Authors: Lamar Waldron
his work against Marcello, and the secret Marcello tapes, would remain
hidden away in FBI files. After Jorge Ochoa was suddenly freed from
his Colombia prison in 1996 without explanation, US officials targeted
Ochoa’s son, who was convicted in 2003. The younger Ochoa’s case
remains under appeal; thus, the Informant and his family are subject
to retaliation not only from members of the Marcello organization, but
also from the Ochoa clan—which is why we decided not to reveal his
name in this book.23
Press coverage of the November 1988 twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s
assassination included several television specials, news reports, and
high-profile articles that mentioned Carlos Marcello as one of several
possible suspects—but none of the journalists knew the FBI was sitting
on a trove of secret reports and tapes that included Marcello’s confes-
sion. Because of that, some authors continued to blame JFK’s murder on
Castro, anti-Castro Cubans, wealthy Texas oil men, LBJ, Hoover, or the
military-industrial complex, creating a confusing mix for mainstream
journalists to sort through at the time.
Half a dozen television specials—involving newsmen ranging from
Walter Cronkite to Geraldo Rivera—were aired around the anniversary,
and several featured information about the Mafia. But the most influ-
ential would prove to be Jack Anderson’s November 2, 1988, special,
American Exposé: Who Murdered JFK?
It focused extensively on Marcello,
Trafficante, and especially Rosselli, though it appeared to endorse Ros-
selli’s false claim that Castro was involved in JFK’s murder. However, at
the end of the program, Anderson revealed that thousands of JFK files
remained unreleased, which started to generate a movement calling
for their release. Because Anderson’s special aired three weeks before
the twenty-fifth anniversary, the movement was gaining traction by
November 22, and was further fueled by the January 1989 release of
John H. Davis’s Marcello biography and other books. The push to release
the files accelerated rapidly when Oliver Stone announced plans to dra-
matize the case in his film
JFK
. Essentially, the attention generated by
the twenty-fifth anniversary reignited public interest in JFK’s murder,
eventually leading to action by Congress.
For Carlos Marcello, the most serious of the growing tide of accounts
linking him to JFK’s murder was the January 1989 release of John H.
Davis’s
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Ken-
nedy
. Unlike most previous TV specials and books, Davis’s biography
presented Marcello not as one of many suspects in JFK’s murder, but
as
the
suspect. Even with so much material still withheld, Davis came
remarkably close to outlining how Marcello had murdered JFK and used
Jack Ruby in his plans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, in January 1989, Carlos Marcello had his first
of several small strokes. He was transferred to Rochester, Minnesota’s,
Medical Center for federal prisoners.24 There, on February 27, 1989, while
Marcello was “in a semi-coherent state,” an attendant overheard him
say, “That Kennedy, that smiling motherfucker, we’ll fix him in Dal-
las.” The FBI didn’t ask Marcello about his statement until September 6,
1989, when he denied “any involvement in the assassination of President
Kennedy.” Apparently, the Bureau didn’t question Marcello at that time
about his earlier remarks to the Informant.25
By that time, the debilitating effects of Marcello’s strokes, com-
pounded by Alzheimer’s, were clear. One of the FBI agents involved in
CAMTEX told us he had not noticed any signs of the latter four years
earlier, while listening to the Bureau’s undercover Marcello tapes. Agent
Kimmel said he thought some of Marcello’s remarks in 1985 showed
such indications; however, they weren’t enough to stop the dangerous
CAMTEX undercover operation, which continued against Marcello for
another six months. Marcello’s statements, as noted by the Informant in
the FBI files, are usually accurate and consistent with facts that weren’t
well known at the time, and the aging godfather demonstrated a firm
grasp of complex criminal, business, and government matters in the
1985 accounts, prior to his 1989 strokes.26
Marcello was released from prison on October 6, 1989, after his BRILAB
conviction was reversed unexpectedly. The government decided not
to retry him, so Marcello, increasingly incapacitated from the strokes
and his Alzheimer’s, returned to Louisiana. By the time of his strokes,
Marcello’s empire had begun to break apart, and be taken over by his
former associates, like Frank Joseph Caracci, because Marcello’s broth-
ers weren’t capable of managing the organization.
Carlos Marcello died on March 2, 1993, at age eighty-three, after
spending his final years at home, his mind ravaged increasingly by dis-
ease and his strokes. Marcello reportedly died peacefully in his sleep
at his home; his death was a far cry from the bloody executions he had
ordered for so many victims. His obituaries, such as the one the Asso-
ciated Press ran, noted that “Marcello’s name was often mentioned in
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
connection with the assassination of [JFK], but he was never charged.” It
would take until 2008—and the publication of this book—for the public
to know just how much information the FBI and the Justice Department
had about the secret Marcello tapes, Marcello’s confession to JFK’s mur-
der, and his talk of meeting with Oswald and Ruby.27
Around the time of Marcello’s death, his name was linked publicly to
Martin Luther King’s assassination for the first time by Lloyd Jowers,
an associate of Frank C. Liberto. Jowers ran a shop in Memphis across
from the Lorraine Motel and below Ray’s rooming house, but his
stories often shifted and evolved over time. James Earl Ray died in
prison in 1998, maintaining his innocence, and his belief in Raoul, until
the end. In 1999, a civil trial jury in Memphis found in favor of the King
family and decided that Jowers had been part of a Marcello-backed
conspiracy. However, the following year, a Justice Department report
on the case debunked many of Jowers’ and his associates’ claims. But
the Department’s report failed to mention information in its own files
linking Marcello to the brokering of a hit contract on King for a small
group of white racists—something that had not surfaced in the 1999
trial or in earlier Congressional investigations, nor in official efforts to
declassify JFK files in the 1990s. At that time, Joseph Milteer had not
been linked to either Marcello or to King’s murder in Memphis, so he
was not mentioned in the Justice Department’s report.
