The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  In 1973, with the stench of the Box 13 scandal still lingering and Parr charged with tax evasion, the Duke of Duval would admit to his attorney that he had spoken with Johnson in the days immediately following election night and determined Johnson would need two-hundred votes to salvage the loss.51

  On April 1, 1975, helicopters spotted George Parr’s Chrysler in a fenced clearing on the southeast corner of his Los Horcones Ranch in Duval County, Texas.52 Parr had failed to appear for a court date to answer tax evasion charges the day before, and law enforcement officials had been hunting him down. The car was still running, and the Duke of Duval was inside, slumped over with a bullet hole on the right side of his head; a spent round of ammunition had made its way to the floorboard. Parr’s dentures were also on the floor, forced out of his mouth by the punch of the gunshot.53

  In 1977, after Johnson, Parr, and Stevenson had died, Luis Salas would admit to lying under oath and lend context to his role in the “Box 13” scandal. He confirmed that Parr orchestrated the scandal and also divulged that Johnson was present when Parr told Salas what needed to be done. Salas, in his final years, perhaps to clear his conscience, added that he certified the added names.

  “Johnson did not win that election,” Salas said. “It was stolen for him.”54

  Looking back near the end of his life, Salas was amazed at the level of criminal behavior he was involved in, particularly his role in the “Box 13” scandal.

  “Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t get the electric chair,”55 Salas said.

  In 1952, Coke Stevenson would get closest to the truth of “Box 13” when Sam Smithwick, another of Parr’s deputy sheriffs, wrote him from the state prison in Huntsville pledging his willingness to testify. But mysteriously, Smithwick, serving time for murder, was himself apparently murdered as Stevenson was on his way to the prison to speak with him. En route, Stevenson stopped in Junction to notify prison officials of his arrival time. He was told Smithwick was dead.

  “A prison guard found Smithwick at midnight,” read the Valley Morning Star shortly after his death. “The husky but aging man—he was 64—had twisted a towel, tied it around his neck, and anchored it to the top bunk of the double-decker beds in his cell.”56

  Stevenson would write a letter to the press stating that the murder only strengthened his complaint of election fraud, and in 1956 Governor Allen Shivers would accuse Johnson of having a hand in Smithwick’s murder.57

  Smithwick was the first in a number of people who would perish mysteriously who could be traced directly back to the man who would be president. Johnson would order a chain of murders to protect his Senate seat, cover up corruption, and hide his greed and his adulterous and debauched lifestyle. Johnson’s murders would include not only Smithwick but also a married lover of Johnson’s sister Josefa, several federal informants, a US Agricultural Department inspector and, ultimately, the President of the United States.

  The murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy would not be Johnson’s first.

  NOTES

  1. Royko, Boss, pg. 7.

  2. Schendel; Collier’s Weekly; June 9, 1951, ‘Something is Rotten in the State of Texas’; pg. 68.

  3. Ibid, pg. 70.

  4. Clark, The Fall of the Duke of Duval, pg. 60.

  5. Clark, The Fall of the Duke of Duval, pg. 60.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Caro, Means of Ascent, pgs. 40–43.

  8. Ibid, pg. 51.

  9. Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1943.

