Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  When the show was broadcast in England in 1988, Sarti was dead (having been killed in a shootout with police in Mexico City in 1972), and Bocognani was somewhere in South America, but Pironti, still in France, told the French newspaper Le Provencal on October 26, 1988, “This is the most terrible moment of my life. It is wholly inexplicable. I agree that when I was younger I did things I should not have done. But I have paid for that. I was never a killer for the Mafia or anybody.”11 He told the London Times, “The only thing I know about Dallas is the soap opera I have watched on TV.”12

  Talking about Sarti’s losing one of his eyes, I’m aware of the expression that in a world of blind men, a one-eyed man is a king. But unfortunately for Nigel Turner and his Sherlock Holmes, Steve Rivele, we are not blind (though even a blind man could see through their farce) and we see very clearly that their film is a prodigious fiction. And across the water, it is treated as that. The fury created by the show was such that it was shelved in England. But when Central Independent Television ran into financial difficulty in the early 1990s, it had no hesitancy about selling the show to America, where American audiences, without objection from American authorities or the television industry, have been eating it up, with gusto, ever since. The London Sunday Times, aghast at the American sale, said that “Central Television sold the documentary, which the company must have known was based on false evidence, to American television.”13

  By the way, the absurd conspiracy theorists who have come to believe that the three Corsicans from Marseille, not Oswald, killed Kennedy, and that they did it for “the Mafia,” should get together with the conspiracy theorists who believe Oswald killed Kennedy for the Mafia and was later silenced by Ruby for the Mafia, and ask themselves this question: if the mob felt the need to have Ruby silence Oswald, why wouldn’t it feel the same need (in fact, three times as urgent, since there is not just one killer but three who could talk) to silence their three hit men from Marseille? Yet all three of them were apparently permitted by their mob employers to go on their merry way after they killed Kennedy for them. Just a thought.

  One prominent conspiracy theorist who thinks this completely fictional “documentary” is valid is Gaeton Fonzi, a former Philadelphia writer who worked as an investigator on the Church Committee and for the HSCA. Fonzi actually said that the conspiracy theory in the Kennedy assassination that has impressed him the most “is the French Connection, especially the evidence developed by researcher Steve Rivele.”

  Interviewer: “He was on The Men Who Killed Kennedy?”

  Fonzi: “Yes, the French Connection theory always intrigued me as the most likely possibility…[It’s] the one that makes the most sense to me.”14

  And to think that Fonzi was at one time an investigator on the federal payroll, although I must say that some of his reports for the HSCA seemed professional. Fonzi also said he “always assumed” that Robert Kennedy was murdered because if he became president he intended to reopen the investigation of his brother’s murder, and the conspirators who killed his brother couldn’t allow that to happen.15

  At the end of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, writer Rivele tells the audience that he turned over all of his investigation to the FBI so the bureau could go after the true killers of Kennedy, but, he laments, “Nothing is being done about it.” Again, I can’t imagine why. Could it be that, as another writer, Gertrude Stein, once said in a different context about Oakland, California, “There’s no there, there”?

  Rivele did leave the audience with this bit of insight and wisdom: he is “convinced that Oswald had nothing to do with the assassination and he was carefully chosen and set up to take the blame.” For all its silliness, the American public, as indicated, can’t get enough of the British film. One would think that those who watch the History Channel would be above average in intelligence and erudition. And they probably are. Yet the channel reports that the most frequently asked question it gets is, “When will The Men Who Killed Kennedy repeat?”16

  Charles Harrelson, the father of Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson, was at one time believed to be the youngest of the “three tramps” arrested in Dealey Plaza.17 For years, many conspiracy theorists believed the three tramps to be the president’s killers (see later text). Harrelson, whose late brother was an FBI agent, is not a nut or a publicity seeker but someone with a long criminal record and reputed mob connections. He was convicted of murdering U.S. district court judge John H. Wood Jr. for a drug kingpin for $250,000 outside the judge’s home in San Antonio on May 29, 1979. At the time of his arrest for the murder, Harrelson, high on cocaine, offered the authorities a deal. He was part of a team of assassins who murdered Kennedy, he said, and would be willing to implicate the other members of the conspiracy in return for his freedom. The feds rejected the deal. Harrelson has since admitted making the story up. “On November 22, 1963,” Harrelson said, “I was with a friend at twelve thirty in the afternoon having lunch in a restaurant in Houston, Texas. I did not kill JFK…I was not in my right mind when I confessed.”18 Harrelson is presently serving a life sentence for Judge Wood’s murder at a federal penitentiary in Texarkana, Texas.

