by Lisa Pease
One of the pantry victims inadvertently exposed Wayne’s cover as a “collector” as being another lie. About “ten seconds before” the shooting, Ira Goldstein, who was about to become one of the shooting victims, talked to a man who had a blue press badge and a green press badge, clipped together with “Senator Kennedy’s tie tack,” meaning the PT-109 tie tack. Goldstein told the LAPD:
What happened is, he says to me, “You want to trade press badges?” So, you know, he had a blue press badge, Kennedy Press, and a green one, and I had yellow ones. I said “Yeah, do you have a yellow—blue one [sic in the transcript], because I would like to have one of those and I would gladly trade.” So he says, “No, I don’t.” He said, “I have a blue one and a green one and I want to keep them, and this is Senator Kennedy’s tie tack I have on here.” He had a gold tie tack taped—clipped to both these badges.”440
The man was about the same height as Ira, 5’8”, and weighed about 140. Ira thought he was between the ages of 18 to 24. This sounds like Michael Wayne, and Ira had identified him as Michael Wayne at the trial at Cooper’s urging. He was the same height and weight and was wearing the PT-109 tie clasp Kennedy had given him, clasped to the green and blue press badges Wayne had obtained earlier.
But this man couldn’t have been Michael Wayne, because according to Goldstein the man was wearing “a blue coat” and had “kind of sandy blond hair” that he was “pretty neat” and not curly. Wayne had curly dark hair that could not be mistaken for “sandy blond.” And he didn’t have a blue coat. He was wearing a dark sweater.
Clearly, the person who was shot had obtained the pin and badges from Wayne, looked somewhat like Wayne, and apparently was using his name as well. It was too close a match in terms of the items and the story behind the tie clasp.
Wayne was wearing only one PT-109 pin at the time of his arrest, clipped to no badges at all, and he reported no badge trades that night—only acquisitions. Did Wayne lie to the man, giving him the wrong tie clasp and saying he had gotten it from Senator Kennedy? Or had he given away the pin he had gotten from Senator Kennedy, putting the lie to his claim to be a collector?
Not one of Wayne’s interviewers ever asked where the other PT-109 pin or press badges went. Wayne described picking them up earlier and clipping them to the PT-109 clasp he got from Kennedy. He described getting a second clasp. But in the pictures of Wayne in handcuffs, he has only one PT-109 clasp, and it was clipped to no other badges. If Wayne were truly a collector, he would not have parted with either PT-109 clasp, especially not the one that Senator Kennedy had worn. It is not unreasonable to conclude that Wayne knew the shooting was to take place, and used one PT-109 pin and the press badges to put another conspirator in place behind Kennedy, thereby shedding his fake credentials in the anticipation of being caught.
The man Goldstein was talking to is important for a second reason. After Goldstein realized he had himself been hit, he saw this same man “laying on the ground, blood all over his head.” When asked how the man came to have blood on his head, Goldstein replied, “He was shot.”441 Was this an additional shooting victim? Only three known victims were shot in the head, Kennedy, Schrade and Evans, and this man was none of them. It wasn’t a woman, so that eliminated Evans. It wasn’t Robert Kennedy, so that left only Schrade. I confirmed with Schrade that he was not wearing these items,442 and Schrade had dark hair and was significantly taller. So who was the blond guy on the ground, bleeding from the head?
During the Grand Jury hearing, Goldstein made clear the person was definitely not Irwin Stroll. Goldstein told the Grand Jury the man he had been talking to was the young guy who had just been in there. The only young guy who had preceded Goldstein’s testimony was Vince DiPierro. At first blush, that made sense. Vince had fallen to the floor and had blood on his glasses. But Vince had not been shot or injured in any way, and the description of the man still didn’t fit, so I asked Vince about this. Vince had worn an orange turtleneck that night that he still possessed, complete with a bullet hole in one of the sleeves that the police showed no interest in examining or testing when he told them about it. He had been studying for finals, and when his father called to say get down here and you can see Kennedy, he had rushed right over, wearing blue corduroy pants and no suit coat at all. He did not have any badges on him and the only Kennedy pin of any kind was one he received from John Kennedy, a campaign pin, not a tie-clasp, that Kennedy had given him when he interviewed him for a school paper years earlier. I asked was it possible he had any press badges on? No, Vince told me. The only thing Vince had that night was a button, a bumper sticker and a poster.
