The HSCA investigated Becker’s allegation and questioned whether Marcello had ever made the remark to Becker, concluding that it was “unlikely that an organized-crime leader personally involved in an assassination plot would discuss it with anyone other than his closest lieutenants.”90 But this is surprisingly flabby and self-contradictory reasoning because it is necessarily based on the assumption that Marcello did, in fact, plan to murder Kennedy, when at the same time the HSCA concluded it had no evidence of this and it was “unlikely” that Marcello was in fact involved in the assassination.91 While it is undoubtedly true that if Marcello were engaged in a plot to murder Kennedy he would never have confided in Becker, if he wasn’t, and had no such intent, it wouldn’t be particularly shocking to me that someone like Marcello—particularly since he’d have no way of knowing that a little over a year later a real nut named Lee Harvey Oswald would actually kill the president—might make a threat to kill Kennedy even to a stranger sitting next to him in a corner bar.
Becker told me that after his allegation was published for the first time in Ed Reid’s 1969 book The Grim Reapers, he continued to associate with mobsters in Las Vegas, none of whom treated him any differently. “There was no hostility at all,” which he felt confident there would have been if Marcello or the mob had been behind the assassination. “There were no threats, nothing at all.” He said, “Even Marcello’s man in Las Vegas, Mario, at the Sands,” continued to treat him well. It should be pointed out that in The Grim Reapers, in which the entire incident is capsulized in a few paragraphs, the author, Reid, doesn’t mention his source, Becker, by name.92 However, since the only other two people at Churchill Farms that day (whose identity Reid also does not give) were Carl Roppolo and Marcello’s barber, Becker said Marcello had to know the author’s source.
In concluding that it was unlikely Marcello would have confided in Becker, the HSCA also questioned Becker’s reliability for truth but failed to adequately set forth the basis for its position. To me, Becker comes across as a sensible, candid person who at least “sounds” very believable and matter-of-fact when telling his story, and he points out that he never sought to exploit or capitalize on the story in any way. “People came to me. I never went to them.” He said he never tried to sell the story to the tabloids or anyone else, that he had been interviewed about it perhaps twenty times, yet “I never took or asked for a dime for any of the interviews.” He said, “I wish he [Marcello] had never said it and I wish I had never heard it.”
The owner of the private investigative agency in Los Angeles that Becker worked for, Julian Blodgett, was an FBI agent for fourteen years, leaving in 1957 to head up, between 1957 and 1961, the Los Angeles County DA office’s Bureau of Investigation, a group I worked closely with on many of my murder cases. Blodgett told me that he has known Becker for thirty years and Becker had “always been truthful and honest with me,” saying he was “99.9 percent” sure Becker was telling the truth about the Marcello incident. “I have no reason to doubt Ed,” he said, adding that Becker was the type of person whom everyone liked, and that he had a way of ingratiating himself “into situations that other people could only dream about.”93
I personally give the incident no less than a 50 percent probability of its happening just the way Becker said it did.
It should be noted that apart from what may or may not have been said, it appears from all the circumstantial evidence that Becker did at least meet with Marcello in September 1962. The HSCA said, “The Bureau’s [FBI’s] files from November 1962 noted that Becker had in fact traveled through Louisiana during that period…The Bureau’s own November 26, 1962, interview report on Becker noted that he had informed the Bureau of two business meetings with Marcello that he had attended with Carl Roppolo in recent weeks.”94 Becker told me that when FBI agents interviewed him in Beverly Hills, California, on November 26, 1962, it was his investigation of the Billie Sol Estes case that they were working on, although the first thing they asked him was, “What were you doing with Marcello?” He said that very question indicated that they knew he had met with Marcello, most likely as a result of their surveillance of Marcello. He said he responded, “If you were that close to me, you must have known.” He went on to tell them about the business proposition he and Roppolo had made to Marcello—to have Marcello be the distributor in the New Orleans area for an oil additive that Roppolo had come up with called “Mustang.”*
The main issue, then, seems to be not whether Becker met with Marcello (a strong probability), but whether Marcello said what Becker claims he said. To the FBI’s discredit, the bureau never, at any time, investigated Becker’s allegations, instead making an effort to discredit him. Even though the HSCA was aware of this, it nonetheless embraced the FBI’s view vis-à-vis Becker by concluding, “As a consequence of his [Becker’s] underworld involvement, the informant had a questionable reputation for honesty and may not be a credible source of information,”95 suggesting there is a presumption that anyone who has ever had any association with mob figures is most likely a liar. With that curious attitude, one wonders why the U.S. attorney’s office, in prosecutions of mob figures, routinely offers to juries the testimony of former mobsters who turn state’s evidence and are frequently believed by the juries. And that’s where the snitch has something to gain by lying—immunity from prosecution or a reduced sentence. Here, it would seem that Becker had nothing to gain.
