker that JFK
should be killed to end Bobby’s power. In Miami, Trafficante told a
different FBI informant, Jose Aleman, that “JFK was going to be hit”
and would never survive until the 1964 election. After that, the two
Mafia chiefs began working together to target JFK, meeting several times
in 1963 with Frank Ragano, the lawyer Trafficante shared with Hoffa.
Years later, Ragano told Robert Kennedy’s biographer and associate Jack
Newfield that Hoffa had him take messages about JFK’s assassination
to Marcello and Trafficante in 1963.4 Hoffa himself was under too much
scrutiny to actively participate in the JFK plot, but he made it clear to
Marcello and Trafficante that they would be well rewarded for carrying
out their plan.
As explained in later chapters, Trafficante confessed his part in
JFK’s assassination to Frank Ragano, though the lawyer’s account of
60
LEGACY OF SECRECY
Trafficante’s confession minimized Ragano’s own role in the hit. In addi-
tion, Harry Williams told us that one of Trafficante’s men, who also
worked for the CIA, was involved in JFK’s murder.5
By November 1963, Trafficante had even more compelling reasons
to kill JFK in order to end Bobby’s war against him and his Mafia allies.
These ranged from the major busts that had disrupted Trafficante’s part
of the French Connection drug network to Bobby’s relentless pressure
on his associates, including Marcello, Hoffa, and Giancana. Both of Traf-
ficante’s own brothers were under indictment for tax violations, and two
of his cousins had been arrested.6 Bureau of Narcotics agents had even
monitored the wedding of Trafficante’s daughter, something that would
have been unheard of just a few years earlier.7 Also, Trafficante’s opera-
tions had been exposed in Congressional hearings just five weeks earlier.
While the testimony regarding Trafficante’s activities hadn’t received
the same national exposure and live TV coverage as the Valachi hearings,
such Congressional scrutiny threatened to generate further unwanted
attention for Trafficante’s normally secretive operations.
The October 15, 1963, hearings not only provide a good overview of
some of Trafficante’s operations, but also include details that presage
how JFK was killed. The hearings were conducted by JFK’s former men-
tor, Senator John McClellan. Bobby Kennedy had provided information
for the hearings, which targeted many of the same Mafiosi his prosecu-
tors were going after.
We can now reveal that Trafficante managed to have at the hearings
his main operative on the Tampa police force, Sergeant Jack de la Llana,
who was far more than just a corrupt cop for Trafficante. In Washington,
Sgt. de la Llana not only monitored what witnesses said for Trafficante,
but even testified himself, as a seemingly upright member of the force.
In Tampa, Sgt. de la Llana’s work for Trafficante extended to the whole
state of Florida and beyond. That’s because de la Llana, no doubt on Traf-
ficante’s behalf, had formed the Tampa Police Department’s first crimi-
nal intelligence unit, and became its director. Neil G. Brown, Tampa’s
Police Chief in October 1963, proudly testified that Sgt. de la Llana was
also the “chairman of the Florida Intelligence Unit, a statewide agency
which coordinates information . . . throughout the State of Florida.”8
This cooperation even extended to other states, such as when Sgt. de la
Llana exchanged information with the New Orleans Police Department
about the Fair Play for Cuba committee.
Sgt. de la Llana’s position allowed him to monitor developments in