Carlos Marcello
In New Orleans, a diminutive Sicilian named Carlos Marcello had long had cause to rage against the Kennedys. Known as “the Little Man”—he was only 5’4” tall—Marcello was, with Trafficante, one of the two or three most sinister figures in the history of organized crime. Aaron Kohn, director of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission—a New Orleans citizen’s group formed in response to the rampaging crime in the city—described Marcello to the author as “the most powerful single organized-crime figure in the southern United States … the head of the Mafia, or Costa Nostra, in this area.”
During the 1930s and 1940s, Marcello had fought his way to the summit of the Mafia in his far-flung region. After an early narcotics conviction, he had always managed to place himself at several removes from crimes committed on his behalf. Unlike Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancana, he had not shown up at the 1957 Apalachin “convention,” when many of his kind fell foul of law enforcement. He not only ruled his U.S. territory without serious challenge, but looked abroad for extra pickings. Before the advent of Castro, by one report, he had joined with Trafficante and Meyer Lansky in sharing the booty from Cuba.
Marcello had come to wield extraordinary influence. A list of those who actively sought clemency for him on the only federal offense for which he had in recent times been convicted—assaulting a federal agent—includes a sheriff, a former sheriff, a state legislator, two former state legislators, two former state police commanders, a president of a labor union, a bank president, two bank vice presidents, a former assistant district attorney, a chief probation officer, a former revenue agent, three insurance agents, five realtors, five doctors, a funeral director, and six clergymen. According to the Crime Commission’s Aaron Kohn, Marcello had also corrupted “justices of the peace, mayors, governors … and at least one member of the Congress.”
By the year of the Kennedy assassination, the Crime Commission estimated, the Marcello syndicate was raking in the stupendous sum of $1.114 billion annually. At today’s rates, that would be around $8 billion. By one estimate, the syndicate was statistically the largest industry in the state of Louisiana, with Marcello its “midget Midas.”
He, like Trafficante, was closely involved with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. When the pair got together at the height of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, Marcello reportedly delivered $500,000 in cash for Nixon. Later, Marcello would be linked to an attempt to bribe the key prosecution witness in the Hoffa jury-tampering case.
Within three months of President Kennedy’s inauguration, Marcello, too, fell victim to the Kennedy campaign against organized crime, in a way more dramatic than any other Justice Department target. For Marcello had an intractable problem, in spite of his power.
Though he had spent most of his life in the United States, Marcello had been born “Calogero Minacore”—to Sicilian parents—in Tunisia. Knowing that he faced possible deportation, he had arranged forged documentation that named his birthplace as Guatemala—at the time, a country likely to receive him kindly, and closer to his criminal empire than exile in North Africa or Europe. Nobody, however, really expected it would come to deportation.
With Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department, however, Marcello’s clout counted for much less. On April 4, 1961, Marcello had been summarily arrested as he arrived to make a routine appearance at the New Orleans Immigration Department.4 He was handcuffed, rushed to the airport, and flown to Guatemala—the solitary passenger aboard a special government jet. Later, he got back into the United States again, spirited in illegally either by boat or private plane and—with access once more to his army of lawyers and purchased favor—contrived to stay. From then on, however, Marcello remained locked in an endless legal wrangle with U.S. Immigration and with Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. Worst of all, he had been very publicly humiliated. To one of the world’s top Mafia bosses, imbued with Sicilian pride, the experience had been intolerable. According to one compelling report, Marcello vowed revenge.
In autumn 1962, according to a former associate, the Mafia chief and three others convened on the mobster’s three-thousand-acre estate outside New Orleans. For all his wealth, Marcello preferred on this occasion to talk in a ramshackle building that did occasional service as a hunting lodge. One of the men present was Edward Becker, whose background involved work in the casino business and undercover investigative work. Another was an oil geologist called Carl Roppolo, who hoped to bring the mobster in on a business deal. The third man there may have been a Marcello aide called Liverde. Becker is the source of the account that follows.
