From the moment Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with President John F Kennedy’s murder, the director of the FBI set out to prove the gunman was a Marxist ‘nut’ acting entirely alone.
Two days after the killing, on November 24 1963, J Edgar Hoover told a top aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson: ‘The thing I am most concerned about… is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.’
Note that Hoover did not say ‘lone’ assassin, but ‘real’ assassin.
His view was unshakeable. As assistant FBI director Alan Belmont later put it, Hoover believed that ‘Oswald was responsible for the shooting that killed the President… that Oswald was an avowed Marxist… and an active member of the FPCC [the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Cuba lobby group]’ financed by Communist dictator Fidel Castro.
At Hoover’s instruction, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach sent a memo to President Johnson’s assistant saying: ‘Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off.’
And that’s exactly what happened – so beginning the greatest cover-up of all time.
On November 29, President Johnson signed an executive order to create what became known as the Warren Commission, named after its chair, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court.
Johnson – who had his own links to organized crime, including key people in the plot to assassinate Kennedy – set up the commission to manage the investigation.
Since the FBI was the Warren Commission’s investigative arm, it was Hoover who decided what evidence the commission would and would not see. A congressional inquiry would have been much harder to control.
Former CIA director Allen Dulles volunteered to join the commission and was, quite astonishingly, given a leading role. The appointment allowed Dulles to hide the CIA’s entanglement with the mafia including when, together, the mob and the CIA tried to assassinate Castro in 1960. And when – in my opinion – all the evidence suggests the CIA and the mafia jointly murdered President John F Kennedy.
Future president Gerald Ford, who has been described by numerous sources as the FBI’s reliable friend in Congress, was another appointee.
While Dulles would steer the investigation away from clues that led back to the CIA, Ford would keep the FBI in the clear – despite the bureau’s strong links with Lee Harvey Oswald and other key conspirators.
Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs was also made a member of the Warren Commission.
Like President Johnson, Boggs had received generous campaign contributions from sinister mafia don Carlos Marcello. It might seem fair, then, to conclude that neither Johnson nor Boggs had the slightest interest in pursuing trails that led back to him – even though the evidence suggests the New Orleans don was the prime mover in the killing.
Marcello was based in New Orleans but also, tellingly, controlled Dallas. And he was by no means the only mobster who wanted Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby out of the way.
As attorney general, Bobby had enraged mafia bosses across America by openly declaring war on organized crime. No wonder the mob wanted his brother’s presidency brought to an immediate and violent end.
Why would Hoover oppose a proper investigation? One obvious reason is the mountain of evidence he had deliberately ignored in the months before November 1963.
A proper investigation would have revealed that a steady flow of serious mafia threats to kill the president had crossed Hoover’s desk in the months before the killing – most overheard through illegal wiretaps.
Hoover failed to report any of them to the attorney general, to the Secret Service or to the President himself.
It was well-known that the Kennedys would force Hoover into retirement if Jack won a second term. Did Hoover ignore the mafia’s threats because he wanted the mob to succeed?
It’s not a question Hoover wanted raised in public – and the Warren Commission certainly didn’t bring it up.
Hoover was on record denying the American mafia even existed. Now, as luck would have it, Oswald’s involvement meant he could blame Communists instead.
Whether genuine or contrived, Oswald’s Marxist background – he had once defected to Moscow before mysteriously returning to the US – allowed Hoover to boast that America should worry about the Red threat, not the mafia.
On December 3, three days before the Warren Commission held its first executive session, Hoover issued clear guidance about the conclusions he expected it to reach.
Acting on an authoritative leak, news agency United Press International reported : ‘An exhaustive FBI report . . . will indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone and unaided assassin of President Kennedy.’
The Bureau duly concluded – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – that Oswald was a ‘lone nut’.
This theory had already been destroyed by November 24 when mafia thug and nightclub owner Jack Ruby murdered Oswald in a Dallas police station on live TV. Who would need to silence a lone nut?
Hoover then doubled down and painted Ruby as a second ‘lone nut’.
The Warren Commission would not dare deviate from Hoover’s FBI report, but went through the motions of investigating.
This included a trip to visit Ruby in Dallas, who begged to speak with them. Ruby did not feel safe in Dallas, a city in the grip of organized crime, and pleaded to be taken to Washington.
‘I want to tell you the truth,’ Ruby told Warren. ‘I can’t tell it here… I have been used for a purpose’.
That purpose? To stop Oswald from talking about the mafia’s involvement, of course.
Yet Warren showed zero interest in Ruby’s ‘purpose’. He did not – even as a matter of simple curiosity – ask Ruby who had ‘used’ him or to serve what ‘purpose’.
Ruby’s request to be taken to Washington was dismissed.
On September 27, 1964, after ten months of receiving carefully handpicked ‘evidence’ from Hoover, the commission’s 888-page report was made public.
CBS News was immediately flooded with what it termed ‘thousands of letters asking the network to further investigate the suspect claim that Oswald had acted alone’. Most Americans believed there was indeed a conspiracy – and that it had been covered up.
It is striking that the very first ‘conspiracy theorists’ were the people riding in the Dallas motorcade itself: Texas Governor John Connally and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
When the shooting started and a bullet hit Connally, he yelled, ‘Oh no, oh my God, they are going to kill us all.’
When President Kennedy was shot, the First Lady cried: ‘My God, what are they doing? My God, they’ve killed Jack, they’ve killed my husband.’
Although some people may tend to say they and them when confused and traumatized, neither Governor Connally nor Mrs Kennedy ever accepted that Oswald had acted alone.
Even some members of the Warren Commission had doubts. The report, after all, had ignored the vast majority of witnesses who insisted that some shots came from a grassy knoll overlooking Dealey Plaza.
