The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  Back in Mamaroneck, friends of Mineo’s from Hollywood fought with his family at O’Neil Mortuary. “Michael Mason seemed to have been the center of all debates,” Hartman recalls. “He claimed that money was the first thing Sal’s family asked about.” It didn’t occur to Mason that money had weighed heavily on his own mind and others who’d been close to Mineo. A small cabal headed by Mason tried to ostracize the family from the burial. “Michael Mason told Sal’s brother, ‘It’s too bad you didn’t know him well enough to find these answers out for yourself. But I see why he didn’t like you or have anything to do with you in recent years.’ That statement was a low blow to Sal’s family which he had always loved. Mason did not have his facts correct—he was no better than anyone else in Sal’s life.” It seemed that even in death, “Sal Mineo was being pulled apart, and Michael Mason’s selfishness fueled the tug-of-war. Sal’s family suffered more than anyone can know—even more than ‘friends’ like Mason who took advantage of the good-natured actor.”

  Police still had no murder weapon, no suspects, motive or witnesses.

  Mineo’s body was flown to Mamaroneck, New York for the funeral at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, with 250 paying respects. Many more stood quietly outside, and some 300 onlookers surged in the street. Sal Mineo was buried on February 17, 1976, at Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

  On the same day the body was flown east, detectives revised their description of the suspect: He was a 20–30 year old white male, dark clothing, roughly 5′ 7″ to 10′ tall, average build, dark hair.

  Nearly a year and a half passed before the case was “solved.” Burton S. Katz—a prosecutor in the Manson murders, the district attorney who convicted Bobby Beausoleil and Steve “Clem” Grogan for the slayings of Gary Hinman and Donald “Shorty” Shea—nailed down a grand jury indictment in the Mineo case in May 1977.36 LAPD detectives questioned Theresa Williams, an L.A. hooker. As the police told it, Ms. Williams confessed that her husband had returned home on the night Mineo was killed, smeared with blood. He allegedly told her, “I just killed this dude in Hollywood.” Police were skeptical at first. They were looking for a white male, and Lionel Ray Williams was African-American. But an examination of his arrest records turned up a fascinating detail: Williams had been arrested on forgery and robbery charges shortly after the Mineo murder, and was already incarcerated in Michigan.

  The police claim that Ms. Williams called and freely offered to turn state’s evidence against her husband. Mr. Williams responds from prison: “That’s all crap. That’s not true. Police went to her. She had a prostitution case, and [the police] were going to take my kid from her.” Williams maintains that continual police harassment drove his wife to attempt suicide. She was pressured “to the point where she put a bullet in her head,” Williams said. “She tried to kill herself.”37

  Williams did have one connection to the case. In exchange for clemency, he had offered information about the Mineo case to Michigan police who notified the LAPD—and by stepping forward with the first break in the investigation, Williams may have become the man who knew too much. He said that Mineo had been murdered “in a dispute with a drug dealer.” (Bobby Hall with his amphetamine concession?) Williams was freed, the charges against him dropped with a proviso that he gather more information on the Mineo murder and get back with the Los Angeles homicide detail.38

  The former pizza delivery man was charged on an L.A. County grand jury indictment. Williams pled not guilty to ten counts of robbery, one count of armed robbery—the latter mysteriously overturned despite the Los Angeles Times report that Williams “was armed with a gun or knife in all the robberies except one.”39 The 21 year-old pizza delivery man was held on $500,000 bail and ordered to stand trial before Superior Court Judge Edward A. Heinz, Jr.

  At trial, Hartman says, defense attorney Mort Herbert called two witnesses to the stand, both of whom claimed to have seen a white man running from the scene. “He produced written accounts from many of Sal Mineo’s neighbors who had claimed to have seen a white man running away. He cited that even the police had been looking for a white man. Next, he pointed out the obvious—Lionel Ray Williams was a black man. Another eyewitness verified that they had seen ‘a swarthy white man, perhaps an Italian or a Mexican,’ running down the driveway to of the apartment building. All in all, Herbert punched many a hole in the prosecution’s case.”

  The DA’s office drafted a murder complaint. This was attached to ten complaints of robbery already attributed to Williams. It was a completely circumstantial case, but soon the Sheriff’s Department filed a declaration in Beverly Hills Municipal Court claiming that Williams had confessed to fellow inmates. This development was overheard, police claimed, by a bug planted in Williams’ cell. But transcripts of the bugging were withheld from the defense and even the judge.

