The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (28 page)

By the conclusion of his book, Shane O’Sullivan was not certain whether three CIA agents David Morales, George Joannides, and Gordon Campbell [November 20, 1918–December 22, 2002] were actually present at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968. Now that Irene Gizzi has identified both Morales and Joannides in attendance together, we must focus on the Embassy Room footage of Joannides speaking to a man claiming to be Michael D. Roman, which is in fact a cover name for Gordon Campbell. “When I showed Bradley Ayers this footage [of a man purporting to be Michael D. Roman], it reinforced his identification of Campbell,” wrote O’Sullivan. “The stance, bearing, behavior, and facial expressions all called to mind the man he knew at JMWAVE.”

Morales, Joannides, and Campbell worked at JMWAVE in high positions of power and all three knew each other well. “I met the assistant chief of station, a fellow by the name of Gordon Campbell, who later became my case officer,” Bradley Ayers explained. As mentioned above, Ayers also worked under David Morales. In addition to Campbell, Ayers had identified David Morales to O’Sullivan from the same photograph shown to Irene Gizzi by Jay Margolis.

“The Roman family recognized the figure of Joannides in the photographs,” Shane O’Sullivan intriguingly reported but under a different name. Michael Roman’s son told O’Sullivan, “Both my sister and mother confirm the darker-haired man is Frank Owens [sic]. He died a number of years ago [on March 9, 1990] and his wife may also have passed away or is at a care facility.”

“Owens [actually George Joannides] was a regional sales manager for Michael Roman [who was in fact Gordon Campbell],” O’Sullivan noted, “and seems to match a ‘Frank S. Owen’ from New York interviewed by the FBI on October 21 [1968]. Owen registered at the Ambassador on June 4, listened to Kennedy’s speech in the Embassy Room, and remained there during the shooting.”

Therefore, David Morales, George Joannides (using Frank S. Owen as a cover identity), and Gordon Campbell (using Michael D. Roman as a cover identity) were three CIA agents present together at the Ambassador Hotel when RFK was gunned down. The Roman family agreed that the man they knew as Michael D. Roman was inside before, during, and after the assassination. He attended a sales conference for the Bulova Watch Company at the Ambassador Hotel, just not under the name Gordon Campbell. “Forty percent of Bulova’s revenue came from the defense industry,” O’Sullivan reported, “and sources told me it was a well-known CIA cover. Roman had been appointed Vice President by [General Omar M.] Bradley in 1964.” It was highly effective for both Joannides and Campbell—until now.

“I still don’t understand why the police kept trying to say that it was only Sirhan Sirhan,” Irene Gizzi continued to Jay Margolis. “There were just too many suspicious things that had gone on that evening. The group was the most suspicious, including the taller gentleman with the medallion, and the young pretty girl wearing a polka-dot dress. She’s the only one I saw that evening wearing a polka-dot dress. . . .

“I remember that he was tall. He was good-looking and was wearing a medallion. That stuck out. It was very flashy. He was talking with the girl in the polka-dot dress who was kind of dancing around a little bit seeming nervous and excitable, and there were three other men [Morales, Joannides, and Unidentified Man in Profile] with them . . . I was in my twenties. We had worked for Jack and now we were working for Bobby.

“When we came into the lower ballroom [the Ambassador Room], they were in a group on the right-hand side of the entrance, directly across from the staircase on the left. They were conspicuous because they weren’t wearing any Kennedy paraphernalia. They weren’t carrying anything that had anything to do with the nominating campaign or any political campaign so that’s why they stood out.

“They were kind of in the shadows trying to stay back on the right-hand side, no more than five feet from the doors, against the wall, which also wouldn’t make sense if you wanna get up near the stage to be where you can hear the speaker.

“That was the only thing that stood out at that time. When the shots rang out, and when we all figured out it wasn’t firecrackers, when we turned around, they had disappeared right after the gunshots. All of the group were gone. Most of us weren’t because we didn’t know exactly where to go or what to do . . .

“When you enter the lower ballroom [the Ambassador Room], the staircase was on the left, and the guy with the medallion, his group, including [Joannides, Morales, Unidentified Man in Profile, and] the girl with the polka-dot dress, were on the right. He [Tarrants] could have very easily gone up those stairs while Bobby was speaking [in the Embassy Room] or entered the pantry [also upstairs] because people were coming up and down those stairs all during that time. He was wearing the medallion, which was very flashy, which is like a gold chain with a large sunburst or eagle on it. I think it was an eagle with flares behind it so it would appear almost round but it wasn’t really round . . .

