The Lacey Confession (29 page)

As soon as the chunky man in the dark suit with his back to the camera shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Abby took the lead in investigating him. Every good investigator knows to start with the most obvious evidence. It's basic. If something stares you in the face, follow it. When you have a killing, and you have a live suspect, start with him. If, as was the case with the Kennedy assassination, the suspect too is murdered, start then with his murderer. The assignment was hers before anyone heard the name Jack Ruby—before Oswald stopped breathing—almost before he hit the ground. They all saw it. Like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in his Washington, D.C., home, and millions of Americans across the nation, Robert Kennedy's special Organized Crime investigative team, including Abby O'Malley, watched it happen on television. She leaped from her seat, grabbed her coffee—which was old and cold, she recalled—and shouted, “I've got him!”

It didn't take much to connect Ruby with the mob, she told Walter. He was tied in half a dozen ways. The biggest, of course, was his business. The nightclub in Dallas owed a lot of money to the Chicago family headed by Johnny Rosselli. Jack was behind in his payments. Not a good thing, for him. He was in over his head and to make matters worse, he had cancer. Anthony Rocco, a capo in the Chicago gang, known to his associates as
T Rock
, approached Jack Ruby. The deal he offered would wipe out Ruby's debt and net him fifty thousand dollars on top of it. Abby reminded Walter that fifty thousand dollars in 1963 was like a half million today, maybe more. Jack Ruby had a short time to live and this was a way he could take care of his own. When he was told what was expected of him, he never hesitated. Everyone concerned figured Ruby to be a dead man over this. After all, he was supposed to kill someone in police custody. He would be going into Police Headquarters in Dallas, guns blazing. The necessary arrangements would be made to give Ruby access to his target—more than a few Dallas cops got paid for that one—but no one could protect him afterward. The cops would shoot back, wouldn't they? Part of the deal even? He didn't mind. The cancer was taking him out anyway. As soon as Oswald was captured, Jack Ruby got a call telling him where to be and when to be there. He was on time. He shot Oswald as planned and, fortunately or not, he was not killed in a hail of bullets from the Dallas Police. He was captured and he kept his end of the bargain until the end. Tracking Ruby's movements were easy, Abby said, and the key was the timing. “You see,” she told Walter, “
T Rock
met with Ruby the day
before
the assassination.”

Walter listened. He asked no questions, but his interest was evident, his attention riveted. Abby continued. She knew the mob had not ordered the hit on the President because they would never use a patsy like Oswald or a cutout like Jack Ruby to clean up at the end. That's not the way they worked and Abby knew it. Had it been them, they would have left no loose ends, no errant strings to pull, and no civilians in their wake. Someone else had killed JFK, and somehow managed to get the Chicago organized crime family to eliminate the fall guy. Abby traced Anthony Rocco to a meeting, a full week before November 22, with a man named Angelo Francese. The aged Francese was well known to be
capo de capo
, answering only to the Don whose family ruled in Naples, Italy. The meeting in New York had been arranged, as a gesture, by the Costello family. Once she had the meeting confirmed, Abby told Robert Kennedy. Why, she wanted to know, would
T Rock
from the Chicago mafia meet with someone from Italy, someone from the old country, someone so high up? And why would they meet in New York?

Bobby leaned on his father's contacts on the East coast, Abby told Walter. A face-to-face was arranged for RFK. He went to a beach house on Long Island where he met with one of the Costello lieutenants. It was just the two of them. “This meeting never happened,” the young Costello soldier told the nation's highest-ranking law enforcement officer. That's what Abby told Walter Bobby had told her. Costello's man, who insisted he be called only Dante, explained that an important family in the old country asked New York for a special favor. They wanted to contract with the Chicago people for a hit. Dante said they were never told who the target was or where or when this would occur. “We couldn't refuse,” he told Kennedy. Their service was only that of an intermediary, an act of respect and kindness. “Never, never in a million years did we think this thing would involve your brother, the President.” That's what Dante told Kennedy.

“He was telling the truth,” Abby said to Walter. “When I realized that Costello had misunderstood everything, that he thought the Rosselli crowd had killed the President, I knew Costello really knew nothing. And I knew the mob was in the clear. They did Jack Ruby all right, but they had no clue why, not when they agreed to do it. Of course, by the time Ruby shot Oswald, they had to know it had something to do with President Kennedy. Costello, and his capos, felt betrayed, used. These people are very patriotic, in their own way. Killing the President was out of bounds, like killing your mother. Killing Oswald, on the other hand, was just business. And, by then it was a matter of honor.”