  Even verifiable nuts who have been committed are too much to resist for conspiracy theorists. Unbelievably, author Henry Hurt devoted forty-five pages in his book Reasonable Doubt to the claim of one Robert Easterling (who Hurt admits is a “raging alcoholic, diagnosed psychotic and schizophrenic” who has been admitted to mental institutions) that he was involved with David Ferrie (see conspiracy section), Oswald (who was to be the patsy), and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in a New Orleans–hatched plot to kill Kennedy financed by a wealthy Dallas oilman. Kennedy was to be killed because he betrayed the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. Easterling, who spun his tale to Hurt in September of 1981, claims that his role in the plot was to meet Oswald at a bus station in Dallas at 10:30 on the morning of the assassination and drive Oswald to Mexico City. Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano was to be planted at the Book Depository Building murder scene as a cover for the real murder weapon, a 7-millimeter Czech automatic, which would fire bullets that would disintegrate into untraceable fragments upon impact. Oswald would eventually be killed in Mexico by the conspirators. Easterling learned later that a Cuban named “Manuel,” who originally recruited him into the plot, was the one who shot Kennedy from the sixth-floor window, having entered the building that morning with an Oswald look-alike named Carlo.

  Getting cold feet the night before Kennedy’s assassination, Easterling, who said he was an FBI informant (the FBI has no record of Easterling being an informant), told Hurt he tried to bail out of the conspiracy by calling FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., at 9:30 p.m. from a pay phone at a service station in Baton Rouge. He said he told someone who was working late at the headquarters, “They’re going to kill the president” the next day, only to be told by the person at headquarters, “We know all about it. We’re going to catch them red-handed. You’re in too deep. Don’t go to Dallas,” which Easterling never did. Instead, to provide an alibi for himself in case someone tried to later connect him to the assassination, he burglarized a store in Baton Rouge in the early-morning hours of November 22, 1963, and was later apprehended and sentenced to five years in prison. After the assassination, he told Hurt, several Cubans were sent to kill him by tricking him into taking a drive with them, but he somehow outwitted them and escaped.

  Though Hurt tries to protect his own credibility by acknowledging that Easterling is a “terribly sullied witness” whose story, in some respects, is “obviously preposterous,” he still says that Easterling’s “underlying account is compelling in certain respects,” and that “Easterling’s confession, with all its ragged edges, provides a persuasive version of events that fills the void of uncertainty” created by the Warren Commission. He adds, “In the final analysis, it is not possible to prove that the Easterling confession is true. [Really? If Henry Hurt hadn’t said this, I, for one, was ready to accept it.] What remains is a massive public skepticism over the o
fficial account.” Right. A skepticism almost solely created and fueled by conspiracy theorists like Mr. Hurt who devoted an entire chapter of his book to peddling nonsense like the Easterling yarn.19 And to illustrate how bad the situation is, Henry Hurt, a former editor at Reader’s Digest, no less, is one of the most responsible of the conspiracy theorists.

  A footnote to the Easterling story. Johann Rush, the assassination researcher who shot the film of Oswald passing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, is from the same town as Easterling—Hattiesburg, Mississippi—and knows him well. He told me that after Easterling saw his (Rush’s) first Kennedy report on local television in 1981, “he began calling me to ‘confess’ and to ask me to help him sell his story to NBC news. Easterling’s tale was a little believable until he started telling me how J. Edgar Hoover used to call him up all during the 1950’s and 60’s for advice. Easterling told me he was Hoover’s chief advisor and that Hoover went to Baton Rouge to meet secretly with him when he had a perplexing problem he couldn’t solve by himself. I talked with the local sheriff, Gene Walters, about Easterling, and Walters told me that Easterling had been ‘confessing’ to various sensational crimes for more than twenty years. Easterling called Walters and the FBI in the early 70’s to tell them he knew where Patti Hearst was being hidden, but when they interviewed him, he never would reveal the exact location.”20 Easterling’s first known commitment to a mental institution was in 1974, and his second was in 1983.21

  Marita Lorenz is the soldier of fortune and one-time reputed mistress of Fidel Castro and former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, both of whom she allegedly had a love child with. The thrice-married Lorenz does have photos of herself with Castro, whom she met when she accompanied her father, Heinrich, the captain of the MS Berlin, a luxury German ocean liner, to Havana in February of 1959, when Lorenz was only nineteen. And there is evidence she lived with him for several months after the revolution in his headquarters in the Habana Hilton. Her sister, Valerie, told Vanity Fair that Castro was “the big love of [Marita’s] life,” having been her first lover. The author of the article on Lorenz in the respected monthly concluded that it was “indisputable” that Lorenz did have a long-term affair with Castro and became pregnant by him, but said that “there is no evidence a child was born…So desperate is Lorenz to prove her claim of having had Castro’s child that she offers me what looks like an FBI report in order to verify her story. However, misspellings, uncharacteristic language, and the lack of an FBI file number betray the document as a fraud.” In her 1993 autobiography, Lorenz says her son by Fidel, Andre, has become a Cuban doctor, and Castro only permitted her to meet him once, on a visit to Cuba in 1981, causing her love for Castro to turn into a love-hate emotion. Pérez Jiménez did pay child support for a while for Lorenz’s alleged child by him, Monica (who would one day pose for Playboy and become a finalist in the Miss Fitness USA contest), though the latter’s Miami lawyer said Pérez Jiménez denied the child was his.22

