Authors: Lamar Waldron
Cheramie herself that she worked for Jack Ruby.10 Cheramie told Detec-
tive Fruge the same thing, also giving him detailed information about
the heroin transaction her companions were to complete after taking
care of things in Dallas. Cheramie named the ship and seaman bring-
ing the drugs to Galveston, saying the deal would be consummated at
the Rice Hotel in Houston. Fruge’s superior gave her information to US
Customs officials, who were initially very interested. In contrast, when
Dallas Homicide Chief Fritz was informed of Cheramie’s remarks about
JFK and Ruby, he told Customs he was “not interested.”11
Fruge and Cheramie flew to Houston to help Customs, and every-
thing she said about the heroin operation checked out: Customs found
her reservation at the Rice Hotel, and agents confirmed that the Dallas
man holding Cheramie’s child was a suspected drug dealer. Customs
also verified the name of the ship Cheramie had provided, and the iden-
tity of the seaman smuggler. Author Larry Hancock found that Customs
corroborated Cheramie’s information about the Houston and Dallas
Mafia families involved, which both “had records or reputations for
narcotics [and] white slavery [prostitution].”12
Everything seemed set for a major heroin bust that could have tied
members of Marcello’s heroin network, like Ruby and Mertz, to JFK’s
assassination. It would have been the third bust in Marcello’s South
Texas territory in just over a year, following the October 1963 Laredo
seizure and the 1962 Houston seizure bust, and would have dealt a
serious blow to Marcello’s heroin pipeline. Bobby’s Justice Department
was still prosecuting the first two seizures, but before it was told about
Cheramie’s information, the Houston investigation suddenly ground
to a halt, for reasons that were never explained.
Customs lost track of the seaman they were tailing, and the agents
didn’t bother to interview the implicated local Mafia families or place
them under surveillance. The Houston police entered the case and
wanted to drop the investigation. The Secret Service became involved,
and though its report about Cheramie is referenced in a Customs memo,
no Secret Service files about Cheramie have ever been released.13 Those
weren’t the only files about Cheramie that disappeared: Years later, Con-
gressional investigators wrote that when they looked into the matter,
“US Customs was unable to locate documents and reports related to its
involvement in the Cheramie investigation, although such involvement
was not denied. Nor could Customs officials locate those agents named
by Fruge as having participated in the original investigation.”14
On November 30, 1963, Customs dropped the case, despite having
confirmed all of Cheramie’s leads. Frustrated, Detective Fruge returned
to Louisiana, and Cheramie was left on the streets of Houston. After
reviewing all of the available material, we think it likely that someone
in the Houston Police Department or Customs called off the investiga-
tion in order to protect Marcello’s drug network. However, because the
investigation closed so quickly, with no arrests, Cheramie was eventu-
ally able to resume some of her former contacts. She would lay low for
a year, then try once more to get back at the heroin network of Marcello
and Mertz—only to meet a gruesome fate.
In the days following Oswald’s murder, Marcello, Trafficante, and
Rosselli continued having associates plant disinformation implicating
Castro in JFK’s assassination; it would trickle out to the press and offi-
cials over the coming year, and beyond. The stories in small-market
newspapers and radio, blaming Castro and hinting at the JFK-Almeida
coup plan, were just enough to get the attention of US officials, but not
enough to become major news stories. The mob bosses’ actions forced
top officials into a continuing cover-up about JFK’s assassination, to pre-
vent a public outcry to invade Cuba, and to avoid exposing Almeida.15
The most public spokesman for these efforts was John Martino. On
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November 26, 1963, Martino began implicating Castro in JFK’s murder
and hinting at the JFK-Almeida coup plan in radio, newspaper, and
magazine appearances. Martino was touring the country as a promi-
nent member of the John Birch Society Speakers Bureau, ostensibly to
promote his book
I Was Castro’s Prisoner.
As noted earlier, Martino had
worked with Trafficante, Rosselli, and Rolando Masferrer, and had met
Carlos Marcello. It’s unlikely that David Atlee Phillips or others in the
CIA were behind Martino’s publicity efforts, because Martino’s book
actually mentioned the name of Phillips’s associate, David Morales, a
fact that the CIA wanted to keep secret. In addition, Phillips was capable
of generating much more publicity if he wanted to, and it seems unlikely
that the CIA would have risked exposing the coup plan, since Helms
would pursue a variation of it—with some of the same people, like
Artime—for another year and a half.
Martino’s phony stories started out mildly, claiming that Oswald had
gone to Cuba in the fall of 1963, and had passed out pro-Castro literature
in Miami and New Orleans. Those tales brought Martino a visit from
the FBI on November 29, but he refused to identify his sources.16 As
press reports about the JFK investigation continued, Martino ramped
up his rhetoric.
