A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  At 12:34, a fourth suspect was reported “being held in the building,” meaning the Ambassador Hotel. This was Michael Wayne. Why wasn’t he immediately turned over to the police? Instead, he was taken to the office of William Gardner, the man who had hired Ace Guard Services to help with hotel security. This announcement prompted the officer with call sign 114 to broadcast, “One suspect in custody, one suspect inside the building. Is there a supervisor up at the station?”

  At 12:36 A.M. a description of the fifth suspect, who would turn out to be Sirhan, was broadcast. When Sirhan’s description (“male Latin, 25-26, 5-5, bushy hair, dark eyes, light build, wearing a blue jacket and blue levis and blue tennis shoes”) was put out again at 1:13 A.M., Sharaga was asked if he had anything to add. That’s when Sharaga said that wasn’t the description that he put out.

  At 12:50, the Intelligence Division log stated that Lt. Sillings reported on television that a 6’4” suspect was in custody. Who was he referring to? Sirhan was a full foot shorter than that. Confusion continued until Inspector Powers got on the radio at 1:43 A.M. to preemptively say Rafer Johnson said there was only one suspect and he didn’t want people speculating about a conspiracy.421

  About 30 minutes later, “114” reported that he “just had a call Sgt. Davis Sherr’s office he wants a unit to meet him at 3424 Wilshire in the IBM building. He has a susp he wants interviewed.”422 At 2:13 A.M., an officer transmitted a request to Sharaga at the command post to “send unit to meet Sheriffs at the IBM building to interview subjects.”423 Sharaga agreed to send unit over, and then his communications went down for about 25 critical minutes. It was nearly an hour before word of this now singular sixth suspect reappeared. Sharaga asked what the Sheriff’s would do with the suspect, who turned out to be Terry Lee Fraser. Rampart said to send the suspect there.

  Unlike most of the people seen with Sirhan, Fraser was 5’6”, blond-haired and blue-eyed. Fraser had gone with his friends Gary Harmond and Gary Ford to the Ambassador Hotel. Harmond and Fraser said as they parked at the IBM building just west of the hotel around 12:30 A.M., they heard on the car radio that Kennedy had been shot. They walked to the hotel and saw an ambulance pulling away. They went to the Rafferty party to have drinks, but ended up on separate sides of the room. Harmond said he tried to signal Fraser that he wanted to go to the restroom, but Fraser evidently read that as wanting to leave altogether. They had prearranged to meet back at the car, so Fraser went back to the car and waited. When his friends didn’t show, Fraser returned to the hotel, but wasn’t allowed back in by the cops and was asked to leave. He tried to get to another part of the hotel by sneaking through the bushes but was caught, detained briefly at the IBM building, and then transferred to Rampart and interviewed and ultimately released.

  While Fraser was likely innocent, the tape of his interview on July 7, 1968, did him no favors. When Thompson said he was arrested around 3 A.M. Fraser corrected him and says “3 A.M.? It was closer to 12:30 A.M.” “Right after the shooting?” Thompson asked. “No, wait a minute, when was the shooting?” Fraser asked. When told it was about 12:15 A.M., Fraser moved the time of his apprehension to 1 A.M. Very likely he was just confused. But someone could read his responses as evasive. Without additional evidence, however, I do not believe Fraser was involved. I can’t say the same for the other person known to have been apprehended at the hotel that night.

  Michael Wayne

  MICHAEL WAYNE WAS ONE OF THE MOST SUSPICIOUS CHARACTERS at the hotel that night. Several people noticed him in a negative context. As we have already seen, Wayne was apprehended and handcuffed after being chased from the pantry by people who felt he was involved. One of the Grand Jury witnesses who mistakenly thought he was Sirhan said Wayne appeared to be casing the kitchen as he walked through it. Was his claim that he was just a collector of political memorabilia enough to explain his actions that night? Was he really just running to find a phone when captured?

  Michael Wayne was a 21-year-old male Caucasian, 5’8½” tall, weighing a slim 135 pounds. He was wearing a dark sweater over a white shirt and gray pants. He looked a little like Sirhan due to his dark curly hair, but he had noticeably long sideburns (Sirhan didn’t have sideburns). Wayne had been born in Manchester, England, and had immigrated to the U.S. in 1951, where he became a citizen in 1960. “He professes to be of Jewish background, but not from the mid-east,” Sergeant Varney wrote in his report summary of Wayne.424 Several witnesses mistook Wayne for Sirhan Sirhan.

