Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  White had previously tried to sell his story as a book and movie. His efforts from the beginning had been financed by a group of seven young oil millionaires from Midland, Texas, incorporated under the name MATSU. Under its 1989 contract with White, the group was to receive an eight-to-one return until they received their eighty-thousand-dollar original investment back, then 20 percent of “any and all income generated from the story.”40 But nothing came of the effort. One member of the group would later say, “Ricky sounded sincere, and if what he said was true, he had the key to the biggest mystery in American history. We were young and naive, and being in Midland, had nothing much better to do. We figured we could spend about as much on this project as it would cost to drill a dry hole.”41

  After some national television appearances by White (e.g., on Larry King Live), media interest in his story quickly died, but a conspiracy theorist named Joe West tried to revive interest in the story by calling a press conference claiming that before she died, Roscoe White’s widow had found a second diary of his (which Oliver Stone paid $5,300 for) at her home. “Almost everyone who saw the journal believed that it was a fraud,” wrote Gary Cartwright in Texas Monthly. The belief, he said, was that “Geneva created the journal.” The journal refers to the last assignment for Roscoe by his handlers (the ones who supposedly got him to murder Kennedy) as “Watergate.” The only problem, Cartwright writes, “is that the break-in at the Watergate apartment complex [June 17, 1972] didn’t occur until [close to nine] months after Roscoe died.” Further, though the entries were “supposedly written between 1957 and 1971, it appeared to be written in the same felt pen.” Cartwright did confirm that in August of 1957, White and Oswald, coincidentally, sailed aboard the same ship, the USS Bexar, from San Diego to Yokosuka, Japan. “White was in the same military division as Lee Harvey Oswald,” Cartwright wrote, “the 1st Marine Air Wing. So were about seven thousand other Marines. Geneva swears that her husband and Oswald were friends, but except for her word, there is no proof they even knew each other.” It should be noted that White and Oswald were also stationed in late 1957 at Subic Bay in the Philippines and it is certainly possible they could have run into each other at that time.42

  After White’s press conference at the JFK Assassination Information Center back in 1990, the center turned over the key “evidence” in support of White to the Texas attorney general’s office so the attorney general could conduct an investigation of the matter. In February 1991, the attorney general’s office said that everything it had looked at had “not given any credibility to anything these people have been trying to say.”43

  Though virtually everyone saw that Ricky White’s story was fraudulent, one person, predictably, was impressed with his allegation: Oliver Stone’s hero, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. Garrison told the media that White’s story “rings true.”44

  Another alleged assassin is James E. Files (true name, James Sutton), the Rodney Dangerfield of Kennedy assassins. For years Files has been begging people to believe that he killed Kennedy, but with a few exceptions, no one, not even those on the fringes of the conspiracy community, respects him or his story. Indeed, Files has fallen on such hard times that few buffs will even talk to him. However, a few promoters and publicity seekers have tried to exploit Files’s pathetic story. On August 17, 1992, the late Joe West, who had just failed in trying to promote the Ricky White story, interviewed Files at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, where Files is serving a fifty-year sentence for the attempted murders of two Illinois police officers in 1991.45 West died in 1993, and Bob Vernon, a Houston producer, took over the Files story at the request of West’s family. Vernon videotaped an interview with Files at Stateville on March 22, 1994, in while Files confessed to firing the fatal head shot on November 22, 1963, and the tape, called Confession of an Assassin, was sold commercially.46 Also, between 1996 and 2001, conspiracy author Jerry Kroth visited and interviewed Files at the prison on three occasions as well as corresponded with him, and treats Files seriously in his book on the assassination, Conspiracy in Camelot. Most recently, in 2005, mobster Sam Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette, and two co-authors have featured Files in their book on the assassination, JFK and Sam, calling Files “The Real Assassin.”*

