The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (27 page)

On March 12, 2014, Jay Margolis presented a photo line-up to Ms. Gizzi of three possible suspects for the now-infamous polka-dot dress girl and three possible suspects for her male companion who Irene Gizzi calls the guy with the medallion. From the six photos, Ms. Gizzi identified to Margolis the girl in the polka-dot dress as Kathryn “Kathy” Ainsworth (born Kathryn Madlyn Capomacchia on July 31, 1941) and her companion as Thomas “Tommy” Albert Tarrants III (born December 20, 1946), pictured below in 1967, months before the RFK assassination.

Irene Gizzi therefore became the first person at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, to actually identify via photographs these two individuals out of all the books written on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Even Tarrants himself fixes his own proximity to the RFK assassination
and
the MLK assassination two months before when he wrote in his first book, “In early spring [1968], I had been in California conferring with the West Coast coordinator of the Minutemen, a paramilitary underground organization.”

As for late 1967, Tarrants revealed, “I decided to take a trip to Los Angeles to deepen my ties with Dr. Wesley Swift, a leader in radical-Right circles.” “Tarrants would later testify he bought a rifle from Swift with plans to use it to shoot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jack Nelson who was once Bureau Chief of the
Los Angeles
Times
. Nelson quoted Thomas Tarrants who said, “That was my ambition, to shoot Dr. King. I hated Dr. King.”

On April 4, 1968, using Thomas Tarrants’s own car, Ainsworth and Tarrants had disrupted police radios very shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Nevertheless, in late December 2007, talking with Jerry Mitchell of the
Clarion-Ledger
newspaper, Tarrants denied any involvement in the MLK assassination even though he admittedly hated Dr. King at that time. As for the charge that he helped disrupt police radios, Tarrants claimed, “I don’t know they had people with the technical expertise to do that.”

“The police interviewed me afterwards,” Irene Gizzi recalled to Jay Margolis regarding the RFK assassination. “I gave what information I could then about the girl in the polka-dot dress and the guy with the medallion because those were the two that stood out from a group of five.

“The three men with them were wearing white [dress] shirts [with ties] and khaki pants. They were shorter than he [Tarrants] was because he was the tallest in the group . . .”

Of these three men, on March 25, 2014, Irene Gizzi identified to Jay Margolis two CIA agents, George Joannides (1922–1990) and David Sanchez Morales (1925–1978), who, according to Gizzi, were
together
in the same group of five along with Tommy Tarrants, Kathy Ainsworth, and a person we shall call Unidentified Man in Profile because Ms. Gizzi told Margolis she only saw this individual in profile.

The five were waiting in the Ambassador Room downstairs shortly before the shooting upstairs in the pantry. Per existing footage taken at the Ambassador Hotel on June 4 and 5, 1968, Joannides, Morales, and Unidentified Man in Profile were all wearing suits with ties and coats. However, during different times, Morales can be seen with and without his suit coat where he’s just wearing a white dress shirt with a tie.

At the time of the RFK assassination, the CIA Director was Richard Helms. “Joannides was born in Athens in 1922,” wrote Shane O’Sullivan. “Joannides joined the CIA in 1951 and spent eleven years in Greece and Libya before posting to JMWAVE in Miami as deputy to the chief of psychological warfare operations, David Atlee Phillips . . . On July 31, 1963, Joannides was promoted to chief of psychological warfare operations at JMWAVE . . . He died on March 9, 1990, at the age of sixty-seven.”

As for Unidentified Man in Profile, O’Sullivan wrote on page 446 of his book how the bottom photograph on page 452 “showed a third man . . . with blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses.” This blonde man may or may not be James Hardesty Critchfield (January 30, 1917–April 22, 2003), who was the CIA’s chief in the Middle East on June 5, 1968. Tom Polgar, Joannide’s former station chief in Saigon, at first identified both Joannides and Critchfield to O’Sullivan’s colleagues David Talbot,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
, and
Washington Post
reporter Jefferson Morley.

Two weeks after identifying both men to Talbot and Morley, Polgar took back the certainty of the two identifications but curiously added that the Ambassador photographs were, in Polgar’s words, “not incompatible” with Joannides and identified the blonde man with the horn-rimmed glasses as, in Polgar’s words, “not incompatible with James Critchfield.” Ms. Gizzi told Margolis this man with blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses could
possibly
be the man she saw with Tarrants, Ainsworth, Morales, and Joannides, but she is not certain.

“You saw George Joannides and David Morales,” Jay Margolis verified to Ms. Gizzi on March 25, 2014. Margolis had shown her photographs of these two individuals from Shane O’Sullivan’s book on pages 452 and 474. On page 474, Ms. Gizzi identified David Morales on the far left only, ignoring the other two pictures on the right purporting to also be Morales.

