Reclaiming History (267 page)

In a series of five lengthy telephone conversations
†
between August 13 and September 26, 1999, Becker (eighty-two at the time) told me he was “friendly” with the mob “to this very day.” On the September 1962 day in question, Becker said he was at Marcello’s Churchill Farms, his 6,500-acre estate in Jefferson Parish outside New Orleans, through the auspices of Carl Roppolo, a close family friend of Marcello’s whom Marcello affectionately referred to as his “nephew.” (And Roppolo referred to Marcello as his “uncle.”) In addition to Roppolo, Jack Liberto (Marcello’s barber and a close friend) was at Churchill Farms. Earlier in the day, Roppolo and Becker had pitched a legitimate business deal (ultimately, never agreed on) to Marcello at his office in the Town and Country Motel in the city, and after the meeting Marcello drove the group in his black Cadillac to his sprawling farmhouse to relax.

Becker, by most accounts a colorful character whom people opened up to, had worked as the director of public relations for the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas from 1955 to 1958 when it was controlled by the Chicago mob, finally leaving after his boss, Gus Greenbaum, and Greenbaum’s wife, Bess, were the victims of an underworld killing in Phoenix. Because Marcello knew of Becker’s background in Las Vegas (“Greenbaum was dead and I was still alive, so I must have been okay”), and also knew that Becker had been friendly with Johnny Roselli, as well as Becker’s having had entree to him through his “nephew,” Becker believes that Marcello felt “comfortable” with him. As was second nature to him as a private eye, and because he says he has always been “fascinated” by the mob and its culture (as are millions of Americans), Becker said he didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to hear the legendary mobster emote. The way he puts it, it “was fun” to him, saying he found big-time mobsters “interesting people. It’s not easy to crack that world, and when you do, you take advantage of the situation.” With Roppolo and Marcello’s barber not in the room at the time, having “decided to wander around the farmhouse and grounds,” Becker says he “intentionally provoked” Marcello (known to friend and foe in Louisiana as the “Little Man” because of his height) into talking about what was going on in his life by saying, “These SOB’s [the Kennedys], they’re really going after everybody,” and “Bobby Kennedy is really giving you a rough time,”
*
whereupon Marcello, per Becker, exploded in anger that he intended to kill not only Robert Kennedy but also JFK, explaining that “the dog [JFK] will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail [RFK],” but if the dog’s head were cut off, it would die. Marcello also uttered what Becker (whose mother is half Italian and who grew up in an Italian neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut, but spoke few words of Italian) construed from Marcello’s voice and demeanor to be a “Sicilian curse,” the essence of which Becker remembered phonetically: “
Livarsi na petra di la scarpa
” (“Take the stone out of my shoe,” a translation he said he got not long after the incident from an Italian friend of his in Las Vegas).

When Becker told Marcello that if Marcello did this he would immediately become a suspect (because of the well-publicized effort the Kennedy administration was making to re-deport him), Marcello responded, “You [referring to himself] get a nut to do it.”

Assuming for the sake of argument that this conversation took place, this sequence, of course, is very important. If Marcello had, without prompting, brought up the “nut” reference, it could possibly mean he had already given some thought to the matter. But Becker was very, very clear with me that Marcello’s “nut” remark was a spontaneous response to Becker’s warning to him.
†

But, of course,
if
Marcello had given the matter some prior thought, and
if
he or any other mob leader did actually intend to kill the president, not more than a few moments’ reflection would be necessary to yield the obvious course of action he’d have to take.
‡
The inevitable question that presents itself is this: If any person or group of people had the resources (which organized-crime figures surely do) to employ a third party to kill the president of the United States, what would that person or group then do? Would they hire someone who is an expert gunman with a track record of successful murders, a reliable, professional hit man with a proven history of being closed-mouthed, thereby greatly reducing the likelihood that any finger of suspicion would ever be pointed back at them? Or would they get a nut to do it, increasing the likelihood immeasurably that something would go wrong and the trail would lead back to them, or the nut would simply point the finger at them, and their only defense would be that they could say to the authorities, “Why would I get a nut to do something like this?” When the choice is between
no
finger of suspicion against you at all, and a finger of suspicion against you whose only limited benefit allows you to say, “Why would I hire a nut like this?” the choice can
only
be the former. And this isn’t just abstract, esoteric logic. This is the very, very simplest of common sense. Show me any precedent at all for the mob taking the opposite option.

