The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  Hall was gunned down shortly thereafter. The homicide investigation turned up tapes of bugged conversations recorded by Robert Hall. Captain Jack Egger of the Beverly Hills Police Department abruptly resigned, citing “health” reasons, his underworld connections caught on the 300 tapes confiscated from L.A. stockbroker and gunrunner Thomas P. Richardson, a crony of Hall’s convicted to a six-year prison term for stealing millions from a long list of banks, brokerage houses and Ivy League college funds. 13

  Egger’s sudden departure from the Beverly Hills police force, the Los Angeles Times noted, “was precipitated by Burbank detectives playing selected tape recordings [from Hall’s collection] for Beverly Hills Police Chief Edward Kreina.”14

  The press linked the detective to Washington politicians, famed Hollywood celebs embroiled in corrosive drug and sex scandals, cocaine traffic from L.A. to Malibu, international sporting events, and the LAPD. It was George Yocham, a former police lieutenant, retired, chairman of the Police Science Department at L.A. Valley College, and Robert Hall himself who had given the five-shot, .38 Caliber Centennial Special used in his murder to alleged trigger-man Jack Ginsberg, alias Jack Ginsburgs.15 Yocham was employed as a private detective for Hall’s agency after leaving the Beverly Hills Police Department in 1971, after 25 years of service.

  Ginsburgs was Hall’s business partner and a consultant to Richardson. Also a pornographer with connections to organized crime, the proprietor of XXX, Inc. on Prairie Street in Chatsworth, California. Hougan: “The son of a White Russian émigré, he’d spent his youth inside the decadent Shanghai Bund—that romantic foreign colony which [was] a meld of opium, kinky sex and intrigue.” The transcript of Richardson’s trial reveals that Captain Egger enlisted Ginsburgs as a police informant. He also made Hall a “double agent” in the Richardson stock fraud case. Gene LeBell, the famed ex-wrestler, karate expert and Hollywood stunt man, was charged in Hall’s murder as well. LeBell is well-known in any gymnasium, the son of Aileen Eaton, the famed Olympic Auditorium boxing promoter. It was Eaton who refereed the bout between heavyweight pugilist Muhammed Ali and martial arts star Antonio Inoki.16

  Lebell was a third partner in Hall–s private detective firm, and owned a pharmacy in Hollywood—the same pharmacy that distributed tainted drugs to rock musicians—and Hall had blown the whistle.17 Tommy Richardson, Hall’s partner and Robert Vesco’s pimp (he once reportedly flew Elizabeth “The Hollywood Madam” Adams and a plane loaded with prostitutes to Costa Rica to service the fugitive), told LAPD Detective Richard Schmidt that he believed Jack Ginsburgs “may have killed Hall because of Hall’s activities against Ginsburgs,”18 turning evidence on the poisoned prescriptions and other criminal enterprises.

  The Hall slaying was not the only bullet-perforated door that led to the suites of corrupt public servants and wealthy military-industrialists. L.A.’s “premiere gangster,” gambling czar Mickey Cohen, was a friend of Sal Mineo’s, or so the mobster claimed, and possibly the critical link to the killing of Robert Kennedy. Cohen was moved to contact the press immediately after the murder of Mineo to reminisce about his “old friend,” and his appearance in news reports of the slaying was morbidly incongruous, because the former hit-man had no place in the story except to boast, “Sal was my pal.” Unlike the average “former” underworld figure, he enjoyed the spotlight and maintained amiable relations with the press. But there was a whiff of mordant irony in this impromptu appearance in the very first Los Angeles Times report on Sal Mineo’s murder. They met when the actor was in his 20s, Cohen boasted to the Times. Well . . . they weren’t exactly “close” friends, he conceded, but still “friends.” The actor/singer once frequented a Brentwood ice-cream shop, The Carousel, owned by Cohen’ sister, a thriving mob hangout in the mid-’50s until Cohen took a sabbatical to McNeil Island Penitentiary.19 The Mafioso and the actor remained friendly till the day Mineo was cut down in a dark carport.20

  Cohen was chummy with Nixon and his entourage. In 1968, Cohen, then imprisoned, said that Mob attorney Murray Chotiner had solicited campaign contributions from him on behalf of Richard Nixon. In 1970, Chotiner was appointed to the office of Nixon’s special counsel. A year later, in private practice, he lobbied for a prison pardon on behalf of Teamster heavy Jimmy Hoffa.21

  Cohen was the undisputed godfather of all West Coast Mafia gambling operations, a Meyer Lansky lieutenant. The gangster’s sub rosa political exploits were the topic of his confessions in July 1975, at UCLA Medical Center, where he lay convalescing. One of these, heard only by investigative reporter Chuck Ashman, concerned Cohen’s contribution to the rapturous rise of arch-conservative evangelist Billy Graham, President Nixon’s celebrated “spiritual advisor.”