Vince also knew who Ira Goldstein was and was certain he hadn’t talked to him. “That wasn’t me,” Vince stated emphatically as I questioned him about each point in Ira’s story.443
There is another possibility in light of what followed. Could the 5’8” man in the blue suit with sandy hair who Ira indicated was shot near have himself been one of the participants in the conspiracy? Would that explain why no mention of this victim was made anywhere in the media? Had Wayne given this man his badges and clip so this man could gain access to the pantry? Had this man been an assassin who was instantly killed so he could not talk after? Was this perhaps the person Thane Cesar had hit when he fired his gun? Had other conspirators taken him from the room during the pandemonium, when people would have simply assumed he was being taken for medical aid? If we had a complete record of all witness interviews, we might have the answers to these questions. Without that, we can only speculate as to who this was, why Wayne gave him his paraphernalia, and what happened to him.
Wayne’s possible participation in the conspiracy is heightened by an account that put him in a group with Sirhan, a girl in a polka dot dress, and three other men at the lobby fountain about a half-hour before Kennedy gave his final speech. Marvene Jones, a former newspaper reporter who was currently volunteering for Max Rafferty’s Senate campaign, was manning a desk in the Venetian Room for volunteers when a young white “junior executive type” approached her desk after the shooting and told her,
Kennedy’s been shot. I was back there in that area. There was a man with a gun. He had helpers. They did not have guns but they were helping him. I tackled one of them. … There were two to three helpers. [Emphasis added.]444
This man appears to have been George Ross Clayton (incorrectly listed in some places in the files as Gregory Ross Clayton), a Rafferty campaign worker. He was the one who tackled Wayne when he was running through the lobby after the shooting.
Somewhere between about 11 P.M. and 11:30 P.M. on the night of June 4, George Clayton noticed a group of four guys and a girl standing near the fountain in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel outside the Embassy Room. Clayton’s interview summary states:
[The person reporting (P/R)] noticed noticed four men and one girl standing between the Venetian Room and the lobby fountain. P/R states one of these men resembled Sirhan B. Sirhan. … P/R is sure that all these persons were together. At approximately 12:15 A.M., P/R was en route to the Embassy Room via the Regency Room when he heard firecrackers bursting. Immediately thereafter, P/R observed an unknown male running towards him pushing and shoving people. P/R then heard a newsman yell “stop him.” P/R tackled the suspect and a security officer of the hotel helped subdue the suspect. The officer handcuffed the suspect and took him away. P/R recognized this man as one of the four suspects he observed earlier in the lobby.
P/R did not recognize Sirhan’s picture until he observed it in Life magazine a few weeks after the assassination. Officers showed P/R a picture of Michael Wayne, after which P/R related that this was the man he subdued. …
P/R failed to ID Sirhan’s mug.445
The failure to ID Sirhan from his mug shot for Clayton was not uncommon among witnesses who, by other evidence, had clearly seen Sirhan. Many credible witnesses who could not ID Sirhan from his mug shot were able to identify him from other photos. The mug shot showed Sirhan in a wild state
with his hair mussed and his face bruised by the people who tried to subdue him. That’s not how Sirhan had looked prior to the shooting.
When Fernando Faura caught up with him, Clayton described an additional “two men, one with an object in his hand,” that “appeared to ‘flash’” that ran out into the lobby, one of which was Michael Wayne. Wayne was “knocking a newspaper photographer all over the table there and some chairs” Clayton told Faura. Clayton said when he called to Mallard for help, “the other guy switched and ran back to the hallway.” In other words, a man running from the pantry with Wayne was able to escape while Clayton pursued Wayne.
“The guy had something in his hand?” Faura asked Clayton.