The HSCA investigated Becker’s allegation and questioned whether Marcello had ever made the remark to Becker, concluding that it was “unlikely that an organized-crime leader personally involved in an assassination plot would discuss it with anyone other than his closest lieutenants.”
⁹⁰
But this is surprisingly flabby and self-contradictory reasoning because it is necessarily based on the assumption that Marcello did, in fact, plan to murder Kennedy, when at the same time the HSCA concluded it had no evidence of this and it was “unlikely” that Marcello was in fact involved in the assassination.
⁹¹
While it is undoubtedly true that if Marcello were engaged in a plot to murder Kennedy he would never have confided in Becker, if he wasn’t, and had no such intent, it wouldn’t be particularly shocking to me that someone like Marcello—particularly since he’d have no way of knowing that a little over a year later a real nut named Lee Harvey Oswald would actually kill the president—might make a threat to kill Kennedy even to a stranger sitting next to him in a corner bar.

Becker told me that after his allegation was published for the first time in Ed Reid’s 1969 book
The Grim Reapers
, he continued to associate with mobsters in Las Vegas, none of whom treated him any differently. “There was no hostility at all,” which he felt confident there would have been if Marcello or the mob had been behind the assassination. “There were no threats, nothing at all.” He said, “Even Marcello’s man in Las Vegas, Mario, at the Sands,” continued to treat him well. It should be pointed out that in
The Grim Reapers
, in which the entire incident is capsulized in a few paragraphs, the author, Reid, doesn’t mention his source, Becker, by name.
⁹²
However, since the only other two people at Churchill Farms that day (whose identity Reid also does not give) were Carl Roppolo and Marcello’s barber, Becker said Marcello had to know the author’s source.

In concluding that it was unlikely Marcello would have confided in Becker, the HSCA also questioned Becker’s reliability for truth but failed to adequately set forth the basis for its position. To me, Becker comes across as a sensible, candid person who at least “sounds” very believable and matter-of-fact when telling his story, and he points out that he never sought to exploit or capitalize on the story in any way. “People came to me. I never went to them.” He said he never tried to sell the story to the tabloids or anyone else, that he had been interviewed about it perhaps twenty times, yet “I never took or asked for a dime for any of the interviews.” He said, “I wish he [Marcello] had never said it and I wish I had never heard it.”

The owner of the private investigative agency in Los Angeles that Becker worked for, Julian Blodgett, was an FBI agent for fourteen years, leaving in 1957 to head up, between 1957 and 1961, the Los Angeles County DA office’s Bureau of Investigation, a group I worked closely with on many of my murder cases. Blodgett told me that he has known Becker for thirty years and Becker had “always been truthful and honest with me,” saying he was “99.9 percent” sure Becker was telling the truth about the Marcello incident. “I have no reason to doubt Ed,” he said, adding that Becker was the type of person whom everyone liked, and that he had a way of ingratiating himself “into situations that other people could only dream about.”
⁹³

I personally give the incident no less than a 50 percent probability of its happening just the way Becker said it did.

It should be noted that apart from what may or may not have been said, it appears from all the circumstantial evidence that Becker
did
at least meet with Marcello in September 1962. The HSCA said, “The Bureau’s [FBI’s] files from November 1962 noted that Becker had in fact traveled through Louisiana during that period…The Bureau’s own November 26, 1962, interview report on Becker noted that he had informed the Bureau of two business meetings with Marcello that he had attended with Carl Roppolo in recent weeks.”
⁹⁴
Becker told me that when FBI agents interviewed him in Beverly Hills, California, on November 26, 1962, it was his investigation of the Billie Sol Estes case that they were working on, although the first thing they asked him was, “What were you doing with Marcello?” He said that very question indicated that they knew he had met with Marcello, most likely as a result of their surveillance of Marcello. He said he responded, “If you were that close to me, you must have known.” He went on to tell them about the business proposition he and Roppolo had made to Marcello—to have Marcello be the distributor in the New Orleans area for an oil additive that Roppolo had come up with called “Mustang.”
*

