Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [181]
Marcello, like Trafficante and Sam Giancana, had been targeted by the Justice Department on Robert Kennedy’s orders. He also held a peculiarly personal grudge. Within weeks of taking office in 1961, the President’s brother had arranged for his abrupt deportation to Guatemala as an undesirable alien. When the mobster slipped back into the United States, Kennedy began renewed efforts to kick him out for good. David Ferrie had worked for Marcello’s attorney, Wray Gill, since early 1962 – in parallel with his work for Guy Banister. Ferrie and Banister had both helped prepare Marcello’s defense against charges that he had used a phony birth certificate to avoid being deported.
Had the Marcello angle been pursued, much else would have come out. Oswald’s uncle and surrogate father, Dutz Murret, with whom the alleged assassin stayed in 1963, worked in Marcello’s gambling network. Jack Ruby, who had many mob associations, was in touch with Nofio Pecora, a Marcello lieutenant, three weeks before the assassination. Pecora, in turn, was close to Oswald’s uncle. After the assassination, witnesses claimed that one Marcello associate had been seen handing Oswald cash, and that another had discussed the suitability of a foreign-made rifle to ‘get the President.’
The FBI dropped such leads. Marcello’s name appears neither in the Warren Report nor in any of its twenty-six volumes of evidence. Nor do those of Santos Trafficante or Sam Giancana.
The CIA failed to tell the Commission about its use of the Mafia in its plots to kill Castro, which had continued until early 1963. So did Edgar, who had known about them for a long time. Chief Justice Warren’s investigators were thus denied a vital opening, a chance to make sense of the triple tracks confronting them – U.S. Intelligence, the mob and the exiles.
‘Because we did not have those links,’ said Commission attorney Burt Griffin, who later became a judge, ‘there was nothing to tie the underworld in with Cuba and thus nothing to tie them in with Oswald, nothing to tie them in with the assassination of the President.’ The CIA, and Edgar with his New Orleans leads, did have the link. They held the key to the labyrinth and withheld it from the Commission.
Information from numerous sources suggests the principal Mafia leaders were linked to the case. The secretary to Guy Banister, the former FBI agent said to have manipulated Oswald, said he was visited before the killing by Giancana’s henchman Johnny Roselli. Giancana’s half brother has claimed the Chicago Mafia boss plotted the assassination in concert with Marcello, Trafficante and CIA operatives.
Frank Costello, the old Mafia overlord who helped Marcello build his criminal empire, said before he died that Oswald was ‘just the patsy’ in the President’s murder. Frank Ragano, the former attorney of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, said he was sent to discuss the President’s murder with Trafficante and Marcello in early 1963. He gained the impression ‘they already had such a thought in their mind …’
Most compelling, perhaps, is what the new generation of FBI agents learned during surveillance of Trafficante and Marcello as late as 1975. ‘Now only two people are alive,’ FBI microphones overheard Trafficante say, ‘who know who killed Kennedy.’ Trafficante himself died of natural causes in 1987, but Marcello lived on – according to Joseph Hauser, an FBI plant – to admit that Oswald had worked as a runner in his betting operation in 1963.
The most serious information pointing to Trafficante and Marcello raises the possibility that the FBI was gravely negligent before the assassination. According to Jose Aleman, a wealthy Cuban exile, Trafficante made ominous remarks about the President at a business meeting as early as September 1962. The Kennedys, said the mobster, were ‘not honest. They took graft and they did not keep a bargain