“Yes, that flashed,” Clayton reiterated.446
The “newsman” Clayton had heard was likely the Los Angeles Times news photographer Fontanini. Fontanini and Clayton chased Wayne and were joined by Ace Security guard Augustus Mallard. Clayton succeeded in tackling Wayne, who was then handcuffed by Mallard, a moment Fontanini captured for posterity in a photograph.447 Fontanini had been especially suspicious of Wayne, and didn’t believe Wayne’s explanation for running:
Mr. Fontanini states that Mr. Wayne had stated he ran because he was looking for a telephone. Mr. Fontanini added that there were numerous telephones available in the press room where Mr. Wayne ran from.448
When Sergeant Hank Hernandez polygraphed Wayne, he asked him if he were running to find a phone booth, Wayne answered no, and Hernandez deemed his answer honest. But his answer was recorded in writing as “yes” to this question, even though he can clearly be heard answering this question “no” on the audio tape of his session. After completing the polygraph questions, Wayne explained he was looking for a phone, not a phone booth, so he had to answer no to the question as worded. But that part of his answer was not polygraphed, and it’s possible he just lied as soon as the machine was turned off.
The question was also worded differently on the initial list of questions to be posed. The original question was, “Were you being truthful when you said you were running to make a telephone call after Senator Kennedy was shot?” If Wayne had answered that honestly “no” that would have looked bad. And if he answered it as “yes” but the machine showed he was lying, that would also have looked bad. The easy fix was to reword the question to “phone booth,” allowing Wayne to give a truthful “no” response, which he was then allowed to clarify immediately after the test was concluded. Whatever the truth, the LAPD essentially lied about Wayne’s answer by changing it from “no” to “yes,” stripped of the original context.449 It appeared the LAPD was deliberately trying to help Wayne look innocent.
Did Wayne run a gun out of the pantry? Patricia “Patti” Nelson told the FBI she saw a man running out of the Embassy Room she later identified through photos and video as Michael Wayne. Nelson said Wayne was carrying a package about three and a half feet long and about six inches wide. “From the rear of the package,” she told the FBI, “there protruded a piece of wood which appeared to Nelson to be the stock of either a shotgun or a rifle.” “She does not know the difference between these two types of guns,” her interviewer noted. The interviewer also noted that Nelson saw this man running out of the Embassy
Room area before she knew Senator Kennedy had been shot.450 Her friend Franne Einberg told the LAPD that Patty had mentioned she had seen a man with a “poss[ible] rifle” before Kennedy was shot, probably meaning before she learned that Kennedy had been shot. Nelson was with Joseph Thomas Klein and Dennis Weaver, who also identified Michael Wayne as the man they saw.
Klein described seeing something three feet long by three inches wide that was “larger at one end than the other.” Like Nelson, Klein did not know anyone was shot. He was in the Palm Room, next to the Venetian room at the Eastern end of the lobby. Klein saw a man with long object, about three feet long and two to three inches wide, “wrapped in a blu material poss cloth or paper. [sic]”451 According to his FBI interview, he did not see a gun in it, and he had a clear view, but he surprised himself later by remembering making the comment to Nelson and Weaver, “My God, he had a gun, and we let him get by.”
Weaver, who was standing “within five or six feet” of Nelson said he did not hear Nelson say anything about seeing a gun when the man ran by and did not believe there was a gun in whatever the man was holding. Weaver was “completely amazed” by Patti Nelson’s comment re seeing a gun in the rolled-up poster and “dumbfounded” when he heard Klein tell his story.452
Another witness who thought Wayne, or a man with a similar description, was carrying something inside a poster, was William Singer:
I was in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel right next to the ballroom. Senator Kennedy had just walked away from the podium after his victory speech. Several moments before the commotion started a man came running and pushing his way out of the ballroom past where I was standing. I would describe this man as having Hebrew or some type [sic] mid-eastern features, he was approx. 18/22 5-10 thin face, slim, drk swtr or jkt, drk slacks, no tie, firy [sic] neat in appearance, nice teeth, curly Arab or Hebrew type hair. He may have been wearing glasses, I’m not sure. I can ID him. He isn’t one of the men in the pictures you showed me (Saidallah B. Sirhan or Sirhan Sirhan). This man was in a big hurry and was saying, “Pardon me, please” as he pushed his way out of the crowded ballroom. He was carrying a rolled piece of cardboard, maybe a placard. This placard was approx. 1½ yards long and 4-6” in diameter. I think I saw something black inside. Just as he got pst [sic] me I heard screaming and shouting, and I knew something bad had happened. Two men were then shouting to “Stop that man.” These two men were chasing the first man. I don’t know if they caught him.453
At the Grand Jury hearing, recall that Harold Burba, the photographer for the Los Angeles Fire Department, discussed seeing the man he said was Sirhan but later realized was Michael Wayne in the pantry as Kennedy passed through to speak onstage. Burba said the man caught his attention because “He appeared to be looking all around him instead of looking ahead, as all the other members [of Kennedy’s party] were.” Burba noted, “He had an object in his hand as he passed by, and I saw that object in the air” and “wondered about it as he passed by, what was in it.”454 Burba thought he was casing the pantry.