  Wayne’s own account of his actions that night is as follows. Witnesses, however, would flesh out his story in disturbing ways. The LAPD and FBI interviewed Wayne several times and elicited the following story from Wayne.

  Wayne worked in the accounts receivable section of the Pickwick Bookstore in Hollywood. He claimed to be an admirer of Robert Kennedy and a collector of political paraphernalia for many years. He had an autograph from President Dwight D. Eisenhower and from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, among others.

  On May 20, 1968, Wayne went to the Ambassador Hotel, where Senator Kennedy was holding an event. He obtained a PT-109 Kennedy tie clasp from a Kennedy aide, and later “by chance” met the Senator himself on a stairway in the lobby. He introduced himself and shook Kennedy’s hand and asked Kennedy if he could exchange the tie clasp he had just been given for the one Kennedy was wearing. They exchanged tie clasps, and Wayne left. Remember this tie clasp. It becomes an important part of the story that follows.

  On June 4, Wayne hitchhiked after work at the Pickwick Bookstore to the headquarters of the Republican candidate for California Senator, Max Rafferty, who would lose that night to the Democrat Alan Cranston. There, Wayne picked up various political pins. He then hitchhiked to the headquarters of Thomas Kuchel, the Republican minority whip in the Senate, where he picked up more pins. Given that Wayne was hitchhiking, one wonders where he stored all the pins he was collecting. Wayne had no coat or bag on him at the time he was photographed in handcuffs. One very credible witness thought Wayne did have a coat on when he first saw him.

  Someone else from this case stopped at Kuchel’s headquarters before heading to the Ambassador Hotel: Sirhan Sirhan.

  During his trial, Sirhan described how he came to be at the Ambassador Hotel that night. After he left the shooting range, he stopped at Bob’s Big Boy in Pasadena, where he ran into a friend from Pasadena City College whose name was misspelled “Mystery” in the trial transcript but was actually Mistri. The two went to the Pasadena City College Student Center, where Sirhan challenged Mistri to a game of pool but was turned down, because Mistri was looking for work and needed to go home and read through the classified ads. Mistri bought a paper but stopped Sirhan from buying one of his own, giving him all but the want ads Mistri needed. In the paper, Sirhan saw—or thought he saw—an ad for a pro-Israel march in the Miracle Mile section of Wilshire, the same place the Rafferty and Robert Kennedy headquarters were located. Reading about the march triggered deep feelings of resentment, as the Sirhan family’s life had been shattered by the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1967. “I had the same emotional feeling, the fire started burning inside of me, sir,” when he saw that ad.

  Sirhan said that after Mistri turned him down for pool but before he saw the ad, “I was having in my mind to go to the Rosicrucian meeting. I had that in mind, but that was at 8 o’clock or a later time and between this time and the meeting time, I had nothing to do,” so he decided to go into Los Angeles and check out the parade.

  But Sirhan had misread the ad. The march was on June 5, not June 4. He got so incensed he missed his exit and got lost and had to ask for directions.

  Along Wilshire, Sirhan saw “a store with [a] very highly illuminated interior” and thought maybe it had to do with the parade. But it was the headquarters for the Republican Tom Kuchel, who had originally been nominated to the Senate to fill Nixon’s place. In 1968, Kuchel was running, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for re-election. Sirhan decided to go in and see what was going on there. As he
always did, he left his wallet in his glove box. “I never carried my wallet with me,” he explain to Cooper during his trial. None of the Sirhan brothers carried wallets on them.

  At Kuchel’s headquarters, he found the action “pretty dull, to tell you the truth. At least I thought it was, sir.” (“Forgive me, any of the Kuchel supporters here,” the ever polite Sirhan said to the jury after this remark.)

  There, he heard a couple of boys talking about how there was a “bigger party” down at the Ambassador, so he decided to go check it out. Sirhan walked the five or so blocks west from the Kuchel campaign office to the Ambassador Hotel.

  Did Michael Wayne walk with him?