An article under Martino’s name appeared in the December 21, 1963,
issue of the right-wing journal
Human Events
, in which Martino took
credit for revealing that “the Kennedy Administration planned to elimi-
nate Fidel Castro. . . through a putsch, [and] the plan involved a more
or less token invasion from Central America to be synchronized with
the coup. A left-wing coalition government was to be set up, [and] the
plan involved [the] US [military] occupation of Cuba.” That was more
than most high US officials in the Johnson Administration knew at the
time.17
Martino knew about the involvement of Manolo Ray’s JURE exile
group, writing in the article that “Oswald made . . . approaches to JURE,
another organization of Cuban freedom fighters, but was rejected.” Three
months earlier, Martino and Masferrer had been linked to the attempt
to smear Ray’s group by tying it to Oswald via the incident with Dallas
JURE member Silvia Odio. When Martino’s article was published, only
the FBI and a handful of Odio’s closest family and friends knew about
Oswald’s visit; nothing about it had appeared in the press.18
In Martino’s first major article, he only hinted that Oswald was work-
ing for Fidel when he killed JFK. The following month, Martino revealed
new details about the coup plan and implicated Fidel more directly, in a
January 30, 1964,
Memphis Press-Scimitar
article headlined: “Oswald Was
Paid Gunman for Castro, Visitor Says.” It quotes John Martino as saying,
“Lee Harvey Oswald was paid by Castro to assassinate President Ken-
nedy,” and that the murder was in retaliation for JFK’s “plan to get rid of
Castro.” Martino described JFK’s coup plan with remarkable precision,
including information from documents that wouldn’t be declassified
for more than thirty-five years: “There was to be another invasion and
uprising in Cuba . . . and the Organization of American states . . . was to
go into Cuba . . . and control the country until an election could be set
up.” Martino even knew that “since the death of Kennedy, the work on
an invasion has virtually stopped.”
We can only imagine the consternation Martino’s increasingly pro-
vocative articles caused among some officials in Washington. They seem
to have gotten the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, since FBI agents inter-
viewed Martino yet again on February 15, 1964. In an era when presi-
dents and Congress treated Hoover and his FBI with deference, Martino
basically thumbed his nose at the agents. He declared that “President
Kennedy was engaged in a plot to overthrow the Castro regime by pre-
paring another invasion attempt against Cuba.” But the frustrated FBI
agents wrote that “Martino refused to divulge the sources of his infor-
mation or how they might know what plans President Kennedy might
have had.”19
Other Trafficante associates also leaked information to the press and
officials implicating Castro in JFK’s murder, but none of these other leaks
hinted at the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Martino was unique in that regard,
probably because (by his own admission) he had actually been part of
the assassination plot. Among the others planting stories implicating
Castro was Trafficante’s man Frank Fiorini, whose story appeared in a
Florida newspaper on November 26, 1963, though Fiorini later admitted
he’d gotten his information from John Martino.20
It’s important to note that no credible evidence or testimony has yet
turned up that identifies Fiorini as having played a role in JFK’s assas-
sination. Speculation that Fiorini was one of the “three tramps” arrested
in Dealey Plaza has been disproven, as was an allegation that Fiorini,
Oswald, and others drove from Miami to Dallas in the days before JFK’s
murder. (Numerous witnesses saw Oswald at work during that time.)
A recent alleged confession by E. Howard Hunt places Fiorini in a posi-
tion of trust within the CIA that he never had. Also, Fiorini was such
a publicity seeker (resulting in his friendship with top columnist Jack
Anderson) that no one as careful as Trafficante would have used him
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in any significant way in the JFK hit. However, Fiorini was a trusted
functionary, able to spread disinformation about Oswald and Castro
that helped to divert attention away from the real killers. Though Fiorini
provided a steady stream of other information in 1963 and 1964 to CIA
agent Bernard Barker (code-named AMCLATTER-1), Fiorini never took
that route to spread his phony “Castro did it” stories to the CIA.
Others who spread stories tying Castro to JFK’s assassination included
Rolando Masferrer and drug-linked associates of Manuel Artime. With
so many of Trafficante’s and Rosselli’s associates planting phony stories
implicating Castro, it raises the question of whether they were also feed-
ing phony stories to David Atlee Phillips. Because of their work together
on AMWORLD (and earlier), David Morales knew what type of material
Phillips would be receptive to, and that Phillips had a direct pipeline
to Desmond FitzGerald, who could immediately bring information to
Richard Helms’s attention. Using Phillips as a pipeline for disinforma-
tion would allow it to reach very high levels, with more credibility, very
quickly.
Other efforts to link Oswald and Ruby to Fidel were less sophis-
ticated. These range from the fake “Pedro Charles” letter mailed to
Oswald from Havana on November 28, 1963, to stories linking Ruby
to Cuban plots. It’s amazing how many dozens, sometimes hundreds,
of pages of follow-up FBI and CIA memos were generated because of
one or two obviously false letters or stories. It’s likely that even more
phony information implicating Fidel, with hundreds of pages of official
follow-up memos, remains unreleased.
A well-timed leak that clinched the case against Oswald for much of the
American press and public appears to have been part of the same disin-
formation plan as John Martino, since it also involved people who had
worked for Carlos Marcello. By late November 1963, the mainstream
news media focused on Oswald as JFK’s lone assassin, and on Jack Ruby
as a patriotic nightclub owner with no Mafia ties. However, we noted
earlier the private concerns of officials like Dallas Police Chief Curry
about the weak case against Oswald.21 As if to provide officials with an
ironclad case that Oswald was a cold-blooded killer, a new murderous
accusation against him suddenly surfaced. Spread quickly by the US
news media, it is still repeated today as evidence of Oswald’s guilt as
a “lone assassin.”
The December 7, 1963,
New York Times
reported that on April 10, 1963,
Lee Oswald—acting alone and using the same rifle found after JFK’s
murder—tried to assassinate recently retired General Edwin Walker, a
far-right spokesman. The FBI claimed to have made the discovery in its
December 3, 1963, interrogation of Oswald’s widow, Marina. This news
sealed the question of Oswald’s guilt for most people.22
However, Walker’s background, the evidence, and the actions of Mar-
cello associates like Oswald and Ruby suggest a different interpretation
of the shooting. General Walker became controversial in 1961, when JFK
removed him from command of the 24th Infantry Division in Germany
for indoctrinating his soldiers with inflammatory material from the John
Birch Society. The group and its leader made ridiculous claims, saying