Becker, by the way, has no criminal record except a misdemeanor conviction in his early twenties for stealing two hundred dollars from a photographer friend of his who, he told me, owed him the money. When an HSCA investigator interviewed Becker on October 24, 1978, about his Marcello allegation, he said, “I am willing to take a polygraph and always have been. I will take a polygraph, stress exam, or any other type of test.”96
When I asked Becker if he believed, at the time, what Marcello said to him about intending to kill Kennedy, he chuckled and said, “No. If the mobsters killed everyone they threatened to kill, we’d be depopulated.” He then proceeded to tell me that he spent a lot of time at the Riviera in Las Vegas, and in Los Angeles, with Johnny Roselli (about whom he later coauthored the book All-American Mafioso) when the New York mob (Roselli’s affiliation) was in the process of building the Tropicana and Roselli and his people would “hang out at the Riviera.” And every time Roselli would get angry with someone, “He’d threaten to kill him. That’s the way the mobsters talked.”* However, Becker said that when he heard Kennedy had been killed, which was fourteen months after Marcello’s threat, his first thought was that Marcello was behind it and had meant what he said. But today, after much reflection and study, he feels very confident that Marcello was not involved in the assassination. As indicated, one reason among many he has for this belief is the way he was treated by the mob once his revelation of what Marcello told him became public. In fact, he said, in 1970 he and his wife were flying to Washington, D.C., on business and they stopped off in Shreveport, Louisiana (where he first met Carl Roppolo, Marcello’s “nephew”), and “had a nice dinner and evening with Roppolo and his wife.”
On the issue of the mob not going after public officials in America, Becker said that “on no less than a half-dozen occasions” throughout the years when a mobster would be complaining bitterly about, and reviling, a public official, “I’d ask them, tongue in cheek, and using their language, ‘Geez, why don’t you whack him?’ and they’d always say, with little variation, ‘No, no, we don’t kill cops or politicians.’” Becker said, “It’s like it’s a part of their constitution.” The exceptions, if any, are so very few and far between, and so insignificant, as to be irrelevant—as Dean Jennings’s 1967 book on Bugsy Siegel and the mob is titled, We Only Kill Each Other.97 This reality is known among students of organized crime as “internecine warfare.”
