Legacy of Secrecy (13 page)

flew into a rage, cussing the Kennedys, calling them every name that he

could think of. I thought that he was going to have a stroke.” Suddenly,

Marcello “stopped talking for a minute, and then continued. He said,

‘Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch killed, and I would do it again; he

was a thorn in my side. I wish I could have done it myself.’”14

Chapter 65 will have much more about Marcello’s JFK confession,

including his threat to kill the Informant if he ever told, and how the FBI

kept Marcello’s JFK confession secret for years. For now, it’s important

to note that supporting evidence from independent sources, mostly gov-

ernment investigators and noted historians, exists for each part of the

account that Marcello related to the Informant. For example, Marcello’s

admission about meeting Oswald is given credence by what the Mafia

boss had told another FBI informant, Joe Hauser, a few years earlier.

(Hauser’s testimony in a government sting called BRILAB finally yielded

Marcello a long prison sentence.) Marcello told Joe Hauser that he and

some of his men knew Oswald: “I used to know his fuckin’ family. His

uncle, he work for me. Dat kid work for me, too.” Marcello indicated that

in 1963, Oswald worked briefly as a “runner” for his gambling network,

in which Oswald’s uncle, Dutz Murret, was a longtime bookie.15

In the spring of 1963, Oswald had moved to New Orleans, where he

lived for a time with his uncle Murret. According to
Vanity Fair,
Oswald’s

“youth had been spent in New Orleans. Oswald’s mother’s friends

included a corrupt lawyer linked to Marcello’s crime operation and a

man who served Marcello as bodyguard and chauffeur.” In August 1963,

when Oswald was “arrested, after getting into a brawl with Cuban exiles

while passing out pro-Castro leaflets,” the man who arranged Oswald’s

bail was close to “one of Marcello’s oldest friends, Nofio Pecora, [who

was] called three weeks before the assassination by Jack Ruby.”16

FBI memos first published in Marcello’s 1989 biography,
Mafia King-

fish,
by John H. Davis, describe Oswald’s receiving money from one

of Marcello’s men at the Town and Country Motel’s restaurant in late

February or early March 1963. The nondescript motel on the Airline

Highway—far from the tawdry glitz of the French Quarter—served as

Marcello’s headquarters. According to the FBI memos, Oswald was sit-

ting in the mostly empty dining room when the FBI’s source saw the

restaurant’s “owner remove [a] wad of bills from his pocket, which he

passed under the table to the man sitting at the table,” whom the source

identified as Oswald.17

Yet another well-documented link between Marcello and Oswald is

David Ferrie, whom the Informant said “introduced Oswald to Mar-

cello.” Congressional investigators, FBI reports, and even photographic

evidence confirm that Ferrie had been a leader in the teenage Oswald’s

Civil Air Patrol unit in 1955, shortly before the underage Oswald’s first

attempt to join the US Marines. By 1963, former Eastern Airlines pilot

52

LEGACY OF SECRECY

Ferrie was working for Marcello and his lawyer. Ferrie was suppos-

edly helping with Marcello’s defense against the federal charges being

pressed by Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department, relating to Marcello’s

1961 INS deportation and subsequent reentry. Both Marcello and Ferrie

admitted to investigators that they spent several weekends together at

Marcello’s Churchill Farms estate in the weeks prior to JFK’s assassina-

tion. Ferrie also admitted he flew to Guatemala twice, shortly before

November 22, 1963. Based on what Marcello told him, the Informant

accurately wrote that Ferrie “was an ex–airline pilot. It seems that he

flew to Guatemala to pick up some new papers that Marcello needed to

fight the INS in a court case.”18

Also doing work for Marcello in the summer and fall of 1963 was

private detective Guy Banister, Ferrie’s associate and the former head

of the Chicago FBI office. According to historian Richard Mahoney, six

witnesses saw Oswald with Ferrie or Banister in the summer of 1963,

when Oswald garnered an unusual amount of TV, radio, and news-

paper publicity for his one-man New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for

Cuba Committee. Two witnesses said Oswald was working for Banister

at that time.19

Marcello’s admission about Ruby goes beyond anything previously

reported, but is consistent with other evidence. Dallas journalist Earl

Golz was one of the first to clearly establish the connection between

Ruby and Marcello’s organization, a link confirmed by the 1979 House

Select Committee on Assassinations report.