  Allwyn Williams (no relation to Lionel), a prison inmate, was the prosecution’s star witness, purchased with a plea bargain. He testified: “We came to the discussion that he had killed someone famous. I wondered who. ‘Sal Mineo,’ he replied. He started talking about it. He said he was in Hollywood, driving around below Sunset. He was going to rob someone for money.” No money was stolen. “He stabbed someone. And he told me how he done it. He demonstrated.”

  “Allywn Williams,” Hartman reports, “under cross-examination, admitted that he made up testimony about Williams driving a Lincoln Continental and using a pearl-handled knife in some attacks because he allegedly felt his statement, which linked Williams to the Sal Mineo murder, was not strong enough to get himself out of jail” (Allwyn Williams was provided immunity for an L.A. robbery which he had participated in with the defendant). “Mort Herbert attempted to show that Allwyn Williams had a motive for testifying against the defendant—his own fear of going to prison. Herbert also was able to make Allwyn admit that if necessary he would have lied even further to get his felony conviction reduced to a misdemeanor. The prosecution’s key witness also admitted that he had been taking drugs when the defendant supposedly discussed the murder. A following witness for the defense further discounted the prosecution’s key witness by claiming that he had never heard L.R. Williams admit to the Mineo murder in the supposed conversation with Allywn Williams.”

  NOTES

  1. Dennis Williams and Martin Kashdorf, “The Outcast,” Newsweek, February 23, 1976, p. 25.

  2. Susan Braudy, Who Killed Sal Mineo?, New York: Wyndham Books, 1982, p. 32—a novel based on the case. Mineo’s closest friends insist that these reports were exagerrated, that he was drawn to the gay community because he found it exotic. But “Sal had some strange tastes,” producer Peter Bogdonovich acknowledged, and “he was totally unaffected by it. The murder was so shocking because as a person he was so innocent.” But bisexual and innocent are not mutually exclusive qualities. The Hollywood Paparazzi press, most notably Boze Hadleigh, reports that Mineo was bisexual, counting Rock Hudson among his paramours. See Boze Hadleigh, Conversations with My Elders, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

  3. Elliot Mintz resurfaces in this mortal inventory to witness the unfolding of a covert operation designed to discredit the Beatle and his widow. Mintz was a thorough and highly credible historian of the 1960s, recalls Jim Ladd, a colleague at RADIO KAOS, an underground station in Los Angeles: “During his ten years in the business, Elliot had logged over two thousand interviews and more than 50,000 telephone calls over the air. He explored the entire gamut of the movement during his time in the glass booth, from Baba Ram Dass to Buffy Sainte-Marie, from Jane Fonda to Jack Nicholson, from Norman Mailer to Abbie Hoffman. A self-taught intellectual, and one of the most well-read humans on the planet, Elliot was the counterculture’s answer to William F. Buckley.” Jim Ladd, Radio Waves: Life After the Revolution on the FM Dial, New York: St. Martin’s, 1991, p. 187.

  4. Hartman. Also, Mae Brussell, “Operation CHAOS” unpublished ms. And, Tim Hunter, “Who Done It,” Chic, June 1977, p. 88.

  5. Peter Bogdanovich, “
The Murder of Sal Mineo,” Esquire, March 1, 1978, p. 116.

  6. Lisa Pease, “Sirhan and the RFK Assassination, Pt. II—Rubrick’s Cube,” Probe, vol. 5, no. 4, May–June, 1998.

  7. Michael C. Ruppert, Internet posting.

  8. William W. Turner and John G. Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, New York: Random House, 1978, p. 265.

  9. Hunter and Brussell.

  10. Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents, New York: William Morrow, 1978, p. 243.

  11. Bill Farr and Bill Hazlett, “Tapes Raise Questions in Detective’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1976, p. B-l.

  13. Farr and Hazlett, p. B-1.

  12. For the questioning of Eddie Fisher, see Hougan, p. 245. On the pharmacy connection, Mae Brussell, “Operation Chaos,” unpublished ms.

  14. Hougan, p. 247.

  15. William Farr, “Defense Attorneys in Killing of Detective Ask Access to Files,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1976, p. A-22.

  16. Gene LeBell, a Hollywood actor and stunt man in Hollywood. Among his long list of credits: As Good As It Gets (1997) Dante’s Peak (1997), L.A. Confidential, CIA II Target: Alexa (1994), Darkman (1990), Die Hard 2 (1990), Total Recall (1990), among others.