  10. Caro, Means of Ascent, pg. 49.

  11. Ibid, pgs. 51-52.

  12. Ibid, pg. 229.

  13. Phipps, Summer Stock: Behind the Scenes with LBJ in ’48, pg. 207.

  14. Ibid, pg. 209.

  15. Caro, Means of Ascent, 155.

  16. Ibid, 155.

  17. Ibid, 149.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid, 173.

  20. Dallek, Lone Star Rising, pg. 316.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics, pg. 80.

  23. Dallek, Lone Star Rising, pgs. 316-317

  24. Caro, Means of Ascent, 244.

  25. Ibid, 210.

  26. Ibid, 224.

  27. Morrow, The Best Year of Their Lives, 277.

  28. Caro, Means of Ascent, pg. 244.

  29. Phipps, Summer Stock, pg. 228.

  30. Ibid, 229.

  31. Ibid,.

  32. Bryce, Robert, Cronies, pg. 58.

  33. Caro, Means of Ascent, pg. 230.

  34. Ibid, pg. 220.

  35. Bryce, Robert; Cronies, pgs. 57–59.

  36. Ibid, pg. 59.

  37. Caro, Means of Ascent, pg. 100.

  38. Ibid, pg. 103.

  39. McClellan, pgs. 119–120.

  40. Caro, Means of Ascent, 272.

  41. Ibid, pg. 274.

  42. Ibid, pg. 314.

  43. Ibid, pg. 48.

  44. McClellan, Blood, Money and Power, pg. 90.

  45. Caro, Means of Ascent, pg. 322.

  46. Ibid, pgs. 322–323.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, pg. 47.

  49. Ibid, pg. 399.

  50. Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, pg. 53.

  51. Clark, The Fall of the Duke of Duval, pgs. 19–20.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Clark, The Fall of the Duke of Duval, pg. 60.

  54. Caro, Means of Ascent, pg. 388.

  55. The Daytona Beach News-Journal, July 31, 1977.

  56. Valley Morning Star, April 17, 1952.

  57. Dallek, pg. 347.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CURSES

  In his first year as attorney general, while investigating corruption in Gary, Indiana, Bobby Kennedy was advised by Edwyn Silberling, his chief of organized crime in the Department of Justice, that one of the city councilmen, a bartender, should be the first indicted, because he had the weakest defense.

  “What’s wrong with being a bartender?” Kennedy asked, “My grandfather was a bartender.”1

  Robert Kennedy understood his heritage. He and John Kennedy were the sons of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, a cutthroat businessman who had extensive dealings with organized crime. Their grandfather was Boston Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Neither was known for his integrity. The attorney general was correct in characterizing his grandfather as a bartender, although the context of Pat Kennedy’s professional life was historically less blue collar. Born in Boston on January 8, 1858, Pat grew to be an entrepreneur, who sometimes dabbled in business ventures of questionable legality. The one bar in Haymarket Square that he purchased as a young man expanded to three, and Pat Kennedy eventually bought a liquor distribution, which gave him control of spirits sold to his bars and those of his competitors. With the blessing of Mayor John F. Fitzgerald, Pat Kennedy then entered into finance, forming Columbia Trust. Later, Kennedy tried his hand at politics and, in 1886, won five consecutive one-year terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Six years later, he won a seat in the state senate.2 Kennedy learned the importance of patronage, especially to increase voter turnout and political support. He used his political influence to sway city contracts to bring in more money to his businesses. In 1896, along with Mayor Fitzgerald, Joseph Corbett, and James Donavon, Kennedy formed Boston’s Democratic Party Board of Strategy, intent on controlling the city’s political fortunes.3 The Board of Strategy was part of the political machine in Boston, based on ward bosses and cronyism, a system in which favors begot favors, from the cities smallest political unit up to city hall.

  The hordes of Irish immigrants who moved into the North End of Boston in the latter half of the 1800s became the fulcrum of the electoral process for politicians like Mayor Fitzgerald. The political system was put in place to help these immigrants, who were oppressed socially, economically, and ethnically. Journalist and historian Henry Adams, whose roots in America could be traced to pre-Revolutionary War times, wrote what others in his more privileged class felt about the Irish: “
Poor Boston had run up against it in the form of its particular Irish maggot, rather lower than the Jew, but with more or less the same appetite for cheese.”4

  The machine had grown through the Irish neighborhoods as a way to help their own. Like Parr’s system in Texas, it was an in-or-out proposal: Either vote for who the bosses tell you to vote for and you are taken care of, or don’t, and good luck. Growing up in the system, Honey Fitz saw the power of the machine firsthand when a friend of the family was left jobless for voting against a system candidate.5

  When Honey Fitz was elected mayor in 1906, he championed the machine mentality citywide. The job climate during the Fitzgerald era is expanded upon in Gerard O’Neill’s Rogues and Redeemers, a history of old Irish politics in Boston:

  The first Fitzgerald administration was the old North End patronage machine writ large. No holdover city job was safe. By the end, one out of every forty-two residents in Boston held a city job that kept them inside when it rained and finally out of the construction trench. Bartenders and construction foremen were suddenly running the show. The provisional appointment to get around civil service became an art form. There was such a profusion of deputy sealers in the weights and measures department that even an obscure, out-of-the-way agency managed to have its own feather bedding scandal. There were ludicrous new jobs for tea warmers and tree climbers and a new tear of watchman to better watch those warming tea or climbing trees.6

  Patrick’s son, Joseph P. Kennedy, born on September 6, 1888, lived a life that echoed his father in many regards, straddling the worlds of politics and business, using qualities of one to influence the outcome of the other. Joseph Kennedy also made the tactical move of marrying Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of his father’s political ally Mayor John Fitzgerald. His increasing knowledge of his father-in-law’s bureaucratic affairs raised his own political acumen. Honey Fitz, in becoming Boston’s first Irish Catholic mayor, showed him that power could be achieved against the odds. Through his father-in-law, Joseph Kennedy learned the power of the press—Fitzgerald owned the weekly Republic, a Boston paper that gave voice to the mayor’s political machine. In later years, with Joe’s son John running for office, newspapers and magazines would be bought to amass support for the candidate while others were threatened to be bought out and shut down if they didn’t fall in line.

  Joseph Kennedy began his professional life with the help of Honey Fitz. He was appointed first as the director of the Collateral Loan Company, next, in 1914, to the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Electric Company, and then as assistant general manager of the Fore River Shipyard, a strategic appointment set to coincide with the impending war.

  Following the war, Joe Kennedy, once more with the assistance of his father-in-law, acquired a job at the securities firm Hayden, Stone, and Company. It was there that he learned the subtleties of the stock market, that it was important to know a business before investing, and that fortunes could be bluffed. The education would benefit Kennedy, who made his first hefty financial gain in 1924, when he was hired by Walter Howey to stave off a bear raid on the Yellow Cab Company, in which Howey was a major investor. By manipulating the Yellow Cab Stock, Kennedy saved the company and made a great deal of profit for himself. Years later, he would admit that the assignment made him a “very wealthy man.”7

  Kennedy would bring his skills of market massage and business savvy to the motion picture industry, buying the Film Booking Office of America (FBO) and turning it into a profitable business. Joe approached the motion picture industry like a civil engineer designing a bridge, stressing the importance of a product that was built faster and cheaper than his competition while ensuring that it was structurally sound.

  In addition to becoming intimately involved with the economics of his film company, Kennedy also attempted to handle the finances of some of its talent, the most famous being his mistress, Gloria Swanson.

  Ambassador Joe Kennedy would brazenly bring Swanson to the family compound in Hyannis Port and the Ambassador’s residence in Palm Beach, while his wife, Rose Kennedy, was present. Like their father, Jack and Robert Kennedy both enjoyed a sexual liaison with the reigning movie queen of their time, Marilyn Monroe. The relationships highlight an important difference between that of Joe and his sons: Joe’s angle with Swanson was as driven monetarily as it was sexually, using her name to sell his pictures, using her own assets to purchase gifts for the star. To Jack and Bobby, the conquest of Monroe was purely sexual regardless of risk or reward.

  “Boy, what an ass!”8 President Kennedy said as Monroe famously purred her way through “Happy Birthday” to him in a figure-hugging dress.

  Joe Kennedy shared with his father Pat a relentless drive for power, an ambition that allowed him, like his father, to prosper through finance and alcohol. Through his father’s suppliers, Joe found a foothold in the “import” of Canadian liquor during Prohibition.9 Bootlegging brought Kennedy a great deal of money and big connections. He once worked out a deal with Al Capone over a spaghetti supper to swap a case of his whiskey for equivalent cases of liquor from Capone’s Canadian distillery.10

  Frank Costello, whose Luciano crime family would later extend coast-to-coast, lording over Carlos Marcello’s outfit in New Orleans and Dallas, was counted among Joe’s confederates.