Carlos Marcello was not one of the nine national commission members in 1963, and he was also the lone Mafia leader whom the FBI was unable to eavesdrop on for many years. A form
er FBI official knowledgeable about the FBI’s surveillance program told the HSCA, “That was our biggest gap. With Marcello, you’ve got the one big exception in our work back then. There was just no way of penetrating that area. He was too smart.”98† One reason was probably that Marcello’s New Orleans Mafia family was very small and most of its operations were controlled by his loyal younger brothers, Joseph, Peter, Pascal, Vincent, Sammy, and Anthony.99
But for over a year and a half starting in February of 1979, the FBI was finally able to conduct electronic surveillance on Marcello at his office in New Orleans and wiretap his phone as part of its BRILAB (code name for “bribery of organized labor”) operation. On July 19, 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board released the transcript of thirteen conversations of Marcello that related to the Kennedy assassination. Most took place in the summer of 1979, when the HSCA released its report on the assassination. John Volz, the U.S. attorney in New Orleans at the time who got the court order for the electronic surveillance and wiretapping, told me, “There were nineteen months of BRILAB surveillance, and hundreds of hours. I didn’t listen to all the tapes, but the prosecutors I assigned to the case did. I can tell you, there was nothing on those tapes indicating any complicity by Marcello in the assassination.”100
The transcripts are revealing on several levels, one of the most important of which is that although the HSCA’s report suggested that it was “unlikely” that Marcello was involved in the assassination, reporters at the time like Jack Anderson strongly implied his involvement, and the articles on his possible involvement were on the front page of Marcello’s local paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Yet Marcello and his intimates, though angry at the negative publicity, treated the suggestion of his involvement in the assassination as absurd and, indeed, would bring it up in their conversations after more important discussions about business and, in one instance, women they were sharing. The following are some excerpts:
In a July 13, 1979, phone conversation between Isaac Irving Davidson and Marcello, Davidson, a close friend of Marcello’s who was a Washington lobbyist for organized labor (as well as the Dominican Republic), comments about an Anderson article in the Washington Post the previous day that erroneously reported that the imminent HSCA report would name Marcello as the “chief suspect” in the assassination.
Davidson: “You had as much to do with Kennedy as I have.”
Marcello: “Yeah, well, I ain’t worried about that.”
Marcello then proceeds to talk about something that is more real to him, a proposed civil lawsuit against a New Orleans figure named “Cronvich [phonetic spelling].”
On July 18, 1979, Marcello calls his office and speaks to his secretary, Loretta, to tell her to set up an appointment with someone for the next day.
Then, Marcello: “Let’s see what else I want…You’ve got the [Times-Picayune] newspaper there?”
Loretta: “Yeah, I got it.”
Marcello: “Okay, cut that uh.”
Loretta: “Yeah, I know.”
Marcello: “That Kennedy deal, that whole thing…And put it in the mail.”
(The HSCA Report came out the previous day and was all over the news. Knowing the HSCA at least considered the possibility of his involvement in the assassination, he apparently wasn’t even going to bother going out immediately to get the paper, content to have Loretta send it to him in the mail. He obviously was very worried.)
Later that day (July 18), Joe Campisi, the owner of the restaurant in Dallas (the Egyptian Lounge) where Jack Ruby dined frequently, and a friend of Marcello’s and other underworld figures throughout the country, calls Marcello. After a conversation about business and women, he tells Marcello about an article on the HSCA Report in the Dallas Morning News.
Campisi: “They had a big write-up here yesterday morning about all that shit, you know.”
Marcello: “That Kennedy deal?”
Campisi: “Oh yeah. And uh they said that Jack Ruby had all the connections. You wouldn’t know Jack Ruby if the mother fucker was uh crawl in your room.”
Marcello: “Shit, he never talked to me in his li…I don’t even know him.”
Later on that same day (July 18), an unknown male (UM) calls Marcello. After talking about business and contract matters for most of the conversation, the man talks about President Carter asking his cabinet to resign, then about Ted Kennedy being on television that morning talking about Mary Jo Kopechne. This incites Marcello. “Yeah, that mother fucker [Ted Kennedy]…If we’d uh done that we’d go in the penitentiary.” He then segues into newspapers talking about his alleged hatred for JFK and RFK, and he tells the man about his testimony before the HSCA.
Marcello: “They asked me that…I say I ain’t never hate nobody. I say I have a argument with people…You know what I mean? I can have argument with you…but I make up, maybe tomorrow, next week or next month.”
UM: “Yeah.”
Marcello: “But ain’t hatin’ ya to kill ya. I’m a kill somebody? Shit. President or (laugh) [It’s only a laugh to you, Carlos. Conspiracy theorists don’t know enough to laugh about something as silly as this] Attorney General?…I say I used to love John Kennedy President…I say he would a made the best President if he’d a lived.”
UM: “Ya.”
Marcello: “I uh I say I was really hurt when they, when they killed him…Far as Bobby Kennedy, I didn’t hate him either…[but] I never did like him. How could I like a man that throwed me out to the dogs?”