  The following is a brief synopsis of Files’s story, which I feel is just as good or better than the hugely successful The Men Who Killed Kennedy. What I’m saying is that I feel Files is entitled to more respect from the buffs than he is getting, and they should perk up and listen when he talks. I know I do. (I’m being sarcastic.) Files (“Jim” hereafter) says he was a bodyguard and driver for Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti, a hit man for Chicago mobster Tony Ascardo and, later, Sam Giancana. Six months before the assassination, Chuckie told Jim that Kennedy was going to be killed and Jim was supposed to help out in whatever way he was told. Files said he “never liked Kennedy since he backed out on us” at the Bay of Pigs. A week before the assassination, Jim drove the weapons for the assassination from Chicago (where, Jim says, the assassination was originally scheduled to take place) down to Mesquite, Texas. The next day, Lee Harvey Oswald came by Jim’s motel (Files said he was confident Oswald was sent by David Atlee Phillips, who Files said was Oswald’s as well as his CIA handler) and took him out to a place near Mesquite where Jim fired the weapons and calibrated the scopes. The next “five days” Oswald and he drove around Dealey Plaza and Dallas (apparently Oswald wasn’t at work these days; his supervisors and coworkers only thought they saw him) so Jim would know all the streets and not run into any dead-ends “if anything went wrong and we had to flee from the area.” He said, “Lee Harvey Oswald and I never discussed the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” (That’s one statement I’d be willing to bet every penny I have was true.)*

  On the morning of the assassination, he and mobster Johnny Roselli met Jack Ruby at a pancake house in Fort Worth, where Ruby gave Roselli an envelope that contained Secret Service identification badges and a map of the presidential motorcade route. Per Jim, at the time of the shooting, Nicoletti was firing at Kennedy from the second floor of the Dal-Tex Building (Roselli was present with Nicoletti but did not fire), while he (Jim) was behind the fence at the grassy knoll (Ruby, he said, was at the bottom of the grassy knoll) with instructions from Nicoletti to be a backup shooter only if the shots from the Dal-Tex Building didn’t kill Kennedy. Since it appeared to him that the Dal-Tex shots had only hurt Kennedy (Jim says Nicoletti hit Kennedy from behind with a 7.62-millimeter rifle), Jim fired the fatal head shot with his “Remington Fire Ball” XP-100 pistol, which he says CIA agent David Atlee Phillips gave to him when he worked for the CIA with anti-Castro Cubans at “No Name Key” in Florida. After Jim killed Kennedy, he said he wanted to leave his personal calling card, so he bit the empty shell that had been the casing for the bullet that killed Kennedy and placed it on top of the picket fence.

  Jim said that Oswald’s CIA handler, Phillips, had gotten Oswald his job at the Book Depository Building. He said that Kennedy’s murder was ordered by the mob and the CIA, with the main figure being Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo. The CIA, at the last moment, tried to call off the assassination but Accardo overruled the agency.

  We learn from Jim that Oswald was set up, that he did not fire a round and wasn’t privy to the plan. Oswald also did not kill Tippit. The man who did kill Tippit (Jim wouldn’t say who it was) had been assigned to kill Oswald but he “messed up.” Jim was later paid thirty thousand dollars for his expert services in killing JFK. He believes that Giancana, Roselli, and Nicoletti were murdered later to silence them from telling the authorities what happened, but doesn’t say why “they” haven’t silenced him. I assume it’s because they think he’s a likeable chap. Or maybe they want to hear more of his song. We also learn from Jim that Joe West, the first person who contacted him on this case, was silenced (“they tampered with Joe’s medication”) in 1993 because he was getting close to being able “to get Kennedy’s body exhumed,” and that John F.
Kennedy is not buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

  Personally, a lot of my questions about the assassination were finally and conclusively answered by Jim, and I don’t need any proof beyond his word. But Jim told Jerry Kroth that if he is ever set free, he has “solid proof” of everything he says and would retrieve the proof from a box of papers he has outside of prison. Kroth writes that “Files’ story…is the most believable and persuasive” he has heard or read on JFK’s murder. “His account,” Kroth says, is “surprisingly credible.” Can you imagine that? And Kroth actually found a publisher to publish his book.47

  Ah yes, and then there is Loy Factor, Mac Wallace, and the book The Men on the Sixth Floor by Glen Sample and Mark Collom, which has become a favorite of many on the fringes of the conspiracy community.