Margolis queried, “The unidentified third man [with blonde hair and horn-rimmed glasses] on page 452 on the bottom you say looks like the third man.”

“Looks like the third man—” replied Ms. Gizzi.

“—with Joannides and Morales along with Ainsworth and Tarrants,” confirmed Margolis. “So we have four of the five individuals [from the five-person group Ms. Gizzi witnessed] identified.”

The second photograph of Unidentified Man in Profile looking upwards was taken from Shane O’Sullivan’s 2007 documentary
RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy
.

Jay Margolis gave Ms. Gizzi a red felt-tip pen to draw a crude stick-figure diagram with the sole purpose of showing the exact position of the five-person group including George Joannides, Thomas Albert Tarrants III (Medallion), Kathy Ainsworth (Polka-Dot Dress Girl), David Sanchez Morales, and Unidentified Man in Profile (who may or may not be the blonde man with horn-rimmed glasses).

“When I saw them [Tarrants, Ainsworth, Joannides, Morales, and Unidentified Man in Profile],” Ms. Gizzi continued, “they were to the right of the entrance to the lower ballroom [the Ambassador Room]. They were against the right-hand wall, kind of in the shadows, their back almost leaning on the wall with the medallion guy [Tarrants] who was kind of casual.

“This other guy George Joannides had an arm like behind him [a hand gesture which, as Ms. Gizzi confirmed, is clearly shown in the two photographs on page 452 of O’Sullivan’s book]. The arm was with the elbow crooked out. That made him look familiar. That made it strike a familiarity. The girl was dancing around with her arms up and she was the one wearing the polka-dot dress.

“Another guy David Morales was just standing casually facing sideways talking to Unidentified [Man in Profile] who had his hands kind of down and he wasn’t doing anything. There was nobody else here [in the group of five] and for one thing none of the group were wearing Kennedy hats or buttons . . .

“I do not recall a bald man with the group [of five]. All hair on all of them . . . At the time I saw them, she [the polka-dot dress girl Kathy Ainsworth] was talking to him [the man with the medallion Tommy Tarrants]. The medallion guy wasn’t even looking at her, but I’ve seen a lot of guys do that with girls but he was staring across at the staircase. He wasn’t looking at her at all and she was nervous, dancing around. It seemed like she was trying to get his attention.

“They were all fairly close together but they weren’t cheek-by-jaw. These three [Joannides, Ainsworth, and Tarrants] were closer together than these two [David Morales and Unidentified Man in Profile] but these two [Morales and Unidentified in Profile], you could see they were with that group [of five].

“First off, the polka-dot dress girl stuck out and secondly, the medallion guy stuck out, and thirdly, the whole group [of five including Morales, Joannides, and Unidentified Man in Profile] stuck out with no paraphernalia on. I said to Kathy Lentine, ‘I wonder what they’re doing here because it seems like she [Ainsworth] is awfully nervous.’ But we just figured they were from one of the opposing camps and they had taken off their paraphernalia and didn’t want to be outted . . . The police were trying to say that I saw Sirhan with this group. No, I didn’t. I never saw Sirhan. They showed me pictures and all the pictures resembled Sirhan. ‘Did you see this guy there?’ and I said ‘No.’ Another thing the police kept asking was if they [the group of five] were Middle Eastern.”

“I was in Dallas when we got that motherfucker,” CIA agent David Morales chillingly bragged to his attorney Robert Walton, “and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard [Robert Kennedy].” Walton explained to Shane O’Sullivan “how [Morales] had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy.”

Both George Joannides and David Morales worked for the CIA at the covert Miami, Florida base known as JMWAVE. “I transferred to South Florida, to JMWAVE,” Bradley Ayers told O’Sullivan. “I arrived in April 1963. I worked under a fellow by the name of David Morales, who was the chief of operations. The concept was to conduct covert paramilitary operations involving infiltration and commando raids in an effort to destabilize Castro’s Cuba. We also embarked on efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro.”

“Acquaintances in the Birchers told me of a mysterious figure involved in anti-Castro guerrilla activities,” wrote Thomas Albert Tarrants III. “A staunch anticommunist, he [David Morales] had actually been on raids to Cuba himself. He was active in securing support and supplies for such groups in Florida. Our relationship . . . provided me with my first exposure to the shadowy and exciting world of clandestine activities and international intrigue. Because it was sanctioned and covertly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and because it was anticommunist, I saw it as a patriotic effort to fight communist aggression.”