As the whiskey flowed, Becker said, the talk turned to Marcello’s trials and tribulations under the Kennedy onslaught. As he talked of Robert Kennedy and the deportation episode, Marcello became enraged. Ranting on in his Sicilian-accented Southern drawl, he exclaimed that Robert Kennedy was “going to be taken care of.”
Marcello referred to President Kennedy as a dog, Becker said, and his brother Robert was 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 meaning was clear. Were John F. Kennedy to be killed, his brother would cease to be attorney general and harassment of the Mafia would cease.
What he heard, Becker would tell the authorities repeatedly over the years, left him in no doubt. Marcello had “clearly stated that he was going to arrange to have President Kennedy murdered in some way.” The impression Becker got was that this was something Marcello had been considering for some time.
On its own, the Marcello story might seem far-fetched. Taken together with the remarks attributed to his allies Trafficante and Hoffa, it is chilling. Like Alemán’s account of the Trafficante threat, it, too, was reported to the FBI. Becker told his story to a former FBI agent he knew, Julian Blodgett, and Blodgett passed on the information to an FBI supervisor.
Four years after the Kennedy assassination, when Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ed Reid was researching a book on the Mafia, he, too, heard Becker’s story—and the claim that he had seen to it that the information reached the FBI. When author Reid raised the matter with an FBI contact, the response was outrageous. At the personal direction of Director Hoover, the Bureau’s only reaction was to cast aspersions not only on Becker’s credibility, but on Reid’s professional standards also.5 The matter was dropped.
Witness Ed Becker’s background was not lily white, but those who hold meetings with Mafia bosses tend not to be saints. On the credit side, it turns out that he was indeed in Louisiana at the relevant time and was apparently in business with his alleged companion, Roppolo.6 Roppolo’s family appear to have been close to Marcello, which made the alleged meeting with the Mafia leader plausible. Becker said, “Among people that came from the Old Country—Sicilians—and people that practiced the Machiavellian way of politics, it’s quite common to talk about assassination, even of heads of state. I don’t think it was beyond Marcello’s grasp [to have the President killed]. He had the power… . He doesn’t go around making idle statements. If he makes a statement, it’s got to have some strength in it… . I’m saying he certainly was capable, and he certainly wanted it to happen.”7
In 1979, the House Assassinations Committee took the account of Marcello’s threat seriously. Noting the FBI’s neglect in pursuing the matter, Chief Counsel Blakey declared that J. Edgar Hoover had violated his pledge to the Warren Commission that the Kennedy assassination case would remain open forever.
In considering Jimmy Hoffa’s alleged menaces, the Committee noted that—not being a Mafia boss—he may not have had an apparatus capable of carrying out and covering up a crime of such enormity. Weighing the evidence of Marcello’s reported threat, along with the similar reports about Hoffa and Trafficante, the Committee expressed puzzlement. Knowing Marcello’s reputation for prudence and Trafficante’s expertise in avoiding prosecution, it seemed odd that the Mafia bosses would have taken
the risk of talking unguardedly well before the assassination.
The Committee found, however, that Trafficante and Marcello had “the motive, means, and opportunity to have President John F. Kennedy assassinated.” As of 1979, Chief Counsel Blakey’s personal opinion was that “the Mob did it. It is a historical truth.”
As for the argument that Trafficante and Marcello put themselves at risk, the Committee noted that “any underworld attempts to assassinate the President would have indicated the use of some kind of cover, a shielding or disguise… . An assassination of the President by organized crime could not be allowed to appear what it was.”
A further chilling element to Becker’s account of the Marcello threat echoes exactly that speculation. In his very first account of the threat, he included a disturbing further detail. During the meeting on Marcello’s estate, he said, the Mafia leader spoke of taking out “insurance” for the President’s assassination. This he would achieve by “setting up a nut to take the blame.” That, Becker has said, is “the way they do it all the time in Sicily.”