“The police didn’t shut the main doors until after Rosey Grier threw three reporters down the stairs. The police then shut the doors and locked everybody in. There were a lot of people screaming to get out. We were there until two-fifteen in the morning. From there we went to Good Samaritan because we were praying. I don’t think any of us got home until eight or nine in the morning . . . Unless the cops got all the footage, there’s a bunch of people that have footage because there were television crews there. I know there were radio people there too but they didn’t have cameras.”

The late Professor Philip H. Melanson, PhD notated in his first book, “Three drawn guns were reported by witnesses: Sirhan’s, uniformed security guard Thane Cesar’s and that of an unidentified man wearing a suit.” Don Schulman told Special Counsel Thomas F. Kranz, “I had thought I saw three guns [but only witnessed Sirhan’s and Cesar’s actually being fired].”

Professor Melanson interviewed a lady requesting confidentiality he has named “Martha Raines.” He relayed, “Martha Raines asserts that a gun besides Sirhan’s or Cesar’s was fired . . . Martha Raines told the author of seeing a man fire a gun in the pantry.”

“According to [Martha] Raines, the man fired a handgun of some kind,” Melanson wrote. “She recalled that the gunman ‘was not composed.’ He didn’t shoot ‘more than once or twice’ before running out of the pantry.”

“And, as I recall, one of them [the shots] was high and should have gone into the ceiling,” Mrs. Raines concluded to Professor Melanson. “I don’t know what these people found when they did their ballistics tests . . . but it appeared to me there should have been a gunshot in the ceiling.” What role did the five-person group seen by Irene Gizzi play? They certainly were not at the Ambassador to celebrate Kennedy’s victory. All were avowed Kennedy haters. The CIA men hated the Kennedy brothers for the Bay of Pigs and the supposed failure to resist the communist threat. Thomas Tarrants admitted to a “great fondness for firearms and marksmanship.” He and Kathy Ainsworth were violent KKK terrorists and despised the Kennedys for pushing racial integration in the South. Tarrants expressed in his first book “a dislike for John Kennedy and his policies on race and federal intervention . . . My defiance of authority began when authority placed itself on the side of federal intervention to integrate—the policy of an ideology I viewed as un-American . . . As I saw it, America was being undermined by the communist-Jewish conspiracy.”

Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar demonstrated a remarkably similar motive for RFK’s murder to Ted Charach when interviewed in 1969. “I definitely wouldn’t have voted for Bobby Kennedy because he had the same ideas as John did,” Cesar stated, “and I think John sold the country down the road. He gave it to the Commies . . . He literally gave it to the minority. . . The black man now for the last four to eight years has been cramming this integrated idea down our throat and so you learn to hate him.”

After interviewing Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein, LAPD Sgt. Paul Sharaga relayed, “The woman stated that she and her husband were just outside the Embassy Room when a young couple, in their late teens or early twenties, came running by in a state of glee, very excited, very happy, shouting, ‘We shot him! We shot him! We killed him!’ And the woman says, ‘Who? Who did you kill?’ And the young lady said, ‘Kennedy! We shot him! We killed him!’

“I immediately put out a broadcast with a description of the suspects: male and female Caucasian, the female Caucasian wearing a polka-dot dress . . .”

In fact, Kennedy was shot at 12:15 a.m. and the LAPD logger tape recording for Sgt. Paul Sharaga was as follows: “12:28:53 ‘2L30, description of the suspect; at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard; male Caucasian, 20 to 22, 6 ft. to 6 ft. 2, very thin . . . wearing a brown—brown pants and a light brown shirt; direction taken unknown at this time.’” At the time of the shooting, Tarrants was twenty-one, 6 ft. 3 (according to Jack Nelson’s book), very thin, and Ainsworth was twenty-six but had a youthful appearance.

After running into Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein just outside the Embassy Room, Tommy Tarrants and Kathy Ainsworth next ran into twenty-year old Sandra Serrano, a Youth for Kennedy co-chairman in Pasadena-Altadena, who, according to Shane O’Sullivan, was “sitting on the fire escape below the southwest corner of the Embassy Room.” Serrano first relayed her account an hour-and-a-half after the shooting to Sander “Sandy” Vanocur from NBC. Sandra Serrano stated, “This girl came running down the stairs in the back and said, ‘We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him!’ and I said, ‘Who did you shoot?’ and she says, ‘We shot Senator Kennedy!’ A boy came down with her. He was about twenty-three years old . . . She had on a white dress with polka-dots. She was light-skinned, dark hair, and she had a funny nose.”

