Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  †De Mohrenschildt’s daughter, Alexandra, would later tell a reporter for the New York Times that her father was “mentally and physically afraid” of Oltmans, and “he felt he had been drugged in Amsterdam” (New York Times, April 4, 1977, p.50).

  ‡ Among the papers later found in de Mohrenschildt’s attaché case was a two-page personal affidavit written by him in Brussels, Belgium, dated March 11, 1977, attesting to his friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald (Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office Death Investigation Report on George de Mohrenschildt, April 4, 1977, p.4).

  * If what the conspiracy theorists say is true, almost by definition the CIA would have had to put de Mohrenschildt on to Oswald. But if we’re to believe de Mohrenschildt’s widow, Jeanne, that’s not what happened. “We had been hearing for months that some American Marine idiot that defected to Russia had come back with a Russian wife…The Russian Colony, as we called it, was talking about him. Somehow they didn’t like him at all. He was poor. I told George to go to Fort Worth and bring him over here. He was reluctant because he was tired…But he went…That’s how we met them [the Oswalds].” (Jim Marrs, “Widow Disputes Suicide,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 11, 1978)

  * Another possibility is that he was simply giving Epstein something for his money. Epstein had already paid de Mohrenschildt two thousand of his four-thousand-dollar fee (Epstein, Assassination Chronicles, p.557).

  * On October 29, 1976, just a week and a half before his commitment at Parkland, de Mohrenschildt went to a Dallas psychiatrist, telling him, “I am depressed. I am killing myself,” and asked that he be committed as a mental patient to Terrell State Hospital in Terrell, Texas, near Dallas. Four days later, after the psychiatrist had made arrangements for admitting him voluntarily, de Mohrenschildt changed his mind and decided not to go to Terrell. (Earl Golz, “Oswald Friend Vowed Suicide, Psychiatrist Claimed,” Dallas Morning News, April 1, 1977, p.20A)

  * The inimitable Mark Lane, however, perpetually up to his conspiratorial patter, found sounds indicating, to him, foul play. He wrote in the November 1977 edition of Gallery magazine that he attended de Mohrenschildt’s coroner’s inquest (which ruled that de Mohrenschildt’s death was a suicide, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Gabino Cuevas, testifying to his belief that the gunshot was self-inflicted) and that “the various servants testified that an alarm system installed by the owner of the house caused a bell to ring…whenever an outside door or window was opened. The courtroom became silent as the tape recording was played. Just after a commercial…a gentle bell was heard, and then the shotgun blast.” (Mark Lane, Gallery, November 1977) Detective Neighbors (now a lieutenant) told me that he too was at the inquest. He said that when any door or window at the Tilton mansion was opened, a “beeping sound,” not a bell, was heard, that a beeping sound was heard on the tape just before the shotgun blast, but he had determined it was caused by the live-in maintenance man, Coley Wimbley, walking out the backdoor of the home. “The next beeping sound on the tape was at least ten minutes later. An assassin would be expected to get out of there long before that.” Neighbors said he meticulously went over the movements of everyone coming in and out of the house and “no beeps were unaccounted for.” Neighbors said he had no doubt de Mohrenschildt had committed suicide. “He was a very disturbed individual at the end. He was hiding from the world, thinking the world was against him.” (Telephone interview of Thomas Neighbors by author on November 6, 2000)

  * If the CIA were in any way involved, one could reasonably expect the agency to try to divert the Warren Commission’s investigation from certain potentially incriminating areas by invoking the “national security” argument. But when the HSCA asked J. Lee Rankin, general counsel for the Warren Commission, “To your recollection did the CIA ever indicate to you, to the Chief Justice, or to the Commission in general that you should not pursue a line of investigation because of national security reasons?” Rankin answered, “They never did to me and they never did to any member of the Commission that I know of.” Question: “Did you ever have a feeling that the CIA was trying to encourage you to go in a particular direction in your investigation?” Answer: “No.” (HSCA Record 180-10105-10332, HSCA deposition of J. Lee Rankin on August 17, 1978, p.66)

  * A January 27, 1964, article in the Nation by Harold Feldman repeated the charges.

