Authors: Lamar Waldron
Ragano “to get in touch with Carlos [Marcello] and have him set up
that meeting with Ed Partin,” the government’s prime witness against
Hoffa. Hoffa hoped Partin could be bribed to declare that his testimony
was false, or that the government had illegally wiretapped Hoffa during
the trial. In return, Marcello would get a huge loan from the Teamster
Pension Fund to build a new French Quarter hotel. Hoffa told Ragano
that “Al Dorfman will take care of that while I’m gone. I told Al to give
Carlos whatever he wants.”28
With mere days remaining before Hoffa went to prison, Marcello and
his men were already arranging an attempt to bribe Partin. An aide to
Louisiana’s governor set up a meeting between Partin and a close associ-
ate of Marcello. Marcello’s man told Partin that if he changed sides and
helped Hoffa, “the sky’s the limit. It’s worth at least a million bucks.”
During their talk, Marcello’s associate called Allen Dorfman, explain-
ing that while Dorfman was running the bribe attempt, Marcello was
actually “holding the money.” Marcello’s man then boasted to Partin of
Marcello’s and Dorfman’s political power, saying that they “had helped
Senator Russell Long (of Louisiana) get elected whip” in the US Senate
by paying for the votes of seven US senators.29
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Marcello’s man used a carrot-and-stick approach with Partin. While
dangling the million-dollar carrot, he also told Partin that one or more
Mafia hit contracts had been let on Partin’s life. However, if Partin took
the bribe and helped Hoffa, the Mafia would make sure he was pro-
tected. A few days later, when Partin proved reluctant to lie to help
Hoffa, Marcello’s envoy told him “that Jim Garrison was going to sub-
poena Partin in connection with his assassination probe.” However,
if Partin helped Hoffa, that subpoena could be avoided. Still, Partin
refused.30
At the same time Allen Dorfman—the Teamsters’ money supplier
to the Mafia—was trying to bribe another key Hoffa witness to change
his testimony. Dorfman’s attitude and connections can be summed up
by an encounter that took place the following year at a lavish dinner
party at columnist Drew Pearson’s Washington home. In addition to the
political figures attending were Allen Dorfman and Frank Sinatra, who
announced his opposition to Bobby Kennedy at the party. The
Washing-
ton Post
’s society reporter, Maxine Cheshire, covered the posh event and
recognizing Dorfman, she told him, “I’ve heard you are here to try to get
Jimmy Hoffa out of jail.” Dorfman replied, “That’s right, baby. I’m here
to buy anyone who can be bought. Are you for sale?”31
On March 2, 1967, New York Senator Bobby Kennedy was wrestling
with even more issues than Chavez’s assassination threat, Marcello’s
attempt to bribe Partin, and Ferrie’s recent death. Though Bobby’s public-
approval ratings and his relationship with LBJ were already at a low
point, he took a step that risked making both much worse. That day,
Bobby gave a major speech in the Senate in which he publicly broke with
LBJ over Vietnam. Bobby announced his support for a suspension of
the bombing of North Vietnam as part of an effort to bring that country
into peace talks.
Bobby surprised many by apologizing in his speech for his past sup-
port of the war, saying that during JFK’s administration he had partici-
pated in some of the decisions that had led to the current problem: “If
fault is to be found, or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go
around for all—including myself.” Bobby’s new position was a tremen-
dous political risk, since the same day the other chamber of Congress
defeated, by a resounding 372 to 18 votes, a nonbinding resolution to
stop the bombing. LBJ was livid at Bobby’s Vietnam speech, and the
president gave two hastily scheduled talks that day in order to distract
press attention from Bobby.32
Bobby had arrived at his stance on Vietnam after much soul search-
ing, and it represented a major step in his political growth as a Senator.
After his relatively low level of accomplishment during his first two
years in the Senate, the speech marked a turning point that would see
him come into his own in 1967 as a national political force to be reckoned
with. Yet within hours of his courageous speech, he faced yet another
public crisis, this one stemming from his brother’s murder and his own
secret work on the JFK-Almeida coup plan.
Chapter Thirty-three
Three related news reports about JFK’s assassination that appeared on
March 2 and 3, 1967, would have a tremendous impact not just on Bobby
Kennedy, but also on Richard Helms, President Lyndon Johnson, and
even later presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For decades, most
historians have focused only on Jack Anderson’s explosive March 3,
1967, newspaper column about Bobby, Castro, and JFK’s murder—but
recently declassified files and presidential tapes now show the story
emerged the day before, March 2, on radio and television in New York
and Washington, D.C.
The story that broke on March 2 was Rosselli’s tale that Castro had
killed JFK in retaliation for Bobby Kennedy’s secret efforts to assassi-
nate Fidel, and its release was part of a coordinated effort by associates
of Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante. The leaks to Jack Anderson,
New York City’s WINS radio, and Jim Garrison were designed to divert
suspicion for JFK’s assassination away from the Mafia dons, while also
trying to keep Rosselli and Hoffa out of jail. They also wanted to damage
Bobby politically, to lessen the chance he could run for president or lead
a public outcry for a new government investigation into his brother’s
death. Aiding Rosselli in this effort was CIA official William Harvey, in
the last, sad days of his once notable CIA career.
By the end of February 1967, Rosselli’s initial leak to Anderson and
Pearson—about Bobby’s ordering CIA assassins to kill Fidel—had pro-
duced no tangible results. Though it had traveled to President Johnson,
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Secret Service Chief James Rowley, and J.
Edgar Hoover, Rosselli had nothing to show for it. So Rosselli’s associ-
ates leaked parts of the same story to Jim Garrison and to a reporter with
New York’s WINS radio.
