Authors: Lamar Waldron
invasion of Haiti, which Masferrer had continued after CBS backed out.
No journalist at the time noted that Ruby and Masferrer knew each
other, or that both men had worked with Santo Trafficante.1
Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli must also have breathed a sigh of
relief at Ruby’s death, since it removed any possibility that the increas-
ingly disturbed Ruby might blurt out something incriminating on the
stand or to a journalist. His death allowed the three Mafia bosses to focus
on diverting suspicion from themselves, keeping Rosselli and Hoffa
out of prison, and trying to restrain Bobby Kennedy from taking action
against them. As part of their efforts, they would soon have Rolando
Masferrer feeding disinformation to New Orleans DA Jim Garrison.
In early 1967, Masferrer’s drug-smuggling partner, Eladio del Valle,
was being tracked down by the Garrison investigator recommended by
Albert Fowler. Del Valle, Masferrer, and allegedly even Garrison’s Flor-
ida investigator all had ties to Santo Trafficante. In 1963, del Valle had
worked closely with David Ferrie. In the early 1990s, Cuban authorities
would accuse del Valle of having been involved in JFK’s assassination,
along with Trafficante bodyguard Herminio Diaz.2
Trafficante’s empire was thriving in many ways, from his profitable
operations smuggling heroin and cocaine to the illegal
bolita
lottery,
popular among Cuban exiles. Trafficante had long since given up any
hope of reopening his casinos in Cuba, and was preparing to open a large
casino in the Bahamas.3 However, Trafficante’s plans would all come
crashing down if he were linked to JFK’s assassination, so he couldn’t
afford for del Valle to become a person of interest, like Ferrie was. It was
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
a dangerous situation for del Valle, since his partner, Masferrer, was
under arrest and couldn’t intercede with Trafficante on his behalf. The
ruthless Trafficante would have been determined to squelch or spin any
JFK conspiracy information coming out of his territory.
Possibly as a result of Trafficante’s concerns, in early 1967 racist Joseph
Milteer was briefly the focus of several newspaper articles about JFK’s
assassination. Most historians have overlooked these stories because
they didn’t mention Milteer by name, and because more dramatic events
in New Orleans and Washington soon overshadowed the Miami articles.
Thus the stories were only a brief blip on the national radar and Milteer
was never identified in the media at that time. That left the white
supremacist free to pursue his violent, racist agenda into the following
year, when it would result in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther
King.
Although Milteer lived in the small South Georgia town of Quitman,
he traveled frequently to Atlanta, and less often to Miami, New Orleans,
and other towns in the South. For years, Milteer had subsisted primarily
on a slowly dwindling inheritance, but by 1967 he and three associates
in Atlanta had found a new way to fund their racist efforts while also
lining their pockets: Each Friday, on payday, they waited just outside
the gates of one of Atlanta’s largest factories, a General Motors plant
that employed more than seven thousand people. There, Milteer and
his three partners collected money from some of the well-paid, union-
ized work force for a fund they claimed was to battle civil rights. Only
their most regular contributors, once they trusted them, were told in
confidence the money was really for a fund to kill Martin Luther King.
An Atlanta race riot several months earlier had only increased their con-
tributions. In actuality, Milteer and his partners were using most of the
money to buy undeveloped mountain land in North Carolina, just over
the Georgia border. (The full story of Milteer’s involvement in King’s
murder begins in Chapter 38.)
Milteer had originally been drawn into the JFK conspiracy in 1963,
probably by his racist associate Guy Banister, when reports surfaced
about JFK’s plans to give a speech in Atlanta more than two months
before the President’s visit to Dallas. That was around the time of
Oswald’s visit to an Atlanta Klan associate of Milteer, and calls by David
Ferrie to Atlanta. Though JFK’s Atlanta speech was canceled due to local
officials’ security concerns because of JFK’s stance on civil rights, Milteer
had remained a small part of the JFK plot. Milteer’s involvement led to
the November 1963 tapes and reports by Miami police informant Wil-
liam Somersett that were detailed in earlier chapters.4
Somersett had not been in contact with Milteer since December 1963,
when an irate Milteer had called Somersett after being interviewed by
FBI agents. Somersett had continued to be an informant for various
agencies, since he was opposed to violence even though he was still
extremely conservative politically. Somersett published a small, inde-
pendent labor-union newspaper in Miami, which may have given Traf-
ficante a way to influence him, directly or indirectly. Trafficante had ties
to the Teamsters Union in Miami: He shared an office there with one of
Hoffa’s corrupt locals, and Trafficante was partners with at least two
Miami Teamster–Mafia criminals.5
On January 26, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover told the director of the Secret
Service that the Miami FBI office had just learned of an unusual request
from the Miami Police Intelligence Unit: The police had asked Somer-
sett if they could “release to the press information regarding the plot
to assassinate [JFK] made by J. A. Milteer to [Somersett] on Novem-
ber 9, 1963.” Somersett gave his okay to the Miami Police Intelligence
Unit, “provided the informant’s identity was concealed.” After that,
Somersett “was contacted by . . . a reporter for the
Miami News
,” and
Somersett “confirmed his conversation regarding the threat to President
Kennedy.”6
In a bizarre twist, to the reporter and consistently thereafter, Somer-
sett spun the story of Milteer’s talk of killing JFK not against the white
supremacist, but to slam Bobby Kennedy. Somersett claimed that since
he had told the government about Milteer’s threat, Bobby should have
taken action before Dallas—therefore, JFK’s death was Bobby’s fault.