  Wayne claimed to have walked to the Kennedy headquarters in Miracle Mile. Both the Kuchel and Kennedy headquarters were on Wilshire Boulevard, with the Ambassador Hotel in between. I find it hard to believe that a political junkie like Wayne would have walked past the Ambassador Hotel, with Kuchel, Rafferty and Kennedy there in person, and chosen instead to continue on for the approximate hour walk it would have taken to reach Kennedy’s Miracle Mile headquarters. Given that Wayne had no compunction about hitchhiking, it defies credulity that he would waste an hour walking when he had so many political choices that night. I can’t help but believe someone gave him a ride, at least from the Ambassador Hotel at this point.

  That Wayne did make it to Kennedy’s headquarters was confirmed by the man who drove him from Kennedy’s headquarters to the McCarthy headquarters in Westwood, an Iranian man called “the Khaiber Khan,” whose real surname appeared to be Goodarzian. Khan’s daughter was fingered by a New Yorker the night of the assassination as the girl in the polka dot dress, a story I wrote about in the volume The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Some have mistakenly written that I had “identified” Khan’s daughter as the girl in the polka dot dress, but that was not the case. The point was to show that someone appeared to be framing Khan and his family after the fact. After extensive additional research, I do not consider Khan or his daughter or the numerous volunteers Khan registered to have been any part of the plot. I had speculated at one point that since Khan was under a deportation order, perhaps he had been coerced into some level of involvement, but his deportation was only ordered after the policemen he talked to regarding this case reported him to immigration. The reasons why someone might want to tarnish Khan are amply spelled out in my earlier work. To summarize, Khan had exposed to the U.S. Congress that aid money to Iran was being siphoned into the private accounts of the Pahlavi family and, in some cases, being sent back to people like David Rockefeller and Allen Dulles in multi-hundred-thousand-dollar checks.

  Wayne said there were two others in the car with Khan: Khan’s girlfriend Maryam Koucham, who was in a cast, and one other man, who has never been identified, but whom Wayne “assumed to be a European newspaper reporter.”425

  According to Khan, when Khan came out of headquarters, Wayne was already in the car, having obtained permission from Koucham to tag along. Wayne asked Khan to go back into the Kennedy headquarters to get him a Kennedy pin. Khan turned him down, but Wayne was “most insistent” and appeared to believe that button would get him into the Kennedy party at the Ambassador Hotel.426 Wayne’s pesky persistence around pins, badges and press passes would draw attention all night.

  At McCarthy’s headquarters, Wayne picked up McCarthy’s book and then hitchhiked to the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where he had the book autographed by McCarthy himself. From there, Wayne caught a ride with “two young Caucasian men and a blonde Caucasian girl” to the Ambassador Hotel, arriving between 8 and 10 P.M.” The group drove through the hotel (there was a tunnel under the Embassy Room in the hotel) to the 8th Street parking lot, but they were unable to find parking. Wayne got out of the car before it was parked and said he never saw these people again.

  Inside the hotel, Wayne went first to the press room, the Colonial Room, but was refused entrance by a guard there. He then wandered into the hallway between the end of the pantry and the Colonial Room and entered the Colonial Room from this second entrance.

  Why was the press room the first place Wayne went? Why didn’t he go to the candidate rooms in search of additional memorabilia before whatever was left was all gone? The press room didn’t have any campaign buttons. But what the press had would have been invaluable to anyone who was part of the assassination conspiracy: press badges. Those gave people free access to campaign activities anywhere in the hotel. A press badge would have little sentimental value or trade value—but to a conspirator, the badge would be valuable. In the Colonial Room, Wayne obtained a blue and white “Kennedy Election Night Press” badge. Shortly thereafter, Wayne got a woman to give him a green “Kennedy for President” press badge. Wayne then clipped these two badges together with the PT-109 tie clasp from Kennedy that he was wearing.

  Wayne next went to the lobby where he found someone handing out posters and took two. Where did the other one go? Did he roll them up together into one roll? Did he hand one to someone else at some point? In the photo of him in handcuffs, he appears to be carrying only one poster, and while it’s possible both had been rolled together, in a photo of Wayne taken when he was apprehended, there appears to be only one poster, partially unrolled.