The fiefdom of Carlos Marcello stretched from New Orleans and the cities of the Southeast as far inland as Dallas, in the heart of Texas. It was just months after Marcello’s outburst that Lee Oswald, the man soon to earn infamy as the “lone nut” killer of President Kennedy, would arrive in New Orleans.
Chapter 15
Six Options for History
“My view is that there was, in fact, a relationship between the Cuban connection and the assassination … that more than one person was involved.”
—Senator Richard Schweiker, following Senate Intelligence Committee probe, 1976
April 24, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy was seven months away. The Texan vice president, Lyndon Johnson, had just been in Dallas predicting that the President would visit the state sometime soon. Now, on the evening of the twenty-fourth, amid the clatter of the Greyhound terminal in downtown Dallas, Lee Oswald boarded an overnight bus for New Orleans. He was returning to the city of his birth, and according to the earliest official findings, he would at once call relatives and go to stay temporarily at their home.
The details of Oswald’s stay in New Orleans are important. The question around his movements at the start, for example, is underscored by the revelation that even the relatives with whom he stayed are of interest. Oswald’s uncle, the Assassinations Committee established, had “worked for years in an underworld gambling syndicate affiliated with the Carlos Marcello crime family.” It is a fact that will receive scrutiny later in this narrative. As the investigator picks his way through a minefield of clues, he must decide time and again whether he is dealing with coincidence or conspiracy.
The common denominator of Oswald’s apparent activities and connections in the months before the assassination is Cuba. Oswald’s is a shadowy image, now in focus in predictable pro-Castro colors, now flickering into sight in the improbable company of anti-Castro exiles and their allies in the ranks of both the Mafia and the world of intelligence. This multiple image of the alleged assassin leads us from New Orleans to the eve of President Kennedy’s murder, leaving a trail of seeming contradictions.
There are six main lines of assassination theory.
1. Oswald did it on his own.
That was the Warren Commission version. For all the problems in the story, Oswald was a lone gunman with no clearly definable motive. He killed the President, the Commission suggested, because he hated American society, was a pro-Castro leftist, and sought a place for himself in history.
2. The Soviets did it.
This notion, based on virtually no evidence—and posited by only the odd eccentric—holds that Oswald was a cog in a plot conceived in Moscow. Though Oswald had surely been of interest to Soviet intelligence at the time of his 1959 defection, following his service in the Marine Corps, nothing at all suggests that the Soviets desired President Kennedy’s death. Had they done so, the likely consequences, if detected, would have been deterrent enough. Neither the Warren Commission nor the Assassinations Committee thought Moscow had any part in the assassination.1
3. Castro’s Cuba did it.
The theory that Communist Cuba was behind the tragedy has received serious attention over the years and still has adherents. The central reasoning behind the notion is that the assassination was a preemptive strike. Fidel Castro, or an element of Cuban intelligence, learned of CIA efforts to kill Castro and decided to strike first.
Kennedy’s successor, President Johnson, for a time shared this suspicion, having learned of the CIA plots and in light of stories linking Oswald to Castro’s agents. Johnson swung back and forth, however, between suspecting Castro, or some part of U.S. intelligence, or even a South Vietnamese faction.
There is nothing in the Warren Report about the U.S. plots to kill Castro.2 The notion that Castro might have been responsible for the President’s death was nevertheless taken seriously—so seriously that Chief Justice Warren dispatched counsel William Coleman on a secret mission. Coleman, who has spoken of the trip privately, was closemouthed when the author asked him about the assignment in 1994. “I can’t talk,” he said. “It was top secret.” Asked to confirm or deny that he met Castro, he said: “No comment.”
What Coleman did say is that the mission helped convince him that Castro had nothing to do with the President’s death. The Warren Commission Report, and that of the House Assassinations Committee, took the same view.