The main issue, then, seems to be not whether Becker met with Marcello (a strong probability), but whether Marcello said what Becker claims he said. To the FBI’s discredit, the bureau never, at any time, investigated Becker’s allegations, instead making an effort to discredit him. Even though the HSCA was aware of this, it nonetheless embraced the FBI’s view vis-à-vis Becker by concluding, “
As a consequence of his [Becker’s] underworld involvement
, the informant had a questionable reputation for honesty and may not be a credible source of information,”
⁹⁵
suggesting there is a presumption that anyone who has ever had any association with mob figures is most likely a liar. With that curious attitude, one wonders why the U.S. attorney’s office, in prosecutions of mob figures, routinely offers to juries the testimony of former mobsters who turn state’s evidence and are frequently believed by the juries. And that’s where the snitch has something to gain by lying—immunity from prosecution or a reduced sentence. Here, it would seem that Becker had nothing to gain.

Becker, by the way, has no criminal record except a misdemeanor conviction in his early twenties for stealing two hundred dollars from a photographer friend of his who, he told me, owed him the money. When an HSCA investigator interviewed Becker on October 24, 1978, about his Marcello allegation, he said, “I am willing to take a polygraph and always have been. I will take a polygraph, stress exam, or any other type of test.”
⁹⁶

When I asked Becker if he believed, at the time, what Marcello said to him about intending to kill Kennedy, he chuckled and said, “No. If the mobsters killed everyone they threatened to kill, we’d be depopulated.” He then proceeded to tell me that he spent a lot of time at the Riviera in Las Vegas, and in Los Angeles, with Johnny Roselli (about whom he later coauthored the book
All-American Mafioso
) when the New York mob (Roselli’s affiliation) was in the process of building the Tropicana and Roselli and his people would “hang out at the Riviera.” And every time Roselli would get angry with someone, “He’d threaten to kill him. That’s the way the mobsters talked.”
*
However, Becker said that when he heard Kennedy had been killed, which was fourteen months after Marcello’s threat, his first thought was that Marcello was behind it and had meant what he said. But today, after much reflection and study, he feels very confident that Marcello was not involved in the assassination. As indicated, one reason among many he has for this belief is the way he was treated by the mob once his revelation of what Marcello told him became public. In fact, he said, in 1970 he and his wife were flying to Washington, D.C., on business and they stopped off in Shreveport, Louisiana (where he first met Carl Roppolo, Marcello’s “nephew”), and “had a nice dinner and evening with Roppolo and his wife.”

On the issue of the mob not going after public officials in America, Becker said that “on no less than a half-dozen occasions” throughout the years when a mobster would be complaining bitterly about, and reviling, a public official, “I’d ask them, tongue in cheek, and using their language, ‘Geez, why don’t you whack him?’ and they’d always say, with little variation, ‘No, no, we don’t kill cops or politicians.’” Becker said, “It’s like it’s a part of their constitution.” The exceptions, if any, are so very few and far between, and so insignificant, as to be irrelevant—as Dean Jennings’s 1967 book on Bugsy Siegel and the mob is titled,
We Only Kill Each Other
.
⁹⁷
This reality is known among students of organized crime as “internecine warfare.”

Carlos Marcello was
not
one of the nine national commission members in 1963, and he was also the lone Mafia leader whom the FBI was unable to eavesdrop on for many years. A former FBI official knowledgeable about the FBI’s surveillance program told the HSCA, “That was our biggest gap. With Marcello, you’ve got the one big exception in our work back then. There was just no way of penetrating that area. He was too smart.”
⁹⁸
†
One reason was probably that Marcello’s New Orleans Mafia family was very small and most of its operations were controlled by his loyal younger brothers, Joseph, Peter, Pascal, Vincent, Sammy, and Anthony.
⁹⁹