The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  Cars from law enforcement agencies that were eternally monitoring the Giancana residence were conspicuously absent at the time of the murder.

  “There were cars from the FBI, CIA, and Oak Park Police Department that were always in front of our house, somewhat guarding but watching our home in Oak Park,” wrote Antoinette Giancana, daughter of the Chicago Mob boss. “On their breaks, only one car at a time would leave, return, and then another car would leave. This staggering arrangement had been going on for months. Joe, the caretaker, told us he saw all three of the cars leave the family property, all at one time on the night of the murder. I believe they were ordered off the property. My father’s killer would have entered the house at the basement level, and that basement door was never locked. Just after the three cars had left the property, my father was shot seven times. Not once but seven times. They really wanted to make sure he was dead. Joe went down to see if my father was all right and discovered his body with blood all over the kitchen and made the call to the Oak Park Police Department. Then and only then did all three cars reappear. These three cars all leaving just before my father’s killing and all three returning after his death has to be more than a coincidence.”7

  Decades later, Giancana’s brother Chuck and nephew Sam would release a book Double Cross, which tied “Momo’s” complicity in the Kennedy hit more tightly:

  “Hey,” Mooney said sharply. He leaned forward and knotted his hands into two tight fists. “Forget about the fuckin’ G-men… . I’m talkin’ CIA. They’re different. Like night and day. We’ve been partners on more deals than I have time to tell you about. You should know that by now, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I guess I’ll never understand, huh?” Chuck challenged, irritated by Mooney’s cavalier know-it-all attitude.

  Glowering, Mooney stood up from his chair, cigar in hand, and marched across the room. When he reached Chuck, he lowered his voice and hissed, “Maybe this will help.” He fixed Chuck in a steely, impenetrable gaze. “We took care of Kennedy … together.” He lifted his cigar to his lips and a cruel smile curled like an embrace around it.8

  The collaboration between the Mob and the CIA would not be the first. In 1942, the services of Genovese crime family boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano would be procured to help safeguard American ports during wartime.9 Luciano, at the time serving a lengthy prison term, was more than happy to assist his country in return for a lighter sentence.

  The second Mafia–CIA collusion would be more complex.

  Richard Maheu was an ex-FBI agent, who opened his own private investigations firm in 1954. Most famously serving as the public face for eccentric business mogul Howard Hughes from 1955 to 1970, Maheu’s services were occasionally tapped by the CIA. He met Johnny Rosselli in the late 1950s and was the perfect middleman to make contact with the mobster. Although Maheu said that he did not know the extent of Rosselli’s underworld dealings, it was clear to him that, “he [Rosselli] was able to accomplish things in Las Vegas when nobody else seemed to get that kind of attention.”10

  According to a declassified document, Maheu, working for the CIA, approached Rosselli at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills early in September, 1960 with a proposition for an overseas assignment: the assassination of Fidel Castro.11

  Rosselli was, in the words of Maheu, “very hesitant about participating in the project, and he finally said that he felt that he had an obligation to his government, and he finally agreed to participate.”12

  Much like the Bay of Pigs, the operation would involve contact with the exile community in Miami and, with the help of the Mafia’s vast interests in Cuba, contacts on the island. Working under the pseudonym “John Rawlston,” Rosselli would make Miami contacts claiming he represented a businessman on Wall Street, who wanted help with some properties he had in Cuba. Other mobsters in on the assignment were Sam Giancana, working under the name “Sam Gold” and Santos Trafficante working as “Joe.”

  Trafficante would be the best person to work inside Cuba. He spoke fluent Spanish and had interest in the Sans-Souci nightclub and casino, the Commodoro hotel, and the Deauville casino in Havana. Trafficante was an opportunist, one of many gangsters, financers and moneymen who bet on Cuba as a tourist spot in the 1950s. Cuba, complete with lush surroundings and lax gambling laws, was not a bad bet. Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator at the time, would match dollar for dollar any hotel investment over $1 million, with the added bonus of a casino license. As the foreign traveler dollars increased, the prospect looked to be fruitful and lasting, and from what Trafficante knew, the young revolutionary Fidel Castro was not a threat.