(Marcello, the Tunisian-born immigrant, spoke broken English all his life.)
On August 1, 1979, another unknown man calls Marcello’s office. Apparently Marcello is not in and he speaks to Loretta about a recent Jack Anderson article about her boss. He reminds her that he has been a close friend of Marcello’s for “almost well, thirty-five years.” What is instructive about his remarks is that intimates of Marcello’s would obviously have a much, much better sense of whether Marcello had been involved in the assassination than anyone else. And if they knew, or thought, or even wondered about whether he did, it is rather unlikely they’d be talking like this in an unguarded and private (to them) conversation. The man complains bitterly that the Anderson article was “absolutely vicious…They got Carlos mixed up in this…And I wanta tell you something. Uh, Uh, it’s all I can do [to] restrain myself.”
Loretta: “Well, that’s right…It’s ridiculous, it really is.”
UM: “It is, but you see, at the same time, how is he gonna fight it, cause the minute he opens his mouth, he’s gonna lose.”
Loretta: “You just don’t pay any attention to him [Anderson]. Period.”
UM: “Well, but you see, a lot of people do.”
Loretta: “Well, that’s the sad part about it. People believe everything they read.”
With respect to this issue of how intimates of Marcello’s viewed the charges against him, in an earlier July 17, 1979, phone conversation between Marcello’s lobbyist friend Isaac Irving Davidson, calling from Marcello’s office at the Town and Country Motel in New Orleans, and a Jim Draykel, Davidson tells Draykel that he’s been close to Marcello for twenty-five years, that the HSCA Report scheduled to come out that day was “all bullshit” and that he had talked to Walter Sheridan (a top aide to RFK) “and he says it’s all bullshit too…The only reason it makes [Carlos] feel badly is because of his grandchildren, [they] all hear that bullshit.”
It is all bull…and will always be bull…to anyone who is using the gray matter between their ears. That, of course, automatically excludes virtually all of the resident habitues of the conspiracy community.
After reviewing several hundred hours of conversations recorded by telephonic wiretapping and bugs on the premises, the FBI concluded that “nothing developed in the Brilab investigation…could be considered evidence in the Kennedy assassination.”101
It has to be repeated that even if we accept Becker’s allegation, no evidence has ever surfaced that Marcello had Kennedy killed by Oswald or an
yone else. The HSCA, in its investigation of Marcello, said that although it could not positively conclude that “Marcello and his associates were not involved” in the assassination (i.e., the committee couldn’t prove a negative), it pointed out that “Marcello’s uniquely successful career in organized crime has been based to a large extent on a policy of prudence; he is not reckless. As with the case of the Soviet and Cuban Governments, a risk analysis indicated that he would be unlikely to undertake so dangerous a course of action as a Presidential assassination.”102 Speaking not just of Marcello, but also Trafficante, Newsweek pointed out that one of the big problems with “fingering them as the culprit” was “their own prudence. The two men lasted as dons for decades in part by being cagey, not by trying to kill the president of the United States.”103
It is noteworthy that Marcello, who died in New Orleans on March 2, 1993, at the age of eighty-three, was never charged with any murder during his storied career in organized crime. It is perhaps even more noteworthy that other than some early assault and robbery charges brought against him in his late teens and early twenties, over the almost sixty-year period between 1935 and his death in 1993, with one exception being a charge of assault in 1966 for taking a wild swing at someone he thought was impeding his way as he walked through a crowd at New Orleans International Airport, he was never charged with any crime involving physical violence of any kind.104 All of the charges against him were nonviolent in nature. In 1938, Marcello was convicted of selling marijuana to an FBI undercover officer. For the next forty-two years, other than the assault charge in 1966, there were no prosecutions of any kind against him. In 1981, he was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy to violate federal racketeering laws in his effort to win a multimillion-dollar state group insurance contract (later reversed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision that changed what constituted fraud under federal law), and in 1983, for conspiracy to bribe a federal judge in California presiding over the trial of underworld friends of his. After serving six and a half years in prison on these charges, and in very poor health, he was paroled in 1989.
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