  Wayne then walked to a room off to the side of the Rafferty Room and collected more buttons. It’s a wonder his pockets didn’t burst with all that booty. Maybe Wayne had a bag of belongings that he shed somewhere that night. There was a report of a knapsack found in the flowers in the outdoor patio of the Dolphin Court427 and a report of a knapsack found in a flower pot in the lobby.428 It’s likely this was the same bag, because in both cases the police officer received it from a bellboy or bell captain who had gotten it from a maid. The times of the reports and the original location of the sacks vary, but in both cases the bell person gave the bag to an officer who then gave it to Sergeant McArthur of the LAPD. The contents of this bag have never been revealed. We have only the scrawl of Manny Pena on the cover sheet of one of these accounts saying the owner had been found and the bag returned so “no further invest [sic] needed.”

  Near the Rafferty Room, Wayne may or may not have had a conversation with Daniel Hall, who told the FBI about an encounter with a man who appeared to fit Wayne’s description.

  Somewhere between 10 P.M. and 11:30 P.M., while Hall sat in a lounge with a couple of female Republican Committee workers near the Rafferty party’s room, a white male, approximately 5'8", with “brown, medium-length hair” wearing a bulky dark sport coat and slacks, came to their table and asked if he could join them.

  Hall told the FBI “a bizarre conversation” followed:

  Hall advised that this individual, who spoke with extremely strange vocabulary [sic] but not with an accent, indicated in different sentences that he was for Kennedy and against Rafferty, and then immediately after for Rafferty and against Kennedy. Hall stated that he also advised he was a Bel Air resident, a student at San Fernando Valley State College, a student at Santa Monica City College, and later, not a student at all. Hall advised that the individual in question was carrying a plastic zipper type briefcase containing a bulge which he, Hall, positively believes to have been a gun. Hall stated that he believes this bulge to have been a gun in that he formerly carried a similar briefcase in which he had a .22 caliber revolver, which made a very similar bulge, when he was [his profession is redacted in the document, but handwritten over the redaction is “an insurance adviser”]. Hall stated this man indicated that he liked to get information from people and intended to find out something about Hall and the two girls.429

  The man Hall encountered sounds like an intelligence operative, carrying a gun, lying about his background, and attempted to elicit information. But if so, he was a poorly trained one. And if Hall’s real job had been as an insurance advisor, there would have been no reason to redact that. Hall may have carried that gun in connection with some intelligence agency assignment himself, something the FBI wou
ld be loath to reveal as it would give more credence to his belief there was a gun in the bag.

  Oddly enough, another suspect on June 4 would give an equally dishonest, rambling narrative: the woman who spent the day with John Fahey, who told him Kennedy would be taken care of at the winning reception that night. She not only gave him several different names for herself, but also claimed to have lived in a variety of places, changing her story each time Fahey knew anything about each place she mentioned. It was as if Hall’s man and Fahey’s woman had received the same inadequate training.

  A few days later, the FBI reinterviewed Hall, who shared additional information:

  Hall disclosed that as conversation with this individual proceeded it became evident that there was something “strangely wrong” with this man. …

  Hall advised that he questioned the individual as to why he liked to get information from people. The unknown male replied, “I have a briefcase here full of information but I have something here (pointing to his briefcase) that’s going to make big news tonight. Big news, big news.” Hall disclosed that at this time one of the two girls attempted to touch this individual’s briefcase but he yanked it roughly from her reach. Hall stated that he asked this man to buy a round of drinks for the table to which he replied, “No, I don’t have that kind of money, and I don’t like people that have money.”

  Hall described the man’s complexion as “light, possibly pockmarked” and noted he spoke “strangely, however, not with accent, somewhat effeminate” and added that the man’s “shoulders seemed somewhat hunched.”

  Wayne’s face didn’t appear pockmarked in the only two pictures of him I’ve seen, but his voice was pitched a bit higher than the typical male range and he spoke softly. I could imagine how someone might find that “effeminate.” Wayne had no coat on when he was arrested, but the man who tackled Wayne as he was trying to escape, George Clayton, said Wayne was wearing a coat earlier in the night. And if he were carrying a gun in a zippered bag, no doubt he handed it off to someone at some point that night.