  “The way he [Costello] talked about him [Joe],” recalled columnist John Miller, “you had the sense that they were close during Prohibition and that something happened. Frank said that he helped Kennedy become wealthy.”11

  A Joe Kennedy Mob associate who would be involved in the JFK assassination was Johnny Rosselli, who was the number-two man of Sam “Mooney” Giancana, head of the Chicago Mafia from 1957 to 1966. Born in 1905 in Italy, Rosselli (whose birth name was Filippo Sacco) came of age, like Kennedy, in Boston. Both men were involved with liquor distribution during Prohibition: Kennedy with money, Rosselli with muscle. As a teenager and still unseasoned, Rosselli worked for Kennedy hauling crates of whiskey ashore. Separately, they made names for themselves in the booming motion picture industry. Rosselli, who had spent the early part of the 1920s in Chicago running with Al Capone’s outfit, moved to the warmer climes of Los Angeles in 1923 due to an onset of tuberculosis. Kennedy claimed a stake in the motion picture industry with monetary finesse, stock manipulation, and business savvy; Rosselli claimed his by strong-arming unions on behalf of studios, who needed their employees working. Rosselli and other mafiosi would later strong-arm the studios themselves, a shakedown in the form of a pledge to ensure peace with the unions.12

  Later in life, both men would hover at the outskirts of politics’ grandest stage and play a part in the end game of John Kennedy’s presidency. Following the use of the Mafia to procure votes for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Rosselli eventually became another strong link to the underworld which would return to claim the unpaid debts of the Kennedy family. In friendly times, the relationship of Joseph Kennedy and Johnny Rosselli went beyond business. The two men frequently played cards or golf together when Joe had West Coast affairs to tend to.13 Roselli would emerge later working with the CIA in an assassination plot against Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro—a hit squad some of whom would reappear on November 22, 1963. Rosselli would later claim to be one of three gunmen who fired on JFK in Dealey Plaza. He claimed that he had shot from a sewer grate, where he was allegedly concealed. The body of Rosselli would subsequently be found in the mid-1970s floating in an oil drum off the coast of Miami, only days before he was to testify about the assassination for the House Select Committee.

  In his life, Joe Kennedy vastly exceeded the business ambitions of his father Pat, expanding from the localism of Boston to a national level and beyond. He had a harder time approaching that success in the political arena.

  Joe had dreams of the White House and hoped to be appointed the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, an important and prestigious posting to Great Britain. Realizing the importance of favor in the matter, Kennedy courted Jimmy Roosevelt, son o
f president Franklin Roosevelt, and he found him work, much the same way Honey Fitz did for him.

  Kennedy helped young Roosevelt become president of the National Grain Yeast Corporation of Belleville, New Jersey. Later, he pulled strings in the movie business to get Jimmy a job at MGM Studios as Samuel Goldwyn’s assistant.

  Courting Jimmy Roosevelt wasn’t enough to clinch the ambassadorship for Kennedy. President Franklin Roosevelt, wanting to see the length to which Kennedy would go to get the assignment, ordered that Kennedy drop his pants in front of the president and his son. Kennedy obliged.

  “Joe, just look at your legs,” Jimmy Roosevelt later recalled his father having said. “You are just about the most bowlegged man I have ever seen. Don’t you know that the ambassador to the Court of Saint James has to go through an induction ceremony in which he wears knee britches and silk stockings? Can you imagine how you’ll look? When photos of our new ambassador appear all over the world, we’ll be a laughingstock. You’re just not right for the job, Joe.”14

  Nevertheless, Kennedy did get the appointment to England in December of 1937, but his tenure in the court of St. James would prove to be a disaster. Kennedy was openly pro-Hitler and would pursue an appeasement line. Interestingly, John F. Kennedy himself would write admiringly about Hitler.

  “At a time when we should be sending the best that we have to Great Britain, we have not done so,” wrote Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. “We have sent a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity seeker [Kennedy was the first US ambassador to take along a public relations man to represent him to the press] and who is apparently ambitious to be the first Catholic President of the United States.”15

  As Hitler’s forces continued to advance, Kennedy stuck to the ideal of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that bending to the demands of the Führer would spare a world war.

  “I’m just as convinced that he [Hitler] doesn’t want to fight as anybody else is, but I’m not convinced as to how he can save his own situation for his own people,” Kennedy remarked to Secretary of State Cordell Hull.