The Chris Moeller Archives

Hidden histories

Back on the JFK assassination for a day... I’m reading Lamar Waldron’s 2013 book “The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination,” and he contends that the president was killed on the orders of New Orleans mafia don Carlos Marcello. It's not a new name. In 1979, the Senate Committee on Assassinations even determined that Marcello had the “motive, means, and opportunity” to direct the killing. The lawmakers acknowledged simply that they did not have the evidence to prove it.

Waldron has been working full-time on the case since 1988 and says he has the evidence. He has Marcello and fellow godfather Santo Trafficante connected to Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. Though largely an unknown figure in popular culture today, Marcello was the most powerful mobster in the country for the better part of 40 years. He controlled the game in east Texas, all of Louisiana, and much of Mississippi. His was the oldest family Mafia operation on the continent, and he didn’t have to compete with four other families for control of his part of the country, as the boys did in New York. (He also didn't need the permission of any other families to order the execution of powerful individuals.) His operation was said to have been as financially-lucrative for a generation as General Motors, and the kicker-- he confessed to an undercover FBI informant in federal prison in 1985. (The mobster died in 1993.) I’ve just come from New Orleans, where Mosca’s Restaurant, 17 miles from the Crescent City Connection Bridge, is still operated out of a building owned by Carlos’ descendants.

But I also just completed a book by the father of baseball sabermetrics, Bill James, that dedicates itself to what has apparently been James’ secret second passion throughout his life-- the "true crime" genre. The book is called "Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence." James begins his latest by making the convincing case that the “true crime” aficionado is not necessarily obsessed with morbidity or gore, but with justice. He calls bunk on all Cuban, CIA, and/or Mafia-related conspiracies (like Waldron's), but is bright enough not to believe in the existence of magic bullets. He endorses the theory of the ballistics expert, Howard Donahue, outlined in a book called "Mortal Error," by Bonar Menninger in 1992, that says the third bullet echoing through Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963-- the one that mortally wounded Kennedy, was shot accidentally from the gun of Secret Service agent George Hickey.

The cover-up that followed, he contends, was to protect Hickey's life and reputation, that also of his colleagues, and the livelihood of the Secret Service. With either book, we’ve got a government cover-up, reinforced in theory by the vast number, probably millions of pages, of CIA files still unavailable to the American public, despite a court mandate to reveal. And the Warren Commission findings have now been discredited for more than half a century ago, and effectively contradicted by the later Congressional committee. I’m on it. One of these two authors is certainly biting at the precise truth, and I’m still reading.

5/15/16 update: Waldron's theory seems irrefutable. The mafia-style shooting was ordered by Marcello and Trafficante, upon the brother of the Attorney General that had declared war specifically on the two of them. The order came complete with abandoned and hushed-up prior attempts on JFK's life organized for motorcades in Chicago and Tampa, covered up by Hoover's FBI almost immediately because the mobsters could squeal about the secret assassination attempts of Fidel Castro they had been called to action to perform by the CIA in conjunction with Cuban exiles. (The truth also compromised ongoing actions.) Oswald was, as he told us at the time, a patsy, and Ruby was a Marcello goon ordered to silence Oswald or find somebody on the Dallas police force to do it instead. He failed in his attempt to delegate, but proved to be a crack shot at immediate range. More than forty witnesses in Dealey Plaza claim that the Warren Commission altered their statements. Dozens of people said they saw, and even talked to, men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents in the crowd, but the government officially maintains that the only agents in Dallas were in the motorcade or waiting for Kennedy at the motorcade's destination.

Belief in conspiracy is not, I repeat, not a radical position. The United States House of Representatives officially believes in an assassination conspiracy, likely involving the mafia. In the 1990's, the House ordered the release of all related government files, but its orders fell to nothing after hitting a stone wall. (Oh, the ineffectiveness of a Congressional order when up against the military state.) Kennedy's secretary of state, Dean Rusk, believed in mafia involvement. Robert Kennedy went to his death believing in it. The reality of Jack Ruby alone should cinch it. The Warren Commission sold Ruby to the American people as a patriot. Yet those that champion the Commission and the "lone gunman" theory are the adults in the room?

end of 5/15/16 update

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One of the tricky factors we’re forced to deal with when dissecting and interpreting the historical record is recognizing what people living at that particular time knew about their world, or even about themselves. Hindsight is 20/20, current vision usually less so. As they weren’t alive at the time, a majority of Americans today, for example, probably don’t realize that Hawaii was not one of the United States at the time of the Japanese attack in 1941. Pearl Harbor was a U.S. military installation on an occupied island.

It may have been difficult for 1963 Americans to believe they could be lied to by their government about the murder of their president, but they also didn’t know at the time that the government’s intelligence agency was involved in almost every sort of clandestine global illegality imaginable, from overthrowing foreign governments to promoting regional instabilities. And that's just in Cuba. The people knew virtually nothing of it. Americans experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis through the news lens of a supreme threat of Communist aggression only miles from their shore, but did not yet know, as a citizenry, about Operation Mongoose, the U.S. government's 33 plans for disrupting the government of Cuba, everything from crop destruction, false flag terror operations on U.S. soil, to exploding cigars. History books give us a chronology of events, but not necessarily in the historical order of their reveal.

As Waldron points out, it was, likewise, an easy sell for the intelligence community to convince Americans that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a dedicated Communist. The Red Scare was burning hot. But Oswald had to be the rare “Pinko” indeed that had enlisted in the U.S. Civil Air Patrol, then the Marines, during an era when you were considered "better dead than Red," then supposedly taught himself Russian and convinced all of his military colleagues that he loved the country on the other side of the Cold War (some, we were told, called him “Oswaldskovitch”), yet he was never written up for this pro-Russia behavior in the military, was given sensitive clearances in the Defense Department, and then allowed to get a job at a Dallas firm that made maps from U-2 spy plane photos for the government. He was photographed numerous times with anti-Castro Cubans Americans (including Ted Cruz's father?). Americans watched “nightclub owner” Jack Ruby shoot Oswald to death live on afternoon television, yet it’s strange now to consider that Ruby would not be widely identified in the press as a man with extensive mob ties until the late 1970’s. It’s not that a good many journalists were unaware of the fact. They just said nothing. Americans didn't see the Zupruder film until long after the Warren Commission had closed shop (and years after that before they saw the complete version) so they had no idea that the president's head was yanked backwards after the second hit even though he was supposedly shot from behind by Oswald.

So yes, some of us believe it very possible for large-scale conspiracies, involving multiple players, to stay secret for decades when we’re talking about government agents and underworld henchman. Among both groups, secrets are the stock and trade. And frankly, the secrets surrounding the Kennedy assassination really haven't stayed secret all that successfully. An extraordinary amount of information contradicting the Warren Commission Report has been out there almost from the beginning. Plenty of people with knowledge of events have talked a blue streak. We just don’t have an establishment media that pays those people any mind, or shows an interest in truth. There were a hundred advantages to having Oswald be a "lone gunman," and another one that developed over time, and remains, is to protect the reputations of the journalists that covered it up or had it wrong.

To consider a parallel from today, the United States government did not publicly confirm that it was killing hundreds of civilians with its Middle East drone strikes until March of this year, but those executive murders, over the period of several years, were not exactly what you would call a well-kept secret. Multiple reporters-- but nearly all them outside the main Washington framework, told us of the facts. There was just no institutional pressure upon the Obama administration to confirm them. Same thing with JFK.

posted by CM @ 6:30 PM