  * Hudkins wrote in his Post article, “Was Lee Harvey Oswald a stool pigeon for a federal government agency?…If the answer is ‘yes,’ then the 24-year-old accused…slayer of President Kennedy pulled one of the biggest and certainly the most embarrassing double-crosses in the nation’s history. And if the answer is ‘no,’ it will go down as just another one of the fantastic rumors floating around in official and unofficial circles in Dallas” (Lonnie Hudkins, “Oswald Rumored as Informant for U.S.,” Houston Post, January 1, 1964).

  * The FBI first opened a file on Oswald on October 31, 1959, when a United Press International release reported that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union (CE 833, 17 H 787–789; CE 834, 17 H 804).

  * It is not clear whether this was the first time Alba told this story. In Anthony Summers’s book Conspiracy, he says Alba related this incident to him when he interviewed Alba in 1978, the same year as Alba’s HSCA deposition, but Summers gives no month or day. Summers says Alba thought the FBI agent was “visiting New Orleans from Washington,” and said Alba told him the agent returned the car to the garage in a few days. (Summers, Conspiracy, pp.282–283)

  * Former New Orleans FBI agent Warren de Brueys said that Alba’s story that an FBI agent was driving a Secret Service car “sounds sort of asinine” because the FBI in New Orleans had its “own garage, separate and apart from the Secret Service. I don’t know if that’s ever happened where an FBI agent would be driving a Secret Service car. I am not saying it couldn’t happen, but the odds were a million to one against those sort of facts existing” (Earl Golz, “Oswald Allegedly Given Envelope,” Dallas Morning News, August 7, 1978, p.4D).

  †It was the conventional wisdom in Washington (RFK had mentioned it to too many people) that President Kennedy did not intend to waive Hoover’s compulsory retirement date (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p.536). William Hundley, the chief of the Justice Department’s organized-crime section under William Rogers, told author Ovid Demaris, “We all got the message that they were going to retire him after Jack got re-elected and Hoover hit seventy. And it got back to him [Hoover]” (Demaris, Director, p.143). William Sullivan, Hoover’s number-three man, told author Curt Gentry that when Hoover learned he was going to be retired, “he was very, very unhappy about it” (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p.536). On May 8, 1964, President Johnson signed Executive Order 11154 waiving Hoover’s mandatory retirement. In a Rose Garden ceremony attended by leaders of both parties, Johnson told the assembled guests and media that Hoover was a “hero to millions of decent citizens, and an anathema to evil men.” Saying Hoover was a “quiet, humble and magnificent public servant,” he told Hoover the nation needed him, and hence, exempted him from compulsory retirement for an “indefinite period of time,” tantamount to a lifetime appointment (New York Times, May 9, 1964, p.12). Hoover remained FBI director for eight more years, until his death from a heart attack on May 2, 1972, at the age of seventy-seven.

  * Not all Mafia bosses were coarse and uneducated. Perhaps the biggest exception was Johnny Torrio, Al Capone’s mentor (whose own mentor was Chicago’s first big crime boss, “Diamond Jim” Colosimo), who, even during Capone’s heyday in Chicago, some believed was in control of Capone. Torrio’s enormous influence was not limited to the Chicago mob; he was also very influential with Lucky Luciano and the New York families. Torrio, a soft-spoken family man, spoke five languages, “actually read most of the books in his extensive library,” loved the opera, and was a friend of the great Enrico Caruso. (Sciacca, Luciano, p.20)

  †Castro would soon allow the casinos to reopen, but not under mob control. Eventually, the Cuban government took over all the hotels (5 HS
CA 26) and gambling was prohibited.

  * As author Curt Gentry puts it, “The switch from bullets to ballots” by Aleman undoubtedly came because Aleman “feared possible reprisal from the Trafficante organization” (Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover, p.496 footnote). Aleman told the HSCA that since the Washington Post story, “I have been very much worried. I am very much concerned about my safety…I [have] been in my house because I mean Santos Trafficante can try to do anything at any moment” (5 HSCA 322–323).