With the mob no longer a suspect, out of the picture, for five years Abby chased other leads. She told Walter she couldn't remember how many people she went after. “Everything,” she said. “We rejected nothing out of hand.” Who knew who, or what, or why? Who knew someone else who knew something—something that seemed important? Every theory was checked and then checked again. Assassination conspiracies ran amok in the press, in the media, in books and periodicals, not only here, but worldwide. The CIA killed Kennedy because he was about to abandon Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs did it. No, it was J. Edgar Hoover. Or the Cubans. Maybe the Russians. Abby covered every one. She looked at homegrown racist crackpots in the South, white supremacists out West. Abby went after everyone ever mentioned as having even the slimmest motive. She chased FBI agents, CIA case officers, even a few Dallas cops themselves. Every lead was treated as a good one. At one point she spent three months digging into a tiny cult of radical Catholics in Rhode Island. This bunch thought a Catholic in the White House would bring the Pope to power in the United States. They were beside themselves when it didn't turn out that way and they despised Jack Kennedy for it. She investigated them all, even Lyndon Johnson and his motley crew of Texas associates. “God, Bobby hated that man,” Abby told Walter. Each time she found a string, she pulled it. And every time that string led to another, she pulled it too. Sooner or later, every string came to an end. None revealed the killer.

On a winter afternoon in early 1968, Abby O'Malley and Robert Kennedy sat in a small den in a house in Hyannisport. A fire from four big logs warmed them against the New England snowstorm raging outside. They were alone. A few months earlier, before the leaves changed and the temperatures plummeted, she asked him for a list of individuals, private citizens with no government or political affiliations, a list she told Bobby might contain the name that eluded them, the name of the assassin. Where else could they look?

“We've gone through everyone else,” she said to him. “We should look at it as if it might have been a private matter. It might have been.” The list was a short one.

Jack Kennedy was a man. Like most men, he had made enemies along the way. But, also like most men, none of his personal enemies seemed to be people who would actually try to kill him. Besides, who could kill the President of the United States? Who could manage it? With two exceptions, the men on what Abby came to call the
Private List
were all contemporaries of JFK. One of the two who were not was an old man, a long-ago business partner of Kennedy's father. Bobby said this man indeed hated Jack, hated him since his brother was a young man—since he was at Harvard. Remembering it, Robert Kennedy laughed, as did Abby as she told the story to Walter Sherman. Apparently Bobby's older brother Jack had been sleeping with this man's wife. They were never caught in the act, in flagrante delicto so to speak, but one day in the midst of a bitter argument with her husband, the wife threw it in his face. Jack was still in college, said Bobby. The angry woman then went and told a few of her friends. Her husband was a laughing stock. He threatened Jack Kennedy's life a number of times, in front of quite a few witnesses. Surely, all assumed, the man was all bluster. JFK himself knew nothing of these revelations, or the animosity and hostility they provoked, or the threats. His father shielded him. Bobby only learned of it when his brother became President. As Attorney General, he ordered a complete review of all the President's perceived enemies. He made a list then, too, he told Abby.

“He gave me a copy of that list,” Abby told Walter. “I remember, it was dated February 1960. It must have been the first thing Bobby did when Jack took office.”

By 1963, this vengeful husband was divorced, eighty-one years old, and in the care of a nurse twenty-four hours a day. He had difficulty urinating. He could hardly remember the names of his children. It was doubtful he even knew who the President of the United States was. Abby scratched his name off. What surprised her about Bobby's second list, the 1968 list, was another name, a name that had not appeared on the list he made in 1960. Frederick Lacey—Lord Frederick Lacey.

“Who is Frederick Lacey?” she asked JFK's brother.

Finally, he told her.

By the spring of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was disheartened. Abby O'Malley told Walter she was worried about him. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. affected him deeply. It seemed he was no closer to finding his brother's killer than he was five years before. He viewed the list of private individuals he gave to Abby as a desperate move, an indication all hope was lost. While his run for the Democratic nomination did raise Kennedy's enthusiasm noticeably, Abby could see the despair roiling his gut.

It was on a campaign bus in Indiana, rolling through the foothills in the southern part of the state, with a steady rain more dripping than falling, that Abby first told him it was Frederick Lacey who killed President Kennedy. “He looked at me in disbelief,” she told Walter. “I gave it to him—the whole thing, as I saw it, from start to finish—and he never said a word.” As Abby detailed a sequence of events leading to the assassination, Walter marveled at her concentration, her focus, her ability to relate apparently unrelated facts. Of course, he knew just how accurate her analysis was. He knew what Lacey had written. Abby did not. She knew nothing more than that Lacey had left something in writing, an admission, a confession.