Marcello biographer John H. Davis didn’t have access to the Infor-

mant’s information, but he was still able to detail tantalizing connec-

tions between Ruby and several Marcello associates. These included

Marcello’s Dallas mob lieutenants Joe Civello and Joe Campisi, the latter

described as one of Ruby’s closest friends and who met with Ruby the

night before JFK’s assassination. Davis documented that in the months

and weeks prior to November 22, 1963, Ruby visited or made calls to five

people in Marcello’s organization. In addition to those five, he writes

that “it appears that Jack Ruby knew at least two of Carlos Marcello’s

brothers” via slot-machine and strip-club businesses.20

Jack Ruby had worked for Chicago mobsters for years before mov-

ing to Dallas, where his duties for Marcello included being a low-level

member of Marcello’s part of the French Connection heroin network.

In October 1963 in Chicago, shortly before the November 2 attempt to

kill JFK in that city (discussed in Chapter 5), two witnesses saw Ruby

receive $7,000 from a man who worked with Marcello’s associate Jimmy

Hoffa. Several witnesses say Ruby was in Houston on November 21,

1963, apparently shadowing JFK during his visit to that city. After Ruby

returned to Dallas later that night and met with Marcello lieutenant

Campisi, he heard that JFK’s Secret Service agents were blowing off

steam at an after-hours joint in Fort Worth—so he sent several strippers

from his Carousel Club to join them.21

As for Marcello’s remark that Ruby was gay, most people are unaware

that Jack Ruby was homosexual (or bisexual), even though such informa-

tion crops up almost forty times in Warren Commission documents, and

Ruby’s roommate at the time of JFK’s murder described Ruby as “my

boyfriend.”22 FBI files also back up Marcello’s remark that “all the police

were on the take” allowing Marcello to “operate anything in Dallas that

he wanted to.” The FBI interviewed witnesses who said that Ruby “was

well acquainted with virtually every officer of the Dallas Police force”

and was “the pay-off man for the Dallas Police Department.”23

Marcello’s claim to the Informant that Ruby went to his huge Churchill

Farms property might explain a gap that Congressional investigators

discovered as they compiled detailed information about Ruby’s many

calls and visits to New Orleans in 1963, usually to people or places

connected to Marcello. They were unable to find where Ruby stayed

during his visit to New Orleans from June 5 to June 8, 1963, leading one

journalist to suggest that Ruby had stayed at Churchill Farms during

that time. Ruby had called a Marcello associate several times before that

visit, and Ruby called a club run by one of Marcello’s brothers two days

after he returned to Dallas.24

By June 1963, Ruby owed a small fortune to the IRS and was facing

financial ruin, which would have made him amenable to a lucrative

offer from Marcello. As Congressional investigators documented, in

June 1963, Ruby’s monthly long-distance calls built to a minor peak of

more than thirty, up from his usual handful. The big peak would come

during the three weeks prior to JFK’s murder, when Ruby made more

than 110 long-distance calls, many to associates of Marcello, Trafficante,

Rosselli, and Hoffa.25

FBI files show that “on June 22, 1963”—two weeks after Ruby’s visit to

New Orleans—a horse trainer for one of Carlos Marcello’s brothers said

he was in a bookie joint in New Orleans, where he worked part-time. The

horse trainer told the FBI that another one of Marcello’s brothers came

in and spoke to the owner. The trainer overheard Marcello’s brother say,

“The word is out to get the Kennedy family.”