  Mickey and I had met several times, but it wasn’t until his last illness that he really began to open up. He said he had one final Big One that he had been saving for the end.

  When he told me the tale of his being paid off to fake a dose of Christianity for Billy Graham’s early New York Crusade, I didn’t take it all that seriously. Then I started checking—and I found enough documentation from federal investigators, tax agents, prosecutors and Mickey’s pals, together with a Graham defector, to piece the story together. It was true! Two of Billy Graham’s key disciples had passed more than $10,000 to Mickey and his family in exchange for his staged “conversion” to Christ for the benefit of the first official Billy Graham Crusade in New York City 20 years ago. We found the dates and amounts and even the checks.22

  The former pugilist and trigger-man’s numerous links to the Nixon circle were cast immediately after WWII. In 1946, Nixon made his first bid for Congress. Chotiner, then a defense attorney for mobsters, managed the Nixon campaign with the backing of Mickey Cohen, who contributed $5,000 from his own pocket to the California Republican’s first congressional campaign. When Nixon ran for the Senate, Cohen kicked in $75,000 gathered from Las Vegas mobsters. Thus began the long and mutually-enhancing partnership of Nixon’s political mob and the Mob,23 and the merger would prove fatal to two Kennedy brothers.

  Mickey Cohen was the first bridge linking the killers of Robert Kennedy and Sal Mineo. And much more. The gangster was on friendly terms with Carlos Marcello, the mob boss who ran with David Ferrie—one of the corrupt CIA operatives investigated by New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison in connection with the killing of JFK—in drug smuggling, the illicit import-export arms trade, and other underworld activities. Cohen was also Jack Ruby’s chum. Cohen and Ruby were both fixated on a local stripper, Ms. “Candy Bar,” an ex-convict, and shared her sexual favors. “Ruby often boasted of his friendship with the legendary Mickey Cohen,” mob investigator John Davis notes, “and took pride in the fact that he had an affair with a woman who had been engaged to the Los Angeles mobster. That Robert Kennedy was shot in a city whose underworld was dominated by a friend of Carlos Marcello and Jack Ruby has to be regarded as potentially significant.”24 Marcello and Cohen had an enduring friendship that began in 1959, when they were both hauled before the McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime to face the interrogations of an openly contemptuous Robert Kennedy. As attorney general, Kennedy singled Cohen out as the principal target of his organized crime probe and concentrated his prosecutorial flame-throwing talents on the L.A. Mafioso.

  Cohen was also a friend of Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s defense attorney. Cherita Cutting, a researcher specializing in JFK murder minutiae, reports that Belli “once played a practical joke on a conference of tax lawyers. Belli, the featured speaker, introduced to the crowd a man with a phony name who Belli claimed was an expert on reducing your taxes. It turned out to be Mickey Cohen, who didn’t pay taxes because the government couldn’t prove he earned money.”

  Cohen dominated the West Coast rackets by 1968, the year of Robert Kennedy’s death. He also controlled the Santa Anita race-track, where Sirhan was employed as a groom and exercise boy.25

  Cohen had close business connections to the Ambassador Hotel for many years. But one of
the most damning indictments against him was his tie to Thane Eugene Cesar—in the opinion of most impartial and independent investigators, the unindicted killer of Robert Kennedy, a security guard from Lockheed with a security clearance and a registered .22 caliber firearm of the type used in the assassination—through a close mutual friend of both, John Alessio, the shah of gambling operations in San Diego.26

  Mickey Cohen’s circle of friends, his presence among the super-partiot cadrés of Kennedy’s enemies, and that peculiar appearance in the limelight immediately after the Mineo killing, beg more questions about Hollywood power brokers than they put to rest.