It also took no account of the many witnesses who saw snipers at a number of windows in the Texas School Book Depository – a building looking down on the motorcade – where Oswald worked.
Then there was the ridiculous ‘single-bullet theory’, which defied the laws of physics.
There was an abundance of evidence that more shots were fired than Oswald – using a bolt-action rifle – could possibly have squeezed off. Yet the commission tried to claim that the bullet striking Governor Connally had first traveled through Kennedy, who was seated directly behind.
This magic bullet, fired from a sixth-floor window, supposedly entered Kennedy’s back, turned upward, exited through his throat, then turned downward, entered Governor Connally’s back, bore through his torso, nicked two ribs, exited his chest cavity, hit his wrist bone and settled in his thigh.
The cover-up is all the more blatant given the sheer scale of what Hoover must have known about his own FBI colleagues.
Right-wing elements in both the FBI and the CIA loathed Jack Kennedy for failing to depose Castro. Men from both agencies had trained angry Cuban exiles in the art of warfare.
The Cuban militants were praying that, with their help, the US would invade their former homeland – but they viewed Kennedy as an obstacle.
The mafia, meanwhile, hoped that deposing El Comandante would allow them to reclaim the multi-million-dollar casinos he had confiscated. Mobsters such as Marcello maintained close relations with the Cuban paramilitaries and backed their cause.
It is clear to me that, to a greater or lesser extent, all these groups came together to kill Kennedy. Yet the ease of the assassination suggests it was condoned or even planned, not just in mafia hideouts in New Orleans and Dallas, but in Washington itself.
Consider the astounding security lapses detailed by Jesse Curry, Dallas police chief at the time, who pointed much of the blame at the Secret Service.
In his 1969 book, JFK Assassination File, Curry picked out Winston Lawson, a senior agent who arrived in Dallas on November 12, ten days before the assassination.
Curry claimed that Lawson ‘directed the security arrangements [for the motorcade] in every detail’.
What were those details? To start, ‘Lawson told his men to leave the top off’, meaning that agents were ordered to remove the protective bubbletop from the presidential limousine.
Agents Clint Hill and Jack Ready were told not to stand on the rear riding steps of the car. Hill’s large frame would have obstructed a clean shot from the School Book Depository.
Lawson said that eight motorcycles around the President’s vehicle would be too many; two on either side would be sufficient.
Those motorcycles were positioned level with the rear fender rather than riding alongside the limousine, which might have interfered with a shot from the grassy knoll.
The Press vehicle, loaded with photographers, was supposed to be two cars behind the President but was bumped to the rear of the procession without explanation.
Dallas police were told to stand with their backs to the crowd, making it impossible to spot suspicious persons. The police crowd detail ended one block short of what proved to be the ‘kill zone’ on Elm Street.
As I have laid out elsewhere in my book, the 90-degree turn the motorcade made to reach Elm Street was a last-minute route change – one demanded by the Secret Service. This slowed the presidential limousine to a crawl, making Kennedy an easy target.
Chief Curry wrote: ‘Security was comparatively light along the short stretch of Elm Street where the President was shot… it seems a freak of history that this short stretch of Elm Street would be the assassination site, and that the Texas Book Depository Building was virtually ignored in the security plans.’
Indeed.
In fairness to Winston Lawson, it seems he was following orders from a higher power. He told the Warren Commission that the route through the downtown area of Dallas – regarded as more risky – had been ‘wanted back in Washington’.
The President’s longtime secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, wrote: ‘Our own advance man urged that the motorcade not take the route through the underpass and past the book depository but he was overruled.’ By whom?
It’s an important question. Without these many puzzling security lapses, the perfect hit could never have happened.
The oddities do not end there. When President Kennedy was pronounced dead, Secret Service agents wrested his body from the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr Earl Rose, who had every lawful right to perform the autopsy.
Kenny O’Donnell, who was present with Secret Service agents, described a tense stand-off with foul language and ‘fists doubled [when] Dr Rose… did not get out of our way’.
The stolen corpse was taken to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where many believe an autopsy was performed to hide the true direction of the bullet that ended Kennedy’s life.
The presidential limousine, with brain tissue still on the seats and floor, was also treated strangely. Time magazine reporter Hugh Sidey said: ‘A guard was set up around the Lincoln as Secret Service men got a pail of water and tried to wash the blood from the car.’
The limousine was then driven back to the airport, put on a cargo plane and flown to Washington, where it was quickly and inexplicably repaired and reupholstered.
It is quite apparent to anyone without blinders on that, whatever role played by the mob in President Kennedy’s death, it could not have succeeded without help from an elite government cabal.
The day after the assassination, as Hoover went to gamble at the racetrack, Bobby locked himself inside the Lincoln bedroom of the White House where he was heard sobbing in his sleep and chanting: ‘Why, God, why?’
Should we be so audacious as to answer for the Almighty, we might respond: ‘Why, Bobby, did you pick fights with the CIA, the FBI, Lyndon Johnson and 5,000 sworn mafia killers across the country – with another 5,000 CIA-trained and very angry Cuban militants waiting in the wings?’
At first and in public – no doubt understanding the scale of the forces ranged against him – Bobby Kennedy endorsed the verdict of the Warren Commission, however ludicrous.
But for years to come, whenever anger erupted from inside him, Bobby would blame his brother’s death on ‘those Cuban c***s’ and Carlos Marcello, the ‘guy from New Orleans’.
But never Lee Harvey Oswald, who, at best, was a pawn if not an outright patsy.
Borgata, Clash of Titans, the second part of Louis Ferrante’s History of The American Mafia is published by Pegasus in the US, price $29.95 and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK, price £25.