The version given to WINS radio was similar to Rosselli’s Anderson
leak and to a discredited tale briefly promoted in 1964 by associates of
Trafficante, Masferrer, and Artime. These similarities have become clear
only recently, since WINS didn’t broadcast all the information it had. The
station gave the unbroadcast portion to Texas governor John Connally,
who relayed it to President Lyndon Johnson in a phone call recorded on
LBJ’s White House taping system.1
On March 2, 1967, at 9:55 PM, John Connally called his old friend
LBJ from New York. Connally told LBJ there had been a “long story on
[WINS] tonight . . . from a man who saw the files in Garrison’s office . . .
that there were four assassins in the U.S. sent here by Castro or Castro’s
people.”2 Since the two Texans had been in JFK’s Dallas motorcade, they
shared a personal interest in the WINS story.
Connally told LBJ confidential information from a WINS executive,
who not only had “a team of reporters in New Orleans with Garrison,”
but also claimed to have two reporters in Cuba, though only for one
day. The executive had explained to Connally the radio reporters “were
working from different angles [but] came together with exactly the same
story” implicating Castro. It’s hard to believe that in just one day, or
even several days, American reporters could turn up information inside
Castro’s Cuba that implicated Fidel’s men in JFK’s murder—and even
LBJ would soon voice similar skepticism. More likely, someone had fed
Rosselli’s information to the reporters, since FBI files show that Rolando
Masferrer and an associate of John Martino had fed a similar story to a
New York City radio station three years earlier.3
The reporters’ confidential information, which Connally said was
“not going on the air,” was that “six months after the Missile Crisis was
over, the CIA was instructed to assassinate Castro.” That time frame
matches the one Rosselli gave to Pearson and Anderson, and it coin-
cides with the start of the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Highlighting the anti-
Bobby spin of Rosselli’s tale, Connally said that JFK’s “brother ordered
the CIA to send a team into Cuba to assassinate Castro.”4
Continuing to mirror Rosselli’s story, Connally said, “Some of [the
CIA team] were captured and tortured, and Castro and his people—and
I assume Che Guevara—heard the whole story [and] one of Castro’s
lieutenants, as a reprisal measure, sent four teams into the US to assas-
sinate President Kennedy.” Laying the responsibility on one of Castro’s
lieutenants is a slight evolution of the original Rosselli story, probably to
make it more politically palatable. If all the responsibility were placed on
Fidel, LBJ and other high-ranking US officials would be trapped in the
same box they were in just after JFK’s murder, worrying about a public
or Congressional outcry to invade Cuba and eliminate Fidel. However,
putting the onus on a Castro lieutenant, who might have been acting
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on his own, relieved that pressure. Dropping Che Guevara’s name into
the story was a good touch, since by that time he had long since disap-
peared from public view.5
After Connally concluded his urgent story, LBJ told Connally a similar
tale. After warning Connally, “This is confidential, too,” LBJ explained
he’d gotten “that story [from] one of Hoffa’s lawyers [Ed Morgan, who]
went to one of our mutual friends and asked him to come and relay that
to us . . . just about like you have related it. A week or two passed, and
then [Drew] Pearson came to me [and] told me [that Hoffa’s lawyer] had
told him the same thing.”6
LBJ said he was skeptical of the story, and that Attorney General
Ramsey Clark said there was nothing to it. However, LBJ said he had
been “reconstructing the requests that were made of me . . . right after I
became president,” when LBJ was asked to continue the plans for a coup
in Cuba. LBJ told Connally he was going to discuss this new informa-
tion further with Attorney General Clark so that he and J. Edgar Hoover
could “watch [the story] very carefully.”7
LBJ told Connally that “some of these same sources” trying to prevent
“this jail thing” for Hoffa “have [also] been feeding stuff to Garrison as
they did here.” Historian Michael Beschloss says that LBJ was worried
that the story was being spread by “Hoffa’s allies to keep the Teamster
leader out of prison,” by hoping “Johnson might be willing to intervene
at the last minute at the price of tamping down public revelations about
the CIA-Mafia conspiracy against Castro.”8
One of America’s most canny and astute politicians, LBJ worried that
he and the others were being manipulated to keep Hoffa out of jail. LBJ
didn’t seem to realize that another goal was to divert suspicion for JFK’s
murder away from Rosselli and the other mob bosses, or that the story’s
anti-Bobby spin was designed not only to damage Bobby’s reputation,
but also to appeal to LBJ’s hatred of Bobby. LBJ told Connally he didn’t
“know whether there’s any [real] basis for [the story] or not. . . . I don’t
know how much of it is being fed out through their network . . . and
how much of it anybody would know. It’s pretty hard to see how . . . we
would know directly . . . what Castro [actually] did.”9
LBJ confided to Connally that he had talked to Supreme Court Justice
Abe Fortas about the story. Fortas asked, “Who is it that’s seen Castro
and heard from Castro and knows Castro, that could be confirming all
this?” Fortas found it suspicious that “we just hear that this is what he
did, but nobody points to how we hear it.” Fortas was appropriately
skeptical about the story, but would soon become the focus of scandal
himself and would have to resign from the Supreme Court because of
his close relationship with LBJ.10
There is one important difference between the story Rosselli leaked
to Anderson and Pearson, and the ones leaked to WINS and Garrison:
the Mafia. Apparently, word about the Mafia’s role with the CIA had
been given only to Anderson and Pearson, back in mid-January. At that
time, the Mafia angle had been needed to give Rosselli’s story credibility
and as a way to grab the attention of top officials, especially those who
knew something about the CIA-Mafia plots. The Mafia part of Rosselli’s
tale worked most effectively when shared privately among officials like
LBJ and Helms, as something they wanted to keep hidden. Things were
different by late February and early March, when the Garrison inves-