Once she presented her conclusion to Bobby Kennedy, she asked him how he could have left Lacey's name off the original list of the President's enemies, the list he prepared immediately following the inauguration. His explanation was weak and tentative. It was almost as if he was making it up as he spoke. That was not like him, Abby said. Without Walter asking, she revealed that the real reason for Bobby's oversight in 1960 was embarrassment. Robert Kennedy did not want his dead brother's affair with Audrey Lacey coming to light then, just as he entered the White House, or later, after his death in 1963. In 1968, Abby could see his continuing determination that it never would. Bobby did not see the connections between Lacey's masterminding of the murder and the evidence trails that, over five years, led them into the FBI and the CIA and others. Abby explained it by showing him that Lacey had contacts within all the suspect groups, all the different organizations. Sure the CIA was involved. And the FBI. Lacey was able to get information from each vital to the success of his plan. His reach extended even into the supposedly unreachable Secret Service. The strings she had been pulling, for five years, had been attached only to the coverup. The assassination itself remained a mystery. Like the mob, which was only hired for Ruby's cleanup work on Oswald, the intelligence agencies also did not know what Lacey intended to do before he did it. Once the act had been accomplished, it was too late for all of them. In their rush to cover up their unwitting roles, they made many mistakes. There were dozens of sleuths chasing down the facts: newspaper reporters, magazine journalists and freelance writers, Kennedy conspiracy enthusiasts—nuts, if you will—of all sorts. Plus, everyone at CIA and FBI knew Bobby had a crack team working around the clock. Abby's problem was simple, her delay perfectly understandable. She never heard of Frederick Lacey until 1968.

Robert Kennedy told his mother. Later, Abby was called to her side. Rose Kennedy took great comfort in her religion, and those people, from humble priest to lofty Cardinal, who were significant in it did all they could for her. Had she not forbidden him, Bobby would have flown to England that very day and killed Lacey with his bare hands. His mother insisted he put all thought of that out of his mind. Instead, she called Lacey herself. Abby was with her when she spoke to him. Abby told Walter how shaken she was at the civil nature of the conversation between Rose Kennedy and Lord Frederick Lacey. They had known each other for forty years, Abby said. At one point Rose said, “Frederick, you know why I've called.” She stood a few feet away from Mrs. Kennedy, but Abby could not hear Lacey's voice. “Jack,” Rose said, in a voice cracking like broken glass, a voice fighting a losing battle with itself. Abby saw Rose Kennedy's eyes tearing. “What . . .” she uttered. “What . . . what are you . . . ?” And then, in a helpless wail, she cried out, “My boys, Frederick! What about my boys!” This time Abby could hear Lacey. He screamed, “What about my Audrey!”

It wasn't until two days later that Rose told Abby that it had been Lacey who was responsible for the death of Joe Jr. “A mistake,” she said with the most sorrowful laugh Abby ever heard. Abby could hardly believe the viciousness of it. The face of evil had shown itself. Joe Jr., too? It was a little after four in the morning, the next day, when Bobby called. He had just arrived from London. He needed to talk with Abby, immediately. Not later in the day. Not tomorrow. Right then. She was waiting outside her door when his limousine pulled up. They drove through the morning darkness, past daybreak, moving about the city with no purpose other than to stay in motion. Bobby told her how he had confronted Lacey, man-to-man, how the Englishman had told him about his oldest brother, twenty years ago, and Jack on November 22, 1963. “He killed them both,” Bobby said to Abby. “That sonofabitch! I told him I'll kill him if it's the last thing I do.” She believed him. That meant Lacey had too.

Frederick Lacey was not a man to be lightly threatened. Men far more capable than Robert Kennedy had said much the same thing to him. He had endured tribal curses in savage parts of the world other Westerners had only read about. He had survived the armies of Germany, the emissaries of Russian revolutionaries, angry Turks and other assorted Middle Eastern potentates. His life had been threatened by the best. For fifty years, powerful men had boasted they would do away with Frederick Lacey. Robert Kennedy should not have concerned him.

That was when Lacey revealed the existence of his private journal, the Lacey Confession. He told Bobby Kennedy he had it all written down and hidden safely away. With cold efficiency, Lacey instructed Kennedy, lectured him, scolded him like a child. If anything happened to him, he told Kennedy, the document would be released and the legend of Camelot would come crashing to the ground in a heap of wreckage. “Hypocrisy humbles the highest,” he said. Kennedy reacted badly. He threatened Lacey again. Lacey had disdain for irrational behavior. He rejected Robert Kennedy as unworthy. He also recognized a level of instability in the younger Kennedy, a lack of self-control on his part, a wildness that Lacey felt he had no alternative but to deal with. Who could be certain what such a man as President Kennedy's brother might do? Bobby needed to be escorted out of Lord Lacey's presence.

“I suppose the last thing Lacey heard Bobby say was, ‘I'll kill you!' He must have believed him,” Abby said to Walter. “Less than a month later, Bobby lay dead on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.”