One experienced investigative journalist, meanwhile, has argued that Castro “had little to lose, and everything to gain, by pushing Oswald’s buttons … by merely suggesting through underlings that Cuba’s leader would appreciate his efforts.” Another author, himself a former analyst on the CIA’s Cuba desk, suggested in a 2012 book that—though he may have played no active role—Castro may have had advance knowledge of an intention by Oswald to kill the President, and simply let it happen.3
It seems to this author that for Castro to have risked provoking a devastating American revenge attack would have been suicidal folly. A greater insanity would have been to use a known pro-Castro activist like Oswald, whose involvement would point to Havana. Nevertheless, this book will report the allegations that Castro had a hand in killing the President.4
4. Anti-Castro elements did it, setting Oswald up.
This theory holds that Oswald was the confused leftist crank he appeared to be all along. He arrived in New Orleans and paraded his pro-Castro ideas, attracting the malign attention of anti-Castro militants linked to the Mafia—and to the CIA—in the struggle to overturn the Castro revolution. For such people, joined in their rage against the Kennedys—so goes the theory—the leftist Oswald was a perfect patsy. Wittingly or unwittingly, perhaps believing that he had found friends and allies for the first time in his life, Oswald was drawn into a plot to kill the President. In any version of this scenario, Oswald was set up to take solitary blame.
5. The Mafia did it.
The House Assassinations Committee Report said Mafia members may have been involved, and Chief Counsel Robert Blakey went further in a book published two years later. The evidence, he wrote, “established that organized crime was behind the plot to kill John F. Kennedy.” While conceding that others may have worked alongside the mobsters, he did not waver in that view in the years that followed.5
In 2008, in a study written with access to information not earlier available, a historian and professor at the Naval War College, Dr. David Kaiser, agreed with Blakey. There was a conspiracy, he wrote, and the Mafia was involved.6
As will be shown in this narrative, one of the suspect Mafia bosses—Carlos Marcello of New Orleans—is alleged to have acknowledged his part in the assassination in old age.
6. An element of U.S. Intelligence was somehow involved.
This derives from the suspicion that Oswald became some sort of low-level tool of American intelligence at some poin
t. Unable to credit the overt account of Oswald’s improbable career as a Marxist marine, suspicious of the CIA’s supposed lack of reaction to his Soviet odyssey, some have seen Oswald’s leftist stance as merely a meticulously cultivated front. An alternative speculation is that—perhaps as an alternative to being prosecuted on his return to the United States—Oswald was pressured into allowing himself to be manipulated by American intelligence. Other variations of the speculation posit that he may not have known he was being manipulated. Or simply that, even if not complicit in the assassination, elements of U.S. intelligence were somehow compromised and—after the assassination—covered up.
These suspicions are not the unique preserve of paranoid minds. Representative Don Edwards, a former FBI agent, concluded in 1976—based on his work as chairman of the Constitutional Rights Subcommittee—that the FBI and the CIA were “somewhere behind this cover-up.” Also in 1976, after more than a year of research, two U.S. senators came to troubling conclusions about Lee Oswald.
Democrat Gary Hart and Republican Richard Schweiker were assigned by the Senate Intelligence Committee to study CIA and FBI responses to the assassination. Following his privileged access to some classified files, and after the frustration of not being allowed to see others, Senator Hart expressed himself appalled. He commented bleakly, “I don’t think you can see the things I have seen and sit on it … knowing what I know.”
Hart rated the FBI and CIA investigation of Oswald’s Cuba-related activity “C-minus.” Then, referring directly to Oswald’s time in New Orleans, the Senator raised questions more disturbing than mere inefficiency. He called for further investigation into “who Oswald really was—who did he know? What affiliation did he have in the Cuba network? Was his public identification with the Left a cover for a connection with the anti-Castro Right?” Finally, Hart declared his considered opinion that Lee Oswald was “sophisticated” enough to have acted as a “double agent.”