Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [183]
Edgar was required by law to warn the Secret Service of all threats to public officials. As a matter of routine he did indeed pass on the sort of menaces uttered daily by drunks and maniacs across the country. There is no sign, however, that the FBI told the Secret Service of the many violent remarks about the Kennedy brothers picked up on wiretaps of top mobsters.8 Nor is there any evidence that the FBI passed on Marcello and Trafficante’s talk of assassination.
On the eve of the President’s murder, Jack Ruby ate dinner at a Dallas restaurant owned by Joseph Campisi, an intimate of Carlos Marcello and his brothers. Campisi talked with Ruby then, and would later visit him in jail. Another regular visitor to the restaurant was Joseph Civello, head of the Marcellocontrolled Dallas Mafia. Civello had associated with Sergeant Patrick Dean, the Dallas policeman in charge of security when Ruby shot Oswald.
A witness told the FBI Ruby was close to Civello, and Edgar passed that information on to the Warren Commission, in the most bland language possible, failing to mention that Civello was a top Mafia figure controlled by Carlos Marcello. Nor did he point out something else – that Civello was a close friend of Clint Murchison, Jr., the son of one of Edgar’s very best friends.
Irving Davidson, the Washington lobbyist who counted himself a friend of Edgar’s and the Murchisons, had known Marcello since the early fifties. He styled himself the mobster’s ‘door opener and arranger’ and when the Kennedys succeeded in kicking Marcello out of the country for a while, he was said to be the one man in Washington who had the mobster’s phone number abroad. Davidson was to be the liaison between Marcello and Clint Murchison, Jr., at the time of the sting operation that finally sent Marcello to jail in 1983.
Murchison, Sr., like almost all oilmen, had backed Johnson for the White House in 1960, and his fears about Kennedy turned out to be justified. The young President made no secret of his opposition to the oil moguls’ extraordinary tax privileges, and moved quickly to change them. Murchison and his associates, it turns out, were linked to the assassination saga by a series of disconcerting coincidences.
George de Mohrenschildt, an oil geologist who knew Murchison and had worked for one of his companies, was on intimate terms with alleged assassin Oswald. He would be found shot dead in 1977, an apparent suicide, on the day an Assassinations Committee investigator called to arrange an interview.9
Within four days of the assassination, the FBI received a tip-off that Clint Murchison and Tom Webb – the FBI veteran the millionaire had hired at Edgar’s suggestion – were both acquainted with Jack Ruby. While they denied it, Ruby had met one of Murchison’s best friends, Humble Oil millionaire Billy Byars.
Byars was close to Edgar. They used adjacent bungalows at Murchison’s California hotel each summer. The phone log for the Director’s office shows that, aside from calls to Robert Kennedy and the head of the Secret Service, Edgar called only one man on the afternoon the President was shot – Billy Byars.
Bryars’ son Billy Jr., who was a student in the early sixties, saw Edgar at the Del Charro the following summer. ‘I was there for one or two weeks,’ Byars recalled in 1988. ‘They would eat together, my father, Murchison and Hoover, and the others. Hoover seemed to be in a very strange frame of mind. He was having a better relationship with Johnson, evidently, than he had with President Kennedy – by a long shot. His relationship with Bobby Kennedy had apparently almost driven him over the edge. He used to talk about that constantly, and once I had the chance to ask