Independent accounts support Marcello’s confession that he had

54

LEGACY OF SECRECY

JFK murdered. Congressional investigators took seriously the fall 1962

incident we noted earlier, when Marcello told Ed Becker at Churchill

Farms that JFK was going to be assassinated.26 John H. Davis uncovered

a conversation that Marcello had with a close companion six months

before JFK’s assassination, in which Marcello said that to eliminate Rob-

ert Kennedy’s prosecutions of him, “you gotta hit de top man. . . . This

is somethin’ I gotta get some nut for, some crazy guy . . . But I tell you as

sure as I stand here, somethin’ awful is gonna happen to dat man.” That

conversation occurred at Marcello’s lodge in Grande Isle, Louisiana, a

popular fishing area a hundred miles southwest of New Orleans, on the

Gulf of Mexico. We found another witness who said that in early sum-

mer 1963 at Grande Isle, a cook on a large boat that Marcello used told

the witness he overheard the godfather and a mobster from Los Angeles

planning an attack on JFK.27

What the Informant said regarding Marcello’s control of the New

Orleans police and judges was true, according to Congressional investi-

gators and the New Orleans Crime Commission. Much evidence shows

that Marcello’s corrupt control even affected congressmen, senators,

governors, and other political leaders.28 Marcello told the Informant

about his scams with a Louisiana governor, which are described in

Chapter 65. Marcello’s reach also extended to federal law enforcement

and intelligence activities.

The JFK-Almeida coup plan gave Marcello the opportunity he needed

to kill JFK in a way that would prevent even Robert Kennedy—as well

as Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover—from pursuing a full or public

investigation of JFK’s murder. Though the Kennedys had barred the

Mafia from any participation in the coup plan—and from reopening

their Havana casinos after the coup—the work of Marcello and his asso-

ciates on the CIA-Mafia Castro plots allowed the mob bosses to infiltrate

the coup plan. While the CIA admits only that Rosselli and Trafficante

worked on the CIA-Mafia plots, Marcello told FBI informant Joe Hauser

he had been part of the operation as well. A private investigator for Mar-

cello, Sam Benton, was indeed working on Castro assassination plans

in the fall of 1963. It’s important to remember that David Morales was

working on the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli at the same time Morales

had a significant role in the AMWORLD part of the coup plan.29

Twelve associates of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli knew about

the coup plan, and seven actually worked on parts of it. This was a

remarkable achievement, since we noted earlier that the JFK-Almeida

coup plan was fully known to just a dozen or so government officials

at the time, and the first files about it started being declassified only in

the mid-1990s.

An FBI memo shows that a close associate of David Ferrie told the

FBI about Ferrie’s “dealings with the late Attorney General Robert Ken-

nedy [and] plans for a Cuban second invasion.”30 Another FBI memo

written after November 22, 1963, quotes Jack Ruby as talking about

“an invasion of Cuba [that] was being sponsored by the United States

Government.”31

A long-overlooked
New York Times
article quotes a Cuban exile, who

had been in contact with Oswald in New Orleans in August 1963 and

who knew David Ferrie, as saying that “Lee H. Oswald had boasted

[about what he would do] if the United States attempted an invasion

of Cuba.” Prior to JFK’s assassination, a close friend of Guy Banister

wrote a description of “Kennedy Administration planning” for Cuba,

in which Castro “would be the fall guy in a complete reorganization for

the [Cuban] regime, which will [then] be free of Soviet influence.” After

Castro’s removal, Banister’s friend accurately noted that “a new govern-

ment [for Cuba would be] set up with such men as . . . Manolo Ray.”32

These are just a few of the associates of Marcello, Trafficante, and

Rosselli who knew about the JFK-Almeida coup plan. More are docu-

mented in the next chapter and other parts of the book. One Marcello

associate named John Martino not only boasted to journalists about his

knowledge of the coup plan, but even taunted FBI agents with his inside

information. So many of Marcello’s men knew about the JFK-Almeida

plan that it’s inconceivable Marcello didn’t know about it, too.