  * North gives no citation of authority for this that makes any sense. He first lists the “Washington Post, 2-13-62,” which is seven months before the alleged conversation between Aleman and Trafficante ever took place, then spends the rest of the note he cites as authority for the Trafficante-Aleman incident talking not about Trafficante and Aleman, but Carlos Marcello and Ed Becker, alleging, without proof, that Hoover also had knowledge of Marcello’s plan to murder Kennedy (North, Act of Treason, pp.604–605 note 3). When an assertion like the one North makes is the key point of your book, you obviously have to have a lot of support for what you are saying. North has nothing.

  * Like a typical mobster, Trafficante took the Fifth Amendment as to all questions (including “Did you ever discuss with any individuals plans to assassinate President Kennedy prior to his assassination?”) when he was first called to the stand (HSCA Record 180-10114-10180, Testimony of Santos Trafficante before HSCA on March 16, 1977, pp.7–15), but the HSCA subsequently compelled his testimony by an order it got from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia conferring immunity on Trafficante from having anything he said under oath being used against him. The immunity order did not extend to perjury by Trafficante. (5 HSCA 346–348) Though conspiracy theorists like to cite Trafficante’s refusal to answer the question of whether he had ever discussed plans to murder Kennedy (e.g., Davis, Mafia Kingfish, pp.427–428), not too much should be read into this. The conspiracists don’t point out that before Trafficante was granted immunity, he also took the Fifth when asked, “Will you tell us when and where you were born?” (5 HSCA 346, Testimony of Santos Trafficante before HSCA on September 28, 1978)

  * Of course, as with the alleged Marcello-Becker conversation, if Trafficante had nothing to do with the assassination, such loose talk by him to Aleman would be unremarkable and of no significance.

  * In 1983 in Miami, Aleman, who had become convinced that his 1978 HSCA testimony against Trafficante had prevented his financial recovery and adversely marked him and his family for the rest of their lives, was penniless and despondent. For no apparent reason, he went berserk, shooting and killing his sixty-nine-year-old aunt and seriously wounding three cousins. Police were called to the scene, and in the ensuing shootout where four Miami Police Department SWAT team members were wounded, Aleman committed suicide by shooting himself in the temple. (Davis, Mafia Kingfish, p.446; Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p.6)

  * The number-one G-man (the name coined by gangster George “Machine Gun” Kelly for government men) loved the ponies, and at one time or another visited and bet at virtually every major racetrack in the country, even having a number of horses named after him, but didn’t cash that many winning tickets. “Edgar is a sucker at the track,” a friend said. “He’ll let somebody tout him a horse with information he would throw out the window back at the FBI.” (Knebel, “J. Edgar Hoover,” p.30; G-men coined by Kelly: Whitehead, FBI Story, p.15)

  †Purvis, still enormously popular with the American public, wrote a memoir, American Agent, lent his name to product endorsements, and became “the voice of an unofficial radio adventure, Top Secrets of the FBI.” Author Richard Powers writes, “For the rest of Purvis’ life, the Bureau quietly sabotaged his efforts to build a second career either in entertainment or in the security field…When Purvis committed suicide in 1960 with his Bureau revolver, Hoover’s executive council debated and then rejected the idea of sending a letter to the widow. [She] telegraphed Hoover, ‘We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death. Your jealousy hurt him very much, but until the end I think he loved you.’” (Powers, Broken, pp.154–155)