  They go on:

  Sirhan, while tending horses at Santa Anita, had been befriended by horse trainer “Frank Donneroumas,” an alias for Henry Ramistella, fugitive small-time gangster from New Jersey. Ramistella, Sirhan and Cohen were all close to Hollywood producer and anti-Castro Cuban exile leader Desi Arnaz.27 (In 1966, Sirhan scrawled in his notebook that he had landed a job at Corona Breeding Farm, co-owned by Arnaz. Terry Welch, one of Sirhan’s co-workers at the race track, told the FBI, “Desi Arnaz, Buddy Ebsen, and Dale Robertson, prominent television personalities . . . were well acquainted with Sirhan.”28 All three were ultra-conservatives. “Sol” Sirhan, as he was known in this circle, was also a fierce anti-Communist.)

  But the most telling Cohen link to Sirhan was Russell E. Parsons, Sirhan’s “defense” attorney. Parsons achieved notoriety as consiglieré of the Cohen gang.29 The Mob attorney had once written a letter of recommendation for him. Parson’s syndicate connections were once dissected by the McClellen committee and its chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy. Parsons dropped the ball in his “defense” of Sirhan. John Davis writes, “He made no effort to show that Sirhan might have been the tool of someone else and downplayed his association with racetrack gambling.”30 Worse, Parsons never objected to the prosecution’s argument that the fatal shot was fired by Sirhan despite a statement from the Los Angeles coroner that the accused was in the wrong position to kill the Senator, who was shot from behind, not from the front where Sirhan stood.

  Sirhan was railroaded by his own lawyers. The chief defense counsel in the Robert Kennedy case was Grant Cooper. At the time, Cooper also represented Johnny Rosselli, the mobster and Bay of Pigs veteran, in a card-cheating case and would soon be sentenced to prison himself for perjury for his courtoom performance in that case. Cooper threw Sirhan’s defense by suppressing vital evidence He never cited the autopsy report that would have cleared his client, revealing that the shot that killed Kennedy was not fired by Sirhan.

  Nixon had certain tasks to perform best handled by gangland cut-outs. One declassified FBI memo notes that a domestic Nazi leader and rancher in Southern California pledged up to $750,000 to the Mafia for a contract on the life of Robert Kennedy.31 Larry Jividen, a former Marine pilot and Justice Department informant who mixed with Nixon’s business associates, discovered organized crime with an emphasis on drug smuggling. The word “Rosemark,” Jividen reported in a confidential letter to the Justice Department, was a code word used by this clique in reference to “funds contained in the Union Bank of Switzerland and the Investment and Trade Exchange Central Bank in Zurich, Switzerland. Large amounts of money from underworld operations are funneled into these banks (casino skims, narcotics profits, prostitution income, etc.).” It was from this account that Howard Hughes—whose network, a clearinghouse of CIA/Mafia miscreants, comprises the second bridge connecting the Kennedy and Mineo killings—was loaned the capital to buy TWA in 4 1961, Jividen noted. “Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo appear to have been points for gold bullion pickups. During one flight, Donald Nixon was a passenger. My employers claim their influence permeated the highest levels of government.”32

  Howard Hughes, the scheming apparition of corporate power on CIA contract, another secret investor in Nixon’s campaign, was never far from this circle of corrupt spies and racketeers. Robert Hall, the wire-tapping extortionist, doubled as a security contractor for the Summa Corporation in Los Angeles at 7020 Romaine Street, the communications hub of the decaying millionaire’s worldwide corporate holdings. Security at Summa was overseen by Vince Kelley, formerly the ranking officer of the LAPD’s notorious “Glass House,” the intelligence center of the police department, and much more, a nest of domestic spies who infiltrated prisons and leftist political organizations to gather information, disrupt their activities, and in general cripple organized resistance. George Yocham, the former police lieutenant who kicked in the murder weapon used to kill Hall, reported to Kelley, and so did Robert Hall.

  It’s possible that Sal Mineo, in his homework on the Robert Kennedy murder, learned of Bill Stout, the CBS correspondent, who through then DA John Van De Camp contacted the FBI to inquire about certain fully-annotated Bureau photos the reporter had obtained of the murder scene at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In the photos of the pantry, unexplained bullet holes appeared. The FBI returned that forensic examiners had not conducted a ballistics investigation of the scene, an answer that did not address the question. A Bureau official assured Stout that he would investigate the matter thoroughly and “get back with him.” Stout is still waiting.