The FBI noted that Somersett’s comments “indicated that . . . his story
will be very critical of . . . Senator Robert F. Kennedy.” We spoke to the
Miami News
reporter who broke Somersett’s story, Bill Barry, who said
that when Somersett had first approached him with the story in early
1967, it already had its anti–Bobby Kennedy angle.
Barry refused to include Somersett’s anti-Bobby spin, and broke
the story in the
Miami News
on February 2, 1967, headlined “2 weeks
before JFK was Killed: Assassination Idea Taped.” The
Miami News
article included Milteer’s comments that JFK would be shot “from an
office building with a high-powered rifle,” and that “they will pick up
somebody within hours afterwards . . . just to throw the public off.” The
article didn’t identify Somersett or Milteer, though Milteer certainly
would have recognized his comments.7 Bill Barry’s article also quoted
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Milteer talking about a Klan associate who had “participated in the
bombing of the Birmingham church” in 1963 that killed four young
girls. The article also said Milteer’s associate had “tried to get Martin
Luther King [and] followed him for miles and miles, and couldn’t get
close enough to him.”8
The Miami Police played the surveillance tapes for the news media
the day the story broke. The next day, Barry and the
Miami News
pub-
lished a second story on the matter, and the
Miami Herald
ran its first.
However, despite the country’s rising interest in a JFK conspiracy, the
Miami story did not become major national news. The
Baltimore Sun
and a few major newspapers carried an AP version of the story, but it
didn’t generate any follow-up coverage in the national press, and soon
the allegations vanished from even the Miami newspapers.
The most unusual aspects of the incident are how the story came
out in the first place, and why it disappeared so quickly, before Milteer
was named. Regarding the latter, it’s possible that Hoover and the Secret
Service contributed to the story’s not becoming national news, since the
Milteer affair didn’t reflect well on either agency. Reporter Bill Barry
told us he wanted to name Milteer in the articles and go to Georgia to
interview Milteer, but officials at his newspaper denied both requests.
Instead, Barry was taken off the Milteer investigation to work with one of
Garrison’s men pursuing dead-end leads. Soon, Barry was taken off the
JFK assignment entirely. Left on his own to pursue Milteer, Barry might
well have uncovered Milteer’s ties to Guy Banister, or other important
information. Since Milteer’s name never surfaced in the press at that
time, it left him free to pursue the King assassination plot with Carlos
Marcello later in the year.9
The only official reaction to the Miami stories appears to have come
from the Birmingham police, who came to Miami to listen to the portion
of the tapes about the Birmingham bombing, and from the US Secret
Service, which began a new investigation of Milteer—which would be
closed several months later, after the Secret Service took no action. Also,
even though the articles discussed JFK’s Miami trip on November 18,
none of them mentioned JFK’s Tampa motorcade that same day. Just
as federal officials had stonewalled the
Miami Herald
’s attempt to do
an article about the Tampa threat two days after JFK’s murder—and
had squelched any follow-up about Tampa by the
Herald
or the
Tampa
Tribune
—they may have put a lid on this Miami story for the same reason.
None of the then recent JFK conspiracy books or articles had revealed
the Tampa attempt, and Hoover and the Secret Service wanted to keep
it that way. It’s also interesting that the large FBI folder at the National
Archives with the February 2, 1967, Milteer article also contains memos
about Johnny Rosselli’s 1966 and 1967 activities, as well as many files
about Commander Almeida. It’s as if whoever compiled this FBI folder
knew, or suspected, that all those files were related.10
As for how the Miami Somersett-Milteer story was leaked in the first
place, the FBI memo indicates that the Miami Police Intelligence Unit
first approached Somersett about revealing the story. Given the vio-
lent reputation of white supremacists at the time, Milteer’s associates
in particular, it seems odd that Somersett would have willingly exposed
himself to retaliation—unless he had something to gain. Even after the
Miami newspapers dropped the story, Somersett kept pushing it, even
talking about it on local television the following month. He even con-
tinued his anti-Bobby spin in a story in his own small labor newspaper,
headlined “I charge Robert F. Kennedy with Murder.”
If the Miami story were the only one blaming Bobby Kennedy for his
brother’s death, it might be more difficult to explain, but it was actually
one of two being peddled at the same time; Johnny Rosselli was trying
to leak the other. In fact, the Milteer story was printed at a time when
Rosselli’s effort to get his version into print in a major way seemed to
have stalled, almost as if the leak about Milteer were a backup plan. In
1967, Rosselli’s associate Santo Trafficante wielded tremendous influ-
ence in Miami, and still had a man in the Tampa Police Department, Sgt.
Jack de la Llana, who headed the statewide Police Intelligence network.
It would not have been difficult for Sgt. de la Llana to have learned
about the Milteer tapes and Somersett’s identity from the Miami Police
Intelligence Unit, or for de la Llana to have influenced the Miami Unit’s
actions.
Trafficante would have been concerned about Jim Garrison’s inter-
est in David Ferrie, since Ferrie had spent significant time with Eladio
del Valle in Miami during 1963, while dealing with his Eastern Airlines
dismissal hearing. Perhaps Trafficante and Marcello were laying the
groundwork to frame Ferrie as Banister’s flunky who aided Milteer’s
racist plot to kill JFK. Blaming JFK’s murder on right-wing extremists
would have sounded logical to the public while also diverting suspicion
away from the mob bosses. It’s also possible that Garrison’s investiga-
tor in Miami, or others, had learned of the existence of the Milteer tapes
and the articles were an attempt to get the story out with an anti–Bobby
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Kennedy spin. Trafficante had been in New Orleans on January 30 and
31, plotting strategy with Marcello, just before the Miami Milteer story
broke.
Santo Trafficante was arrested when he returned to Miami on Feb-