  “There was no question about him taking power,” Trafficante said. “They used to—in the papers when you would read about him, you would read like he was some kind of bandit.”13

  Castro did take power, nationalizing every business along the way. The casinos were soon closed, and Trafficante was detained in Trescornia prison for a time, waiting to be sent back to the United States.

  The CIA assignment would give the Mafia a chance to reclaim its lost property and offered the unique opportunity to make contacts in Washington. The recruiting, planning, and implementation of the various assassination plots were at times intriguing, at times farcical.

  Originally, the idea was to kill Castro in a “gangland style killing,” but Giancana, noting the difficulty in finding someone for such an operation, suggested that firearms not be used against Castro. A poison was settled on, something “nice and easy, without getting into any out-and-out ambushing” in the words of Rosselli, something that could be deposited into one of Castro’s drinks.14

  The first attempt in August 1960 failed. Plotters had wanted to inject liquid botulinum toxin, a poison that causes paralysis of the muscles resulting in the inability to breathe, into one of Castro’s signature cigars. The dosage was to be so lethal that Castro would only have to touch his lips to the cigar for the poison to take effect.15

  Other attempts involved poison pills containing botulinum toxin given to Rosselli by the CIA’s technical services division. In the early months of 1961, the pills were entrusted to Juan Orta, who Giancana thought would be a reliable accomplice. Orta was a private secretary to Castro and had been receiving kickbacks from the Mafia gambling interests. In a financial bind, Orta could be easily persuaded to act. Unfortunately, he got cold feet before the poison could be used.16

  The insider tapped by Trafficante to replace Orta was Tony Varona, a Cuban exile leader who had his own interests in overthrowing Castro. Varona was also working with US racketeers, who were funding the anti-Castro movement “in the hopes of securing the gambling, prostitution, and dope monopolies in Cuba in the event Castro was overthrown.”17 The agency, with full knowledge of Varona’s motives, went ahead with the mission. Varona was supplied with the pills and $50,000, with a plan to slip the poison into Castro’s food at a restaurant he frequented. The plan went awry when Varona discovered that Castro had stopped eating at the restaurant.18

  The operation would take an interesting turn in February 1962 when the agency discovered that Maheu was working independently for Giancana, wiretapping the hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan. Giancana’s girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was performing at a Las Vegas nightclub with Rowan, and Giancana heard that he was showing McGuire considerable attention. A suspicious Giancana wanted to know if their relationship extended into the bedroom. When the agency discovered the side project, Maheu faced criminal charges. At the request of the agency, the case was dropped.19

  Bobby Kennedy, although a big supporter of secret actions by the CIA to undermine Castro’s Cuba, was aghast when informed about the CIA’s use of the Mafia. The collusion between the two organizations came to light following the illegal use of wiretaps in Rowan’s hotel room. The use of organized crime—Bobby’s sworn enemy—by the CIA, an organization that Bobby trusted less and less, certainly angered and possibly frightened the attorney general.

  “I trust that if you ever do busin
ess with organized crime again, with gangsters,” Bobby Kennedy told CIA director of security Sheffield Edwards and counsel Lawrence Houston during a May 14, 1962 meeting, “you will let the attorney general know.”20

  The relationship between the CIA and the Mafia, despite the stern warning from the attorney general and the assurances of Edwards and Houston, would not end.

  Three months after the Rowan wiretapping incident, CIA agent Bill Harvey took over the reins as Rosselli’s case officer. Since November 1961, Harvey had headed up ZR/RIFLE, an assassination plan directed at Castro. This no doubt put Harvey in contact with Operation 40. Operation 40 was established by then-Director of the CIA Allen Dulles and originally presided over by Vice President Richard Nixon. It was a CIA-sanctioned assassination squad, which made their frustrating debut in the failed Bay of Pigs. The perceived cowardice of President Kennedy in not providing the necessary and promised air support to the mission drove the hatred of Operation 40 members. The group had included E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis (a.k.a. Frank Fiorini), Dave Morales, and Bernard Barker. Some of them would resurface in the Kennedy assassination and again later in the Watergate breakin. Harvey’s assignment to interact more closely with Rosselli brought the vital members of the CIA/Mafia assassination compact together.

