In the old days in Chicago, Banister’s anti-Communist squad had been one of the most effective teams in the country. And in 1963 in New Orleans he ran penetration operations against the Left, hiring young men to inform on pro-Castro and civil rights organizations – just the sort of operation the FBI was running at the time.
Oswald was in New Orleans that summer, making a show of himself as a pro-Castro activist – the very sort of ‘Commie’ Banister deplored. Yet information suggests they had a secret working relationship with each other. According to his secretary, Banister even provided Oswald with office space. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Delphine Roberts quoted her boss as saying. ‘He’s with us, he’s associated with the office …’
One of Banister’s associates, former Eastern Airlines pilot David Ferrie, has also been linked to Oswald. They apparently met for the first time in the fifties, when Oswald was a teenage cadet and Ferrie an instructor in the Civil Air Patrol. By the early sixties Ferrie’s life, like Banister’s, had become a constant round of anti-Castro scheming and right-wing politics.
Numerous witnesses would recall having seen Oswald in the company of two men, one of whom was almost certainly Ferrie, less than three months before the assassination. They arrived together in a black Cadillac, acting oddly, during a black voters’ registration drive in Clinton, a town north of New Orleans. Even then, local civil rights activists suspected, they were undercover FBI agents.
One of Banister’s investigators, Jack Martin, blew the whistle on his boss and Ferrie immediately after the assassination. He made, then retracted, an allegation that Ferrie had been involved with Oswald and in planning the murder. Ferrie himself, meanwhile, charged frantically around New Orleans quizzing Oswald’s former landlady and neighbors about a library card. Other information suggests Oswald may have been carrying a library card when arrested, one with Ferrie’s name on it.
Banister, for his part, spent hours after the assassination drinking heavily with investigator Martin. The session ended with Banister accusing Martin of going through his confidential files, then beating him over the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. The fracas started, according to Martin, when he asked Banister: ‘What are you going to do, kill me like you all did Kennedy?’
This would seem to be more than enough to have become a serious focus of the investigation, yet the FBI let the matter drop after perfunctory inquiries. Guy Banister was interviewed, but was asked no questions at all about Oswald. Neither his name, nor Ferrie’s, appears in the Warren Report. Banister was found dead of an apparent heart attack, with a gun at his side, before the Commission finished its work. Ferrie was to die in 1967, a possible suicide, after New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had reopened the case and was about to call him before a grand jury.
A clue to the Banister connection was handed to the FBI on a platter, but it was not passed on to the Warren Commission. Some of Oswald’s pro-Castro leaflets had been stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, the building that housed Banister’s detective agency. Yet the FBI memorandum on the leaflets, which might have alerted the Warren Commission attorneys to this coincidence, concealed it. It listed Banister’s address as 531 Lafayette Street, a reference to the alternative entrance to the 544 Camp building, which stood on a corner. The Commission’s attorneys, poring over reports in Washington, had no way of knowing that fact. The FBI knew it very well, but kept the Commission in the dark.
Had Edgar provided the full picture on Banister and on David Ferrie, the Commission would have surely paid more attention to something very serious, the possibility that the Mafia had a hand in the assassination. Years later, Congress’ Assassinations Committee expressed suspicion that two specific Mafia bosses might have been involved – Santos Trafficante of Florida and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans.
Marcello, like Trafficante and Sam Giancana, had been targeted by the Justice Department on Robert Kennedy’s orders. He also held a peculiarly personal grudge. Within weeks of taking office in 1961, the President’s brother had arranged for his abrupt deportation to Guatemala as an undesirable alien. When the mobster slipped back into the United States, Kennedy began renewed efforts to kick him out for good. David Ferrie had worked for Marcello’s attorney, Wray Gill, since early 1962 – in parallel with his work for Guy Banister. Ferrie and Banister had both helped prepare Marcello’s defense against charges that he had used a phony birth certificate to avoid being deported.