  17. Brussell.

  18. Farr and Hazlett, p. B-1.

  19. Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Hollywood Kryptonite: Accident, Suicide, or Cold-Blooded Murder—The Truth About the Death of TV’s Superman, New York: St. Martin’s, 1996, pp. 9.

  20. John Kendall, “Motive in Sal Mineo Slaying Baffles Police,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1976, p. A-3.

  21. A.J. Weberman, Coup D’Etat in America Data Base http://Weberman.com. FBI FOIA Request #72,182 approx. 500 pp.; HSCA OCR 11.2.78 Brady.

  22. Chuck Ashman, “The Conversion of Mickey Cohen,” Chic, Vol. 1, no. 8, June 1977, p. 56.

  23. Hougan, pp. 251–52.

  24. John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989, p. 346.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Davis, p. 356. In 1968, novice “underground” journalist Lowell Bergman discovered that Alessio had enormous influence in southern California right-wing circles and a possible motive for wanting Robert Kennedy out of the way. Bergman went on to write for 60 Minutes in 1983, but in his youth lived in a commune and wrote for the resident underground newspaper: “What we were trying to do was break the monopoly on information. We tried to approach it from an academic point of view. Some of us had experience in what was called ‘power-structure research.’ What we were looking for was: Who ran San Diego? What we discovered was that the richest guy in town, [financier] C. Arnholt Smith, was in reality in partnership with John Alessio. The second-largest landowner, next to the Navy, at that time, was the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, which had been called by Robert Kennedy, the attorney general at the time, the ‘piggy-bank’ for the Mob.” [John Freeman, “Lowell Bergman, Television-Radio Writer” (interview), San Diego Union-Tribune, May 26, 1996, p. E-l.]

  Like Cohen, C. Arnholt Smith and his San Diego business clique made illegal campaign contributions to the Nixon campaign in 1968. Harry D. Steward, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, ran an investigation of the contributions—and was forced to resign in December, 1974 after the Senate Judiciary Committee charged him with obstructing its probe. One of Steward’s career highlights was the 1970 conviction of Alessio, described by federal officials as the largest case of income-tax evasion at the time. But Alessio received a light sentence, three years in federal prison, and was paroled in two.

  27. Davis, p.352. Also see, John G. Christian and William W. Turner, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: A Searching Look At the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 1968–1978, New York: Random House, 1978, p. 220.

  28. Christian and Turner, pp. 220–21.

  29. Dan E. Moldea, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, p. 116.

  30. Davis, p. 354.

  31. Christian and Turner, p. 320.

  32. Hougan., p. 253.

  33. Turner and Christian, p. 315. Harper also reported that Sirhan’s prosecutors “attempted to establish that the Sirhan gun, and no other, was involved in the assassination. It is a fact, however, that the only gun actually linked scientifically with the shooting is a second gun, not the Sirhan gun.”

  34. Ellen Hume and Ted Thackrey, Jr., “Sal Mineo Knifed to Death,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1976, p. A-l.

  35. Kimberly Hartman, “Pretty Boys Make Graves,” unpublished ms., ch. 20.

  36. “Judge Burton S. Katz,” press release, Santa Barbara Speaker’s Bureau, P.O. Box 30768, Santa Barbara, CA 93130-0768. Katz went on to be a judge, in which capacity he presided over the murder trial of John Sweeney—convicted on minor charges of simple assault and voluntary manslaughter for the strangulation murder of actress Dominique Dunne. He has taught at law schools, police academies, and the California Specialized Training Institute. “Menendez. Simpson. Bobbit. King,” boasts the Bureau’s release. “Everyone immediately recognizes these names because of their high-profile cases—and controversial verdicts.”