  John Kennedy’s first impression of Harvey, who was described to him as “America’s James Bond,” was no doubt different from what he had imagined. Kennedy was such a James Bond devotee, he once asked Bond author Ian Fleming how he, Fleming, would dispose of Castro. The paunchy, rumpled Harvey, with bulging eyes due to a thyroid problem, was a sharp contrast to the urbane superspy.

  Harvey’s comparison with 007 was surely derived from his ability to get things done quietly. One example was the Berlin Tunnel operation in 1953, his greatest early accomplishment for the agency. As base chief, Harvey oversaw an operation to dig under southern Berlin and tap into communication wires between Soviet-occupied East Germany and other parts of the Soviet Union.21 Conducted unassumingly under enemy soil, the tunnel provided the United States with important intelligence on Soviet affairs, both military and diplomatic.

  The Kennedy fascination with the CIA, and Harvey in particular, went south quickly. To President Kennedy, Harvey was part of a defective agency. Harvey himself was not enamored with the Kennedys from the start: In private, he referred to the increasingly meddling Bobby matter-of-factly as “that fucker.”22 Harvey, though, was perfect for the CIA–Mafia collusion. It was a cloak-and-dagger operation, which required further secrecy. In a phone call to director of security Edwards in May 1962, Harvey told him that “he was dropping any plans for the use of Rosselli in the future.”23 This claim would be challenged by Harvey, who asserted that he had taken over “a going operation.”24 The phone call was placed to deliberately mislead Sheffield: The operation was continuing, but with different objectives and only a small platoon in the know.

  “I wanted everyone else cut out,” Harvey would later tell Church Committee investigators.25

  That same month, a base was built for Rosselli and a military unit assigned to him in Key Largo for the purpose of training snipers.26

  The back-and-forth accusations within the CIA over who was in charge of what and at what level would be a common theme of the 1975 Church Committee hearings on alleged assassination plots involving foreign leaders. Pennsylvania Senator Rickard Schweiker, a committee member, told Harvey in one exchange: “Mr. Harvey, we’ve had witness after witness after witness come since you were here last and say that you are in error, and the CIA was operating out of control, and the junior officers were going berserk.27

  The CIA, and Bill Harvey were acting with power the agency was lawfully granted with the approval of NSC 10/2. Harvey continued the program after had been was ordered to shut it down because he believed it in his rights to do so. Harvey even persisted on advancing the mission after he had been removed from the country.

  By 1963, Harvey had been exiled to an outpost in Rome by Bobby Kennedy after sending troops, unbeknownst to almost all branches of government, to Cuba for a potential invasion during the missile crisis. Despite being sent away and ordered to stay out of contact with the Florida Castro operation, Harvey was taking many trips back to the Florida Keys to see Rosselli, whose role with the CIA was supposed to have already been terminated. Harvey met secretly with Rosselli, CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, and Operation 40 member David Morales.28

  Harvey also held separate meetings with Rosselli throughout 1963. On April 18 and 19 of 1963, Harvey and Rosselli chartered a boat and motored off Plantation Key beyond the reaches of surveillance to discuss private matters.

  “Regardless of how he may have made his living in the past,” Harvey said of his mobster friend, John Rosselli had “integrity as far as I was concerned.29

  The cooperation of Operation 40 and the mafia element is integral to the assassination of John Kennedy. They would be necessary to Lyndon Johnson because this was not good ‘ole boy Texas justice—a more sophisticated plan was needed. The CIA and Mafia element would likewise be dependent on LBJ to effectively control the location, chain of command, and evidence.

  “I can just visualize Harvey and LBJ forming a kind of a thieves, compact between them,” said Operation 40 agent and Watergate recruiter and organizer E. Howard Hunt. “I think that LBJ was an opportunist, and he would have not hesitated to get rid of obstacles in his way.”