  The key to the story, Sample and Collom tell us, is Lawrence Lloyd Factor, a Chickasaw Indian from Fillmore, Oklahoma. Factor, a World War II veteran, was declared incompetent by the Veterans Administration in 1948, which required the appointment of a legal guardian for him before he could receive his sixty-dollar-per-month disability payments.48 In 1969 he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter for strangling his wife, Juanita, the previous year. A diabetic with one wooden leg, he was being treated in 1971 for hepatitis in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma state prison at McAlester. For some undisclosed reason, Factor decided to tell a story—and a whopper it was—to Collom, another hepatitis patient in the ward. According to Factor, in November of 1961 his wife suggested that they and their kids drive to Bonham, Texas (a few hours away), so they could see President Kennedy, who was going to attend U.S. Senator Sam Rayburn’s funeral there. While Factor was waiting in the crowd on the street in Bonham, a Spanish-speaking man, whom he later identified as Mac Wallace, approached him and asked about his ability as a marksman. Being a hunter, Factor said it was right good. Wallace gave him twenty dollars and told Factor to take his family to a nice dinner.

  A year later, Wallace showed up unannounced at Factor’s home. Factor demonstrated his marksmanship for Wallace by shooting bottles with his deer rifle, after which Wallace offered him ten thousand dollars if he would do an unspecified “job” for Wallace and his people, two thousand payable up front, eight thousand when the job was done. A deal was struck. A few days before the assassination, a young Hispanic woman of around twenty named Ruth Ann, accompanied by a man, another young Hispanic, drove to Factor’s home in Fillmore to fetch him for the ride to Dallas. Factor suspected they wanted him to kill someone, but he told Collom he was too afraid to back out. Plus, he needed that extra eight thousand dollars. The two Hispanics drove Factor to a small home in Dallas, where Wallace, the group leader, was already present. For a few days, the group discussed (while Factor sat idly by) their plan to kill Kennedy. Ruth Ann, Factor said, was second in command. Two other people arrived at the house to sit in on some of the planning sessions—Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Per Factor, just before the assassination Ruth Ann drove him to the Book Depository Building and led him up the stairwell to the sixth floor, where Wallace and Oswald already were. Factor was given a rifle. “Wallace told me that if they [Oswald and Wallace] missed, I would be the backup. They [had] wanted me to shoot, but I told them I wouldn’t do it,” Factor told Collom in a subsequent interview in which coauthor Glen Sample was also present. Nonetheless, Factor was told to go to the southwesternmost window on the sixth floor. Wallace was two windows to the east, and Oswald was at the sniper’s nest window at the southeasternmost corner. Ruth Ann, with a walkie-talkie communicating with other shooters, presumably located on the grassy knoll, gave a countdown to Factor, Wallace, and Oswald, signaling them when to fire. But Factor said that although he “ejected a shell from the rifle,” he did not fire it.*

  Following the shooting, Factor said that he and Ruth Ann fled down the stairs† and she dropped him off at the Greyhound bus depot. But before she did, even though he hadn’t done what he was paid to do, Ruth Ann was sweet enough to give him his eight thousand dollars. An hour or so later, while he was still waiting for a bus out of town, Ruth Ann came back to the bus depot with Wallace. “They said they had to get me out of town, ’cuz things was too hot there.” Ruth Ann and Wallace, or whoever employed them, certainly could have used some of that eight thousand dollars they gratuitously handed to Factor to make sure they had a dependable getaway car, because—well, let’s let Factor tell the story: “We was headed up through Mead [Oklahoma] when the car broke down, right outside of Mead. I think the clutch went out,” Factor said, so he got out on the highway and hitched his way home, presumably leaving the two masterminds behind the biggest murder in American history sitting in a dead car alongside the road.

  Ol’ Loy might have been too incompetent to take care of his own personal affairs, but he wasn’t too incompetent for people to hire him to kill the president of the United States, and in the process, get them to pay him ten thousand dollars for doing nothing. Factor died in 1994.

  No rational person could possibly believe this pathetic story,‡ even, it seems, the authors themselves. In the acknowledgments section at the beginning of their self-published book, the Garden Grove, California, sign-shop owner (Sample) and Bellingham, Washington, real estate agent (Collom) thanked, among others, their wives, who “not only allowed us our fantasy, but encouraged it.” In some circles, this is known as a Freudian slip. What Sample and Collom should know is that even if their fantasy was that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy’s guardian angel, and it was Jackie Kennedy who was behind her husband’s murder, there would be many in the conspiracy community to encourage that fantasy too.