In fact, Kathy Ainsworth was bragging to the Bernsteins and to Sandra Serrano that “we” had just shot the Senator. After analyzing footage in the Embassy Room shortly after the shooting in the pantry, it appears that CIA agent Gordon Campbell is holding onto the medallion guy’s weapon (hidden underneath Campbell’s dress shirt so it doesn’t show) using his right hand to firmly press it against his chest as a Latin man with a mustache is curiously guiding Campbell to an exit.

But the CIA connection didn’t stop there. LAPD Lieutenant Manuel Pena and LAPD Sgt. Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, chosen to investigate the RFK assassination, were also CIA agents, and they controlled the flow of information. “The way they’ve written it, it sounds like I was brought back [out of retirement] and put into the [RFK] case as a plant by the CIA,” Pena relayed to attorney Marilyn Barrett on a 1992 recording, “so that I could steer something around and . . . guide the investigation to a point where no one would ever discover a conspiracy or something.” FBI agent Roger LaJeunesse, who investigated the RFK case with the LAPD, confirmed that Pena worked for the CIA for at least ten years.

Since there were three shooters, it is important to focus our attention on the powder burns found on the Senator. “It is scientifically highly unlikely,” Noguchi explained to investigative reporter Ted Charach regarding the possibility that Sirhan Sirhan’s gun, being at least three feet from the Senator, would have produced the powder burns Noguchi later found on Kennedy’s body. “In this case, there was an abundance of powder burn embedded deep in the tissue . . . Because of the soot in the hair, I believed that the muzzle distance of the fatal shot had been from one to three inches away . . .”

Given the undeniable scientific evidence presented before him, Noguchi concluded, “I now knew the precise location of the murder weapon at the moment it was fired: one inch from the edge of his right ear, only three inches behind the head . . . Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy . . .”

Thane Eugene Cesar told Ted Charach he did indeed draw his gun but claims he did not fire. Cesar himself conceded he was positioned behind the Senator holding his right elbow with his left hand, guiding him through the crowd when suddenly Cesar got powder burns in his eyes. “I got powder in my eyes,” Cesar stated to Ted Charach. “I was a little behind Bobby so I would say I was about three feet from the flash [of Sirhan’s gun] . . . and as I said I got a little bit of powder in my eyes.” Cesar could only have received blowback from his own gun if he pulled the trigger at the Senator’s head but he did not. The powder burns came from the gun of the third shooter who fired the fatal shot.

Professor Melanson intriguingly noted a third witness to the third gun in the pantry, besides Martha Raines and Don Schulman, and wrote, “In addition to Sirhan’s gun and that of security guard Cesar, Lisa Urso saw another one . . . She sighted the gun immediately after the shooting, just as Sirhan’s gun was wrestled from him . . . Schulman is no longer the only second-gun witness [or third-gun witness]. And there may be more such witnesses like Urso and Raines whose sightings of second or third guns have not yet been recorded.” Lisa Urso stated she saw a man “by Kennedy” with a suit holding a gun after the shooting stopped.

In court, testifying at Sirhan Sirhan’s trial, Ambassador Hotel busboy Juan Romero asserted that the shooter was
not
in the room. Harry F. Rosenthal from the Associated Press wrote on February 16, 1969, “Shortly after midnight Romero saw someone coming toward Kennedy.”

Romero relayed, “I thought it was a person who couldn’t wait to shake his hand. I seen the guy put a hand at the Senator’s head. And then I saw a gun. Then I saw Sen. Kennedy stretched out in front of me. I leaned down and picked up his head.”

“Romero was asked if the man who did the shooting was in the room,” Rosenthal continued. “He shook his head. Sirhan was asked to stand.” Romero replied, “I don’t believe that’s him.”

Therefore, Juan Romero is one of two known eyewitnesses to the third gunman firing his weapon, the other being Martha Raines. Romero was close enough to Kennedy and the third gunman that Romero got powder burns on his ear, not from Cesar’s two non-lethal right armpit shots, but from the third shooter’s fatal shot to RFK’s head. Since the shooting happened within five and a half seconds, there wouldn’t have been enough time for Cesar to raise his weapon from Kennedy’s right armpit all the way to the back of the Senator’s head to make that last fatal shot. In fact, Cesar also got powder burns like Romero, not on his ear, but in his eyes. Both of these powder burns came from the third gunman to the back of Kennedy’s head.