Weaver, Klein and Nelson were taken to the local ABC affiliate station to view footage taken in the pantry before Kennedy was shot. In the footage, Klein and Nelson were certain the man they saw running with the package was Michael Wayne. Weaver could make only a tentative identification.455 In the pantry, when Kennedy walked through the first time, Wayne had been photographed by Bill Epperidge at the moment when Kennedy stopped to sign Wayne’s poster. In the Epperidge photo, the poster Wayne carries is pristine at the end, tightly rolled, about an inch and a half wide at the end. There would have been no way to hide a gun in that poster. The (apparently) same poster appears in the photo that Fontanini took, but the edges are crumpled and the roll has loosened to create a hole three or four inches in diameter. It also looks ripped—as if something had been pulled from it in a hurry. There would have been plenty of room inside that poster to hide a gun.
Klein and Nelson were only shown the footage during the period in which the Epperidge picture was captured. But if Wayne had a gun at any point, that was not when he had it. The video of Wayne without a gun in his poster at that moment was apparently enough to convince them Wayne never had a gun in his poster at a later point.
Augustus Mallard, who worked for the same security firm Thane Cesar worked for, said that Wayne did not have a gun in the poster when he captured him. I believe that is true, as Clayton never mentioned a gun on Wayne when he tackled him. I believe Wayne’s running was designed to pull focus to allow others with guns to get away.
As you will see, three suspects ran through the lobby before people in the lobby realized a shooting had occurred. One of these suspects split off from Wayne with something that “flashed” in his hand and ran
south down a corridor and out of the hotel toward 8th Street. Another man, a tall blond man, hurdled a couch in the lobby and pushed people over. Maybe Nelson saw the gun stock sticking out of a poster in someone else’s hand and confused it with Wayne? Remember how quickly Virginia Guy came to confuse the man who ran at her and chipped her tooth with Sirhan? Witnesses who saw two people sometimes appeared to have conflated two people into a single person.
As the two other men fled from the hotel, the captured Wayne, who had “a look of madness in his eyes as if he had rabies,” according to Clayton, kept saying, “‘Let me go. Gotta get out of here. Let me go.’”456 Another witness, Mrs. Abo, the wife of one of the doctors who came to Kennedy’s aid in the pantry after the shooting, was running for ice for Kennedy through the lobby past the fountain when she almost bumped into two men bringing someone in handcuffs through the lobby. This had to have been Wayne, as no other person was handcuffed but Sirhan, and he wasn’t taken out through the lobby. Mrs. Abo stated that the man who was handcuffed was sporting an “insane grin.”457
Clayton thought Wayne had been wearing a coat with four flag pins on it. If he was, he had shed it before Fontanini took his picture and taken it off before getting Kennedy’s signature on a poster, as neither shows Wayne in a coat. If Wayne had a coat earlier in the night, the first time Clayton saw him, with the group that included Sirhan and the girl at the fountain, then it gives more credence to the notion that Wayne was the man Daniel Hall had talked to, who hinted at something “big” to happen that night, and who appeared to be carrying a gun in a zippered bag.
Faura asked Clayton why he noticed this particular group of people by the fountain in the lobby. Clayton said he feared they were there to cause trouble for the Rafferty party, which was just off the lobby in the Venetian Room, so he kept an eye on them. One of the young men kept pointing toward the Embassy Room, and Clayton knew there was a western entrance to the Venetian Room near the Embassy Room entrance. He feared the group might try to enter the Venetian Room through that western entrance.