Had the Marcello angle been pursued, much else would have come out. Oswald’s uncle and surrogate father, Dutz Murret, with whom the alleged assassin stayed in 1963, worked in Marcello’s gambling network. Jack Ruby, who had many mob associations, was in touch with Nofio Pecora, a Marcello lieutenant, three weeks before the assassination. Pecora, in turn, was close to Oswald’s uncle. After the assassination, witnesses claimed that one Marcello associate had been seen handing Oswald cash, and that another had discussed the suitability of a foreign-made rifle to ‘get the President.’
The FBI dropped such leads. Marcello’s name appears neither in the Warren Report nor in any of its twenty-six volumes of evidence. Nor do those of Santos Trafficante or Sam Giancana.
The CIA failed to tell the Commission about its use of the Mafia in its plots to kill Castro, which had continued until early 1963. So did Edgar, who had known about them for a long time. Chief Justice Warren’s investigators were thus denied a vital opening, a chance to make sense of the triple tracks confronting them – U.S. Intelligence, the mob and the exiles.
‘Because we did not have those links,’ said Commission attorney Burt Griffin, who later became a judge, ‘there was nothing to tie the underworld in with Cuba and thus nothing to tie them in with Oswald, nothing to tie them in with the assassination of the President.’ The CIA, and Edgar with his New Orleans leads, did have the link. They held the key to the labyrinth and withheld it from the Commission.
Information from numerous sources suggests the principal Mafia leaders were linked to the case. The secretary to Guy Banister, the former FBI agent said to have manipulated Oswald, said he was visited before the killing by Giancana’s henchman Johnny Roselli. Giancana’s half brother has claimed the Chicago Mafia boss plotted the assassination in concert with Marcello, Trafficante and CIA operatives.
Frank Costello, the old Mafia overlord who helped Marcello build his criminal empire, said before he died that Oswald was ‘just the patsy’ in the President’s murder. Frank Ragano, the former attorney of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, said he was sent to discuss the President’s murder with Trafficante and Marcello in early 1963. He gained the impression ‘they already had such a thought in their mind …’
Most compelling, perhaps, is what the new generation of FBI agents learned during surveillance of Trafficante and Marcello as late as 1975. ‘Now only two people are alive,’ FBI microphones overheard Trafficante say, ‘who know who killed Kennedy.’ Trafficante himself died of natural causes in 1987, but Marcello lived on – according to Joseph Hauser, an FBI plant – to admit that Oswald had worked as a runner in his betting operation in 1963.
The most serious information pointing to Trafficante and Marcello raises the possibility that the FBI was gravely negligent before the assassination. According to Jose Aleman, a wealthy Cuban exile, Trafficante made ominous remarks about the President at a business meeting as early as September 1962. The Kennedys, said the mobster, were ‘not honest. They took graft and they did not keep a bargain … Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.’ When Aleman demurred, saying he thought the President would be reelected, Trafficante said quietly, ‘You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.’
In Louisiana that same month, Marcello and two close associates met to discuss an oil project with Ed Becker, an entrepreneur from California. And as the whiskey flowed, the mobster talked angrily about his ordeal at the hands of Robert Kennedy. Finally, uttering a Sicilian oath, he exclaimed th
at the Attorney General was ‘going to be taken care of …’
According to Becker, Marcello referred to President Kennedy as a dog, with his brother Robert being the tail. ‘The dog,’ he said, ‘will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail.’ If the dog’s head were cut off, the biting would end.
The more Marcello ranted on, the more serious he seemed. According to Becker, he ‘clearly stated that he was going to arrange to have President Kennedy murdered …’ As ‘insurance’ for the assassination, he spoke of ‘setting up a nut to take the blame.’
The Marcello threat was first reported in a 1969 book by Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Reid, the Trafficante comments in The Washington Post in 1976. Congress’ Assassinations Committee, however, inadequately probed the claim common to both of them – that the FBI was fully informed at the time.
Aleman, a valued FBI contact, would later insist that he told Bureau agents about Trafficante’s remarks soon after they were made in 1962. After the assassination, he said, two agents rushed to see him, made him go over his story again, then asked him to keep the conversation confidential.