  ‡ Remarkably, or coincidentally, Dillinger, Floyd, Barker, and Nelson were all hunted down and killed by the FBI within a mere six-month period, making heroes in the public eye of Hoover and his G-men almost overnight, and marking the year, 1934, as the biggest one in the bureau’s fabled history. FBI chronicler Richard Powers writes that Hollywood also helped turn the FBI “into American legend through movies about the Bureau’s gangbusting cases, beginning with James Cagney’s G-Men, in 1935. [Later films included The FBI Story starring Jimmy Stewart in 1959 and television’s The FBI from 1965 to 1974.] There was FBI entertainment in every media: radio shows, pulp magazines, and even bubble gum cards.” The overall effect was to persuade the public “that all crime was local and the Bureau’s job was to take over cases that were too difficult for the local police.” (Powers, Broken, photo section; Theoharis with Poveda, Rosenfeld, and Powers, FBI, pp.176–177) Though still admired as a competent and clean law enforcement agency, because of an accumulation of events, including the revelations in the 1970s and 1980s of Hoover’s abuse of power, today’s FBI no longer enjoys the mythical status it once did in the nation’s eyes, and being the nation’s lead agency against terrorism within our shores, the bureau took a serious blow after the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001.

  * It was one thing for the FBI, acting within its jurisdiction to investigate domestic subversion, to use illegal means to do so. But prior to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s front-page article in the December 23 and 24, 1974, editions of the New York Times, it was not publicly known that the CIA, with no jurisdiction domestically, had been illegally spying on American citizens since the Nixon administration. Hersh’s articles caused President Gerald Ford to order CIA Director William Colby to report to him “within a matter of days” on the published allegations. (New York Times, December 23, 1974, pp.1, 19; New York Times, December 24, 1974, pp.1, 4) Hersh’s explosive revelations are widely credited with Ford’s creation of the Rockefeller Commission on January 4, 1975, to determine whether the CIA was exceeding its statutory authority.

  * These dalliances started before his presidency, with his affair in 1941 with the married (separated) and beautiful, honey-blonde Inga Arvad (former Miss Denmark and Miss Europe), who for a time was erroneously suspected of being a Nazi spy, and continued into 1962 with Judith Campbell Exner, and 1963 with a stunning, Elizabeth Taylor–resembling call girl, Ellen Rometsch, whom Bobby Kennedy quietly deported back to Germany.

  * If the truth be told, many in Dallas, the most conservative large city in Texas, viewed Kennedy as a “pinko” (colloquial for Communist) and didn’t even want him to come. (But as long as he was coming, they, the conservatives, wanted to be in charge.) How could Kennedy possibly be viewed as a Communist? In these circles, said Dallas Democratic political organizer Elizabeth Forsling Harris, “anybody who had any interest in what might be called social equality,” or thought the government should serve “the needs of all the people, was, ipso facto, a Commie” (HSCA Record 180-10078-10272, Deposition of Elizabeth Forsling Harris before HSCA on August 16, 1978, pp.8, 49).

  †The decision may have been helped by a report from Winston G. Lawson, the Secret Service White House advance agent for the trip, to Gerald Behn. Although he did not make a recommendation for the Trade Mart over the Women’s Building, after visiting both buildings on the morning of November 13 Lawson told Behn that the Trade Mart had two security advantages over the Women’s Building. Number one, the internal security system at the Mart barred entry to everyone other than lessees of commercial space at the building and their customers. Number two, there was no kitchen at the Women’s Building, so the food would have to be brought in from the outside. (4 H 336–338, WCT Winston G. Lawson; 11 HSCA 517)

  * The murder of Kennedy remains the only murder ever of a president who was under
Secret Service protection.

  * In 1963 it was not the practice of the Secret Service to check out, in advance, buildings along the routes a presidential motorcade took (HSCA Record 180-10074-10392, HSCA interview of Dallas SAC Forrest Sorrels on March 15, 1978, p.4; WR, p.664). James Rowley, the chief of the Service, told the Warren Commission, “Except for [an] inauguration or other parades involving foreign dignitaries accompanied by the president in Washington, it has not been the practice of the Secret Service to make surveys or checks of buildings along the route of a presidential motorcade…With the number of men available to the Secret Service and the time available, surveys of hundreds of buildings and thousands of windows is not practical…In accordance with its regular procedure, no survey or other check was made by the Secret Service, or by any other law enforcement agency at its request, of the Texas School Book Depository Building…prior to the time the president was shot.” Rowley went on to say that since the assassination, “there has been a change in this regard.” (5 H 467)