  37. “Sal Mineo,” Mysteries and Scandals, E! Channel, February 14, 1999.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Bill Farr, “Mineo Slaying Suspect Charged,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1978, p. B-8.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Project Walrus” and Holden Caulfield’s Warm Gun

  AT THE MORGUE, THE ENTRANCE WAS SEALED SHUT WITH A LOCK AND CHAIN. ATTENDANTS WITH GREEN MORTUARY MASKS MOVED AROUND IN A DUMB SHOW, THEIR WORDS INAUDIBLE, OR TYPED OUT FORMS ON GRIM CIVIL-SERVICE TYPEWRITERS. BEHIND THEM, IN A REFRIGERATOR, LAY THE SIXTIES. PETE HAMILL, NEW YORK MAGAZINE, JOHN LENNON OBITUARY

  The “Catcher in the Rye of the present generation” confronted his judge on January 6, 1981. The courtroom antics that followed were a macabre illustration of the principle that the cover-up proves the crime. Justice Herbert Altman asked how Mark David Chapman chose to plead. “Not guilty,” the prisoner—following the direction of his “voices”—responded. By law, the defendent decides the plea, guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity, one or the other, not the defense attorney. Nevertheless, Chapman’s attorney Jonathan Marks punctuated the plea “. . . by reason of insanity.”

  The bench favored a motion from Marks to enlist three psychiatrists to provide opinions on Chapman’s mental competence to stand trial. The first was Dr. Milton Kline, a prestigious clinical psychiatrist, an authority on hypnosis from New York,1 and an esteemed consultant to the CIA on the creation of programmed killers while president of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, a true believer in the “Manchurian Candidate” killing concept who once boasted that he was capable of creating a hypnotically-driven patsy in three months, a mind-controlled assassin in six.2

  The second psychiatrist chosen to examine Chapman was Dr. Bernard Diamond from the University of California at Berkeley, a busy hive of illicit mind control experimentation in past decades. Dr. Diamond had provided the same service to Sirhan Sirhan. The accused killer of Robert Kennedy told another psychiatrist, Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, a clinical psychologist assigned to the case, that he did not trust Dr. Diamond. As Sirhan explained to Dr. Simson-Kallas after the trial, “Whatever strange behavior I showed in court was the result of my outrage over Dr. Diamond’s and other doctors’ testimony. They were saying things about me that were grossly untrue, nor did I give them permission to testify [on] my behalf in court.”3

  The third psychiatrist entrusted to evaluating Chapman’s hold on reality was Dr. Daniel Schwartz, director of forensic psychiatry at King’s County Medical Center in Brooklyn. Dr. Schwartz had examined David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, and offered that the accused serial killer believed he’d been commanded by “demons” to kill. Mark David Chapman had also been pushed by the “demons” of his dementia to shoot John Lennon, Dr. Schwartz opined from the stand. He testified that
Chapman had admitted, “I can feel their thoughts. I hear their thoughts. I can hear them talking—but not from the outside, from the inside.” Up to the moment he squeezed the trigger of his Charter Arms .38, Chapman “continued to operate under this primitive kind of thinking, in which he believed or believes that forces outside of him, supernatural or otherwise, determined his behavior.”4 The diagnosis was nearly identical to the one he gave Son of Sam.

  Not one of these three mental health specialists explored the hint of mind control, in the opinion of Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a professor in psychiatric research at the Yale School of Medicine and a consultant to Marks. Dr. Lewis reported that the assassin may have acted in response to a “command hallucination.” British barrister Fenton Bresler, in Who Killed John Lennon?, asks: “Could any term be more appropriate for a disturbed man operating under hypnotic programming?”5

  In 1977, Chapman lost his religion. His fundamentalist indoctrination festered in a stew of self-loathing, devil-worship, and a killer’s fantasies. Months before the murder, he visited satanist and film-maker Kenneth Anger at a screening in Hawaii, shook hands and handed over two .38 caliber bullets. “These are for John Lennon,” he explained to Anger.6 Chapman may have felt a spiritual kinship with the satanist. He had attempted suicide, interpreted his survival as a sign, and thereafter addressed his prayers to Satan,7 who responded with commands, mind control. And, as it happens, the CIA has been obsessed with mind control techniques since the dawn of the Cold War. Agency psychiatrists were eminently capable of transforming a hyper-religious nobody on the board of the Decatur, Georgia YMCA into a programmed killer, and the allegation has been made repeatedly since Lennon’s murder.

  Psychotronics was the topic of an August 22, 1994 Newsweek report on a secret Arlington, Virginia conference between behavioral specialists from the FBI’s Counter-Terrorism Center and Dr. Smirnov, whose work was truly Frankensteinian: “Using electroencephalographs, Smirnov measures brain waves, then uses computers to create a map of the subconscious and various human impulses, such as anger or the sex drive. Then through taped subliminal suggestions, he claims to physically alter the landscape with the power of suggestion.”