Available FBI files contain no reports showing that Trafficante’s comments, or the Marcello threat, were reported as claimed. Paul Scranton, one of two former agents whom Aleman said he told of the Trafficante comments before the assassination, refused to deny or confirm the claim. ‘I wouldn’t want to say anything to embarrass the Bureau,’ he told The Washington Post in 1976.6
Ed Becker, for his part, said from the start that he, too, quickly informed the FBI. ‘When I got home from Louisiana,’ he said, ‘I found that Bureau agents wanted to see me. They obviously knew I’d been seeing Marcello and asked why. I told them about the oil deal I’d been trying to set up and what Marcello had said about killing Kennedy. But they never came back to me. Although I talked to the congressional inquiry in the seventies, the FBI has never questioned me about it …’7
In 1962, when Ed Becker saw Marcello, he was working part-time for a former FBI agent turned private investigator, Julian Blodgett. Blodgett, who once also served as chief investigator for the Los Angeles County District Attorney, revealed in 1992 that Becker had told him of the mobster’s threat less than two days after it was made. As a law enforcement professional, he responded by calling the FBI immediately.
‘I took it seriously,’ said Blodgett. ‘Becker described the circumstances very carefully, and I considered him reliable, as I still do. I at once notified one of my Bureau contacts, a Supervisor in Los Angeles. He was a very dedicated man, and I am sure he reported it. A subject as vital as that would have been made a matter of record and transmitted to Washington.’
Blodgett was an agent of the old school, steeped in respect for J. Edgar Hoover. He was mystified that FBI files supposedly contain no record of his report, nor of Becker’s. Memos in the file do, however, show that in 1967, when the author Ed Reid was planning to publish Becker’s account, Edgar and senior aides mounted an operation designed to destroy Becker’s credibility. Agent George Bland visited Reid and tried to convince him that Becker was ‘a liar and a cheat.’ Becker’s statement that he reported the Marcello threat to the FBI was removed from the book as a result.
Edgar had assured the Warren Commission that the FBI would keep the Kennedy assassination ‘in an open classification for all time,’ that ‘any report from any source will be thoroughly investigated.’ Yet far from investigating, he did everything possible to suppress Becker’s story when it surfaced in 1967. This was, said the Assassinations Committee, ‘a violation of the Director’s promise.’ Former Agent Blodgett’s statement that the threat was reported more than a year before the assassination, makes the violation looks even worse.
Edgar was required by law to warn the Secret Service of all threats to public officials. As a matter of routine he did indeed pass on the sort of menaces uttered daily by drunks and maniacs across the country. There is no sign, however, that the FBI told the Secret Service of the many violent remarks about the Kennedy brothers picked up on wiretaps of top mobsters.8 Nor is there any evidence that the FBI passed on Marcello and Trafficante’s talk of assassination.
On the eve of the President’s murder, Jack Ruby ate dinner at a Dallas restaurant owned by Joseph Campisi, an intimate of Carlos Marcello and his brothers. Campisi talked with Ruby then, and would later visit him in jail. Another regular visitor to the restaurant was Joseph Civello, head of the Marcellocontrolled Dallas Mafia. Civello had associated with Sergeant Patrick Dean, the Dallas policeman in charge of security when Ruby shot Oswald.
A witness told the FBI Ruby was close to Civello, and Edgar passed that information on to the Warren Commission, in the most bland language possible, failing to mention that Civello was a top Mafia figure controlled by Carlos Marcello. Nor did he point out something else – that Civello was a close friend of Clint Murchison, Jr., the son of one of Edgar’s very best friends.
Irving Davidson, the Washington lobbyist who counted himself a friend of Edgar’s and the Murchisons, had known Marcello since the early fifties. He styled himself the mobster’s ‘door opener and arranger’ and when the Kennedys succeeded in kicking Marcello out of the country for a while, he was said to be the one man in Washington who had the mobster’s phone number abroad. Davidson was to be the liaison between Marcello and Clint Murchison, Jr., at the time of the sting operation that finally sent Marcello to jail in 1983.
