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‘I asked him, “Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it?” And he stopped and he looked at me for quite a long time. Then he said, “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.” That’s all he said, and I could see he wasn’t about to say any more.’

President Johnson, who should have been privy to the best intelligence on the assassination, believed there was a conspiracy. ‘Just a few weeks later,’ recalled Madeleine Brown, the woman who says she was his mistress, ‘I mentioned to him that people in Dallas were saying he himself had something to do with it. He became really violent, really ugly, and said it was American Intelligence and oil that were behind it. Then he left the room and slammed the door. It scared me.’10

Johnson seems to have swung back and forth, certain there had been a conspiracy yet unsure where to pin the blame. His suspects varied from some Vietnamese faction to Fidel Castro to U.S. Intelligence. In 1967 he told his aide Marvin Watson that he felt ‘the CIA had something to do with this plot.’ At the time of his death in 1973, he was still wondering whether the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, on which he was briefed soon after taking office, had somehow boomeranged.

Months after the assassination, in the privacy of his office, Edgar told a visitor that the case was ‘a mess, a lot of loose ends.’ Why, then, did he steer the Warren Commission so insistently toward the lone-assassin theory, when there were clues demanding investigation of elements of U.S. Intelligence, the Mafia – even his own oil millionaire friends? Was he merely doing President Johnson’s bidding, covering up information that would exacerbate the crisis? Or was he, too, under a different kind of pressure?

‘I got a way,’ Carlos Marcello once said during a Louisiana election. ‘No matter who gets in there, you know I’m going to find a fuckin’ way to get to ’em. I don’t care who it is.’ Along with the other factors that may have left Edgar compromised by the Mafia, there is the report of an occasion long ago when he had been arrested for a homosexual offense in New Orleans.11 Just as he may have had no choice in his failure to pursue the Mafia for years before the assassination, Edgar may have had no choice but to drop the leads that pointed to the mob in November 1963.

The most telling postscript to the assassination may be the fate of Robert Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime. Before the murder, the President’s brother had been succeeding in his struggle to force Edgar to confront the mob. Whether Edgar liked it or not, the FBI had become what it had never been before: a force the Mafia had cause to fear.

Fifteen weeks before Dallas, an FBI wiretap in Florida had picked up a conversation between two men who knew Edgar. One was Alvin Malnik, an attorney who would one day be identified as ‘one of Meyer Lansky’s trusted people’ and whom Edgar had befriended on a visit to Miami Beach. The other was local restaurateur Jesse Weiss, host to numerous mobsters and – every Christmas – to Edgar.

The log of the wiretap shows that the two men discussed the continuing crackdown on organized crime, and – with Robert Kennedy now in the ascendant – Edgar’s waning influence:

WEISS: They’re taking the play away from him.

MALNIK: Hoover is a lost …

WEISS: Cause.

MALNIK: A lost cause, that’s all …

WEISS: They take everybody’s picture – license numbers and everything …

MALNIK: Well, that’s not even bad, but when they go breaking into private property trying to get evidence, that’s the limit … the lowest.

WEISS: And then it’s laughable. Once upon a time, you know, you walked into the FBI … intimidate …

Poor reception apparently blurred the rest of Weiss’ comment, but the transcript resumes:

MALNIK: Sure! It doesn’t mean anything anymore … it doesn’t mean anything … Does Hoover realize this great transformation that’s happened within his own organization?

WEISS: I spoke to him. Two weeks ago I was in Washington before he went