Carlos Marcello’s self-professed role with Trafficante and Rosselli in
the CIA-Mafia plots was only revealed by John H. Davis in 1989, and
was never addressed by Richard Helms or any of the relevant CIA offi-
cials. Before Marcello’s involvement was exposed, legendary CIA spy-
master James Angleton passed away in 1987 and David Atlee Phillips
died in 1988. Shortly before Phillips’s death, he told an associate that
in JFK’s murder, “there was a conspiracy, likely including American
intelligence officers.” Phillips’s remarks wouldn’t be published until
six years later.28
The deaths of Angleton and Phillips left a dwindling number of
people in a position to know about the darkest secret of Richard Helms
and the CIA: how Helms’s unauthorized 1963 CIA-Mafia plots had
compromised the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and resulted in JFK’s assas-
sination. Michel Victor Mertz died in France on January 15, 1995, but
the FBI and the CIA withheld the news of his death from a fresh set of
government investigators, allowing Mertz’s files to remain unreleased
even today.
When Richard Helms died on October 23, 2002, he seemed to have
taken his most important secrets to the grave. The media savvy, and
political clout, of Helms and the CIA had successfully maintained his
decades-long cover-up in the public eye, and rebuilt his reputation in
the process. Helms’s autobiography, released six months after his death,
was even less revealing than Thomas Powers’s 1979 biography: Helms
devoted only one line to a brief mention of a 1963 coup plot against Fidel,
and another to his belief that Fidel had not killed JFK.29
As we noted in
Legacy of Secrecy
’s introduction, E. Howard Hunt was
somewhat more revealing in his 2007 autobiography, published after
Hunt’s January 23, 2007, death. Hunt essentially admitted that David
Atlee Phillips had acted as Maurice Bishop, and that Richard Helms
“made a confidant out of me [and I was] the first person” Helms told
about “important events in his life.” However, Hunt also said that Helms
always kept his eye on “his future,” and that if Helms were involved in
something negative, “he would lie about it later.”30
Hunt limited his JFK assassination revelations in the book to specula-
tion, some of which was inconsistent with remarks he made to his son in
a later-publicized tape. Other of Hunt’s claims are demonstrably false.
Hunt had tried to make millions selling his story to actor Kevin Cost-
ner before his death, and some of Hunt’s account appears to have been
cribbed from existing JFK conspiracy books, as he speculates about—
but claims no direct knowledge of—a large conspiracy that could have
included LBJ, Cord Meyer, William Harvey, David Phillips, David
Morales, Frank Fiorini, and French hit man Lucien Sarti. Most tellingly,
Hunt never mentioned—in his autobiography or in his son’s tape—the
Mafia ties of his closest friends, like Manuel Artime, or Artime’s work on
the CIA-Mafia plots. Likewise, Hunt avoided any mention of his work
on the JFK-Almeida coup plan, even though the first revelation of it and
Hunt’s role had been published in
Ultimate Sacrifice
well before Hunt
completed his autobiography.
Now that Helms and Hunt are dead, perhaps only two people are
still alive that have significant firsthand knowledge about the opera-
tions that allowed Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli to infiltrate the
JFK-Almeida coup plan and murder JFK. One is a man with a reputation
for integrity, while the other worked for Trafficante on JFK’s assassina-
tion. While some secrets died with the participants who have already
passed away, or in records that were destroyed, other information has
yet to be exposed. The Washington think tank OMB Watch found that
“well over one million CIA records” pertaining to JFK’s assassination
remain unreleased. But despite a 1992 law requiring their release, the
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
CIA intends to keep them secret until at least 2017—unless the public
and Congress demand action. Otherwise, as the history revealed in this
book has shown, the legacy of secrecy surrounding the events of 1963
will continue to extact its tragic toll on America.31
Epilogue
The JFK assassination files still withheld today, material that could
also shed new light on the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby
Kennedy, are inexorably intertwined with events in Cuba. That was
true in 1963 just as it is in 2008, when several key players in the JFK-
Almeida coup plan could still play important roles in resolving the
forty-seven-year-old impasse between the US and Cuba. Developments
from the late 1980s until today, involving both Cuba and the withheld
files, help to illuminate why so much was secret for so long, and how
each issue affects the other.
After serving twenty-one years in a Cuban prison, former exile leader
Eloy Menoyo was released in 1986, the same year the last prisoner from
the Bay of Pigs was released due to Senator Edward Kennedy’s efforts.
Commander Juan Almeida, still a revered figure in the Cuban govern-
ment, was untainted by a 1989 drug scandal in the higher ranks of the
Cuban military. However, several top officers were executed and others
imprisoned, including some of Almeida’s former protégés. One of them
may have bartered for his life by revealing Almeida’s secret work for
JFK in 1963—because soon after the trials, Almeida largely disappeared
from view in Cuba. There was no official explanation, though Almeida’s
absence was noted by exiles and journalists. Some rumors said Almeida
had been executed, while others claimed he was under house arrest, trot-
ted out only for rare public appearances before returning to custody.1
In the US, the success of Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
in late 1991 amplified
the growing movement to open the remaining assassination files. In an
attempt to preclude Congressional action, President George H. W. Bush
ordered the CIA to quickly declassify thousands of CIA files in 1992. The
first few AMWORLD documents slipped through in the rush and were