Murchison, Sr., like almost all oilmen, had backed Johnson for the White House in 1960, and his fears about Kennedy turned out to be justified. The young President made no secret of his opposition to the oil moguls’ extraordinary tax privileges, and moved quickly to change them. Murchison and his associates, it turns out, were linked to the assassination saga by a series of disconcerting coincidences.
George de Mohrenschildt, an oil geologist who knew Murchison and had worked for one of his companies, was on intimate terms with alleged assassin Oswald. He would be found shot dead in 1977, an apparent suicide, on the day an Assassinations Committee investigator called to arrange an interview.9
Within four days of the assassination, the FBI received a tip-off that Clint Murchison and Tom Webb – the FBI veteran the millionaire had hired at Edgar’s suggestion – were both acquainted with Jack Ruby. While they denied it, Ruby had met one of Murchison’s best friends, Humble Oil millionaire Billy Byars.
Byars was close to Edgar. They used adjacent bungalows at Murchison’s California hotel each summer. The phone log for the Director’s office shows that, aside from calls to Robert Kennedy and the head of the Secret Service, Edgar called only one man on the afternoon the President was shot – Billy Byars.
Bryars’ son Billy Jr., who was a student in the early sixties, saw Edgar at the Del Charro the following summer. ‘I was there for one or two weeks,’ Byars recalled in 1988. ‘They would eat together, my father, Murchison and Hoover, and the others. Hoover seemed to be in a very strange frame of mind. He was having a better relationship with Johnson, evidently, than he had with President Kennedy – by a long shot. His relationship with Bobby Kennedy had apparently almost driven him over the edge. He used to talk about that constantly, and once I had the chance to ask him directly about the assassination.
‘I asked him, “Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it?” And he stopped and he looked at me for quite a long time. Then he said, “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.” That’s all he said, and I could see he wasn’t about to say any more.’
President Johnson, who should have been privy to the best intelligence on the assassination, believed there was a conspiracy. ‘Just a few weeks later,’ recalled Madeleine Brown, the woman who says she was his mistress, ‘I mentioned to him that people in Dallas were saying he himself had something to do with it. He became really violent, really ugly, and said it was American Intelligence and oil that were behind it. Then he left the room and slammed the door. It scared me.’10
Johnson seems to have swung back and forth, certain there had been a conspiracy yet unsure where to pin the blame. His suspects varied from some Vietnamese faction to Fidel Castro to U.S. Intelligence. In 1967 he told his aide Marvin Watson that he felt ‘the CIA had something to do with this plot.’ At the time of his death in 1973, he was still wondering whether the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, on which he was briefed soon after taking office, had somehow boomeranged.
Months after the assassination, in the privacy of his office, Edgar told a visitor that the case was ‘a mess, a lot of loose ends.’ Why, then, did he steer the Warren Commission so insistently toward the lone-assassin theory, when there were clues demanding investigation of elements of U.S. Intelligence, the Mafia – even his own oil millionaire friends? Was he merely doing President Johnson’s bidding, covering up information that would exacerbate the crisis? Or was he, too, under a different kind of pressure?
‘I got a way,’ Carlos Marcello once said during a Louisiana election. ‘No matter who gets in there, you know I’m going to find a fuckin’ way to get to ’em. I don’t care who it is.’ Along with the other factors that may have left Edgar compromised by the Mafia, there is the report of an occasion long ago when he had been arrested for a homosexual offense in New Orleans.11 Just as he may have had no choice in his failure to pursue the Mafia for years before the assassination, Edgar may have had no choice but to drop the leads that pointed to the mob in November 1963.
The most telling postscript to the assassination may be the fate of Robert Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime. Before the murder, the President’s brother had been succeeding in his struggle to force Edgar to confront the mob. Whether Edgar liked it or not, the FBI had become what it had never been before: a force the Mafia had cause to fear.