  “There was no other group that honored, if I can use that term, the clandestine limitations the way the CIA did,” Hunt added. “They could do something, turn their back on it, then move on to something else.”30

  Hunt, who was on his deathbed at the time of his confession, said that he was approached to be a “benchwarmer” on the assassination, which was known in certain channels as “The Big Event.” Was Hunt in Dallas on November 22, 1963? In 1974, the Rockefeller Commission concluded that Hunt used eleven hours of sick leave from the CIA in the two-week period preceding the assassination. Saint John Hunt, E. Howard’s son, remembered his mother informing him on November 22, 1963 that Howard was on a “business trip” to Dallas that day. Later, eyewitness Marita Lorenz testified under oath in a district court case in Florida that she saw Hunt pay off an assassination team in Dallas the night before Kennedy’s murder. Saint John Hunt: “One of the things he [E. Howard Hunt] liked to say around the house was let’s finish the job,” said Saint John Hunt. “Let’s hit Ted [Kennedy].”

  Saint John Hunt explained that the reason why his father had waited until he was dying to confess was his fear for the lives of himself and his family. Hunt’s wife Dorothy had died in a commercial plane crash in Chicago, which killed forty-five people in 1972. Hunt did not believe it was an accident.

  “Later on in his life at one of these bedside confessions, tears started welling up in his eyes, and he said, ‘You know, Saint, I was so deeply concerned that what they did to your mother they could have done to you children, and that caused the hair on my neck to stand up.‘ That was the first disclosure from my father that he thought there was something else going on besides sheer pilot error,” said Saint John Hunt.31

  The man who met with Johnson, Hunt believed, to “undertake a larger organization while keeping it totally secret” was CIA official Cord Meyer.

  By the time of the assassination, Meyer’s ex-wife Mary had become one of John Kennedy’s mistresses, making Meyer more easily accessible to Johnson.

  “Jack confided to Kenny [O’Donnell] he was deeply in love with Mary, that after he left the White House, he envisioned a future with her and would divorce Jackie,” said investigative journalist and author Leo Damore. The writer had been working on a book regarding President Kennedy’s affair with Mary Meyer when he died mysteriously of an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1995.32

  When he lost his wife to Kennedy, Cord Meyer had nothing left.

  A year after Kennedy’s death, Mary Meyer was dead, killed by an unknown assassin. In 2001, wasting away in a Washington
nursing home, Meyer told author C. David Heymann that the people who killed Mary were “the same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”33

  Lyndon Johnson also had many connections to the CIA through Texas oil money. Chief among them was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository building and LBJ oil crony D.H. Byrd, the cousin of Senator Harry F. Byrd, whose political machine dominated Virginia politics from the mid–1920s until 1966.

  In the 1960 Democratic primary, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia crossed over into West Virginia to campaign for Hubert Humphrey at the request of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ wanted to block Kennedy’s ascent, but hadn’t yet entered any primaries. H. L. Hunt was flooding the state with anti-JFK tracts, tying him to the Pope and Catholicism. In 1964, unlike his Senate Colleague J. Strom Thurmond who bolted the Democratic Party to support Goldwater, Byrd supported the Johnson–Humphrey ticket and accompanied Lady Bird Johnson on a campaign swing through Virginia.

  Contrast this with 1960, when Byrd said he would “maintain the golden silence” and withheld his support from Kennedy. In fact, Byrd, along with Johnson, were two of the earliest congressional overseers of the newly created CIA.

  Lyndon Johnson had deep intelligence and military ties. Senator Johnson and his top aide Walter Jenkins both had Q clearances, which is a very high-level clearance by the Department of Energy specifically relating to atomic or nuclear materials.

  Another connection to help draw the CIA into the plot was oil magnate Clint Murchison. For years, Murchison had colluded the interests of Texas oil with the CIA, FBI, and Mafia elements through his ownership of the La Jolla, California Del Mar Racetrack and the nearby Hotel Del Charro, a resort that entertained and introduced members from all groups. Carlos Marcello and Jack Ruby were also regulars with the Del Mar set.

  Harry Hall, a well-connected member of organized crime and Jack Ruby gambling cohort, would join Ruby at the Del Mar to habitually play the odds, in one instance winning an impressive sum of money on the Cotton and Rose Bowls from oilman, LBJ business partner, and JFK assassination moneyman H. L. Hunt.34