Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [182]
In Louisiana that same month, Marcello and two close associates met to discuss an oil project with Ed Becker, an entrepreneur from California. And as the whiskey flowed, the mobster talked angrily about his ordeal at the hands of Robert Kennedy. Finally, uttering a Sicilian oath, he exclaimed that the Attorney General was ‘going to be taken care of …’
According to Becker, Marcello referred to President Kennedy as a dog, with his brother Robert being the tail. ‘The dog,’ he said, ‘will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail.’ If the dog’s head were cut off, the biting would end.
The more Marcello ranted on, the more serious he seemed. According to Becker, he ‘clearly stated that he was going to arrange to have President Kennedy murdered …’ As ‘insurance’ for the assassination, he spoke of ‘setting up a nut to take the blame.’
The Marcello threat was first reported in a 1969 book by Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Reid, the Trafficante comments in The Washington Post in 1976. Congress’ Assassinations Committee, however, inadequately probed the claim common to both of them – that the FBI was fully informed at the time.
Aleman, a valued FBI contact, would later insist that he told Bureau agents about Trafficante’s remarks soon after they were made in 1962. After the assassination, he said, two agents rushed to see him, made him go over his story again, then asked him to keep the conversation confidential.
Available FBI files contain no reports showing that Trafficante’s comments, or the Marcello threat, were reported as claimed. Paul Scranton, one of two former agents whom Aleman said he told of the Trafficante comments before the assassination, refused to deny or confirm the claim. ‘I wouldn’t want to say anything to embarrass the Bureau,’ he told The Washington Post in 1976.6
Ed Becker, for his part, said from the start that he, too, quickly informed the FBI. ‘When I got home from Louisiana,’ he said, ‘I found that Bureau agents wanted to see me. They obviously knew I’d been seeing Marcello and asked why. I told them about the oil deal I’d been trying to set up and what Marcello had said about killing Kennedy. But they never came back to me. Although I talked to the congressional inquiry in the seventies, the FBI has never questioned me about it …’7
In 1962, when Ed Becker saw Marcello, he was working part-time for a former FBI agent turned private investigator, Julian Blodgett. Blodgett, who once also served as chief investigator for the Los Angeles County District Attorney, revealed in 1992 that Becker had told him of the mobster’s threat less than two days after it was made. As a law enforcement professional, he responded by calling the FBI immediately.
‘I took it seriously,’ said Blodgett. ‘Becker described the circumstances very carefully, and I considered him reliable, as I still do. I at once notified one of my Bureau contacts, a Supervisor in Los Angeles. He was a very dedicated man, and I am sure he reported it. A subject as vital as that would have been made a matter of record and transmitted to Washington.’
Blodgett was an agent of the old school, steeped in respect for J. Edgar Hoover. He was mystified that FBI files supposedly contain no record of his report, nor of Becker’s. Memos in the file do, however, show that in 1967, when the author Ed Reid was planning to publish Becker’s account, Edgar and senior aides mounted an operation designed to destroy Becker’s credibility. Agent George Bland visited Reid and tried to convince him that Becker was ‘a liar and a cheat.’ Becker’s statement that he reported the Marcello threat to the FBI was removed from the book as a result.
Edgar had assured the Warren Commission that the FBI would keep the Kennedy assassination ‘in an open classification for all time,’ that ‘any report from