  Lorenz has provided the quenchless conspiracy community with another wild and improbable tale of a plot to murder the president. Described by a New York reporter as a “curvy, black-haired American Mata Hari,” the German-born Lorenz waited until 1977, fourteen years after the assassination, to inform the world of what really happened. She told New York Daily News reporter Paul Meskill in September of 1977 that she had accompanied Oswald and an “assassin squad” to Dallas a few days before the assassination.* Meskill wrote, “[Lorenz] told the News that her companions on the car trip from Miami to Dallas were Oswald, CIA contract agent Frank Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz, and two Cuban brothers whose names she did not know. She said they were all members of Operation 40, a secret guerilla group originally formed by the CIA in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion…She claimed the group conspired to kill…President Kennedy, whom it blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco…Ms. Lorenz said she first met Oswald, whom she knew only as ‘Ozzie’, at an Operation 40 ‘safe house’ in Miami’s Little Havana section in the summer or early fall of 1963. She said she asked Sturgis who the stranger was and he replied: ‘He’s OK. He’s one of us.’” Lorenz said that after the group arrived in Dallas she “flew back to Miami the next day. And two days later I was on a plane to New York when the co-pilot announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.”23

  In sworn testimony before the HSCA in 1978, Lorenz said the group met in September of 1963 at Bosch’s home in Miami. She was never told about the purpose of the meeting, but heard the group discussing a trip they were going to take and she assumed “it was an armory hit,” a raid to get weapons as she had done before with Sturgis. She noticed one thing that caught her attention, however. The group was studying street maps of Dallas. “About a week or so before November 22nd,” she said, the group left for Dallas in two cars. Oswald, whom she said she didn’t like, Diaz, Bosch, and Gerry Patrick Hemming,† whom Lorenz never mentioned to Meskill, were in one car, and she, Sturgis, and “the Novo’s” (Guillermo and Ignacio Novo, the two previously unnamed brothers who were anti-Castro Cuban exiles) were in the other car. After the two-day, 1,300-mile trip, they holed up in a motel on the outskirts of Dallas. The group’s two rooms were separated by an open door. Sturgis was in charge. “We were told no newspapers, no phone calls, we don’t go out, food will be brought in…Once we were inside, the trunk of the car was opened and they brought in…three, four automatics.” Lorenz sensed this was not going to be a hit on an armory, where she was always used as a decoy, but when she asked Sturgis, “What the hell is going on?”* he simply told her, “I will talk to you later.” She decided she wanted to return to Miami the very next day, but before she left, a visitor came to the motel room. “It was…Jack Ruby.”24 Marita would later tell Vanity Fair, “[Ruby] comes into the room. He’s like a little Mob punk, a short, balding guy with a cocky hat, heavyset, with a cleft on his chin. He took two steps inside, saw me lounging, and said ‘Who’s the fucking broad?’ And I said, ‘Fuck you, punk.’”25

  The HSCA said it could find “no evidence to support Lorenz’ allegation.”26 Edwin Lopez, an HSCA researcher who testified for the defense at the London trial, told Case Closed author Gerald Posner, “Oh God, we spent a lot of time with Marita…It was hard to ignore her because she gave us so much crap, and we tried to verify it, but let me tell you—she is full of s——…Marita is not credible.”27

  Not that they would be expected to acknowledge it if Lorenz were telling the truth, but Lorenz didn’t fare any better with members of the “assassin squad.” Bosch told the HSCA that the last time he saw Lorenz was in 1962 when she called him to get involved in anti-Castro activities, and he turned her down, adding he never traveled west of New Orleans in his life. The “Novo” brothers were never located, but Diaz and Hemming both denied ever taking any trip to Dallas with Lorenz. When the HSCA deposed Sturgis on Lorenz’s claim that he had participated in a plot to murder Kennedy, he responded, “Sir, that is an absolute lie…She is a liar. I took a polygraph examination to that effect that I have never been involved in any conspiracy to kill the president of the United States…nor was I with her in any automobile with these people or any other people going to Dallas to plot to kill the president of the United States. She is an absolute liar.”28†

  In late October of 1977, Lorenz succeeded in having Sturgis arrested in New York City for allegedly making threatening calls to her, which she taped. But when the Manhattan district attorney’s office heard the tapes (there were seven) Lorenz provided, they contained “no threats.” The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Alan Brooms, accordingly made a motion, which was granted, to dismiss the charges against Sturgis because “a lack of any substantiation of her [Mrs. Lorenz’s] charges impairs her credibility.”29

  Even the wacky conspiracy theorist A. J. Weberman said he didn’t believe Lorenz’s story. A measure of Lorenz’s lack of credibility is that when her mother (whom, heretofore, not even
Marita had alleged was a part of her far-reaching world of espionage and intrigue) died in 1977, Marita exclaimed, “She knew too much. They gave her a shot. Same as they gave Jack Ruby.”30

  Marita should have known that quite apart from the fact that all the evidence shows precisely who killed Kennedy, and there is no evidence that shows her group did, she made it hard on herself by alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald, or “Ozzie,” was part of her group. The slightly inconvenient fact for poor Marita is that Oswald could not have been in Miami the week before the assassination and then traveling cross-country with her and the others thereafter, since Oswald was seen every day during this period in Dallas, where he was living. Indeed, every day of the week (except on Saturday and Sunday) he was working at the Book Depository Building and accounted for.