  Why did Wallace mastermind Kennedy’s death? The authors ask the reader to believe that LBJ ordered Wallace, who allegedly was a part of LBJ’s Texas inner circle, to do so. Not too much is known about Wallace, who died in a car accident near Pittsburg, Texas, on January 7, 1971. Wallace, a University of Texas graduate and student body president in 1945 who at one time worked as an economist in Washington, D.C., for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, did, indeed, commit one killing we know about. In 1952, he was convicted in Austin, Texas, of murdering a golf pro, John Douglas Kinser, who had been having an affair with Wallace’s estranged wife. He received a five-year suspended prison sentence. The authors see the dark hand of LBJ in the very light sentence, since Wallace’s lawyer, John Cofer, was one of LBJ’s main lawyers in his successful postelection legal battle for the U.S. Senate against former governor Coke Stevenson in 1948. How Cofer would have the power to bring about Wallace’s light sentence, the authors don’t say. In a 1986 interview with the Dallas Times Herald, D. L. Johnson, one of the jurors in the Kinser case, said that he was the only juror who favored an outright acquittal for Kinser and that he forced the guilty-with-a-suspended-sentence verdict by threatening to cause a hung jury if he didn’t get his way.49

  To fortify their position that Wallace wasn’t just a heat-of-passion killer of his wife’s lover but a cold-blooded premeditated killer for hire, the authors struggle mightily, without succeeding, to prove that Wallace was responsible for the June 3, 1961, shotgun death of Henry H. Marshall of Bryan, Texas, a regional official for the Department of Agriculture who was in charge of the federal cotton allotment program in central Texas. Marshall, it was claimed, had to be silenced because he could connect Johnson aide Cliff Carter and LBJ with the illegal activities of Billie Sol Estes, an LBJ political ally and fund-raiser Marshall was investigating who had, among other things, been fraudulently obtaining federal cotton allotment payments as well as mortgages on farm equipment that did not exist. As author Alfred Steinberg described Estes, the short, plump young man from Texas “could have written volumes on wheeling and dealing and financial fakery.”50 Estes was eventually convicted in 1963 (after his first conviction in 1962 was reversed because the televising of his trial without his consent was deemed to be a denial of his right to a fair trial) of swindling farmers and banks out of millions of dollars and sentenced to prison. After
being paroled in 1971, he was convicted again in 1979 for mail fraud and concealing assets. At Estes’ sentencing before the Dallas federal judge, he told the judge, “I have a problem. I live in a dream world.” The judge sentenced him to ten years.51

  In an August 9, 1984, letter to the Department of Justice, Estes’ lawyer, Douglas Caddy, said that Estes, who some believe never forgave Johnson for not fixing the case against him back in 1962, was “willing to testify that LBJ ordered…the killing of President J. F. Kennedy,” and that “Mac Wallace” murdered Kennedy for Johnson. Pretty serious charges, right? The problem is that Estes, who had been released on parole in 1983, said that LBJ had ordered seven other murders, and he transmitted his orders through his close aide Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who committed the murders. The murders included not just Henry Marshall, but—get this—LBJ’s own alcoholic younger sister, Josefa Johnson, who died, per her death certificate, not as a result of a homicide but from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-nine on December 25, 1961, after coming home from a Christmas party at LBJ’s ranch. Also among the seven people whom LBJ, per Estes, had Wallace kill for him was John Kinser, the man who was having an affair with Wallace’s wife.52* It obviously was loony bird time, but the Department of Justice, to avoid charges of indifference, actually sent three eager investigators down to Texas to interview Estes, but Estes cancelled the interview. A con man to the end.

  No remotely believable evidence that Mac Wallace had anything to do with the assassination has ever surfaced, and in fact, around the time of the assassination, Sample and Collom say he was living in Anaheim, California, where he worked for Ling Electronics from 1961 to 1969. (When I called Ling Electronics on February 20, 2002, they said their employment records did not go back to 1963, and hence they were unable to provide documentation for Wallace’s employment with them.)53