  Someone else was agitated about the bullet holes in the Ambassador Hotel pantry. In August 1971, criminalist William Harper narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by a pair of gunmen pecking away at his automobile. The attempt to silence Harper occurred the day before he was to testify before a grand jury investigating ballistics evidence in the RFK assassination.” Harper testified in a sworn affidavit that “Senator Kennedy was fired upon from two distinct firing positions while he was walking through the kitchen pantry.” Further, “no test bullets recovered from the Sirhan gun are in evidence. The gun was never identified scientifically as having fired any of the bullets removed from any of the victims.” The firearm forcibly pried from Sirhan’s grip “has not been connected by microscopic examinations or other scientific testing to the actual shooting.”

  Eight years later . . .

  Pop music heaven admitted a number of rock celebrities in 1976, including: Mal Evans, 40, the Beatles’ road manager, shot dead on January 5; Florence Ballard of the Supremes, 32, dead of “natural causes” on February 22; Free’s Paul Kossoff, 25, drug overdose, March 19; Duster Bennett, 29, in a March 26 car crash; Phil Ochs, 35, suicide by hanging, April; Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, 33, electrocuted on May 14; Tommy Bolin, 25, of Deep Purple and the James Gang, heroin overdose in December. Flo and Eddie were forced to cancel a tour of America and the UK booked a year in advance after their lead guitarist dropped nine stories from his room at the Salt Lake City Hilton and was killed. On November 9, 1976 San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Austin commented, “The accident has not yet been reported.” The police, he observed, were “trying to keep the lid on it.” Was the media blackout of the “accidental” fatality related to the death threat that Jim Martin, the band’s manager, received a few days earlier?

  On February 13, 1976, the front page of the Los Angeles Times teemed with political upheaval. A bomb exploded at the Hearst Castle. A fiercely-delivered denunciation was leveled by a “strained” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at congressional investigators. Nixon’s ranking foreign policy advisor cursed a newly-released report from the House Intelligence Committee enumerating a litany of CIA abuses. “A vicious lie,” he spat. Kissinger soundly excoriated the document, The Pike Report. It was “flagrant,” “a disgrace,” a “new version of McCarthyism” that “can only do damage to the foreign policy of the United States.”

  The swelling hordes of American conservatism heard, rallied, and dogged Pike into political obscurity for his “vicious lies” about the CIA.

  Next to Kissinger’s throes, the Times ran the obituary of veteran actor-singer Sal Mineo, stabbed to death in his carport at Hollywood Manor at roughly 9:15 PM. Neighbors heard the cries for help. The body was found by Ray Evans, a neighbor in the complex, a retired actor in the real estate business.
“I saw a man in the fetus position, lying on his side,” Evans told police. “Because of an incline, blood seemed to be coming from his head. I turned him over and I said, ‘Sal, my God,’ and I saw his whole chest covered with blood on the left side.”

  Witnesses gave homicide detectives a partial description. A white man with long brown or blond hair fled the murder scene in a yellow compact.34

  The autopsy transcript states that Mineo suffered “a massive hemorrhage due to a stab wound to the chest, penetrating the heart.” The murder weapon was a “heavy-type knife.” There were, officially, no other injuries apparent. This observation clashed head-on with the testimony of eyewitnesses, who reported that Mineo had been stabbed repeatedly. This and other absurd contradictions were tell-tale signs that the fix was in. The name Robert Hall or one of his associates may have fit the profile, but his name would never surface in the ensuing investigation.

  Homicide detectives installed a 24-hour hotline for information about the Mineo murder on February 17, five days after the knife attack. The delay may have sabotaged the entire investigation.

  The Hollywood press handled the story with its usual dearth of aplomb. Kimberly Hartman, in an unpublished Mineo biography, recalls, “a powerful battle had begun—the image of Sal-the-Good-Son vs. Sal-the-Weirdo. Sal-the-Weirdo won out. [The] tabloid journalism did nothing to help the case. Some cops simply labeled it a ‘fag killing’ like the Navarro case only eight years before, and simply did not want to deal with it. The ones who did care were swamped with easily hundreds of tips, most of them fantasy and speculation.”35