American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [51]
Hughes had brought Rosselli into his own organization when he moved into the Mob’s Las Vegas territory. Rosselli was tight with Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante Jr., a couple of the gangsters who have since been linked to JFK’s assassination. And a friend of Rosselli’s, Jimmy Starr, later told the mobster’s biographers: “What I heard about the Kennedy assassination was that Johnny was the guy who got the team together to do the hit.” We know today that certain people in the CIA wanted to pin the blame for JFK’s murder on Castro, to take the heat off themselves. We also know today that Nixon, while he was Vice President under Eisenhower, was the liaison to the CIA in the first assassination attempt against Castro. But that secret, like the others, was still way below the radar when Nixon was in office.
So, on the very day that column by Jack Anderson came out, Haldeman asked John Dean (the White House counsel) to make an inquiry into the relationship between Maheu, Hughes, and a guy named Lawrence O’Brien. Remember that name? It was O’Brien’s office that the burglars broke into at the Watergate. At the time, he headed the Democratic National Committee, so people presumed Nixon’s team were looking for dirt on the dems. But O’Brien was not only a former staff assistant to the Kennedy brothers, but also an old friend of Robert Maheu’s. Two weeks after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Maheu had arranged for O’Brien to hire on as a consultant to the Hughes organization. Then when Hughes vanished and Maheu got purged, O’Brien went with him. As a White House aide wrote to John Dean on February 1, 1971: “Mayhew’s [sic] controversial activities and contacts in both Democratic and Republican circles suggest the possibility that forced embarrassment of O’Brien ... might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.”7 What kind of skeletons? Could the interest in O’Brien, all the way to the Watergate break-in, have concerned what he might know about Maheu, Rosselli, and the intrigue around “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”?
In February 1971 came another Jack Anderson column about Rosselli.8 The story was sketchy, but tantalizing. It said: “Confidential FBI files identify him as ‘a top Mafia figure’ who watched over ‘the concealed interests in Las Vegas casinos of the Chicago underworld.’” Also that he’d been recruited by Maheu and “had handled undercover assignments for the CIA.” The story concluded: “Rosselli’s lawyers are now trying to get clemency for their client, citing our stories about his secret CIA service.”
Sure looks like somebody was putting out a message through Anderson, doesn’t it. Rosselli was facing time, and hinting he might squawk if he got convicted. So what happens next? Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, phoned Maheu, who caught the next flight to D.C. and told Mitchell everything he knew about the CIA-Mob plots. Mitchell was “shaking” by the time Maheu ended his story, and after that helped Maheu avoid a grand jury.9
What happens to Anderson after he does these stories? He’s targeted by Nixon’s infamous Plumbers Unit, the guys who liked to “plug leaks” by breaking into various places. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt Jr. later admitted during the Watergate hearings that they met with a CIA operative in 1972 to talk about slipping the columnist LSD, or putting poison in his aspirin bottle, or concocting a fatal mugging. The plot was aborted when the Watergate break-in occurred.
Howard Hunt had supposedly retired from the CIA in April 1970, but he’d immediately landed a job with a CIA front outfit called the Mullen Company. They’d been instrumental in setting up the CIA’s “Cuban Freedom Committee” that helped disseminate the Castro-did-it rumors after the Kennedy assassination. Their cover specialty was PR, and now they